Riding
in a cab out past People’s Park, the former British racetrack here in
Shanghai. On the radio perky
Mandarin about how “civilized” people with high levels of civilization, should
go about properly using public bathrooms.
She was in Germany, she says as a student, and people kept the bathrooms
free of smoke and of ashes and butts.
The cab driver is talking with my ten o’clock meeting in Shanghainese to
determine the precise address. Headphones on it disappears and Prince Buster is
Judge Dread from Ethiopia, sentencing Rudeboy Adolphus James to 400 years. “Stop your crying! Rudeboys don’t cry, that’s what I
hear.” I was feeling cool stepping
in to the elevator at the hotel with my complementary double espresso to-go
complete with a flip back lid, till I realized it had spilled a generous blotch
on my white shirt with green stripes.
Sitting now in a meeting now out near Putuo Qu. I have the middle button on my three-button
suit closed in this hot room. This, so that the atrocious brown stain on my
shirt is largely obscured. It is
impossible to ignore though, because the space between the buttons is creating
a coffee cave of odor that wafts up to my nose, reminding me of my
transgression. I have a recurring
fantasy of getting back to my hotel and stripping this damn thing off and being
free, of stain so that 井然有序[1] Fortunately
there is a good six feet between us with this table and the room is darkly lit
for the benefit of the power point presentation, so my wretched blotch might be
mistaken for some muddy paisley design here in the shadows.
Earlier this year I had the good fortune of reading my first
novel by Iris Murdoch, “The Sea, The Sea”, which was from sea monster
hallucination onward, remarkable.
My step dad has read every novel she’s written after a friend had recommended
her and he raves about her fictional oeuvre. But when I asked him recently he was not familiar with her
writings as a philosopher he replied that he’d only read her fiction. I recently finished up “The
Sovereignty of the Good” which is a collection of three of her essays. I hadn’t known but it shows that she
was a student of Ludwig Wittgenstein with an emphasis on the difficulty of
precision with words. It is
daunting to consider that so much underlay informs her fiction, which had
otherwise seemed so effortless. http://www.amazon.com/The-Sovereignty-Good-Iris-Murdoch/dp/0415253993
As the title suggests Ms. Murdoch wrestles with the idea of
the good. Goodness is tied to an understanding of your mortality. For
her the word essentially serves as a substitute for the all-powerful word, with
one less “o.”
“When true good is loved, even
impurely or by accident, the quality
of love is automatically refined and when the soul is turned towards Good, the
highest part of the soul is enlivened. Love is the tension between the imperfect soul and the
magnetic perfection which is conceived as lying beyond it."
I thought of my stepfather, who is such a fan of Ms. Murdoch
and certainly resonates goodness beneath his empirical precision.
He is an ornithologist who loves literature; a scientist who is thrilled
by Shakespeare. Iris would
appreciate his empirical criticality, but would question his presumed
assumption that proof, was it’s own absolute, because any “proof” must be made
in words.
Words are the most subtle symbols
which we possess and our human fabric depends on them. The living and radical nature of
language is something we forget at our peril. It is totally misleading to
speak, for instance, of “two cultures” one literary-humane and the other
scientific as if they were of equal status. There is only one culture of which science, so interesting,
and so dangerous, is now an important part. But the most important and fundamental aspect of culture is
the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and
understand human situations. We
are men and we are moral agents, before we are scientists, and the place of
science in human life must be discussed in words. This is why it is and always will be
more important to know about Shakespeare, than to know about any scientist: and
if there is a Shakespeare of science’ his name is Aristotle.
Doug: I invite
you to submit your rebuttal below. Is there a world where you'd trade the “Voyage of the Beagle” for “The Tempest?”
Sitting as I write all this, in a bar called “Dr. Wine” on
Fuming Lu, with a glass of Gruner Veltliner towards the end of the day. I am
sure that I rode my flying pigeon bike along Fuming Lu twenty years ago as
well. There was absolutely no “Dr.
Wine” here at that time. There
were no café’s or sushi bars, or tapas bars or internet bars, any other manner of hip serviced
offerings along this street in those days. But the buildings were all here. They were sagging and ill kept but the physical
architecture, with the small little lead glass windows and the blooming English
Plane trees, these were all here.
These chicken skewers I’m having aren’t as tasty as the
confrontationally authentic Uyghur food I had with a good friend last
night. But the libations are
a step up from the Xinjiang beer. Now
it’s off to some other tree-lined Shanghai street on this mild night in Shanghai, before the dread heat descends.
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