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The Falling Pachyderm, or, There Is an Elephant in the Way
We are fortunate that students don’t yet know enough to hire intellectual property lawyers on spec. Or, perhaps, that the property rights to examination papers reside with the examiner and not with the examinee, even though they are returned to their originator.
It allows documents like the one reproduced above to circulate and be appropriated from a friends-only blog (which I cite as anonymous because, well, it’s friends-only and the friend can bloody well step forward and take credit).
I wisecracked to the amused teachers of science who were commenting that the student had a right to posit a falling elephant arriving just in time to block the movement of the object when it comes to rest with the spring at maximum compression, because a world in which a ramp is absolutely frictionless is already not the universe in which we live. It is closer to the universe in which elephants can fall fortuitously at the correct moment, sort of the semi-converse of the disappearing elephant in Murakami’s story.
The student still deserved to have points taken off because the elephant would not block the motion as described if it were added to the equation exactly as it is depicted.
That set me, this typically apnea-awakened early morning, to imagining a short story full of detailed description of the falling pachyderm, its great bulk and its rough skin coming to rest exactly, meticulously contiguous to the smooth surface of the frictionless object, just at the moment when the object itself comes to rest against the tension-filled compression of the coiled spring: the whole complex of forces in perfect balance in a world not unlike our own, save for this or that counterfactual that, well, uh, changes it.
And when we have changed one small thing, who is to say we have not changed others as well, so that elephants can fall from space (or more likely, from just high enough above the object to avoid colliding with it), and we must contemplate how the rules play out upon their improbable but no longer impossible arrival?
But then I realized I would actually have to recollect all the laws of motion and inertia and gravitation that come into operation, and would have to do at least some of the math to have even a shred of verisimilitude.
Not being William Gass or Donald Barthelme nor was meant to be, I said, “To hell with it.” And anyone who reads the foregoing parody, unfortunately seriously meant, of the interminable rhythms of postmodernist prose( * ) will be glad I sent it off to hell. How much better off the world would be if everyone had read Hermann Broch’s Death of Virgil and decided, “There is something to be said for Ernest Hemingway, after all.”
But alas, I, like others, read Broch’s famous pages-long sentence with all the semicolons and commas and circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one, and I said, not without mixed admiration and exasperation: “You know, I bet I could do that.”
Happily, I never did, preferring to confine my rhythms to poems and longwinded essays. (By the way, the bizarrely inserted, not necessarily familiar quotation from Arlo Guthrie in the preceding has a purpose. Wait for it.)
But, also this apnea-awakened two a.m., I picked up Michael Mejia’s novel about Anton Webern, Forgetfulness, and while sinking pleasurably into its own brand of experimentation, realized anew the implicit contract between author and reader. And what happens when the terms of the contract change.
I confess I don’t read much nineteenth-century British fiction, no matter how classic and lovingly constructed its realism, because it would take me into a social world in which I have little enough interest, and the novels require me to dredge up my half-forgotten English history, which at times can resemble 1066 and All That.
Pretty soon I would be trying to recall the Corn Laws and the rotten boroughs and before I know it I would be off successive centuries earlier with the enclosures and eventually end up alongside the aristocrats forcing the king to grant them the Magna Carta, if not somewhere in the days of Alfred the Great or alongside Claudius, who Frank Morley speculates might have brought elephants along on his invasion of Britain. And then I would be right back to the damn frictionless ramp, so I just don’t do things like that.
But I do do things like pick up Mejia’s novel, which approaches Webern by way of small, deliberately disconnected paragraphs about the physical composition of the eye or Karl Kraus at the Café Central, or paragraphs offering hallucinatorily exact poetic descriptions of displaced persons circa 1940, et cetera. Plus a lot of Webern’s biography, contextualized sufficiently for those already immersed in the culture of modernist Vienna.
And in that “contextualized sufficiently” lies the problem. For the contractual agreement here is that the reader who picks up a novel like this one has a sufficient interest in the topic to understand the references, or at least enough of them to enjoy reading the book. Just as Victorian novels decline in interest for some once their topical concerns have receded into history, but remain powerful realist narratives for others; even so, for certain readers a book like Mejia’s can sail along on sheer style; and by and large it does.
It is inconceivable that any reader who would up Forgetfulness in the first place would fail to get the little joke about the woman showing off the cat in a box that she just now got from her neighbor that nice Mr. Schrödinger, but she cannot open the box because the cat might be dead but until she opens the box this sweet little tortoiseshell cat is neither alive nor dead. It’s not one of the strongest moments in the book, but it’s a cute breather in between the other intellectual pirouettes and poetic pavans.
Everybody knows Schrödinger’s cat, even if they don’t know that Schrödinger composed his parable to ridicule the theory of which it is an illustration.
But not everybody knows Karl Kraus, much less the names of multiethnic provinces that Mejia tosses into a brief passage about Franz Josef’s jubilee year of 1908. He blends the latter into a sweet little evocation of the elderly emperor’s recollection of that jubilee day “long ago” (I guess we are in the time of sliding time, since for the historical emperor, a day less than a decade ago wouldn’t seem all that distant when compared with the half-century since the loss of the Italian provinces).
A couple of paragraphs and format changes later, we are in Webern’s classroom, the good Herr Professor hearing in the hall “a murmured babble of Polish, Yiddish, German, Hungarian, Czech.” The isolated excursus on the emperor being, of course, a nice setup for this incidental detail.
Mejia is allowed such leaps, and moments that go no further, because he’s not writing a strict narrative, even if there is a plot that moves forward in a book that Mejia describes as “itself an archive of voices.” His four pages of acknowledgments of sources are less gracefully written than John Crowley’s, from whom Mejia could take lessons on how to annotate a novel.
Which brings me to the subject of the novel that I feel compelled not to discuss before publication, so I won’t. But I remind everyone to run out and pre-order Endless Things so as to be sure of getting the first printing.
And I will allow myself to say that one of the many things I admire about Crowley is his ability to work his reflective disquisitions into the flow of the narrative, and to keep his in-jokes from being intrusive. Some of them are so dry that readers not already familiar with the topics being transformed aren’t even aware that a joke has been made.
Now, to get back to the frictionless elephant…that reminds me of the one-paragraph post I did not post yesterday about the cellphone conversation overheard the night before in a Thai restaurant in Decatur.
I had walked by just as a suave, ebullient gentleman from India exclaimed into the phone, “No, no, Atlanta is wonderful! It’s just like Bangalore! It’s hot!”
Which struck me as yet another marketing slogan that our perennially inept self-image fashioners should pick up on. “Bangalore is hot. So are we!” (Which we, at the moment, are not. At least not in terms of air temperature, and it is not for me to judge the other aspects.)
But I realized that a quotation of the man’s witticism, taken in isolation, could have negative resonances I didn’t intend, and once I figured out I would soon be drifting off into 1500-word disquisitions on Kiran Desai, I again said, “To hell with it. I’ll find some way of working it in soon enough.”
This was a damn clumsy way to do it, don’t you think?
We are fortunate that students don’t yet know enough to hire intellectual property lawyers on spec. Or, perhaps, that the property rights to examination papers reside with the examiner and not with the examinee, even though they are returned to their originator.
It allows documents like the one reproduced above to circulate and be appropriated from a friends-only blog (which I cite as anonymous because, well, it’s friends-only and the friend can bloody well step forward and take credit).
I wisecracked to the amused teachers of science who were commenting that the student had a right to posit a falling elephant arriving just in time to block the movement of the object when it comes to rest with the spring at maximum compression, because a world in which a ramp is absolutely frictionless is already not the universe in which we live. It is closer to the universe in which elephants can fall fortuitously at the correct moment, sort of the semi-converse of the disappearing elephant in Murakami’s story.
The student still deserved to have points taken off because the elephant would not block the motion as described if it were added to the equation exactly as it is depicted.
That set me, this typically apnea-awakened early morning, to imagining a short story full of detailed description of the falling pachyderm, its great bulk and its rough skin coming to rest exactly, meticulously contiguous to the smooth surface of the frictionless object, just at the moment when the object itself comes to rest against the tension-filled compression of the coiled spring: the whole complex of forces in perfect balance in a world not unlike our own, save for this or that counterfactual that, well, uh, changes it.
And when we have changed one small thing, who is to say we have not changed others as well, so that elephants can fall from space (or more likely, from just high enough above the object to avoid colliding with it), and we must contemplate how the rules play out upon their improbable but no longer impossible arrival?
But then I realized I would actually have to recollect all the laws of motion and inertia and gravitation that come into operation, and would have to do at least some of the math to have even a shred of verisimilitude.
Not being William Gass or Donald Barthelme nor was meant to be, I said, “To hell with it.” And anyone who reads the foregoing parody, unfortunately seriously meant, of the interminable rhythms of postmodernist prose( * ) will be glad I sent it off to hell. How much better off the world would be if everyone had read Hermann Broch’s Death of Virgil and decided, “There is something to be said for Ernest Hemingway, after all.”
But alas, I, like others, read Broch’s famous pages-long sentence with all the semicolons and commas and circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one, and I said, not without mixed admiration and exasperation: “You know, I bet I could do that.”
Happily, I never did, preferring to confine my rhythms to poems and longwinded essays. (By the way, the bizarrely inserted, not necessarily familiar quotation from Arlo Guthrie in the preceding has a purpose. Wait for it.)
But, also this apnea-awakened two a.m., I picked up Michael Mejia’s novel about Anton Webern, Forgetfulness, and while sinking pleasurably into its own brand of experimentation, realized anew the implicit contract between author and reader. And what happens when the terms of the contract change.
I confess I don’t read much nineteenth-century British fiction, no matter how classic and lovingly constructed its realism, because it would take me into a social world in which I have little enough interest, and the novels require me to dredge up my half-forgotten English history, which at times can resemble 1066 and All That.
Pretty soon I would be trying to recall the Corn Laws and the rotten boroughs and before I know it I would be off successive centuries earlier with the enclosures and eventually end up alongside the aristocrats forcing the king to grant them the Magna Carta, if not somewhere in the days of Alfred the Great or alongside Claudius, who Frank Morley speculates might have brought elephants along on his invasion of Britain. And then I would be right back to the damn frictionless ramp, so I just don’t do things like that.
But I do do things like pick up Mejia’s novel, which approaches Webern by way of small, deliberately disconnected paragraphs about the physical composition of the eye or Karl Kraus at the Café Central, or paragraphs offering hallucinatorily exact poetic descriptions of displaced persons circa 1940, et cetera. Plus a lot of Webern’s biography, contextualized sufficiently for those already immersed in the culture of modernist Vienna.
And in that “contextualized sufficiently” lies the problem. For the contractual agreement here is that the reader who picks up a novel like this one has a sufficient interest in the topic to understand the references, or at least enough of them to enjoy reading the book. Just as Victorian novels decline in interest for some once their topical concerns have receded into history, but remain powerful realist narratives for others; even so, for certain readers a book like Mejia’s can sail along on sheer style; and by and large it does.
It is inconceivable that any reader who would up Forgetfulness in the first place would fail to get the little joke about the woman showing off the cat in a box that she just now got from her neighbor that nice Mr. Schrödinger, but she cannot open the box because the cat might be dead but until she opens the box this sweet little tortoiseshell cat is neither alive nor dead. It’s not one of the strongest moments in the book, but it’s a cute breather in between the other intellectual pirouettes and poetic pavans.
Everybody knows Schrödinger’s cat, even if they don’t know that Schrödinger composed his parable to ridicule the theory of which it is an illustration.
But not everybody knows Karl Kraus, much less the names of multiethnic provinces that Mejia tosses into a brief passage about Franz Josef’s jubilee year of 1908. He blends the latter into a sweet little evocation of the elderly emperor’s recollection of that jubilee day “long ago” (I guess we are in the time of sliding time, since for the historical emperor, a day less than a decade ago wouldn’t seem all that distant when compared with the half-century since the loss of the Italian provinces).
A couple of paragraphs and format changes later, we are in Webern’s classroom, the good Herr Professor hearing in the hall “a murmured babble of Polish, Yiddish, German, Hungarian, Czech.” The isolated excursus on the emperor being, of course, a nice setup for this incidental detail.
Mejia is allowed such leaps, and moments that go no further, because he’s not writing a strict narrative, even if there is a plot that moves forward in a book that Mejia describes as “itself an archive of voices.” His four pages of acknowledgments of sources are less gracefully written than John Crowley’s, from whom Mejia could take lessons on how to annotate a novel.
Which brings me to the subject of the novel that I feel compelled not to discuss before publication, so I won’t. But I remind everyone to run out and pre-order Endless Things so as to be sure of getting the first printing.
And I will allow myself to say that one of the many things I admire about Crowley is his ability to work his reflective disquisitions into the flow of the narrative, and to keep his in-jokes from being intrusive. Some of them are so dry that readers not already familiar with the topics being transformed aren’t even aware that a joke has been made.
Now, to get back to the frictionless elephant…that reminds me of the one-paragraph post I did not post yesterday about the cellphone conversation overheard the night before in a Thai restaurant in Decatur.
I had walked by just as a suave, ebullient gentleman from India exclaimed into the phone, “No, no, Atlanta is wonderful! It’s just like Bangalore! It’s hot!”
Which struck me as yet another marketing slogan that our perennially inept self-image fashioners should pick up on. “Bangalore is hot. So are we!” (Which we, at the moment, are not. At least not in terms of air temperature, and it is not for me to judge the other aspects.)
But I realized that a quotation of the man’s witticism, taken in isolation, could have negative resonances I didn’t intend, and once I figured out I would soon be drifting off into 1500-word disquisitions on Kiran Desai, I again said, “To hell with it. I’ll find some way of working it in soon enough.”
This was a damn clumsy way to do it, don’t you think?
