footnotes to footnotes to footnotes to unwritten essays

At an art get-together Thursday night somebody brought up the experiments with the color sense shown by chimpanzees and I commented that it was curious that the art made by chimpanzees and elephants is always used to disrespect abstraction; that it would be like dissing auto mechanics because chimpanzees can fit two sticks together securely to reach a banana outside the cage bars.

If we are higher animals, the operative word is "higher." Angels, if they exist, are even higher animals. Complexity counts, though so does simplicity in the right circumstances. The choice is the difference. Or the difference is the difference.

coincidentally....

having had on my mind, from the morning's LJ posting, the statisticians' example that we don't notice all the times we think of a friend who doesn't call, I was engaged in a brunch conversation on my birthday that led from Mardi Gras beads to the history of New Orleans to a story about architecturally distinguished homes in New Orleans neighborhoods being sold to artists at prices allowing them to do installation art in them.

A discussion ensued regarding the architecture of outlying neighborhoods damaged in the flood. I brought up the 1960s ranch-style home in which a New Orleans-raised friend of mine had grown up.

She called roughly two minutes later to wish me a happy birthday.

Statistically highly probable (one of those people who would call at some point on my birthday) but another illustration that we must have dozens of seemingly improbable coincidences happening to us all day long.

I got your number. Right here.

Enumerate this.

All of us interpret according to our preferred categories, but sometimes the right answer is "none of the above," if not "not this, not this."

I knew the eleven-eleven would draw out certain responses, though it's interesting that nobody thinks of the end of the War to End All Wars any longer when the number comes up.

I don't remember much about numerology, there being too many systems of them, but human beings like repetition. (See the friends-only post re repetition, with apologies to friends that here I repeat myself.)

But the real cognoscenti get the triple-four reference, and I dunno what the triple-three traditionally means, 'cept that as per the comment, half a beast is roadkill or dead meat one way or another.

Now, three hundred eight would be a different matter, given as how six hundred and sixteen is the original Greek text of the Apocalypse of John that just barely made it into the New Testament over great protest.

In any case, we know more than we used to know, and just because you are paranoid does not mean that no one is engaging in improbable plots. This is the story line of Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, where the attempt to make up a really silly imaginary story turns out to rouse the fears of those engaged in just such a conspiracy.

Which brings me to Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence, which I think actually works because it is one of those cute, too cute attempts to incorporate the assumptions of the fictions written in Renaissance Florence and in Akbar's India concurrently, and to cram them together into a tale that is written to amuse those who know the conventions of that time. Since hardly any reviewer knows what is being parodied, and since it masquerades as a standard-issue magical realist novel, the reviewers don't like it.

I'm not sure I like all of its efforts to outdo Borges and John Barth at the same time as it recapitulates the wonders of Renaissance storytelling, but it's a better novel than the reviewers seem to think.

Hell, maybe there are repeated numerals in there someplace, though I sure enough haven't found any.

getting it

"I don't get it." But that is my point. We can be reliably expected not to understand in specific ways. And we can be marketed to or manipulated according to what it is that we can be expected not to get. Or to think we get when we don't. Complimenting the audience's superior intelligence or making the audience believe it has reached its own conclusions when it has reached the conclusions intended by the orator are rhetorical tricks known to antiquity, though not quite since antiquity, apparently.