Vonnegut – Slaughterhouse-Five

Posted on by January 20, 2016
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Slaughterhouse fiveThis is a fine postwar novel in the tradition of others that expressed dehumanization and even nihilism after the catastrophic death and destruction of World War II. Unlike many others (such as The Sheltering Sky, The Stranger), in this one Vonnegut keeps the tone light and humorous, even while the mood is very dark, the text describing incredible suffering and degradation. That contrast makes the book intellectually and artistically stimulating.

The tale opens with a first-person narrator swearing that what you are about to hear is true, then the narration evolves into a more distant third-person story, and finally, in the last chapter, comes back around to the first-person narrator. This technique allows Vonnegut to jump around improbably in time and space, from protagonist Billy’s imminent death in a plane crash, to his childhood, and even to his journey to an alien planet light years from Earth. All that time-blending conveys impressions of the war and Vonnegut’s reaction to it, outside the traditional three-act story structure – because the war erased all structures.

Vonnegut’s famous narrative tic, to follow each mention of death with the phrase, “And so it goes,” renders all death equivalent, whether the slaughter of innocents or a bottle of champagne that has gone flat (“dead”). Death, says someone who knows, is unrelated to justice, and without moral or emotional meaning. Death is inevitable anyway, so why dwell on it? Accept what cannot be changed and change the things that can be. Or as the alien Tralfamadorians advise Billy, look away from your unpleasant destiny and go to the zoo instead.

Billy is way beyond shell-shocked. He is dazed and numb, not even human throughout the war, unable to evaluate anything or respond to the horrors he experiences. He becomes unhinged when he imagines being abducted by aliens in a flying saucer. After the war he became prosperous, with a wife and child, a house in the suburbs and a big Cadillac. But even then, he is shocked to discover that he doesn’t know the first thing about adult son and has nothing to say to him. Despite the trappings of happy success, after the war former soldiers were (are) still denuded of interior life, Vonnegut says, even of himself.

Jesus on the cross was “dead as a doornail,” the narrator says, so no redemption is possible, and yet, you have to be careful nailing up a guy like Jesus, because it turns out he was very well-connected and his dad was not pleased. The message of the novel wavers between utter despair and a hopeful but timid affirmation of life as long as it is lived only in the present moment.

Vonnegut, Kurt (1969). Slaughterhouse-Five. New York: Dell/Random (215 pp).

I Still Have Questions

Posted on by January 18, 2016
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Spiral GalaxyI have many questions about basic facts of the universe, from “What is sleep for?” to “How do Mirrors Work?” It’s a long list. I’ve attempted to find answers to these questions over the years, unsuccessfully. Usually it’s because I can’t make the question clear to anyone, or I can’t understand the answer.

One of these perennial questions came up again for me in an article on black holes in a recent edition of The Economist (January 9th, Science and Technology section: Astronomy).  My question is not about black holes although those are plenty mysterious. My question is much simpler: Why do spiral galaxies have spiral arms?

If you look at a picture of a spiral galaxy, and there are many of them from Hubble (our own Milky Way is a spiral galaxy), they look like pinwheels. But that’s impossible. There would have to be some inertial resistance operating on the arms to prevent them from spinning as fast as their core.

Space is a vacuum, so what is the equivalent of the wind resistance that would force jets, or tendrils, or tentacles of stars to be swept back into spiral form?  (The whole question of why astronomical objects spin in the first place is another question – to be deferred).

Maybe space is not a vacuum. There might be an environment of tiny dust particles that could constitute the “atmosphere” that puts up the drag to oppose the spinning of the object’s arms. But I doubt that. It would be too thin, and besides, the arms of the galaxy ARE the dust. That’s exactly where star formation is taking place by accretion. There’s no reason to believe that the empty space around a galaxy is thick with enough matter to force a starburst shape to become a spiral shape.

Assuming the stars in the arms are falling into the spinning core, it makes sense that the ones farther out are not falling as fast as the ones closer in, so I have no problem with the tapered shape of the arms. The problem is why the spinning of the core should have any effect on the arms. I would expect to see something like a regularly gradated cloud of stars around the cord, denser near the center lighter at the edges – in other words, a non-spiral galaxy. I would not expect to see a pinwheel.

A few years back, I asked a prominent University of Arizona astronomer this question, and I think I made myself clear, but I couldn’t understand his answer. He said those spiral arms are not really there. It’s a perceptual illusion. New stars are being formed at the tips of the arms while old stars are being consumed near the core, and the differential timing of that process gives the illusion of a spiral. That’s what he said.

“Do you understand?” he asked.

“So you’re saying the spiral arms I am questioning are not really there so I have no question?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

Well, I have to say, that answer just didn’t do it for me. I get that my analogy to a pinwheel in an atmosphere might be off-base, but to say that “Your question is not legitimate,” is not a good answer to any question, at least not without a lot more explanation.

So I read the article in The Economist with great interest, but my eyes kept going back to the picture. I still have questions.

Chinatown Bound

Posted on by January 14, 2016
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Society2I signed up for a writer’s conference in Portland, OR, a town I’ve always been fond of. When I lived in Seattle, I often  used to take the Amtrak down to Portland for the PDX Jazz Festival and enjoyed the music and the opportunity to shake hands and talk to a lot of interesting people, including Esperanza Spalding, Joe Lovano, Gary Burton, and many others. It is, or was, remarkable for being a small, informal festival with a surprising lineup of heavy hitters. I  have fond memories of late nights in Jimmy Mak’s.

The Portland Film Festival was also a pleasure, also low-key and casual yet first-class. Unlike the Seattle SIFF, which is so huge you can’t even scratch the surface, the PIFF was human in scale. That’s where I first encountered the work of Bela Tarr, one of my all-time favorite directors (I recommend “Damnation,” though you better read up on it first – it’s not for everyone).

Alas, Portland has been discovered and has become one of the most expensive cities in the country (like Seattle), and I imagine those festivals have by now become slick and shiny. Portland always did suffer from Seattle-envy.

Nevertheless, I signed up for this writing workshop, a “Novel Intensive,” partly out of nostalgia for the city, and partly because I always gain new insight at such gatherings. It’s a very small, low-key affair, just the way I like (www.novelintensives.com/) and the main presenter, Larry Brooks, is a name brand, someone I can learn from.

The workshop will be held in a hotel I cannot afford (The Benson), in a town I really cannot afford either, but I’m going to try to beat the system by staying in a newly renovated, hundred-year-old “historic” hotel in so-called “Chinatown” (north of Burnside). My wife is skeptical, but we did manage to score a room (only one of four) with a private bathroom, so she’s willing to go along. No TV, no phones, no restaurant, austere rooms that look like stone-walled cells, but that could be construed as atmospheric. It’s on the MAX trolley line that goes past Powell’s Books into downtown. What more could you ask? (www.thesocietyhotel.com/).

An added attraction is that in my current project, my main character, a Korean woman, is on the lam, pursued by the Los Angeles prosecutor’s office. Why not have her hide out in Portland? “All Asians look the same to white people,” she tells her friend in justifying the choice. So I can explore Portland’s Chinatown neighborhood for scene settings, take pictures, and theoretically write off my expenses as “research.”  (That would be assuming I had income to “write off” against, which I don’t, but still, it sounds impressive.)

So that’s coming up in three months. All I have to do now is complete the novel that will be intensively analyzed at the workshop. Piece of dim sum.

Bazell – Beat the Reaper

Posted on by January 14, 2016
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BeattheReaper_redThis is the kind of airport novel I used to read when I traveled a lot. Since then I’ve learned how to read literature with characters who develop self-awareness over time and stories that illuminate the human condition. I’m afraid that evolution spoiled my capacity to enjoy cartoony romps like this one, but I appreciate that there is an audience that wants and expects nothing more.

Beat the Reaper held my interest for a good 175 pages. The protagonist is a medical intern working at a big city hospital, in New York, I think. His secret is that he used to be a mafia hit man but after turning state’s witness, he graduated from the witness protection program into medical school. Bad luck then when one of his patients is a mob boss who recognizes him.

Much of the story is flashback, explaining how Dr. Brown got involved in the mob as a youth, how he was finally targeted by the mob and had to go undercover. None of it is believable or very different from a thousand other mob stories you’ve seen or read, and it destroys the pace of the much better present-day story.

The fun part of the book is the protagonist describing in viciously cynical detail the tense, crazy life of an intern in a hospital, on chronic sleep-deprivation, popping drugs, and avoiding writing anything in a patient’s chart that could be subpoenaed. It’s hilarious stuff and rings half-true. I especially liked notes like the explanation that all bottles of water in hospitals contain 5% glucose. That’s to avoid a billing line-item that says, “Liter of fucking tap water: $35.”

Unfortunately, that sharp humor made up only a fraction of the story, most of which is taken up by thick backstory until the halfway point, at which time everything turns to an elaborate chase with multiple shootouts, and even a shark attack. It’s as though the author ran out of story and lost his voice so just started making up the most ridiculous murder scenes he could think of – and there are some original murders, but none are believable or very funny, so who cares.

I finished the book, although after the midpoint when I realized I had seen all the author’s cards and nothing interesting was going to happen, the last half was a slog. But if you’re on a long flight with nothing else to do, this novel might keep you amused for a few hours.

Bazell, Josh. (2000). Beat the Reaper. New York: Back Bay/Little, Brown. (310 pp.).

Pynchon – Inherent Vice

Posted on by January 14, 2016
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inherent-viceThis is supposedly more accessible than Gravity’s Rainbow, the ponderous postmodern exercise for which Pynchon won the National Book Award in 1974, although the Pynchon style is the same.  This is a lighthearted detective story, with the PI, Doc Sportello trying to solve a kidnap case that involves a mobster-connected real-estate developer and his girlfriend who is also an ex-girlfriend of Doc’s.  Doc is a hippie in the early 70’s who chain smokes joints as he romps through Los Angeles looking for clues.  Inevitably, the police pick him up as a suspect, but in the end all is well.

The story is recognizably Pynchonesque, with a cast of hundreds, most wacky, an incredible, convoluted plot that just barely hangs together, infused with a mood of paranoia. Pop-cultural references abound. Characters have playful names that deliberately bump you out of the story, such as Riggs Warbling, Bigfoot Bjornsen,  Japonica Fenway, and my favorite, Vincent Indelicato. That is consistent with the silly tone of the book overall.

It is not a serious mystery, because not only is it hard to remember what’s going on and who’s who, but neither Doc nor any other character is well motivated or challenged (maybe that’s the marijuana thing), so the reader actually doesn’t care about the story or the characters.  About the only thing keeping you turning the pages are the trenchant descriptions and the humorous, but not-believable dialog.

Doc, making his single allowed call to his lawyer from the jailhouse:

“All’s I get here’s a three-minute, call, Saunch, they’ve got me in Compton, and it’s Bigfoot again.”

“Yeah well, I’m watching cartoons here, okay?  And this Donald Duck one is really freaking me out? …

“You have a pen, Saunch?  Here’s the processing number, prepare to copy.”…

“It’s like Donald and Goofy, right, and they’re out in a life raft, adrift at  sea?  for what looks like weeks?  and what you start noticing after a while, in Donald’s close-ups, is that he has this whisker stubble?  like, growing out of his beak?  You get the significance of that?

“If I find a minute to think about it, Saunch, but meantime here comes Bigfoot and he’s got that look, so if you could repeat the number back, OK, and…”

“We’ve always had this image of Donald Duck, we assume it’s how he looks all the time in his normal life, but in fact he’s always had to go in every day and shave his beak.  The way I figure, it has to be Daisy.  You know, which means, what other grooming demands is that chick laying on him, right?”

The book is really about Thomas Pynchon.  It is clever-funny, completely silly, and in the end, unsatisfying. Why that is, I’m not sure.

Inherent Vice is in part, a parody of, or an homage to, the noir detective novels of the 1940’s, in particular, ones by Raymond Chandler, such as “The Big Sleep” and “Farewell, My Lovely,” featuring detective Phillip Marlowe. Yet it isn’t fan fiction. It just sort of wears similar clothes as the Chandler originals, but its structure and voice are definitely derivative.

As a nominal detective novel, not much detecting goes on in IV. There is a nominal plot, a missing businessman and a missing girlfriend, but it’s so disjointed, with so many characters moving on and off stage that readers really can’t follow. When you start out with a detective and a girl in crisis with a missing boyfriend, that tees up a mystery.  How long will a reader stick with the book until realizing that the logic of the mystery story is virtually non-existent? I felt cheated somehow.

Yet the writing is so much fun, so original, so unexpected, so genuinely silly (and I love silly),  that I had no trouble keeping the pages turning. I guess postmodernism still takes some getting used to.

Pynchon, Thomas (2009).  Inherent Vice. New York: Penguin Press.

Lolita in Japan

Posted on by December 31, 2015
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Great FireFine writing is the main attraction of this novel, set in Japan and China immediately after WW II. Individual scenes and character gestures are sometimes done with such elegance and grace that the prose verges on poetry.

“Until this, war has been the way out, for most men. Soldiering, or seamanship. Young recruits with their dreams of transformation: of conquest, plunder, fornication. Even, in some, the dream of knowledge. Inconceivable, in advance, the red mess and shallow grave” (p 24).

“The hill above the tiny town was gravid in the way of that landscape, its grassy garment stretched like soft cloth over an imagined anatomy of ancient, unremembered walls, graves, and ditches:  a tumid rise, over which you might mentally pass your hand” (p. 60).

“Rysom laughed too loud – his need for advantage vigilant as fear” (p. 73).

Sometimes, however, the lyrical prose verges on mere overwriting.

“In the crystal morning, Leith was driving with Talbot into green hills: discarding the exploded dockland, winding around ledges of emerald rice” (p. 23).

Quite often, the author unnecessarily uses an indirect reference to a character, with the result being confusion. For example, there are two men in talking in a room and she will begin referring to one of the actors as “the man.” That is just not helpful. In other places, characters are randomly referred to as the boy, the soldier, the girl, each time  ambiguously. Maybe she thought this technique introduced tension into otherwise tensionless scenes.

There is also quite a bit of head-hopping, changing the third-person narrator’s close POV from one character to another even in the same paragraph, so that we are told what Brian is thinking, then a few sentences later, what Paul is thinking. That’s is a writer’s taboo, as everyone knows, and the real problem is that it ends up distancing the reader from all the characters and focusing instead on the narrator’s voice.

Literary distance is a problem throughout the book. It’s easy at first to believe that the book is “about” Japan and China after the war, since the main character is a mid-thirties Brit whose job it is to assess damage around Hiroshima, and his best friend’s job is to identify war criminals in Japan.  However, the story doesn’t describe the landscape, culture, or people of Japan and China in any detail, so that is not the theme of the book. Instead, we are to focus exclusively on Major Leith, the British damage assessor.

But after you recognize the initial misdirection and acquiesce to a love story having nothing seriously to do with the aftermath of the war, you find that story lacking. The Major improbably falls in love with a 15 year-old Aussie girl, but at least controls himself until she is a more decent 17 years old. She is presented as intelligent, sensitive and erudite, old beyond her years (?) but that doesn’t mitigate the creepy mood. Like Humbert, Leith is manipulative, and like Lolita, she is compliant. It’s a male fantasy, deeply unsatisfying, and not as well written as Nabokov’s tale.

There’s no plot line, as is often the case in literary fiction, so you have to enjoy the story, such as it is, for the scenery, the characterizations, and the lyrical language.  Of these, the language is almost redemptive, good enough to win a National Book Award, apparently.

Hazzard, Shirley. (2003).The Great Fire. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (326 pp.).

Piano on a Bicycle

Posted on by December 31, 2015
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Piano-BicycleI’m sketching for my new novel. I have 20 pages of notes, not really an “outline,” as in Roman numerals and all that, but I start out with a blank document divided into three sections, or “acts,” which are, Beginning, Middle, and End.

In the Beginning section, I make notes about my main character (MC) and her status quo situation (SQ). She’s a carry-over from the last novel, as this is the third in a trilogy, so I already know quite a bit about her. For SQ, I locate her in time and space (contemporary Los Angeles), and have her exercising her occupation (designer of AI androids).

Then a Trigger Event is supposed to occur that destroys her SQ.  In this case, the trigger will be slow in coming. First, a mysterious disease has to spread through the population, slowly in the beginning, then ever-increasing. Scientists and authorities are baffled. The public is panicked. When MC is practicing her avocation, all of her students suddenly die of the disease. Consequently, she is identified as a kind of “Typhoid Mary” and is forced into hiding to save her life. That’s finally the trigger.

To bring Act I to a close, I identify MC’s story goal. She must remain hidden, but also find the real cause, and hopefully the cure for the disease. So we have a mash-up of The Fugitive and Saramgo’s Blindness.

Then I sketch the ending, Act III.  In that section, MC must confront her obstacles (demons and villains) to achieve the story goal and establish a new SQ with increased self-understanding. The difference between MC’s self-understanding in Act I and her final understanding in Act III, defines her character arc.

I’m a little shaky on that arc. She does undergo a transformation, but it might be too subtle. I think it needs work still.

In the Middle, I sketch notes for Act II, the various actions, reactions, successes, and mostly failures, as MC tries to get from Act I to Act III.  My historical tendency is to pile too many complications into Act II, so I’m trying to keep it down. I also need to develop a romantic interest in Act II. Since MC is a shaman, I also want the story to reflect two levels of existence, the objective world we are familiar with, and in which  she exercises scientific thinking to solve problems; and a subterranean world, not literally underground, but under the level of self-aware, linguistic consciousness.

A metaphor I’ve found for this layering is music in 6/8 rhythm but with the melody line expressed in a slower, 4/4 time. On 6, 12, 16, and 24 bars, the melody and the rhythm coincide nicely. An example would be “Theme From a Summer Place,” a deadly tune, but one which exemplifies the kind of layering I’m after. A better example is “Ti-Na-Na,” by Buckwheat Zydeco.

To help me develop the idea, I’ve spent most of the morning mounting my electronic keyboard onto the handlebars of my stationary bicycle. To date, my exercise regime has been to sit at my desk and gaze at the exercise bike. That has not produced impressive results. I’m hopeful that with the addition of a piano keyboard, I will be motivated to explore my story metaphor in detail.

Why Dialog Isn’t Real

Posted on by December 22, 2015
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ER ImageI went into the hospital “for some tests,” as we say. In the ER, I gritted my teeth against abdominal pain as I listened to the moaning and crying around me and smelled the odors of sickness. I endured. Hospitals run on their own time.

Finally a tall African-looking youth appeared in my curtained cell. Multiple ID badges clacked from his lanyard.  He hooked me up to hydration and a morphine drip.

“My name is Ishmael, and I’ll be your nurse while you’re here, sir,” he said.

Despite my discomfort, I had a very strong urge to reply, “So what can I call you?” But I knew that would be silly and disrespectful, so I simply said hello.

Thinking about this exchange as I waited another hour for an EKG, I realized how different literary dialog is from real-world dialog. If we had been characters in a novel, I would have asked Ishmael the question and he would have stopped what he was doing and looked me in the face with an expression of disappointment and disdain. I think he wouldn’t have replied, not because he didn’t get the joke, but because he’d heard it a thousand times. Then he would have resumed pressing buttons on the pump controller and entering data into a computer on a stand-up workstation.

But sometime later, when the EKG was ready, he would have come back with the cardio tech and said to me,

“How you feelin’ now, Ahab?”

He would have seen me smile and that would have been my nickname for the next four hours in the hellhole and we would have been buddies forever.

The nurses in ER are a special breed. They really make an effort to keep the tone friendly and light, despite being surrounded by so much human suffering. Ishmael was expert at his job.

Why would that scene only happen in fiction? Fictional dialog, and fictional scenes in general, are never realistic, no matter how mundane they might seem on the page. We write fictional scenes to call out interesting moments of human life that are normally buried and diluted in a miasma of context.

Writing and reading are a kind of communication rare in human life. Both ends of the communication channel are almost completely conceptualized and articulated and 100% linguistically encoded and explicit.

In real life, we let most of everything go unsaid, not because we can’t think of the words, but because we are unable to conceptualize all our experience as it happens. We move through life mostly on instinct, habit, gestures, and autopilot. What we do say is often not what we mean.

But you can’t write fiction that way. You have to take every movement and understand it and find the right words to express it. The result is all very explicit, even if you are good enough to see the parts that will be understood without writing them.

And it’s the same for the reader. Everything is spelled out, even those parts that are only implied. Writing and reading constitute an unnatural kind of communication that doesn’t occur in life. And maybe that’s what makes writing and reading interesting as an art form.

Or maybe that was just the morphine talking.

Ferrante – The Days of Abandonment

Posted on by December 22, 2015
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Days of AbandonmentThis book was recommended to me as an example of how to show characters’ emotions effectively, something I struggle with. It’s the story of a woman whose husband abruptly abandons her for a younger woman, leaving her adrift and with two children to care for. The cad!

She goes through stages of pain, from disbelief, certainty that it’s just a temporary phase, to rage and even violence.  The first 73 pages of the book are quite gripping in describing all that. Afterwards however, she becomes deeply depressed and filled with self-loathing. She acts irrationally, neglects her children, and can’t concentrate.

In the end, she finds her feet again and enters into another relationship with a man, a predictable but unsatisfying ending that reminds us every fish needs a bicycle.

I enjoyed the first 70 pages or so, learning about the character and watching her reactions to the great injustice, but after that, when she goes depressive and a little insane, I lost interest. When somebody is “crazy,” anything can happen, because, well, they’re crazy. Causal sequencing is out the window and any event is as probable as any other because nothing follows from anything. I don’t find that interesting reading.

What about the idea that this book is an example of effective emotional description? Well, there too, I have to say, I was disappointed.  The author simply names a lot of abstract emotions and mental states: “I was sad; I was confused; I was angry.”

I can do that. What I was looking for was something more subtle. Furthermore, the author doesn’t even account for these cognitive and emotional labels. The emotion or thought just comes upon the character of its own accord, without explanation.

“The suspicion soon became a certainty. He wanted to help me accept the necessity of our separation; he wanted it to be me who said to him: you’re right, it’s over. But not even then did I lose my composure. I continued to proceed with circumspection as I always had before the accidents of life. The only external sign of my agitation was an inclination to disorder and a weakness in my fingers and the more the anguish increased, the harder they found it to close solidly around things.” (p 17)

To my eye, this is just a report of mental and emotional phenomena, with no connecting tissue. This happened, then that happened, for no reason at all. The whole book is like that.

The author is more effective in evoking moods of horror and despair, and she does that by describing body functions and body fluids in detail, on the assumption that most readers are horrified by display of body products. I’m convinced that Ferrante had compiled an exhaustive list of all possible body products, because most of them are mentioned, from vomit to diarrhea and everything in between. That doesn’t seem like a coincidence.

And yet even listing body parts and products doesn’t strike me as a very effective way to express emotions. How does one express emotions in a sophisticated way? My feeling is that it’s best done indirectly, in dialog and interactive behavior, but I couldn’t spell out the principles.

So for now, I still struggle to effectively express my characters’ emotions.

Ferrante, Elena (2002/2005). The Days of Abandonment. New York: Europa Editions (188 pp.).

Year of the Einstein

Posted on by December 10, 2015
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Space-timeIt’s been a hundred years since Einstein published his General Relativity (Gravity) theory. How time flies when your space-time is curved!  Many summary articles have appeared, in The New York Times, Science News, and The Economist, to name just a few that have come my way.

I’ve always been skeptical of the Theory of Relativity (both theories), not because I’m a hide-bound Newtonian, but because of the slippery language used to express them. The true language of physics is math, and I don’t speak it well enough to communicate (Einstein himself barely did), so I am left with descriptions of the theories in ordinary language, and those I have found lacking.

My concerns could therefore be dismissed as irrelevant, since I am not communicating in mathematics. But that would be unfair, because scientists must be able to explain their work in ordinary language or they risk becoming an echo chamber for specialists, irrelevant themselves. Science is a societal enterprise, supported by the wide society, and scientific ideas must ultimately be communicable to its members. That’s my justification for having an opinion on these matters in ordinary language.

My concerns about relativity arise from two basic points. One, how is it that one man could, using only the power of his imagination, conceive of a cosmology that ultimately turned out to be so useful to so many – and which corresponds so remarkably well with observation of the physical world?  It’s not like he was poring over reams of anomalous data and trying to find a least-squares regression line or something else to organize it all. No, he just conceived a universe from whole cloth. How? It’s a psychological question whose answer throws doubts over the special theory, which is foundational for the general theory.

My second issue is about the language and logic of science itself, particularly when it comes to the role of the observer, and indeed the very definition of what it means to “observe” something.  This is a question about the nature of human perception, cognition, and epistemology.

When science writers talk about clocks giving different times depending on their motion or gravitational situation, they almost seem to be deliberately hiding the role of the observer with disingenuous language. Clocks do not “give” or “tell” time at all. A human observer must look at the instrument and interpret the reading. So the real issues in time dilation and space-time curvature involve the capacities of the observer, not the performances of clocks and beams of light. The relentlessly objective language seems perversely blind to the reality of the subjective observer.  Again, my skepticism boils down to psychological issues.

Do I have alternative ways of thinking about such matters?  None that are non-risible to scientific thinking. But since I question the very basis of scientific thinking, objectivity and even the definition of empiricism, foundations that scientists cannot and do not dare examine, my alternative formulations are not crushed by being labeled “unscientific” or “non-mathematical” or “untestable.”  Such labels would miss the point of my alternate world-view.

Okay, I admit I’m intimidated by the massively overwhelming social acceptance of scientific epistemology as the gold standard of critical thinking. That’s why I’m not offering my alternative ideas here. I lack an appropriate language for making them understood.

In reading various mini-biographies of Einstein this month, I understand he faced a similar challenge, finding appropriate language to express his ideas. He was fortunate to connect with mathematicians familiar with non-Euclidean geometry and other tools that eventually led him to the expression he sought.

But importantly, Einstein spoke the lingua Franca of physics. He needed only a few bridging sentence structures. The community was already prepared to understand the result (not without some difficulty, it’s true). I, on the other hand, will never be able to express my ideas in the language of science. Perhaps the language of fiction instead will carry me where I want to go.