To the happy few

Rorschach: Used to come here often, back when we were partners.

Dreiberg: Oh. Uh, yeah… yeah, those were great times, Rorschach. Great times. Whatever happened to them?

Rorschach: [exiting] You quit.

— Alan Moore, in Watchmen

Graphic novels make use of some techniques that are hard to mimic in other media. Much is left to the imagination, not only in terms of action and filling the gaps, but also in the speech and pauses. In this regard, this art form stands somewhere between literature and movies, and when it is done right it can be the best of both worlds.

Laurie Juspeczyk: Hey, you remember that guy? The one who pretended to be a supervillain so he could get beaten up?

Dan Dreiberg: Oh, You mean Captain Carnage. Ha ha ha! He was one for the books.

Laurie: You’re telling me! I remember, I caught him coming out of this jeweller’s. I didn’t know what his racket was. I start hitting him and I think “Jeez! He’s breathing funny! Does he have asthma?

Dan: Ha Ha Ha. He tried that with me, only I’d heard about him, so I just walked away. He follows me down the street… broad daylight, right? He’s saying “PUNISH me!” I’m saying “No! Get lost!”

Laurie: Ha Ha Ha. What ever happened to him?

Dan: Well, he pulled it on Rorschach, and Rorschach dropped him down an elevator shaft.

Laurie: PHAAA HA HA HA! Oh, God, I’m sorry, that isn’t funny, Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha!

Dan: Ha Ha Ha! No, I guess it’s not…

Laurie:Ahuh. Ahuhuhuh…Jeez, y’know, that felt Good. There don’t seem to be that many laughs around these days.

Dan: Well, what do you expect? The Comedian is Dead.

— Alan Moore, in Watchmen

I like that scene; it embodies the sort of punchline that creates the dark atmosphere in superhero stories. Perhaps this scene would be too obvious in a movie, and it would take literary genius to pull it off in narrative style.

Heard joke once: Man goes to doctor. Says he’s depressed. Says life seems harsh and cruel. Says he feels all alone in a threatening world where what lies ahead is vague and uncertain. Doctor says “Treatment is simple. Great clown Pagliacci is in town tonight. Go and see him. That should pick you up.” Man bursts into tears. Says “But Doctor… I am Pagliacci.”

— Alan Moore, in Watchmen

Assisti recentemente a um seminário dado por Denis Noble, um cientista com um certo renome, sobre a modularidade e a biologia de sistemas. Entre outras coisas, negou o dogma central da Biologia Molecular, defendeu o Lamarckismo e contrariou a tese do gene egoísta. Tudo isso foi extremamente interessante, mas o que me cativou mais no senhor foi o interesse com que seguiu as restantes palestras, elogiando e fazendo perguntas, ao contrário de outros investigadores de igual estatuto. Havia um poema de Aleixo que era algo como: “Se puderes estar sereno / No meio onde estão aqueles / Que te julgam mais pequeno / Serás maior do que eles.” Nunca gostei muito da quadra, pela mesma razão que levou Pessoa a desprezar Oscar Wilde, mas é tentador inverter a ideia: quem for capaz de caminhar sem ilusões entre os que são considerados mais pequenos, será de facto grande.

1 IF I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.
2 If I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.
3 And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I surrender my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing.
4 Love is patient, love is kind and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant,
5 does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered,
6 does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth;
7 bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
8 Love never fails; but if there are gifts of prophecy, they will be done away; if there are tongues, they will cease; if there is knowledge, it will be done away.
9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part;
10 but when the perfect comes, the partial will be done away.
11 When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things.
12 For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I will know fully just as I also have been fully known.
13 But now faith, hope, love, abide these three; but the greatest of these is love.

— 31 Corinthians 13, The Bible

Nunca li a Bíblia, mas sei que está cheia de episódios e ensinamentos interessantes (só nesta citação há pelo menos três ou quatro que me chamaram a atenção). Fez-me lembrar o Fio da Navalha, porque contraria a ideia de que o caminho mais nobre é o da Razão. Existem tantas fontes de sabedoria; “they can’t all be right”. Tinha lido uma piada informática que dizia “Jesus saves, Buddha makes incremental backups”, mas só agora me apercebi que era uma referência ao mito da reencarnação; Larry disse que o cristianismo absorveu tanto do neoplatonismo que facilmente poderia ter incorporado também esse mito, que seria então observado pelos crentes com o mesmo estatuto da ressurreição de Cristo. A verdade é que todas as fontes de sabedoria podem mesmo estar certas, porque “há mais respostas do que perguntas, e a alguns elas satisfizeram plenamente”.

Oftentimes, the interest raised by a question depends on how you frame it. Immunology is a fascinating subject on its own, but when you think about it as the general problem of discriminating self and non-self, with all the connections to pattern detection and artificial intelligence this entails, it can blow your mind.

(On the other hand, is it really immunology that blows your mind in this case, or is it merely an instance of the naturally mind-blowing subject of artificial intelligence?)

Autoimmunity may be considered a “strange loop” according to Hofstadter; is the immune system intelligent? Can there be other forms of intelligence that we cannot yet comprehend? This reminds me of self-organized complexity (that word “self” again); can it be intelligence if it follows a deterministic path, almost like a river flowing to the ocean? And if not, are human beings intelligent?

One could go crazy thinking about these things, and there you would have your “strange loop” for intelligence, Gödel’s Theorem in all its glory.

I attended a seminar where Luís Rocha was describing the current state of biological research, and he talked about how thousands of individual scientists generate vast amounts of data that must then be processed by a computer so we can grasp its meaning. He then remarked how amazing it was that in this instance we are like little ants, mindlessly gathering information so an artificial intelligence makes sense of it.

This is why I love Heller:

Siegfried was dead at the end; Brünhilde was dead, even the horse was dead; Valhalla had collapsed, the gods were gone with it; and the composer was elated while his voluptuous music subsided in triumph like a delicate dream, for such is the calculating nature of art and the artist.

— Joseph Heller, in Closing Time

They create worlds and never stop to think about the grief and pain of their inhabitants. Proust noted the natural evolution of real characters towards the fictional, and Eco also blurred that distinction, but I’m not sure they went as far as Heller in this passage; here is the paradox: fiction does not become real by surpassing the artist, but because it is fabricated by him. Naturally, once it exists it outlives the Creator, much like Humanity with God, mixaphorically speaking. Tangled web of origins. Would Hamlet imagine his own Shakespeare? That is the true magic of religion, as Dostoievsky wrote in Brothers Karamazov.

All around us, as far as we could see, everyone was dead, men, women, and children, every parrot, cat, dog, and canary. I felt sorry for them all. I felt sorry for the Polish slave laborers. I felt sorry for the Germans.

I felt sorry for myself. I didn’t count. For a second I almost cried. Didn’t they care that we might be there? I still don’t know why we were spared.

I saw I made no difference. It all would have taken place without me and come out just the same. I would make no difference anywhere, except at home with my family and maybe with a few friends. And after that, I knew I would never even want to vote.

— Joseph Heller, in Closing Time

Lew has all the heavy scenes. In any case, I was amused by the consequence he takes from his musings. Not wanting to vote. Is that the best conclusion you can come up with? Seriously? The feeling of making no difference is a powerful one, and it is a shame to see it wasted on self-pity, instead of being a driving force, as it should.

– Esqueci-me de onde moro. E não tenho backup.
– Estou tão triste. Perdi os últimos dez anos da minha vida.

— Informáticos do IGC, comentando a possibilidade de expandir a memória humana