Tag Archives: memoir

Ideas are like boomerangs

Posted on by

Reading In a Flight of Starlings: The Wonder of Complex Systems by Giorgio Parisi for The Telegraph, 1 July 2023

“Researchers,” writes Giorgio Parisi, recipient of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics, “often pass by great discoveries without being able to grasp them.” A friend’s grandfather identified and then ignored a mould that killed bacteria, and so missed out on the discovery of penicillin. This story was told to Parisi in an attempt to comfort him for the morning in 1970 he’d spent with another hot-shot physicist, Gerard ‘t Hooft, dancing around what in hindsight was a perfectly obvious application of some particle accelerator findings. Having teetered on the edges of quantum chromodynamics, they walked on by; decades would pass before either man got another stab at the Nobel. “Ideas are often like boomerangs,” Parisi explains, and you can hear the sigh in his voice; “they start out moving in one direction but end up going in another.”

In a Flight of Starlings is the latest addition to an evergreen genre: the scientific confessional. Read this, and you will get at least a frisson of what a top-flight career in physics might feel like.

There’s much here that is charming and comfortable: an eminent man sharing tales of a bygone era. Parisi began his first year of undergraduate physics in November 1966 at Sapienza University in Rome, when computer analysis involved lugging about (and sometimes dropping) metre-long drawers of punched cards.

The book’s title refers to Parisi’s efforts to compute the murmurations of starlings. Recently he’s been trying to work out how many solid spheres of different sizes will fit into a box. There’s a goofiness to these pet projects that belies their significance. The techniques developed to follow thousands of starlings through three dimensions of space and one of time bear a close resemblance to those used to solve statistical physics problems. And fitting marbles in a box? That’s a classic problem in information theory.

The implications of Parisi’s work emerge slowly. The reader, who might, in all honesty, be touched now and again by boredom, sits up straighter once the threads begin to braid.

Physics for the longest time could not handle complexity. Galileo’s model of the physical world did not include friction, not because friction was any sort of mystery, but because the mathematics of his day couldn’t handle it.

Armed with better mathematics and computational tools physics can now study phenomena that Galileo could never have imagined would be part of physics. For instance, friction. For instance, the melting of ice, and the boiling of water: phenomena that, from the point of view of physics, are very strange indeed. Coming up with models that explain the phase transitions of more complex and disordered materials, such as glass and pitch, is something Parisi has been working on, on and off, since the middle of the 1990s.

Efforts to model more and more of the world are nothing new, but once rare successes now tumble in upon the field at a dizzying rate; almost as though physics has undergone its own phase transition. This, Parisi says, is because once two systems in different fields of physics can be described by the same mathematical structure, “a rapid advancement of knowledge takes place in which the two fields cross-fertilize.”

This has clearly happened in Parisi’s own specialism. The mathematics of disorder apply whether you’re describing why some particles try to spin in opposite directions, or why certain people sell shares that others are buying, or what happens when some dinner guests want to sit as far away from other guests as possible.

Phase transitions eloquently connect the visible and quantum worlds. Not that such connections are particularly hard to make. Once you know the physics, quantum phenomena are easy to spot. Ever wondered at a rainbow?

“Much becomes obvious in hindsight,” Parisi writes. “Yet it is striking how in both physics and mathematics there is a lack of proportion between the effort needed to understand something for the first time and the simplicity and naturalness of the solution once all the required stages have been completed.”

The striking “murmurations” of airborne starlings are created when each bird in the flock pays attention to the movements of its nearest neighbour. Obvious, no?

But as Parisi in his charming way makes clear, whenever something in this world seems obvious to us, it is likely because we are perched, knowingly or not, on the shoulders of giants.

The Value of Psychotic Experience

Posted on by

Reading The Best Minds: A story of friendship, madness and the tragedy of good intentions by Jonathan Rosen. For the Telegraph, 3 April 2023

This is the story of the author’s lifelong friendship with Michael Laudor: his neighbour growing up in in 1970s Westchester County; his rival at Yale; and his role-model as he abandoned a lucrative job for a life of literary struggle. Through what followed — debilitating schizophrenia; law school; and national celebrity as he publicised the plight of people living with mental illness — Laudor became something of a hero for Jonathan Rosen. And in June 1998, in the grip of yet another psychotic episode, he stabbed his pregnant girlfriend to death.

Her name was Caroline Costello and, says Rosen, she would not have been the first person to ascribe everything in Laudor’s disintegration, “from surface tremors to elliptical apocalyptic utterances, to the hidden depths of a complex soul.”

It will take Rosen over 500 pages to unpick Costello and Laudor’s tragedy, but he starts (and so, then, will we) with the Beats — that generation of writers who, he says, “released madness like a fox at a hunt, then rushed after — not to help or heal but to see where it led, and to feel more alive while the chase was on.”

As a young man, the poet Alan Ginsburg (whose Beat poem “Howl” gives this book its title) gave permission for his mother’s lobotomy. He spent the rest of his life atoning for this, “spinning the culture around him,” says Rosen, “into alignment with his mother’s psychosis”. By the summer of 1968 the Esalen Institute in Big Sur was sponsoring events under the heading “The Value of Psychotic Experience”.

To the amateur dramatics of the Beat generation (who declared mental illness a myth) add the hypocrisies of neo-Marxist critics like Paul de Mann (who proved texts mean whatever we want them to mean) and Franz Fanon (for whom violence was a cleansing force with a healing property) and the half-truths of anti-psychiatrists like Felix Guattari, who hid his clinic’s use of ECT to bolster his theory that schizophrenia was a disease of capitalist culture. Stir in the naiveties of the community health movement (that judged all asylums prisons), and policies ushered in by Jack Kennedy’s Community Mental Health Act of 1963 (“predicated,” says Rosen, “on the promise of cures that did not exist, preventions that remained elusive, and treatments that only work for those who were able to comply”); and you will begin to understand the sheer enormity of the doom awaiting Laudor and those he loved, once the 1980s had “backed up an SUV” over the ruins of America’s mental health provision.

This is a tragedy that enters wearing the motley of farce: on leaving Yale, Laudor became a management consultant, hired by the multinational firm Bain & Co. Rosen reckons Laudor got the job by talking with authority even when he didn’t know what he was talking about; “That, in fact, was why they had hired him.”

By the time Laudor enters Yale Law School, however, his progressive disintegration is clear enough to the reader (if not to the Dean of the school, Guido Calabresi, besotted with the way an understanding of mental health could, in Rosen’s words, “undermine the authority of courts, laws, facts, and judges, by exposing the irrational nature of the human mind”).

Soon Michael is being offered a million dollars for his memoir and another million for the movie rights. He’s the poster child for every American living with mental illness, and at the same time, he’s an all-American success story: proof that the human spirit can win out over psychiatric neglect.

Only it didn’t.

No one knows what to do about schizophrenia. The treatments don’t work, except sometimes they do, and when they do, no-one can really say why.

Rosen’s book is a devastating attack on a generation that refused to look this hard truth in the eye, and turned it, instead into some sort of flattering sociopolitical metaphor, and in so doing, deprived desperate people of care.

Rosen’s book is the mea culpa of a man who now understands that “the revolution in consciousness I hoped would free my mind… came at the expense of people whose mental pain I could not begin to fathom.”

It’s the darkest of literary triumphs, and the most gripping of unbearable reads.

Where the law of preposterousness trumps all

Posted on by

Reading Pieter Waterdrinker’s The Long Song of Tchaikovsky Street: A Russian Adventure for the Times, 29 January 2022

On 16 June 1936 the author and Bolshevik sympathiser Andre Gide left France for 9-week trip to the Soviet Union. In Soviet Russia, he was offered every comfort — an experience he found extremely unsettling. “Are these really the men who made the Revolution?” he asked, in his book Afterthoughts. “No; they are the men who profit by it. They may be members of the Party — there is nothing communist in their hearts.”

Parisian intellectuals immediately piled in on this turncoat, this viper: Romain Rolland called Gide’s reporting “astonishingly poor, superficial, puerile and contradictory”.

It is possible to misread The Long Song, Pieter Waterdrinker’s memoir of Russia and its revolutions, in the same way, and lay the same charges at his door. How do you write about a place like St Petersburg (where “although the law of chance may be predominant as a rule, the law of preposterousness trumps all”), how do you anatomise the superficiality, puerility and contradiction of Russian civic culture, without exhibiting the same qualities yourself? How do you explore a sewer without getting covered in….? Well, you get the idea.

Waterdrinker is a novelist best known for the farcical and exuberant The German Wedding (2009). Poubelle, published in 2016, is a dizzying state-of-nations novel rooted in the war in east Ukraine. Waterdrinker’s gift for savage comedy, and his war correspondent’s eye, have few contemporary equivalents. Reading Paul Evans’s impressively brutal translation of The Long Song, I was put in mind, not of any contemporary, but of Wyndham Lewis, a between-the-wars writer so contrarian and violent and hilarious, English letters have spent the 60-odd years since his death trying to bury him.

Waterdrinker complains that he’s been receiving similar mistreatment from the cognoscenti in his native Netherlands. And let’s be frank: there’s nothing more inconvenient, nothing more irritating, than a leftist who calls out socialism.

Be that as it may, The Long Song has already sold over 100,000 copies across mainland Europe. After twenty-odd years of trying, Waterdrinker is an overnight success.

What is this book, exactly? A synthesis of Waterdrinker’s irascible personality and colourful career? A non-fiction novel? A deconstructed political memoir?

Pieter Waterdrinker, who calls a spade a bloody shovel, calls it “… a personal book about the Russian Revolution of 1917. You buffed up your own life with a little patina, borrowed an abundance of what others had written, with liberal citations, made up a bit if need be, and mixed it all together like the ingredients of a thick, hearty soup, et voilá: it was as if the book had written itself.”

Waterdrinker interleaves his early biography (sucked into, and unceremoniously spat out of, the goldrush accompanying the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s) with the history of revolutions in Russia. He concentrates particularly on the people (including Valdimir Lenin, “the bastard that started it all”) who either resided or worked on Tchaikovsky Street (named after the revolutionary, not the composer) where Waterdrinker and his wife Julia and their three cats once lived.

“One of our neighbours… was standing on the landing in a blue-and-white striped sailor’s top, hacking up an antique sideboard with an axe,” the author reminisces. “‘No, not Mama’s dresser…’ the man imitated his wife’s voice out of key. ‘But why not, you slut!’ The axe-head fell again, the splinters and brass fittings flying every which way.”

And this, bear in mind, is the couple’s isle of calm; the place from which Waterdrinker looks back on his early life, before he became a writer. It’s a tale dominated by a series of increasingly dubious business dealings, starting in 1988 with a scheme to smuggle bibles into Leningrad and ending in 1990 when he was strongly urged to transport a container of French wine to Kazan each month “in exchange for an unlimited supply of tender Tatar beauties to work as dancers in the Amsterdam nightlife circuit”. After a spell in the Netherlands, the couple returned to Russia in 1996.

There are moments of sybaritic delight, as when the young would-be writer bathes with his wife-to-be (a teacher who has lived in poverty and squalor for years) in a bathtub of Soviet champagne. There are moments of horror, as when the author’s business associates are hung from trees to freeze to death; or are, more straightforwardly, shot. There are unforgettable grotesques: the half-mad elderly Madam Pokrovskaya, who has eluded the tragedy of a life spent in St Petersburg by entirely abandoning her sense of time; young Waterdrinker’s grinning business partner Swindleman, so hollow, he rattles. In the end (but not so soon as to spoil the book) a sort of tinnitus sets in. The apartment on Tchaikovsky Street is itself lost to redevelopers in the end, and the book ends in clouds of plaster dust and the thudding of drills.

The Long Song draws parallels between the revolution of 1917 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. It is, to Waterdrinker’s mind, the same revolution, which is to say, the same orgy of resentment, hate and nihilism, fomented by psychopaths, and barely contained — drab decades at a time — by self-serving bureaucrats and secret policemen.

Waterdrinker sees a continuum of moral annihilation stretching from the czars to the present. He concludes that Russian political culture runs on hatred, and its revolutions are, far from being attempts at treatment, merely symptoms of an ineradicable malaise. Waterdrinker prefers witness over analysis, because he’s a sometime war correspondent, and eye-witness is his metier; and anyway, how are you supposed to “analyse” moments like the one recorded by Philip Jordan, a Missouri-born African-American and assistant to the US ambassador, when “in a house not far from the embassy, [the Red Guards] murdered a little girl, twelve bayonets stuck into her body”? The Long Song’s abiding emblem is a description, not of the taking of the Winter Palace, but of the taking of the Winter Palace’s wine cellar, some eight months later: “scenes of tableaux worthy of Dante, in which men up to their ankles in wine shot at each other, the blood of the dead and the wounded mixing with the alcohol.”

The Long Song contributes to a tradition that’s recognised for its literary merit (think Bunin, think Zamyatin) but which tends to get saddled with the “contrarian” label — not least because much of the Left establishment still pays lip-service to the Bolshevik idea. (Consider how Orwell was treated by his contemporaries — or Christopher Hitchens, for that matter.)

Waterdrinker is too much the literary werewolf to change many made-up minds. But, given Russia’s current expansionist posturings, we’d be well to give him audience. Listen, if not to him, then to the dairist who once shared his street, Zinaida Hippius, who watched this horrorshow the first time around: “If a country can exist in Europe in the twentieth century where there’s such phenomenal and previously unwitnessed slavery, and Europe doesn’t understand that or else accepts it, then Europe must meet its downfall.”