Greek barbers and the re-invention of expensive grooming

The oldest known example of professional hair cutting in the western world comes from classical Greece. A finely groomed beard used to be a symbol of high social status, and beard-trimming was raised to a delicate art-form. The statesmen and aristocrats of ancient Greece regularly visited barber-shops to keep their appearance in sync with the stringent demands of their privileged positions. And so these barber-shops became important centres of socio-political debate as well as sources of information regarding matters of state. No doubt that the luxury of professional grooming was made possible by the relative economic prosperity achieved in the classical period, but like in most so-called prosperous historical periods there was widespread social and economic inequality. Under such circumstances, the differential affordability of expenses like personal grooming become the markers of the division between the haves and the have-nots.

During the late medieval and early modern periods, barbers were moved to the category of "barber-surgeons" who, in addition to attending to the grooming needs of people, had to perform more urgent medical tasks like minor surgeries and bloodletting, particularly after it was decreed by the council of Tours in 1163 that it was sacrilegous for the clergy to draw blood (in the literal sense). And when you fast-forward to the 21st century, you see that the cities of modern, industrialized nations are full of beauty salons that offer to take away some of your hair for a sum of money that could feed a poor family for a week. We have entered the age of cosmetic beauty, where not only are you to be judged by stereotyped standards of aesthetic acceptance (ask the dark-skinned girl who could not get a job as a flight attendant), but where the business of "beauty enhancement" is a multibillion-dollar industry in its own right. I guess it is time to wonder whether this is simply a consequence of greater prosperity, or the sign of a deep-seated cultural need to identify ourselves as the ruling elite who can afford expensive and wasteful modes of consumption in an increasingly bipolar world.

The Determinist's Paradox

The Story According to Newton

When Isaac Newton, the knight of Woolsthorpe, wrote down his three laws of motion, some people were greatly relieved. "Finally", they said, "we have a grand unified theory. Now to understand a system, we just have to find the right forces and plug them into Newton's second law with the correct initial conditions, and solve it to predict the evolution of the system in time."

Indeed, when taken literally, the implications of Newton's equations were astounding. It implied that the future of the universe can be exactly predicted to the last detail if the initial conditions of the universe and all the forces operating in it are known. Whether we have the machinery to actually do it in practice is beside the point. The real marvel of Newton's scheme lay in the prediction of a deterministic universe, where every single event, no matter how small or insignificant, has been decided in advance, during the birth of the universe itself. Indeed, the fact that you are now sitting in front of a computer reading this blog, was in principle predictable at the beginning of time itself. This picture of the universe came to be known as the "Newtonian clockwork". Needless to say, it was the deadliest form of fatalism the human mind had ever invented. It had the power to render human will unnecessary, morality obselete, and consciousness merely a helpless onlooker of the inevitable.

Enter Quantum Mechanics

However, quantum mechanics has partly salvaged this situation by declaring the falsity of Newtonian mechanics at the atomic level, and proclaiming at least the atomic world to be inherently non-deterministic. The most famous, and the most misunderstood, expression of this God-knows-what'll-happen anxiety is to be found in Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. However, what the ramifications of this are for the predictability of the macroscopic world are yet to be fully decided.

The Paradox

When I first came across this confounding clockwork framed by Newton, I desperately tried to find my own way out of this cage, and after some thought I arrived at what I called the "Determinist's paradox". It is a simple thought experiment which I believed "disproved" the possibility of a deterministic universe. This is how it goes.

Suppose the universe is deterministic. So you design an instrument that takes in the current state of the universe as input and outputs the state at any future time. Now, there is a glass of water standing on the table in front of you. Your machine tells you that at 7:00 pm the glass is going to be full (empty). Then at 6:59 pm you deliberately empty(fill up) the glass, thus altering the foretold future. This outcome contradicts the starting assumption that the universe is deterministic.

This is a very simple thought experiment; but remember that the essential idea used is that conscious beings are capable of making small and deliberate changes in their environment. So any pre-determined state of the universe is potentially capable of being disrupted, by however small an amount, by a conscious agent who can make a choice.

This, in short, is the Determinist's Paradox.

Incidentally, a friend of mine told me that this is akin to what is known, in a different context, as the Cafe de Santa Fe Paradox. Interested people may look it up.

Also, I was recently reading "Notes From Underground" by Dostoevsky, and was surprised to realize that some of the narrator's thoughts correlated well with these ideas of mine.

Soul

My doctor had ordered some tests. When I handed him the results, he frowned at them for a few seconds, and then said with an air of calm authority, "Your soul is eroding."
"My soul is what?", I asked.
"Eroding", he said, "Going clear down the drain."
"So what's the remedy?", I asked in dismay.
"Nothing. You have to just wait it out. Once your soul is gone completely, you can try to get hold of a new one and start afresh."
"How long does it take for it to erode completely?"
"Technically, it could take anything from a couple of months to five years. But my experience says that in most cases it is gone within one year or so."
"And then, how do I get hold of a new soul?"
"Well, that's the difficult part. There is no definite clinical method. I know many patients who never got another soul, and lived forever in a kind of stupor. But I know of at least three cases where there have been successes. Would you like to hear about them?"
"Of course."
"The famous case is that of Michael Jackson. He caught the disease quite early. But when he changed his skin color, an emotional soul that was passing by took pity on his ghastly white face, and lent itself to him. So you could try a color change too, maybe you will get lucky."
"Not possible. I am quite attached to my skin color, and besides I have no intention of hurting my parents."
"Then the second case was that of Saul Bellow, the writer. He used to be a fine chap with progressive ideas, but then he caught this disease. He made a deal with the devil to get his soul back. That's when he turned conservative."
"Aww, I don't know about all that political crap. Besides, how will I find the devil anyway? Tell me about the third case."
"Well, that", said the doctor, coughing uncomfortably, "is the case of my mother. She, it seems, er, lost her soul when she conceived me. It's possible that her soul passed into the little embryo that was forming inside her. She lived quite haplessly all these years. Recently I gave her a small part of my soul, and she says she feels a bit like her old self now."
"So, you are saying, it is possible to borrow someone's soul?"
"Or steal," he said, shrugging."You have a girlfriend?"

To Michael: An Impossible Thanks

The question is one of fundamental principles. The question is to decide whether there are any fundamental principles. The answer of course is an obvious no. It is one of those rare questions that I can readily decide. But the trouble is, it is hard to get that across to you.

I was never a big MJ fan. I had watched some of his videos, the standard ones. I had not retained any distinct impressions of them. And looking back at my tender age at that time, and the fact that I was a conformist not by choice, I can't say I am responsible for that. The last time I watched any of his videos was probably ten years ago (and I would be 14 then). By that time the 1993 American Music Awards performance of Dangerous had already taken place; an auditorium packed with people had been enthralled beyond redemption. They had experienced something so violently magical that the impression would last them a lifetime. But I did not know about it then. I was unaware that the last great and hopeless attempt at putting an order back into things had already begun. You can take this as an overstatement, but I won't change it. A thanks is meant to be an overstatement, even when it is sincere.

For the last ten years I had not heard anything about Jackson (except for some occasional reports of pedophilia and monetary debts, which I did not understand). I had all but forgotten about him. When I came across the news of his death, I had a strange feeling. Some old and confused memories came back to me. I wish I could say that an age had ended, and indeed some would say exactly that, but that is not the case. MJ was neither constitutive nor a representative of our age. He wasn't a prophet of our times, at best he was an anti-prophet.

I started going through his videos again, one by one. It became a journey of discovery for me, a discovery of what was not to be, of what was impossible. I got hooked to the impossibility. Impossibility has a truth of its own, because it is the most fundamental form of unreality. And our age, though not innocent, and certainly not impossible, is nevertheless unreal. Impossibility forms both the foundations and the boundaries of the unreal. An interest in the world at large necessitates an interest in the unreal, which should bring up the question of impossibility.

When I was a kid, the people around me had little concern for MJ. I grew up in a general air of scorn for innocence. As I said, our times are not innocent times, and it would certainly be inappropriate to grow up innocently, and I am grateful to my folks for not letting me do that. Today I am trying to arrive at an understanding of the world as it is, but nevertheless, I would like to say that the relevance of the impossible is insufficiently understood by our modern intellects. Certainly our major concern is with the possible, or even the probable, but I cannot imagine a definition of myself that at least does not pay a sincere homage to the impossible. For it is likely that we shall all collide with the impossible someday. And it is important to know the true nature of what we are colliding with, of what posits a likely risk for us, of what can catch us unaware some day, and run us down. Impossibility also has a close connection to what we call the 'rational', and who would deny that the rational is an important idea for us? Impossibility has several links with the possible, and they are waiting to be discovered by us. Perhaps we could start with MJ...........or, on second thoughts, we could just let him go.

I never experienced any innocence in my own actions, but I seem to have some pristine memories of it. But those memories are not nostalgic, because they do not relate to any real experiences. [I like to think that MJ related to his childhood in a similar way; but that is impossible, isn't it, MJ?] That is why my relation to innocence is unconditional, I can think about it without giving myself up; in other words, there is a sense of objectivity in my perception of innocence. But it is my personal objectivity, and I cannot do much to express that in a piece of writing like this. For example, if I tell you that the nature of innocence is in the form of a dance movement, something that a confused (and euphoric) audience witnessed at the 1993 American Music Awards, would that make any sense to you? Wittgenstein, one of those rare geniuses of clarity, once made a famous proclamation: "Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent". I guess he was right about it. I should remain silent.

But this article is not about impossibility or innocence, it is about MJ, and fundamental principles. So I ought to write something about them before I end this. The fact is, people love to talk, and to theorize, and will continue to do so forever. I am a fine example of this human fallibility. Mr. Jackson, I know you will find it hard to believe, but I can assure you hat there are no fundamental principles, except the ones we personally invent to keep track of things. So let us talk and theorize, let us go on about it indefinitely, it doesn't matter.

Rest in peace.

...........

[ I owe my acknowledgments for this piece to the following.
1) A certain friend from school, in a quite personal way.
2) A readable expression on Janet Jackson's face on a particular evening.
3) My childhood, and MJ's. A tribute to difference.]

Fallen angel

Every morning, an angel waits outside my bedside window. He waits for me to wake up to him. He has a face as handsome as the wood-carvings of the Santhals, hair as golden as the flowing Subarnarekha, eyes as green as the stars of the Orion nebula. His silent, gentle smile signals to me the start of an eternity, an eternity so long that it shall wear out my immortal shoes. An eternity so long that the infinite forest of mango trees shall wither and die, and fill up the vast, empty landscape with the sad fragrance of lost times.
My angel never speaks, for he comes from a world that exists beyond spoken words. For words are ephemeral, momentary, mortal; they metamorphose like ants, they age like leaves, they go past us like idle travellers on summer afternoons. In his own land that is fashioned out of stone and wind and fire, the angel never had any use for things that would die as soon as they are born. And yet when he is with me, in the very presence of my eternal transience, does he not wish to speak?
During the summer rains, when I look out my window, my angel stands all alone across the street, soaked in rain, his wings folded under his arms. And in his eyes is a gentle sorrow that glows softly like a dying lamp. At the corner of his mouth I feel the presence of an unsaid word, which floats upon my dark memories like an honest reassurance, like the breast of a mother that casts a soothing shadow over her sleeping child. I come out of my house, and stand beside the angel in the rain, like a tree beside another, and once more believe in the truth of pain and consolation, of darkness and light, of moments and eternity.