Hanja, Eliot and much ranting

Ad Mundo Exteriore,

It's interesting that there are two different characters that can be used for the "sa" character in "samak" (Korean) or "sabaku" (Japanese), the word for "desert". One possible character means "sand" and the other probably has to do with "lack of water", though my parents aren't sure. They are both constructed using "so" (Korean), which is the character for "to be smaller/less", but the first "sa" combines it with "seok" (Korean) for "rock", while the second uses the three-stroke "su" for "water". Father says the "mak" (Korean) or "baku" (Japanese) means "wasteland".

It immediately reminded me of the fifth section of, yes, the Eliot poem, where the narrator returns to the waste land and writes:

Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think
Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand
If there were only water amongst the rock (331-338)

If there were water
And no rock
If there were rock
And also water
And water
A spring
A pool among the rock (346-352)

A neat parallel, how the characters for desert can be defined either by "rock" or "water", and Eliot's repetition of these very words in describing the waste land. I wrote a very convoluted essay on this section of the poem for College Lit, which upon second reading has some good ideas but is excruciatingly verbose. I was focusing on dualities and cycles, and appropriately enough, my very argument was redundantly circular.

I think I said that the waste land was both punishment and purification for excessive sexuality as represented by excess water which led to sterility, paradoxically resulting in the lack of water. It was simultaneously an unnatural state of nonprogressing, repeating time that was cut off from the seasonal cycle of death and rebirth, as well as a stage in a much broader historical cycle of the rise and fall of civilization. So the changeless waste land cuts us away from, as well as eventually returns us to, the ongoing progress of time: leading the reader through a series of triple revelations about the nature of the desert, which is first a pit of despair, second a hope for redemption, and third an even subtler trap of repeating human history. The Golden Age swiftly decays into decadence, which is usually followed by a spiritual purge (à la Chesterton and medieval Christianity, see his hagiography of St. Francis of Assisi) that in turn prepares us for a new cultural fertility. And on and on it goes.

I think the frustrating dualism of the symbols in The Waste Land results from Eliot's despair upon uncovering that escaping one cycle only leaves you trapped in a larger one, that at the peak of civilization the signs of rot are already inescapable, that birth already means death. Yet he does not want to think that it is better to have never lived at all (see Camus and the all-important question of suicide, though the starting point is very different), so he keeps hoping for an ultimate redemption, ripping through the final veil, so to speak. But he does not know whether the possibility of such a complete escape is yet another illusion, so he sits on the shore, waiting for a single Savior. Appropriate, again, that the references in the fifth section are to the Vedas, since one of the hallmarks of Hinduism is multiple redeemers, i.e. Vishnu in his many reincarnations, and Eliot seems to be wondering if even salvation is another circular trap.

That reminds me, there's a new SF/F book out that retells the Ramayana. I'm kind of annoyed by that because there's already a perfectly beautiful account by Narayan that is an elegant introduction to the story for Westerners, without the ridiculous "modern take" that SF/F writers tend to indulge in. If you don't want to go and find a good translation, then why on earth are you reading a 700-page book that's half invented nonsense and half misinterpretation? I once started reading an awful expanded retelling of the Mabinogion, and while I understand about the Goddess cult in Celtic culture, I still don't think that the myths should be solely interpreted as being about "female empowerment". There's a tendency to romanticize the Celts, especially because of Wicca, and it's now an established "fact" among fantasy writers that there was this whole male/female conflict between the patriarchal druids and the matriarchal priestesses before Christianity came and overswept everyone with not only the tradition of male tyranny but also the impertinence of insisting on a single god. Oh, the horror! And I know people say that Mists of Avalon was a brilliant book, and since I haven't read it, I can't argue with them, but I do know that it's mostly Marion Zimmer Bradley's fault that I have to suffer through badly written stories about enlightened pre-Christian priestesses who were "in touch" with their sexuality and Mother Nature.

Now, I don't exactly have the knowledge to say whether this depiction is historically inaccurate, but the writers push it so far into the realms of improbability (in a very Mary Sue-like fashion, ahem) that it only takes a little common sense to realize how ridiculous they're being.

Mary Stewart's trilogy on Merlin is perhaps one of the few Arthurian retellings that I've found worth reading. (Partly because it doesn't villainize Merlin as some kind of evil male pervert.) It has a very shamanistic view of how Merlin uses "magic", as well as a convincing portrayal of family dynamics and cultural beliefs. Gender conflict is present but Stewart uses it as a means of telling the story and doesn't overtly try to sneak in a feminist message.

I'm not at all against feminism, but once you mix up equal rights with words like "Mother Goddess" and "the yang principle", I start throwing up. I mean, the ideas in themselves are not nonsense, but people, especially popular writers, don't really see them from an analytical perspective. They give in too easily to the impulse of sentimentalizing everything--"Oh, how better it was before those nasty Romans came and enslaved us with their patriarchal way of thinking!"--and exasperate the sensible reader. >_<

...Tari

Post-script: I know I've written way too much already, but I'd also like to add that there was a different Unitarian minister for the Sunday morning radio program a few weeks ago, who spoke about the Delphic Oracle and the female principle in the old religions. He was much more intelligent than the usual speaker, who is so sappy and scatterbrained that it gives me a headache to listen. Anyway, this new minister was saying that women tend to want to be at the "center" of the world while men want to be at the "top". Women focus on relationships, while men focus on material success, blah blah blah, a much better spiritual ideal that we should all strive for, blah blah blah. The minister's eloquence is undeniable, and he did include the necessary disclaimers/qualifiers to prevent this statement from becoming a gross generalization, but I still think this way of analyzing gender is kind of stupid. The way I see it, girls are just as competitive and eager to defeat one another as boys are, but they have the social tact to realize that they shouldn't be offensive about it.

More on Darwin

Ad Mundo Exteriore,

( New skin )

A week or two ago, I said that there is no consistent scheme for classifying species, which is not entirely correct. The cladistic approach to taxonomy is extremely rigorous--note the word "extreme"--but leads easily into absurdities. I remember that Ernst Mayr had a long passage examining the pros and cons of cladistics in This is Biology, but I didn't understand most of it and yawned through the rest. >_< Eh, one of the books I should definitely read before the end of freshman year.

Nevertheless, it's easy to see how cladistics can quickly become quite ridiculous. The basic principle is that each taxonomic group is distinguished from the parent branch by one key differing characteristic. So vertebrates are distinguished from the rest of the animals by the presence of a backbone; mammals further distinguished from the rest of the vertebrates by possessing hair as a body covering; placentals determined by the, well, placenta connecting fetus to mother...the flaw is obvious: when there is more than one key characteristic in common throughout a group, how do you choose?

It becomes especially knotty if you imagine two groups A and B arranged in an overlapping Venn diagram. Label the overlap C. Members of group A all have trait A in common, members of group B all have trait B in common. Where do you put the members of group C?

Another issue with cladistics is implicit in a comment of Darwin's: "In genera having more than the average number of species in any country, the species of these genera have more than the average number of varieties. In large genera the species are apt to be closely, but unequally allied together, forming little clusters round certain species." He interprets this trend to mean that since there has already been more speciation in a larger genus than a smaller one, it is unsurprising to find that there is more ongoing speciation in the larger genus (as seen in the presence of more varieties within the species of the genus). Varieties, Darwin argues (very convincingly, I might add), are "incipient" species, or potential species in formation. But getting back to the original point, the statement brings up another important problem for cladistics: the relative "importance" of the key characteristic. After all, Darwin notes that the degree of variation among the species in larger genera is much less than in smaller genera. Undoubtedly, the subjective aspect is pretty important here. For species in larger genera, the criteria for division into another clade does not require the same degree of variation as it would for species in smaller genera. Slight contrasts become much more noticeable when you have a larger range of species, I suppose. Again, a matter of perspective. Thus, cladistics can never be as rigorous as it wants to be, which sort of undermines the whole theory behind the approach.

We would like to say that our classification system is as objective as possible, that it accurately describes the diversity of species. But ultimately, it's a matter of utility. When biology was still natural history, appearance and habitat was mostly what mattered. Once the naturalists started dissecting organisms and looking at skeletons, the differences in internal body structure became more important. Now, with the advent of genetics, it's all about the genome sequences. We now say that Archaea are just as different from Bacteria as they are from eukaryotic organisms, as counterintuitive as that sounds, because our priorities for classification have shifted from cell structure to ribosomal RNA. (Anyone notice the microscoping process here? It happened in physics too.)

Anyway, I'm not really arguing properly because Darwin is looking from the bottom up, so to speak, because he's touching upon the question of how to determine species in the first place, while cladistics is from the top down, how to split up the great kingdoms into smaller and smaller categories. Furthermore, large-scale taxonomy usually treats species as indivisible units (well, loosely speaking, if we ignore subspecies), like marbles to be tossed into the proper bins. It doesn't bother to angst over whether two marbles are actually one marble or even one and a half marbles, (for that matter, whether one marble is in the process of splitting into two or not). And cladistics, when it is useful, is best applied to large-scale taxonomy. A good example is the fourth floor of the AMNH.

I think the most deeply rooted problem is that taxonomy began with Linnaeus, who preceded Darwin and other evolutionists, and it still tends to operate under the assumption that species are now static. Although taxonomy does reflect evolutionary history (well, we think it does anyway, despite the subjective factor), it often forgets that species are still in the process of changing. (Look, I personified taxonomy! Urgh. >_<) I mean, whether you agree with the punctuated equilibrium theory or not, evolution still takes place in ultra slow motion, and it's easy to treat species as, well, predetermined elements. And let's not forget that transmutation is technically possible through radioactive decay.

Um, I think I should stop before I start mixing up my metaphors and analogies to the point of no return. I'm restating the obvious for the most part, but I did want to note down the Darwin quote before I forgot.

Speaking of quotes, how about this one: "[F]or instance, on a piece of ground three feet long and two feet wide, dug and cleared, and where there could be no choking from other plants, I marked all the seedlings of our native weeds as they came up, and out of the 357 no less than 295 were destroyed, chiefly by slugs and insects. If turf which has long been mown, and the case would be the same with turf closely browsed by quadrupeds, be let to grow, the more vigorous plants gradually kill the less vigorous, though fully grown plants: thus out of twenty species growing on a little plot of turf (three feet by four) nine species perished from the other species being allowed to grow up freely." (from "Struggle For Existence", in Origin)

Can you believe that Darwin actually counted and tagged all 357 plants?! And that he kept track of which ones died and which survived? What kind of patience (::cough:: obstinacy) does that kind of observation take? I'm so impressed. I knew Darwin was meticulous, but I didn't know he was such an excellent researcher. It's also a good precedent for modern ecological studies, neh? Perhaps this sort of study was a normal pursuit for a Victorian gentleman with a strong interest in science and natural history, but it amazes me nonetheless.

Part of the reason why my progress through Origin is so abominably slow is that I spend hours on a page, thinking along silly tangents in this fashion. Argh. There are fourteen chapters, and I've already read three. I should go up to chapter nine by the end of today if I want to finish it by tomorrow. ::begins reading spurt now::

...Tari