Saturday Nights

It’s not the same now. Nothing ever is, you know. The Village I knew so many years ago is gone, the people dispersed or dust now. But it was really quite a place then, the Village I knew. Streets filled with young people overstuffed with hope and ambition, armored in invincibility, suspended in time for so very few years between the generations of Kerouac and Leary. Coffeehouses in abundance, a few to a block. Intense conversations at every table, as often centered on existentialism as not. We were something way back then, I'll tell you.

Saturday nights – no, make that summer Saturday nights – were special. Washington Square was the great evening gathering place. From dusk on into the far corners of the night the Square was brimming with people and talk and song.

Let’s set the scene. It’s about 8:30 in the evening. The last dim glow of the day can still be seen in the west down the street between the buildings. In one corner of the park a man sitting on a bench takes an accordion from its case and begins playing while singing softly in Italian. The song’s Core ‘ngrato. From all over the Square singles, couples, trios and more begin to move toward him, drawn by the music. As they slowly coalesce and form a circle around him they start to sing along in Italian. The music slowly swells along with the group. Song after song, each louder, richer, perfumes the evening with under-notes of rich oregano, espresso, sambuca.Two policemen were assigned in those days to keep order. Their instructions were simple: keep groups from becoming crowds. [Crowds become mobs.] They stay together and stand, waiting, near the fountain. They talk police talk quietly to each other. Like scientists working with fissionable uranium, they have winkled out the exact size of a critical mass. They wait, talk, and watch.

At some point the growing group of singers triggers a response from the policemen. They walk slowly, without swagger, sure of their timing and the people’s response. When they reach the perimeter of the impromptu chorus they request politely for the singers to move on. There’s no argument. The singers know well the rules of the game. The crowd begins to disassemble; a living Lego destined for transformation.

In another corner of the park another musician, on cue, begins playing a guitar and singing; this time in Spanish. The people, strung out now in moving knots along the pathways, coalesce to form a new chorus. Again the singing, this time in Spanish, slowly grows louder. Cumin and sea-dark tannic tempranillo.The policemen, back at the fountain, wait and talk as before.

For hours the scene repeats itself. Each time the group, quicksilver-like, breaks up at the touch of the law and reassembles, the language of its songs magically changed. French, and the scents are tarragon and inky Bordeaux. Then Russian caviar and a samovar of Caravan tea. Next, Scandinavian aquavit and cardamom. The people join in, somehow knowing the words and spirit of the songs. The policemen talk in low tones and wait. And watch.

As the scene fades from memory, my eyes fill with an old man’s tears.

A Way of Thinking

A few years ago, a topic of after-dinner conversation was the concept of the two ‘cultures’ existing within the world of higher education: the liberal arts culture and the science culture.

There were many pages written to define what was meant by ‘culture’ and to distinguish between these two particular types. One area which came under scrutiny was how each approached problems and solved them. Of all the explanations, I think none exceeded the following for simple charm as well as depth of insight.

A college, it was said, wished to track incoming students to either the sciences or the liberal arts. To achieve this as quickly and efficiently as possible, the following two-step test was developed.

Step A.

A student to be tested is shown into a room. There is a sink with a cold water faucet [turned off], a gas stove [unlit], a table with a box of matches on it and, on the floor, an empty kettle. The student is asked to boil water.

All of the students tested pick up the kettle, go to the sink, open the tap, put water in the kettle, turn off the tap and place the kettle on the stove. They then go to the table, get the matches, turn on and light the gas and wait until the water in the kettle boils.

Step B

A student who had completed Step A is again shown into the same room. Now, the kettle already contains water and is already in position on the stove. The stove is unlit and the box of matches is sitting on the table. The student is again asked to boil water.

The students best suited to the liberal arts go to the table, get the matches, turn on and light the gas and wait until the water in the kettle boils.

The students best suited to the sciences take the kettle from the stove, go to the sink, empty the kettle and place it on the floor.

The science types solve the Step B problem by reducing it to the Step A problem, which they've already solved.

Instructions

‘I’m in iambic pentameter and
If you will note the quotes ‘round “&”,
& call it by its proper name, (Please do!),
You’ll find that now my lines will scan, thank you.’

Now and Then

I look back on my Village days

so filled with life -- the many ways

we used to revel! Swords of light

arrayed against the dark of night.


Yes, we were quite another kind:

bright Knights and Ladies of the mind.

Bring on the World! Its equal, we

would conquer all that we could see.


But now my world’s grown rather thin.

I rest. I take my medicine

when it is time. My Lady sits

across the room. She hums. She knits.

A New Law

You’ve probably heard of Murphy’s Law [‘If something can go wrong, it will.’] and the Finagle Factor [tweaking data to make it fit better.] There are other examples, often growing out of a specialized field of knowledge. Parkinson’s Law and the Peter Principle fall into that group.

In the sciences, words such as ‘law’ and ‘factor’ and ‘theory’ have precise meanings. You can find them in any decent dictionary. But in common usage, a law is thought of as something which is proven while a theory is still open to question. Using the common definition, laws such as Murphy’s are really theories. No one to date has come up with a formal proof for any one of them. We may suspect they’re true, but we simply can’t be sure. We've no firm proof.

I’ve stumbled [breaking my toe in the process] on a new law which sums up much of the pioneering work of Murphy, Finagle and several others. My debt to them is great. As Newton said, ‘If I have seen farther than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.’ I call it the Law of Maximization of Misery for short. Here it is in its complete form:

"Events will conspire to produce a maximum of misery for the individual(s) at their focal point."

If you’ve been following this, you’re asking, ‘So where’s the proof?’ I’m going to take a page from Einstein here and make use of a ‘thought’ experiment. Here we go!

[begin thought experiment]

You have a key ring with two keys. They look so much alike that in dim light you can’t tell them apart. One opens your front door and the other doesn’t. You come home at night, take out the key ring and select a key to open the door.

Now, you know just as well as I do that you’ll select the wrong key first more often than not. This is especially true when it’s raining or when you have your arms full of packages or when you can hear the telephone ringing. If all three are happening at the same time, chances are you'll not only select the wrong key but you'll also drop the key ring [prediction based on Murphy's 'Law'.]

If you have a scientific bent, it won’t take you long to try and see if the wrong key choice really occurs more of the time than chance would dictate. You begin carrying a piece of paper and a pencil with you. You jot down which key you choose each time you try to unlock the door. After a decent length of time, say six months or so, you tally the data. Sure enough, you find that you’ve been choosing the ‘right’ key about half the time after all, within the normal statistical limits of uncertainty.

[end thought experiment]

Let’s review the experiment. Remember, the Law states that events will maximize your misery. It's important to fix this concept firmly in mind as we consider the results of the experiment.

Before you started keeping track of the choices you were picking the wrong key more often than chance would permit. Your misery was maximized, in full accordance with the Law.

Here comes the tricky part [really, a 'key' part] of the proof. In the second step, when you carefully recorded your choices, you knew, a priori, that the statistics of an even choice were being violated before you started collecting the data. But when you recorded the data and examined it, you found you couldn't prove it. Your misery was again maximized, just as the Law requires!

We can extract another conclusion from the experiment: making an attempt to prove [or to disprove] the Law of Maximization of Misery shall, after a review of the data, prove the Law of Maximization of Misery. This byproduct of our little thought experiment probably falls into the category of the Law of Unintended Consequences.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

Sidebar: In the first part of the experiment, the Law forces you to pick the wrong key more of the time, but not all of the time. If you picked the wrong key all the time, you would adopt a reverse strategy and open the door with the unpicked key. Misery would not be maximized under such conditions, and a violation of the law would be created. There's more than a whiff of Zen about an unpicked key, however. The concept of an un-chosen key, on analysis, falls outside the limits of this paper.

Sidebar to sidebar: If you're a game enthusiast [as opposed to gaming enthusiast], you might find a chuckle in the 'reverse' nature of the 'proof' of the Law and the wordplay of misery/miseré. It's suggested in the above comment. Wheels within wheels.