Rew

The scenes of the universe are continually shifting, and one object follows another in an uninterrupted succession; but the power or force, which actuates the whole machine, is entirely concealed from us, and never discovers itself in any of the sensible qualities of body.

- David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding


"Living backwards!" Alice repeated in great astonishment. "I never heard of such a thing!"

"—but there's one great advantage in it, that one's memory works both ways."

"I'm sure mine only works one way," Alice remarked. "I ca'n't remember things before they happen."

"It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards," the Queen remarked.

- Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass


After that, we headed over to Stage 9 to see Matthew Grimson play some dark, intense piano songs and have Al Tuck mesmerize us with his quiet power. Both sets were intimate, magical, and way too short. There was a table of I'm going out on a limb here and guessing students behind us, making inhuman amounts of noise, which was probably more irritating than it would have been if there had been any other tables of people in the place besides our two, and what were they doing in there anyway with the cover being six dollars and all if they just wanted to drink beer and publicly and obnoxiously empty the contents of their brains isn't that what blogs are for, but we found that we didn't even notice when exactly they had gotten up and left, so entranced had we become by the music.

Played some billiards with a fine bunch of ladies last night, including regular characters Meg and Johanna. It was really fun, but the balls kept popping up out of the pockets and attaching themselves to the cue ball whenever I put my cue up to it. Made the game somewhat difficult. I found, however, that I could coax out the opposition's balls by aiming the stick at the last pocket they'd sunk one in, and soon our team would be winning again. But then we would invariably decide we had lost and, sure enough, the 8-ball would appear while our team still had balls on the table. It was almost as if the games were pre-determined or something.

I guess Hume's point is supposed to be that the phenomenon of causation is one we can't experience directly, but can only infer, in a never fully justified way, from experience itself. Just because drinking too many beers the night before has always given me a headache the following morning up until now, who is to say that the next time it happens I won't feel fine? Or even that I won't get the headache the night before and wake up the next day drinking the beers? There's no logical necessity to be seen here. I'll just have to keep on trying.

Hume is very careful to never put it exactly like this, but I think in the end he's questioning why we believe in causation at all, or where we get the idea of it. And if you think about it, those are the kinds of questions you can't really ask. Not to be a logic nazi or anything, but questions like why, how, and where does it come from sort of presuppose the concept of causation. If you're not going to talk about a cause, what kind of answer could you possibly give? It's a pretty firmly entrenched idea in our language and lives, and hard to just imagine away.

Martin Amis gives it a pretty good kick at the can, though, in Time's Arrow, a deeply disorienting novel in which the main character experiences time backwards, and therefore all effects precede their causes.



Speaking of the Smiths, I bought a secondhand record by Bert Jansch the day before yesterday. He's a British folk guitarist from the sixties who was a huge influence on The Smiths' guitar player, Johnny Marr, believe it or not. I can't really hear much in the way of similarity, except that they both play delicately and complicatedly. But it's a very enjoyable record and I'm glad I bought it. Thank you, Bert, for getting Johnny to play that way so that I would fall in love with The Smiths as a teenager and therefore be led in later life to pick up one of your recordings. It was very forward-thinking of you. I'd thought the price tag said five dollars, which would have been a steal as it was an import, but it turned out to be twenty-five. The two had been covered by a descriptive label on the outer plastic sleeve. The guy was nice enough to knock five bucks off the price, though.

So in the book buildings rise out of rubble and people get apologetic right before they hit you, and angry afterward. Doctors are evil because healthy people go to see them and are made unhealthy in all sorts of horrible ways. The main character performs all his morning rituals just before going to sleep, and says something like, "I don't even want to tell you what happens on the toilet." After awhile you stop reversing things in your head and just get used to the backwards world, and then watch out when it's time to put the book down! I found staircases to become particularly difficult.

But that was many years ago, when I'd first met Alison. Now she's in her place of origin, Waterloo, sifting through old toys and assorted junk that her parents have had in storage there for like ever and would like to take out of storage i.e. throw away. There'll probably be all sorts of surprises in there of the kind that only the past can bring. I know she's particularly interested in rescuing her old Fisher-Price people. The ones with wooden bodies, before they became plastic, then large and chunky, then limbed and completely unrecognizable. We were trying to describe them to Meg, who, not growing up in North America, had never seen them, and I found I was able to draw an almost perfect rendition of the mother's face from memory.

But I'm especially hoping that she'll find the kid with the pot on his head. I love that guy. It's very strange that the characters Fisher-Price saw fit to give our imaginations were, almost without exception, really generic icons — father, mother, sister, brother, dog, "bad" (= freckles and a frown) kid — and then there's this oddball with a pot on his head. An actual cooking pot! What the hell, man? I guess he was the punk/non-conformist/stinky kid that the other kids didn't want to sit beside. Is it because of my later outsider status, real or imaginary, that I am so drawn to this figure? Or, conversely, did I come to picture and thereby invent myself as an oddball because of an early childhood identification with the interesting weirdo character? Or, finally and much more spookily, did the kind of person I would later become somehow retroactively CAUSE that pot handle to be so appealingly chewable? I guess I'll never know.

- Andrew