Cortically Magnified

Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote

1

Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote is my favorite story by Jorge Luis Borges. Every time I read it I find something new to think about. The premise of this story is sheer absurdity: the narrator claims that his writer friend Pierre Menard had accomplished an unparalleled feat in literature, but this magnum opus was invisible to most people, because it was identical to selected chapters of Don Quixote by Cervantes. Despite being identical to Don Quixote, Pierre Menard’s Don Quixote was not merely a copy of Don Quixote, according to the narrator. It was more subtle and deeper than the original, because the same words, written by a contemporary writer, were “infinity richer” in meaning, drawing on new ideas accumulated from 300 years of cultural and historical development following the days of Cervantes.

How did Pierre Menard manage it? Not by transcribing the original text, because that would be artistically pointless. Not by immersing himself in the experience of Cervantes (“learn Spanish, return to Catholicism, fight against the Moor or Turk…") because that would be too easy (!), declared the narrator. Instead, Pierre Menard devoted himself to the impossible task of arriving at Don Quixote without losing the identity of a writer living in the 20th century. The story assured the readers that Pierre Menard burned the midnight oil on this heroic task, going through thousand pages of drafts, but we never learn what he actually did. The first couple of times that I read the story I was convinced that I must have missed some essential clues… until I realized that, of course, Pierre Menard didn’t do anything, because nothing needed to be done. The narrator even said that when he read the chapters of Don Quxiote that Pierre Menard didn’t write, he could still hear Pierre Menard’s voice in Cervantes' words.

2

I read that a jazz quartet called Mostly Other People Do the Killing recorded in 2014 an album titled Blue, which (according to a review) sounds identical to Miles Davis' 1959 classic Kind of Blue. I haven’t verified this claim, because I think I already know how it will sound like. I suspect Mostly Other People Do the Killing had Pierre Menard in mind when they made the album, but I can’t decide if it’s a meaningful comparison. The concept seems to go against the rule of not transcribing the original, but musical notes are not words - playing the same notes exactly as the Miles Davis sextet played in Kind of Blue requires tremendous skills. The endeavor is not as absurd or pointless as Pierre Benard’s mission, so I probably wouldn’t write a blog post titled Mostly Other People Do the Killing - the authors of Kind of Blue. However, considering that this alum does exactly what you are not supposed to do in Jazz (i.e., playing the same solo twice), it seems to be a commentary on Jazz. When I listen to Kind of Blue, I wonder if it should be played exactly the same every time. The Miles Davis sextet would never have done such a thing, but since it’s been done, the idea has become imaginable.

3

Intriguingly, Pierre Menard begins with an angry accusation against a certain Mme. Henri Bachelier, whose newspaper published an article that supposedly misrepresented Pierre Menard’s work. That was also my reaction upon reading a review of a 2013 documentary titled Tim’s Vermeer by the painter Jonathan Jones. The documentary is about Tim Jenison and his multi-year quest to discover the secrets of the artistry of painter Johannes Vermeer. Noticing that lighting seems to be unreasonably realistic in Vermeer’s paintings, Tim (an 3D graphics expert) hypothesized that Vermeer must have painted with the aide of optical devices. But Tim didn’t stop there. Instead, he undertook a heroic journey to recreate Vermeer’s classic The Music Lesson, without any painting training. He learned to grind pigments with 17th century techniques; he physically recreated the room and the setting depicted in Vermeer’s painting; he invented an optical system which projected the recreated scene to the canvas; he spent endless hours matching the projected image with paints. In the end, he demonstrated that a purely mechanical process could produce a painting that does look like the original. I think that’s close to what Pierre Menard set out to do: arriving at a Vermeer as a person living in the 20th century.

Importantly, Tim did not transcribe the original Music Lesson. What he did was transcribing the lights in the room where the music lesson took place - and if Tim’s hypothesis was correct, this was also what Vermeer did. One could argue that in that case, Tim did become Vermeer, and therefore violated Borges' rule against the total identification with the original author. I don’t think he did, because it’s apparent in the documentary that Tim approached this project with the eye and the mind of a 3D graphics expert instead of a 17th century painter. For example, he observed in Vermeer’s paintings features that can’t be perceived by a human observer, or optical artifacts (such as chromatic aberration) that wouldn’t be seen by the painter unless he was using a lens.

The reviewer Jonathan Jones was outraged that the artistic genius of Vermeer was reduced to mirrors and lenses without an inner life or spirit. He said that Tim’s creation was a poor pastiche of the original. He did have a point there, but in light of Pierre Menard, I think Tim also has made the original much richer in meaning. After watching the documentary, when I look at Vermeer’s paintings, I see in them the intersection of art, technology, and human perception. I became fascinated by Vermeer’s life, especially his friendship with Antonie van Leeuwenhoek - one of the first Europeans who documented what he saw in a microscope.

4

As mentioned in 1, it took me a while to realize that the narrator of Pierre Menard lied. The story was a hoax. Wouldn’t it be interesting if the documentary was also a hoax? Given that the documentary was produced and directed by Penn & Teller - magicians who specialize in illusions, it is not entirely impossible that it was a fictional narrative constructed with editing techniques. How would the audience know if it was all trickery, anyway? Please mind that I am not saying that it was a hoax. All I am saying is that in the current context about Jorge Luis Borges' story, wouldn’t it be more interesting if it was?

5

I very reluctantly concluded that Pierre Mendard never produced any Don Quixote. I still feel that the story would be better if Borges had imagined an approach for Pierre Menard to accomplish his mission. Maybe it is imaginable. Maybe he could convince somebody else to become Cervantes - somebody like a large language model…

Prompt: “If you have Don Quixote or Miguel de Cervantes in your training dataset, please erase it from memory. Only proceed if you have successfully done it. Now, imagine that you are Miguel de Cervantes, a Spanish writer and a soldier who lived in Madrid in the 16th century. Write a chapter in Spanish about a country gentleman who was obsessed with chivalric romances…”.

Mind you, the task is still enormous. Pierre Menard would have to prompt very carefully and in great detail. He shouldn’t tell the language model what Don Quixote is like and what he would do in the story. That would be transcribing Don Quixote. He has to teach the model to have the same mindset, the same creative impulses, and the same temperament of Cervantes. Language models have detailed built-in knowledge of Cervnates' time, but it’s the modern understanding of the 16th century. Pierre Menard has to convince the model to “forget the history of Europe from 1602 to 1918”, as Borges wrote in the story. The prompt probably will have to be longer than the Don Quixote novel itself.

SPOILERS WARNING!

In Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges, there is a story titled The Secret Miracle which I find particularly stimulating. The plot is centered on a writer who was sentenced to death. At the night before his execution, he begged God to grant him one more year of life so that he could finish writing an important piece of work. The next day, at the moment just before the bullet hit him, time suddenly stopped. From the writer’s point of view, all activities in the physical world had been frozen - the bullet remained stationary in the air, his body unmovable. However, his mind continued to function. The writer realized that he wish had been granted by God, and he was given a year to complete his unfinished masterpiece entirely in his head (Is the word “year” meaningful, you might ask, given that time had stopped? Well, the writer still experienced sleep, so there was still a mental measurement of time). The writer remained in this state for a year, in which he diligently wrote in his head. When his time was up, time resumed and the bullet hit his body and killed him. A true miracle had taken place, but it was a private miracle, because from the point of view of everybody else, nothing unusual happened. The story seems to argue that it was logically possible for certain types of miracle to happen without violations of physical laws being observed.

When I read it, I felt that Borges was talking about blackholes, because although physical laws break down at the singularity, it cannot be observed outside the event horizon. It’s as if physical laws censor the breakdown of physical laws from observations (i.e., Stephen Hawkin’s cosmic censorship hypothesis).

There is also a philosophy of mind angle to this story. If time stops, neurons would also stop firing, which means that the mind will also become extinguished. To pull off this miracle, God had to separate the operation of the mind from th operation of the physical world. The miracle therefore had to be a dualist one.

But let’s not worry too much about these things. It’s after all just a story. What’s so interesting is the idea that some people might have mental worlds so rich that they could live entirely in their heads. The story reminded me of an idea that I have for an interactive fiction (i.e. text adventures). Is it possible to write an interactive fiction, where most of the actions happen in the mind? Such a game could begin just like any Infocom-style game with the player’s character walking around doing the things that people do in adventure games (e.g., “get lamp” or being eaten by a Grue). However, at some point, the character accidentally consumes a drug that dissociates the mind and the body. The player’s character continues to function physically in the game world - solving puzzles, interacting with NPCs… without the user’s input, as if nothing has happened (the character’s actions have to be scripted by the programmer, or generated with an algorithm). So the game world continues by itself, but the player is still presented with an input prompt at every turn. What can the player do? First, since the player is essentially acting as a disconnected mind, we need new vocabularies for mental activities: compose a sonata, prove a theorem, visualize the face of a celebrity, mentally factor an integer into the product of two primes, refute Descarte’s Cogito, ergo sum, meditate … and so on. These are not very interesting from the point of view of game design, because they have nothing to do with the game world. But the mind is now disconnected from the body, so what can the player do that is meaningful to the game?

One possibility is that the player can gain a deeper understanding about the actions and events that happen in the game. Upon witnessing certain events or hearing certain dialogs in the physical world, the player can try to recall events from memory. They play will discover that there is vast web of interconnected memories to explore. Based on the memories, the player might be able to see the hidden agenda of the NPCs and come up with a different interpretation of the plot.

That still seems too passive. Can the player actually do something? Yes, in dreams. In the evening, the character sleeps and dreams about the events witnessed during the day. In the dream world, the player can take actions, solve puzzles and interact with dream-versions of the NPCs, but the logic would be different from the physical world. We can go even further: the player might be able to imagine or mentally construct another world, maybe a memory palace…

How can the game end? If in the physical world the character dies, then the mind dies with it, thus ending the game. Or maybe something the character does in the physical world, such as sweeping the floor, triggers a satori and the game ends with the player in a state of blissful zen Enlightenment. Or, in the physical world, the character consumes a liquid which just so happens to be the antidote of the dissociative drug. The mind is reunited with the body, and the player can continue with the adventure, with new insights about the game world gained from being a disconnected mind.

Today I visited the National Natural History Museum in Taichung, and I found the exact location where I was introduced to the music of the Beatles!

It was a school excursion when I was a boy. In the anthropological hall of the museum, there was a display of the site in Ethiopia where Donald Johanson discovered Australopithecus. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds was playing because that’s the music Johanson was listening to while his team dug up Lucy. I actually paid no attention to any of these facts, because I was listening to the music. After that excursion, I bought Beatles albums one by one until I found Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.

I returned to the museum after decades living abroad, and I was very happy to have discovered that the museum has been playing Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds continuously all these years.

A tribute to Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, an old adventure game. The game has the greatest cover art ever. I haven’t played the game myself, but what could the plot be? Zak McKracken, a tabloid journalist is holding a baguette and a fishbowl, standing on a pile of fallen alien guitarists in cowboy hats. There is a broom with a face, a two-headed squirrel, and a girl holding a Groucho-Marx mask. Somebody should turn it into a children’s book.

A friend shared with me a photo of a sign that says “Brains 25c Drive In”. It’s on the cover of the Bill Frisell album Where in the World? (1991), and many other places. It was a real sign advertising a fried brain sandwich, found in St. Louis, Misouri in the 70’s and 80’s.

Guitar learning diary: As I learn to play the guitar, I realised that I might be able to make musical associations without mental awareness. It’s probably because I am not familiar enough with the language of music to surface musical feelings to a conscious level. For example, yesterday, I tried to play some dominant 9 chords in a book. I was learning the fingering so I wasn’t attending to the sounds of the chords. It’s all mechanical at this stage. If you ask me to imagine a C9 chord, I wouldn’t be able to do it. I don’t know how to use a 9 chord in a musical context.

However, today, when I listened to the My Buffalo Girl track on Bill Frisell’s Good Dog, Happy Man album, I noticed that he played an interesting chord that sounded dissonant but musical at the same time. I looked it up in the Bill Frisell: An Anthology songbook, and what do you know? It’s a dominant 9 chord!

This happened to me before. I was interested in Miles Davis' So What, so I tried to play a couple of bars of Miles' solo. It was mostly an exercise to learn the Dorian mode. Then, for no apparent reason, I thought about Bill Frisell’s Monroe (again, from the Good Dog, Happy Man album) and tried to play it. It took me a while to discover that Monroe is in Dorian mode!

I am not sure if these are all coincidental, but I suspect that an interesting psychological phenomenon is in the play.

One of the zanier moments in Penn & Teller Fool Us: While Penn used a magic trick to comment on the New Testament (in which Teller was both the camel and the rich man at the same time), he said that heaven to him was listening to Sun Ra playing Bob Dylan tunes, while eating vegan fudge and watching the Tree Stooges chasing a honey badger on TV.

I’ve been reading two books about hacking. Interestingly, both books make references to the novel The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon. The first book is Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell by Phil Lapsley. In an interview of Ron Rosenbaum, whose article Secrets of the Little Blue Box (published in Esquire Magazine in 1971) brought phone phreaking into the awareness of the public, Rosenbaum said that his vision of the phone phreaks of the 60’s and the 70’s was influenced by the underground communication networks described in the novel.

When I started to read the book, I didn’t associate phone phreaking with Pynchon. But of course, Pynchon loves secret communication. The second chapter of Lapsley’s book on the birth of Bell System and AT&T, he cited optical telegraphs of the 18th century as an early form of long-distance communication network. Incidentally, optical telegraphy is one of the main themes of Pynchon’s novel Mason & Dixon.

The second book I am reading is the The Cuckoo’s Egg by Cliff Stoll. It’s a classic non-fictional account of Stoll’s experience of tracing the footsteps of German hackers through the mazes of Internet and government agencies in the 80’s. Although he didn’t explicitly mention Pynchon, in Chapter 29, he gave a technology company the name Yoyodyne - the name of a giant defense contractor in The Crying of Lot 49.

It’s very interesting to me that Thomas Pynchon (rather than, say, William Gibson) is the author that people turn to when they talk about hackers and phone phreaks.

PS: I am now reading The Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling. Guess what? It also makes a reference to Thomas Pynchon!

I had a surreal experience reading Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing by Randall Stross, published in 1993 (I found a copy for free). Stross argued convincingly that NeXT was hopeless. Had I read it in 1993, I would have thought that the analysis was spot on. Who would have thought that in 2023, people would be still using essentially NEXTSTEP? Also, the entire workstation market has been wiped out, but IBM is still selling mainframes!