The Coin Toss and the Love Triangle

The Coin Toss and the Love Triangle

There are two flavors of uncertainty in our lives. Math helps with both.

 

 

 

Illustrations: Gérard DuBois

 

 

Uncertainty

Nautilus

Aug 17, 2018 · 17 min read

By Simon DeDeo

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
—Ecclesiastes 9:11, King James Bible (Pure Cambridge Authorized Version)

“Chance”appears to name a single, unitary thing. But its genealogy, its family history, turns out to be a tangled one. One way to understand its branching origins is to turn to literature: We may look, in turn, to two very different novels.

Anton Chigurh, the antagonist of Cormac McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men, forces his victims to guess the outcome of a coin toss, taking their life if they guess in error. McCarthy’s villain forces blind chance into his victims’ lives in the most brutal way. That chance is entirely contained, not in Chigurh, but in the toss — in nature itself. This is one source of uncertainty.

To understand the second source, we travel as far as possible from McCarthy’s American Southwest. The first volume of Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove ends with Milly Theale, a wealthy American heiress, visiting the National Gallery in London. To her surprise she sees an acquaintance, Merton Densher, in the company of her best friend, Kate Croy. The plot of the book from this point forward hinges on a single question: will Milly learn what the reader already knows — that Merton and Kate are in love and secretly engaged to be married.

In the sequence, told from Milly’s point of view, we see how Kate — caught sharing an intimate afternoon — acts in such a way as to generate an alternate hypothesis for her friend: that Merton may well be keen on her, but that she, Kate, is not keen on him.

Here are uncertainties not otherwise found in nature: probabilities about probabilities, beliefs about beliefs held by others.

For many of us, the material world of the coin toss may be a byword for chance. But the cognitive world of the love triangle is just as fraught and, at its limits, just as much a form of chance as a tumbling coin. We humans are capable of introducing a degree of uncertainty both dizzying and unavoidable.

Therefore, Ecclesiastes was right twice over. Uncertainties — both natural and human — must be dealt with even by the swift, strong, wise, and able. Our objective is to demonstrate the depths of each kind of uncertainty and to introduce mathematics that can help us come to terms with both.

I. The Coin Toss

What’s the most you ever saw lost on a coin toss?
— No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy (2005)

Sufficiently many fictional murderers have toyed with their victims that, today, the idea borders on cliché and parody. But Chigurh’s game chills us still, perhaps because of the concentrated form of his message. His impartial, deadly coin toss is a reminder of the dominance of chance in our own lives.

From the accidents we have avoided or been met with, to the relationships we have formed and the institutions we have come to be associated with — each fact about ourselves appears to depend on a series of events, any one of which could have gone another way. To stand on top of a tower of such coincidences and look down gives us a hint of vertigo. Which aspects of life are real, we ask, and which simply luck?

This question is, on the one hand, at the heart of much literature and art; on the other, it is a hardheaded question in the mathematical sciences.

Many fictional murderers have toyed with their victims.

In particular, the branch of mathematics known as information theory concerns itself with how to describe chance and uncertainty. It reconciles the unlikeliness of any particular life with the intuitive sense that the shape of one’s life is not simply a matter of chance.

To see how, let us begin at the beginning, at the base of the tower of coincidences. Suppose Chigurh’s coin toss is fair — equally likely to come out heads or tails. What are the possible strategies his victim should consider? Always guess tails? Heads? Some alternation?

Should the toss be fair, no strategy is better than another. Indeed, strategies are indistinguishable from each other. This is due to the symmetry of the problem: We can swap the labels on each side of Chigurh’s coin at any time and thereby convert any prescription into any other. In McCarthy’s desert landscape, strategy and reason are meaningless. The vertigo of chance is upon us.

This, of course, doesn’t describe the world we normally confront. In our world there is predictability, with a preference between outcomes¹ and the possibility of rational choice. Broken symmetries make reason relevant to our lives.

But this doesn’t rescue us from the vertigo of chance. Suppose, for example, Chigurh’s coin is slightly more likely to come up heads. Now, strategies are distinguishable. For a heads-biased coin, the preferred and most rational strategy is always to guess heads.

In the course of your life you need to make many decisions. What if you had to guess the coin toss more than once? Consider tossing the biased coin a thousand times. Since each toss is independent of the one before, the most likely outcome is the repeated occurrence of the most likely outcome of each one separately. And thus, of all the possible histories we could foresee, the strangest sequence of all, an unbroken run of heads:

HHHHH … H, 1,000 times

is the single most likely. Our intuition is that such a sequence will never, in fact, occur.

And of course we are correct. Fix the bias of the coin at 60 percent heads. The chance of heads on a first toss is (by definition) 6 in 10; of two heads in a row, a little over 1 in 3. The chance of three heads in a row is only a little better than 1 in 5.

In McCarthy’s desert landscape, strategy and reason are meaningless.

The chances of an unbroken run decrease exponentially; the chance of ten heads in a row is less than 1 percent, and a few more doublings suffice to place the chances beyond the astronomical. It is unlikely to see an unbroken run of heads in 80 tosses, even if one completes such a sequence once every second for the 13 billion years the universe has existed.

We’ve established that a string of unbroken heads is extremely unlikely. But any other history is even more so. As time passes, every narrative becomes an extreme rarity. Despite the existence of a most rational choice, the particulars of your life describe a very unlikely path. The biased coin, which signifies the possibility of reason, does not relieve our vertigo after all.

Yet we also know that some things are routine, expected — even, at times, part of our birthright — and others less ordinary. A friendship might depend on having shared a freshman seminar, but is it so unlikely to have made a friend in college?

This intuition has a mathematical grounding in what is called the typical set. The typical set is the mathematics behind our feeling of normalcy. It reconciles reason and chance by linking the nature of the singular event to the properties of the history it belongs to. More than biased probabilities, it challenges the vertigo of pure chance.

Consider the space of all possible histories: an exhaustive list of every sequence of events that might have occurred. Every coin toss, every decision ever made. The typical set bounds a very small region in this space and describes the path that we, as time goes on, are increasingly likely to follow. Given a prescription for the probabilities of individual decisions, the typical set picks a list of histories whose rates of uncertainty accumulation become increasingly close to each other, and match, on the average, the intrinsic rate of the probabilities themselves².

Let’s return to the freshman seminar. Your college life is a series of chance events whose probabilities are set by a finite list of constraints: your major, your age, and so on. As your college days run on, the set of possible histories you are likely to experience converges with those found in the typical set your constraints define. Each individual history is rich in idiosyncrasy while being drawn from a narrowly circumscribed set of possibilities that is much smaller than the space of all that might happen³.

Despite the existence of a most rational choice, the particulars of your life describe a very unlikely path.

We are left in a profoundly ambiguous place. The typical set rescues normalcy but also dictates typical lives, common stories: boy meets girl, dog bites man. This wisdom was also known to the author of Ecclesiastes, who wrote that there was “nothing new under the sun.” To the swiftest, the race might go once, or even twice, but on the longest scales of time no streak is left unbroken.

At the same time, our pasts and our futures — even our most likely futures — are, in their details, profoundly unlikely things.

An information theorist may not know the exact world we live in, but she does know that, in the long run, it’s a world in the typical set. And she also knows that she doesn’t know anything else⁴.

So much for coin tosses and freshman seminar assignments: things external to ourselves, driven by the chances of the physical world⁵. These material things, however, are not the only — or even the most important — sources of life’s uncertainty. To see that, we turn from Cormac McCarthy’s American Southwest to Henry James’s London.

II. The Love Triangle

Little by little indeed, under the vividness of Kate’s behaviour, the probabilities fell back into their order.
— The Wings of the Dove, Henry James (1909)

It is a remarkable fact about the structure of our reasoning that probabilities can be understood to represent not only chances of outcomes in the physical world, but the strength of the convictions we hold within our minds⁶. This has been known explicitly only since the 1940s, when the physicist Richard Cox derived the laws of probability from a set of logical postulates. His work was then adapted by key figures such as Edwin Jaynes (another physicist) to found an account of chance based on degrees of belief — to go from biased coins to biased thoughts about them.

It is under this latter understanding of chance that James’s narrative best shines. Milly must make sense of the unexpected: Merton and Kate together in the National Gallery. Under the influence of Kate’s posturing, she must form a set of beliefs — a set of “probabilities,” concerning beliefs about beliefs. James’s self-reflexive prose abounds with difficult-to-track higher-order thoughts — perhaps this is why it was once said of James that he chewed more than he bit off.

Our pasts and our futures are, in their details, profoundly unlikely things.

Although remote from the raw chance of the physical world, mathematics can also help us understand how to describe these beliefs and show us how they can start to resemble raw chance.

To begin with some notation, let us represent the fact that person X believes sentence s in the form BX (s), which is read as “X believes that s”⁷.

The recognition that takes place between Milly and Merton and sets the narrative in motion can be described this way. Merton sees Milly first; he is of course aware of this, and so we can write:

BMerton(“Merton sees Milly”)

Or, in words, “Merton believes that Merton sees Milly” (it will save us a great deal of trouble if we avoid pronouns for a spell).

Milly then sees Merton. As she is also self-aware,

BMilly(“Milly sees Merton”)

When, as the narrative tells us, she can see that Merton can see her, we have

BMilly(BMerton(“Merton sees Milly”))

Or that “Milly believes that Merton believes that Merton sees Milly.” Not only is this recognition mutual, but so is the recognition of this recognition, so that

BMilly(BMerton(“Milly sees Merton”))

And, indeed, this recognition itself is also known to Merton, so that

BMerton(BMilly(BMerton(“Milly sees Merton”)))

Aided by the mathematical notation, one can see that these towers are potentially infinite in extent, with true and false beliefs possible at each point.

Game theorists — in a beautiful simplification — use the term common knowledge to refer to cases where sentence s is true, and any arbitrarily nested belief functions referring to the state of knowledge of individuals concerning s are also true. Common knowledge is often associated with social norms such as obeying traffic lights and being polite, but here we can see the infinite tower emerge, at once, in the meeting of gazes.

Not all forms of belief are commonly held; indeed, it is the failure of common knowledge that drives many narratives (including those of Othello, Hamlet, and nearly all of Shakespeare’s comedies).

It is only after Milly and Merton have recognized each other, in other words, that the games begin. After the awkward encounter, Milly invites both Merton and Kate to her hotel so as to appear to take Kate’s hint that the encounter must seem to Milly “queer,” but that it has a simple interpretation. Milly does this in part because she believes the best solution is to adopt and emphasize her “native wood-note,” her own spontaneous, American attitudes. This, she feels, will ease the strain of her stumbling on a scene of unrequited (that is, Merton’s) love.

In short: Milly believes that Kate believes the scene has induced a belief in Milly; Milly, holding beliefs about her own beliefs, attempts to induce a new belief in Kate. Such patterns of thought are real, if delicate; they are difficult to represent properly in English (though of course James tries) but more than amenable to the formalism above.

Milly reasons that, becauseBMilly(BKate(BMilly(“something’s queer”)))```

and

BMilly(BMilly(“one should be straight-forward”) is the best response),

the awkward predicament can be resolved by acting such that

BKate(BMilly(“with time, an innocent explanation will emerge”)).

Milly is proud of the complexity of her reasoning⁸, motivated by a noble desire to be a good friend to Kate. She is unaware, of course, that the English girl, nesting all of Milly’s beliefs one level deeper and responding appropriately, is able to conceal the essential truth: that Merton’s love is in fact requited⁹. At each stage, these belief functions carry with them probabilities — degrees of belief — that multiply together in increasingly complex ways.

The typical set was the star of Section I: It gave us a handle on the nature of uncertainty. The sources of that uncertainty were drawn from the material world. Here in Section II we have seen how to describe the emergence of uncertainty among thinking, competing agents. The extension of chance to the social world requires a new set of mathematical tools. These tools show us plainly the potential for spiraling complexity, for reflexivity, which we can now name precisely: BMilly(BKate(BMilly…

III. The Limits of Reflexivity

At sufficient complexity, social and natural uncertainty, both in principle and in practice, become indistinguishable. While readers might find Wings of the Dove difficult (if rewarding), they are not alone if forced to rely on the Merchant-Ivory version of James’s subsequent, and even more oblique novel, The Golden Bowl.

Put another way, our cognition, so limitless in the development of the natural sciences, seems the most fallible when, in walking down the street, we meet a stranger coming from the other direction, and, symmetrically polite, both move left and right in a frustrated attempt to make way.

The extension of chance to the social world requires a new set of mathematical tools.

It occurs to us that the best solution can often be the leaving of things to chance. When our social environment demands we take into account too many reciprocal beliefs about beliefs, we become — against our better knowledge — mystics. We attribute chance and randomness to others even as we fail to attribute it to ourselves. The minds of others become too complex, and we treat the social world as we do the natural one — as fundamentally unknowable, fundamentally subject to chance.

Navigating the limits of our ability to judge the degree of certainty in our own beliefs and those of others is a defining human characteristic. With this understanding, the point at which one crosses from theories of mind to theories of chance is a balance of innate ability and a philosophical choice about what it means to lead a good life.

One might imagine a science fiction device — a probability meter — that would measure the differential contribution of nature and humankind to the uncertainty of an outcome. How much uncertainty in the average corporate boardroom is due to nature (e.g., the chances of bad weather delaying a shipment of parts) and how much to the strategic creation of uncertainties by human participants (e.g., the refusal to disclose final production targets to one’s suppliers)? Of course, such a meter could wreak havoc in any real boardroom — and itself be a source of its own readings.

Social and natural uncertainty are like natural and anthropogenic sources of carbon dioxide. When CO2 reaches the atmosphere, its source makes little difference. But there are essential differences in our ability to manage social and natural uncertainty. Our modern world of technology and planning has transformed many natural uncertainties into near-certainties. The same, however, cannot be said of higher-level aspects of human interaction.

Not that we aren’t trying. Today, machines manage much of our response to chance. They do so often by a low-level approximation of our own ideals of reasoning. Modern algorithms respond not only to inputs from their environment but also to degrees of belief in those inputs.

Machine learning systems that use this so-called Bayesian approach not only monitor the antilock brakes on modern cars and fly-by-wire passenger jets, but have spread far into the social domain. Among other things, they provide estimates of (and degrees of belief in) a student’s scholastic abilities (as part of automated essay-grading algorithms used by the Educational Testing Service for the SAT exam) and the romantic compatibilities of couples (as part of the algorithms developed by the online dating service eHarmony).

Computers, however, have shown far less ability than humans in the modeling of higher-order systems. While they can estimate with high accuracy the optimal move in a game of chess, they have performed poorly in games such as poker that require estimation not only of the facts at hand but of the beliefs of other players concerning those facts.

Modern algorithms respond not only to inputs from their environment but also to degrees of belief in those inputs.

Machines that play a naively “optimal” poker — folding with poor hands and persisting with better ones — can beat a simpleminded human player by better estimation of the odds. But they lose disastrously to a more expert player who can learn the underlying strategy and, by reference to the machine’s tolerance for risk, bluff more precisely.

Since we have allocated to machines reasoning tasks that far exceed our own abilities, since each successive limit to the power of computers relative to those of human reason has fallen, we might well ask: Can we expect this last domain in which properly thoughtful humans remain the unchallenged experts to remain inviolate? Will machines eventually diagram The Golden Bowl for us? And perhaps — let us speculate — produce new solutions to the dilemmas faced by its characters?

More lucrative avenues than literary criticism suggest themselves. Will corporations someday put supercomputers into boardrooms as well as their research labs to better anticipate and maneuver against their competition?

Though few have gotten rich betting against technological progress, this final step to fully automated reflexive knowledge of other minds seems far off. There are even reasons to believe that the search would amount to the construction of a conscious being or would pose questions fundamentally unanswerable to man and machine alike¹⁰. Should such a thing occur, our world would become, in an instant, unrecognizable. But the words of Ecclesiastes would still remain: Time and chance shall happen to them all — machine and creature alike.

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Footnotes

1. The inscriptions on the two sides of a coin have different forms and weights; this difference imprints itself on how coins behave in the real world, as can be seen by balancing a dozen pennies on their edge, and thumping the table to make them fall. A tossed coin is less sensitive to these effects, but (more seriously) is sensitive to the side facing upward at the beginning of the toss — the bias is roughly 51–49 in favor of the coin showing the side that faced up at the start.
2. The relationship between a history in the typical set and the underlying chance events that produce it is somewhat akin to the train conductor who makes up time along his route. In the short run, one might be delayed — or arrive ahead of schedule; but on the longest journeys, one finds the train pulls in exactly as expected.
3. How to best adapt the mathematics of probability to the cognitive and social worlds remains a challenging problem and places us at one of the major research frontiers. Two assumptions in particular, technically known as stationarity and ergodicity, play central roles here. My colleague Ole Peters, at the London Mathematical Laboratory, has been at the forefront of asking what we might need to do if these simplifying assumptions fail, in part by careful study of the St. Petersburg paradox, an apparent failure of human reasoning to abide by mathematical principles.
4. Leibniz introduced us to the idea of possible worlds and was memorably parodied as Dr. Pangloss in Voltaire’s Candide, who teaches his student that we live “in the best of all possible worlds.”
5. The “chance” in the King James Version translation is the noun, ôÌÆâÇò (pega) in the original Hebrew, etymologically derived from the word for “impact.”
6. It is not difficult to describe games where the mathematically rational choice is at odds with the sensible one we would make ourselves. One example is the Allais paradox. Question one: Which would you prefer? A million dollars guaranteed or an 89 percent chance of $1 million and a 10 percent chance of $5 million? (And thus a 1 percent chance of nothing.) Question two: Would you prefer an 11 percent chance of $1 million or a 10 percent chance of $5 million? If you prefer the first option for question one and the second option for question two, your choice-making violates some of the basic assumptions that underlie the mathematization of reason presented here.
7. Here we adopt the semantic approach of the Interactive Epistemology notation given by Aumann, Int. J. Game Theory (1999) 28:263.
8. We assume, as James does in this passage, that Milly can alter her own beliefs at will. Not a trivial assumption: A common human predicament is the desire to change a detrimental belief. Such desires are familiar in the religious realms — the struggle for faith — as well as the social ones, where self-help books encourage one to practice staying positive (i.e., holding certain beliefs about the future) against one’s prior, learned inclinations. Such struggles are not uncommon in science, either: Scientists often report a frustrated desire to reconcile their “naive” beliefs with their scientific ones.
9. Merton Densher has very little idea what is going on and spends most of his time in the nested belief functions of the two ladies. Whether this represents an amusing comment on the powers of Edwardian-era male reasoning or a failure of imagination on the part of Henry James is left as an exercise for the reader.
10. A machine capable of reasoning about reasoning — capable of forming beliefs about its beliefs, as is necessary for the kind of higher-order reasoning seen in the writing of Henry James — also becomes subject to one of the most mysterious mathematical results of the 20th century: the so-called Incompleteness Theorems, first explicitly formulated by Kurt Gödel in 1931. One can see this informally in the self-referentiality that the BX(s) formalism allows and can imagine sentences that refer to, for example, the believability of sentences that deny their believability; more rigorously, one can note the possibility of modeling a primitive arithmetic with the syntactic rules available.

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Simon DeDeo is a Research Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. His work, on the cognitive structure of natural and artificial systems, is supported by the National Science Foundation and the Emergent Institutions Project

Typing in Ancient Greek

Typing in Ancient Greek

August 25, 2020 ~ sententiaeantiquae

Note: This is a collection of sites/tools to help students and enthusiasts. I am posting it gain because I frequently get the question and there is no simple answer

Typing ancient Greek on computers and hand-held devices is increasingly necessary, but remains more difficult than it needs to. I won’t regale you with horror stories of the days of symbol based fonts when every journal used a different format that required separate entry or converters. But, it did involve keyboard maps that looked like this:

Unicode has made things much easier because almost every font can potentially be Greek.

But text entry can remain an issue for new Greek users. The main challenge for those of us with Roman letter keyboards is that we need to be able to use Polytonic Greek (Polytonic means “with many accents and diacritical marks”; most Greek keyboards are for the simpler modern Greek).
Just to clarify, then, the challenge is getting your device to assign the symbols you want to the keyboard you have and to modify these symbols with diacritical marks (breathings, accents, etc.). If you are just copying and pasting things already used in Greek, you don’t actually need to change anything. (And, if you are quoting long portions of Greek text, I strongly suggest just copying and pasting from the TLG, Perseus, etc. and then checking against varied editions.) But if you want to be a Greek Boss you need to change your keyboard settings.
Most devices already have settings that allow you to do this. (There are assistance utilities for those of us who have less patience/ability). Apple/MAC products tend to have simpler instructions, but sometimes still present challenges. PC/Android products can be annoying. But don’t get too frustrated–just imagine what it was like before computers!
Please add comments and I will add to the list.

Resources:

1. A handout for polytonic Greek in a windows environment. Here’s the equivalent for doing it in an Apple one. Here’s a good .pdf from Smith College Classics by Sarah Abowitz

2. For iOS and Android, Ryan Baumann suggests the Hoplite Polytonic Greek Keyboard. See also his page on the ChromeOs extension. Here’s a Linux utility too.

3. A somewhat outdated online guide from Mt. Holyoke. Also see the resources at Penn State’s Symbol Codes or University College of London’s “Greek Fonts and Typing Greek“

4. I use the Antioch utility. Campus antivirus programs will not allow it to be downloaded and installed. You need to do it from a private residence. I have not tried Keyman, but it looks promising. A similar utility mentioned by Mt Holyoke and Baumann for Apple products is SophoKeys (yay wordplay!). See also, Bill Thayer’s cyborg Typinator.

5. If all else fails, you can cheat using online input pages: lexilogos, Greek.typeit. or typeGreek, or tastiera greca A commenter has also suggested this inputter.

I have this beautiful dinosaur in my office.

Note: I am certainly not the first to collect some of these resources. Here’s a twitter picture guide:

Giovanni Lido

@Giovanni_Lido

You do not need to download anything (let alone *pay* for anything!) to type in Greek. A Greek keyboard already comes installed on your computer—you just have to turn it on. It’s very easy; here’s how.

Klaus et Annemarie

par Gilles Collard

6 mai 2012

Quand politique et poétique sont indissociablement liées.

Klaus Mann et Annemarie Schwarzenbach

Le XXème siècle ne sera jamais le siècle des lignes pures qu’affectionnent les historiens. Il est, et restera sans doute pour toujours, le siècle réfractaire à toutes les lectures univoques, à toutes les mises en récit de la grande continuité historique. Il sera à jamais impossible de suivre toutes les courbes qui le composent dans un ensemble homogène et cohérent. Le XXème siècle est le siècle qui ne cessera de casser les os de la tête, comme si les actes de ses protagonistes s’enchaînaient dans un élan qui évacuait d’emblée une prise rationnelle et qu’ils épuisaient d’entrée de jeu la rationalité qui aurait dû les informer. Entre la science et la philosophie, la politique et l’amour, ce fut un siècle de déchirements, les vies s’échouaient sur les récifs d’une société abrasive. Seule, sans doute, la littérature a pu en porter un reflet, car seule la littérature a pu rester cet espace de tous les possibles où aucune préconception de la vie et des gens, de la politique et de la société ne venait dicter les règles de conduite de cet art. Pour le meilleur comme pour le pire, la littérature aura été ce moule d’une sculpture en mouvement, à l’instar de ces plâtres qui épousent dans les moindre détails les aspérités d’une matière molle.
On connaît sur le bout des doigts les égarements des uns et des autres, leurs retournements, leurs fluctuations, leurs suivismes, leurs affiliations, leurs renoncements, leurs suicides, leurs gloires et leurs pertes, les illusions de l’engagement et de l’indifférence. De la philosophie à la littérature, en passant par l’essai, les bougés du siècles furent traduits sur le même papier photographique.
Prenons Céline, prenons Heidegger. Prenons Aragon, prenons Sartre. Ou encore Malraux, Blanchot, et tant d’autres…
A l’infini, il sera possible de palabrer sur les raisons de leurs textes et de leurs engagements.
Et puis, il y en a quelques-uns,  généralement moins connus que ces grands ténors. La postérité les a souvent négligé. Pas par le manque d’envergure de leur œuvre, mais sans doute parce qu’ils ne pouvaient pas se prêter à une lecture qui laissait place à une fascination pour l’ambiguïté et le mal (un grand match pourrait se jouer ici entre Malraux et Malaparte). Leur lecture ne peut laisser place aux mensonges, aux petits arrangements que requièrent les dorures de la gloire et la paresse du confort.
Il est des astres qui ne souffrent aucune discussion, leur lumière existe et jette un éclairage tranchant, sans appel, sur les égarements de la majorité. Klaus Mann et Annemarie Schwarzenbach sont de ceux-là.
On s’interroge souvent sur la nature d’un salaud, la saleté de certains engagements. Mais c’est sans compter sur cet impensé de la psychologie des foules, de la politique et de l’individu, que jamais nous n’avons pu expliquer le choix de chacun envers l’une ou l’autre cause. Qu’est-ce qui fait qu’un individu se tourne vers un côté obscur ? Opère des choix criminels ? Est-ce l’éducation, la force d’un choix rationnel ? Là-dessus, on ferme les yeux, on se réconforte avec des repères bien assis, et on n’admet que rarement une ignorance, comme s’il fallait sans cesse combler le vide qui loge dans les comportements des individus.
Et si cela ne tenait qu’à toutes ces choses d’apparence frivole ou inavouable à des dispositions ou à une constitution ? quelle est notre somme de réflexes ? Ne serait-ce pas ce style de vêtement, ce goût de se transporter dans les villes, un penchant pour la drogue ou l’ascèse, une indétermination dans les genres sexuels ? Une physiologie, la place d’un corps dans l’enchaînement des phrases ?
Sur cette question, l’incipit du Tournant, la célèbre, et pourtant trop méconnue autobiographie de Klaus Mann, reste d’une force redoutable et essentielle. Lucidité de Klaus Mann, y compris sur lui-même, qui voit parfaitement l’enjeu de rendre compte de la nature d’un engagement qui nourrit toute une vie, au détriment, parfois, de celle-ci : « Où l’histoire commence-t-elle ? Où notre vie individuelle prend-elle sa source ? Quelles aventures, quelles passions englouties ont modelé notre être ? D’où viennent les traits et les tendances multiples et contradictoires dont est fait notre caractère ? »

Revue antifasciste fondée en 1933 par Klaus Mann

En terme de questionnement sur le comportement de tout un chacun dans un siècle de feu, on aura rarement lu des lignes aussi incisives et justes sur l’origine des actes des uns et des autres.
On a toujours fait comme si la vitesse, les déplacements, l’attention portée aux vêtements, le rapport à la drogue, un type de sexualité qui naviguait entre les genres, l’attitude, en somme, n’était qu’accessoire chez Klaus Mann et n’alimentait sa biographie que pour en accentuer le côté tragique au regard de sa véritable ligne de force qui était sa lucidité et son combat envers le fascisme. On ne s’est jamais demandé comment le biographique dans sa quotidienneté, ses habitudes, ses postures (souvent dites frivoles ou désinvoltes) nourrissait le regard de l’intellectuel, son intelligence intransigeante, son verbe et ses phrases, son attitude inflexible et admirable pour servir les causes les plus éclairées dans une Europe en ruine. Or je tiens que ce lien est essentiel, non seulement dans le cas précis de Klaus Mann mais, plus généralement, pour essayer de comprendre et de rendre intelligible les errances criminelles des uns et les combats lumineux des autres.
L’exemple de Klaus Mann nous permet de tenir le poétique et le politique pour indissociablement liés. Le 20ème siècle et l’engagement des intellectuels durant cette période se tient tout entier dans la réussite ou l’échec de ce nœud.
D’Annemarie Schwarzenbach, nous pourrons dire la même chose sans réserve. Comment expliquer que cette fille de la très haute bourgeoisie suisse, issue d’une famille de riches industriels qui n’ont jamais caché leur complaisance, voire leur conviction envers Hitler, ai pu s’engager corps et âme dans un combat contre la montée du nazisme, en le vivant dans sa chair et ses affects, en se mettant rapidement à dos tout ce que la Suisse compte de bonne société, en se servant de sa fortune, le temps que ses parents lui laissaient encore en jouir, pour aider financièrement la revue antifasciste que Klaus Mann met sur pied en Hollande, au début des années 30 d’abord, sous le nom de Die Sammlung, à la fin de la décennie, ensuite, à New-York sous le beau titre de Decision. C’est avec une fidélité sans faille, une loyauté (il faut bien le dire, pas toujours soutenue avec la même élégance par Klaus) qu’Annemarie versera tous les mois sa contribution financière pour que les volumes puissent paraître.
Regardez ces photos, au-delà de « son visage d’ange inconsolable » qui vous donne « le mal d’Europe », regardez, plutôt le geste, cette façon de tenir une cigarette, de porter un pantalon, une tunique, une veste, de se laisser glisser sur une chaise, de tenir le regard perdu au loin pour ne pas croire en ce monde-ci. Il y a un mystère et une magie. Une duperie qui esquive pour mieux tenir ses forces et affronter la page qui n’attend pas.

Klaus Mann

Car pour Klaus, comme pour Annemarie, si le combat se mène toujours sur la page blanche, sans cesse à reprendre, au prix de se ruiner la santé et d’aller au-delà de l’effort physique, là où seules la force morale et la vie psychique prend le pouvoir, même si la chimie n’y est pas pour rien, si c’est là que se joue l’essentiel pour l’un et l’autre, ce furent aussi et à hauteur quasiment égale des amoureux du monde et de certains êtres qui traversaient l’époque, leurs contemporains. Il fallait rencontrer, voir, fédérer. Les deux étaient certes d’un narcissisme endurci et increvable, mais jamais mégalomane,s les deux étaient surtout dans une quête perpétuelle de ce qui pouvait forcer leur admiration. Admirer, c’était un travail en soi. Trouver les mots et les gestes, converser, envisager, produire, réaliser, c’est un grand tournis. Même une lecture distraite du Journal de Klaus retiendra le lecteur par la capacité qu’il avait de remplir une journée par autant de phrases et de mots que par des êtres de chair et de sang. 9 janvier 1932  «  Je suis assez fatigué ; voir trop peu de gens, cela crée une sorte d’empoisonnement, de même qu’un sommeil trop rare. » Le geste, une fois encore. Cette rencontre du poétique et du politique, qui s’écrivait avec des mots mais aussi avec des corps.
Il y a un épisode qui m’a toujours subjugué, au croisement de ses deux vies sans répit, dans l’inconfort du foyer de flamme qui les brûlait. A deux reprises, au moins, Klaus Mann et Annemarie Schwarzenbach partagent une intimité plus grande, théâtre d’une amitié (et le reste) aussi incertaine que fidèle. La première scène se passe à Venise, la seconde à Moscou pour le congrès des écrivains communistes. Je m’étendrai plus largement sur la première. Car ma fascination pour l’un et pour l’autre naît d’une photo, d’une image, d’une force d’attraction inoïe. Annemarie, Klaus et sa sœur, Erika, sont sur une gondole qui se laisse bercer sur le grand canal à Venise. C’est aussi simple que cela. Il faut regarder leurs visages. Retrouver les raisons de ce voyage, les traces de ce départ. On aimerait retrouver leurs mots échangés, retrouver un film avec du son. Quelques notes, toutefois, suffisent. Car cet épisode fut sans doute la fin d’une parenthèse et annonce le début de l’exil, conjointement à un exercice plus soutenu de la morphine pour l’un comme pour l’autre.

Erika Mann, Annemarie Schwarzenbach et Klaus Mann

On peut lire dans le Journal de Klaus qu’Annemarie les a tous filmés une journée entière à Venise, principalement durant des achats faits par Klaus autour de San Marco. On rêve de retrouver ce film pour vérifier ce que la pellicule, le cinéma, serait capable de retranscrire de leur corps et postures, de leur marche, de la fragilité de leurs nerfs. Retenir un regard, par exemple, qui dirait tout. Car il y a bien un mystère autour de leurs existences, on cherche en vain à comprendre ce qui aurait nourri cette lucidité à toutes épreuves, y compris, cette lucidité qui prévaudra toujours sur leur santé et leur confort. Un fois encore, il s’agit de ne pas perdre le fil qui relie l’ensemble de leur condition d’existence, leur manière d’être. Leur souci d’eux-mêmes passe toujours, sans exception, par le filtre de l’inquiétude du monde, jusqu’au plaisir éphémère qu’il peut procurer.
Mai 1932, Venise, donc. Une gondole sur le grand Canal. Erika et Klaus plongés dans le profonde tristesse causée par le suicide de leur ami le plus proche, le plus intime, le plus fragile. Sans prévenir personne, Ricki, c’est son nom, se donnera la mort en avril, alors qu’ils projetaient tous de partir en Asie pour respirer loin de l’Allemagne… irrespirable, déjà. En fait, c’est plus que projeter que la troupe faisait. Tout était fin prêt : matériel, itinéraire, administration. Ils devaient tous partir le lendemain, Ricki compris. Ricki se tua sans prévenir personne et en maintenant jusqu’au bout l’illusion de son enthousiasme, camouflant, par force de caractère, son triste dessein qui fut de succomber psychologiquement à l’horreur des premiers actes barbares des nazis.
Venise est dès lors un second choix, ils décident de partir pour oublier, pour changer d’atmosphère, pour enterrer définitivement cet autre voyage, avorté, en Perse.
La situation commence à sérieusement dégénérer à ce moment en Allemagne. Il y eu l’incendie du Reichstag, la montée en puissance irrésistible des nazis. Lucidité de toute la troupe, sans nuance, sur les dangers des troubles de cette Allemagne.
Klaus a travaillé d’arrache pied avant de partir : roman, nouvelle, article, autobiographie. Il n’a pas arrêté. Il lit Anna Karenine, Axel Munth, Goethe. Il commence aussi avec l’aide d’Annemarie à préparer la naissance de la revue Die Sammlung, qui se voudra être la revue cosmopolite antifasciste qui fédèrera le plus grand nombre d’intellectuels possible.
Il commence aussi à s’habituer à la morphine. Durant le séjour à Venise, il fait aussi mention d’une autre prise de médicament sur lequel je ne retrouve aujourd’hui aucune précision quant à la composition, mais qu’il nomme « adaline ».
Annemarie, de son côté, vit de très grave turbulences avec sa mère, qui incarne pour elle la somme de ses contradictions. Si elle connaît ses choix, assume ses sentiments politiques, si elle sait que l’avenir de l’Europe la requiert, qu’elle a envie de se rendre utile, si pour elle les exactions commises en Allemagne sont insupportables, et l’attitude de la Suisse bien trop frileuse, elle n’arrive pourtant pas à rompre avec sa mère, qui suffirait à elle seule pour incarner la pente glissante de l’Europe : fascination pour Hitler et la pureté du renouveau qu’il incarne, prolongation du passé familial autour de la quête d’une grande Allemagne sur laquelle la Suisse doit s’aligner, etc. Elle est clairvoyante, mais souffre intérieurement de cette incapacité à s’émanciper corps et âme de l’emprise de sa mère. Elle préférera d’ailleurs toujours la fuite et les voyages comme si l’Europe était l’incarnation de cette contradiction qui restera à jamais irrésolue. « Je trouve que l’on devrait quitter l’Europe et les sentiers battus ; ici, on exige de nous trop peu de courage et beaucoup trop de patience. »
Klaus, de son côté, essaie de reprendre souffle. Smoking le soir pour les diners à l’hôtel (l’hôtel des bains, sur la face est du lido), lecture de Tolstoï sur la plage. Promenades et achats dans Venise. Visite de l’église des Miracoli, à la frontière de San Marco et du Cannaregio, du Palais des Doges, et de l’ancêtre de la biennale de Venise. Sureté du goût, jugement sévère, ils se gaussent des futuristes comme, peu de temps auparavant, il mentionnera l’archi nullité de Leni Riefensthal.

Annemarie Schwarzenbach

Après Venise, en 1934, c’est à Moscou que se rend Klaus en compagnie d’Annemarie (celle-ci pense même peut-être à ce moment l’épouser) pour participer au premier congrès des écrivains soviétiques. On peut lire ici toute la malice, l’intelligence de Klaus qui se rendra en Russie par curiosité, pour aiguiser son regard et, une fois encore, ne pas se tromper. Ce sont quinze jours qui sont relatés dans le Tournant et qui restent sans appel, tant, dès 1934, Klaus dans sa lecture du mouvement bolchevique et de sa mise en place étatique reste d’une acuité sidérante, à faire passer les éclaircies des années 60, 70 et 80  pour une lecture bien tardive de ce qui se jouait déjà en Russie avec le léninisme.
Deux épisodes, retracés ici bien trop brièvement. Il y aurait tellement de choses à reprendre, à relire, citer et nommer dans les œuvres d’Annemarie Schwarzenbach et de Klaus Mann qui rendent compte d’une cohérence inouïe au cœur du chaos du 20ème siècle.
Mais il faudra toujours revenir là-dessus, insister sur le fait que ces deux -à, avant d’être des écrivains hors pairs, des intellectuels qui se sont épuisés dans leurs combats et dans les voyages, dans l’exil, et les terres inconnues, sont avant tout des artistes. C’est-à-dire des êtres d’une sensibilité extrême qui les rendait, à cet époque, réceptifs au son d’une société, à ses ondulations, à ses voix sourdes qui se propageaient par les faits et gestes de la politique et du peuple.
Au final, il faudrait souligner que c’est toujours le goût que Klaus a mis au poste de commande, une sensibilité, une attitude, des gestes. C’est par son oreille, son regard, avant les concepts, que Klaus a pu emprunter une trajectoire tragique mais rectiligne, orgueilleuse mais généreuse, à travers sa trop courte vie. Klaus s’est toujours méfié, ceci dit, des penchants vitalistes, d’un nietzchéisme mal digéré, d’une foi en la vie, en ses pulsions dont il voyait très vite la mesure totalitaire : « L’orgie de masse à laquelle je prends un plaisir mi-ironique et amer, mi-doux et vulgaire, porte en elle le germe du meurtre en masse ; toute ivresse est en puissance une ivresse sanguinaire, constatation par laquelle je ne voudrais pas, bien sûr, désavouer mon apologie de la volupté, mais, toutefois, la tempérer comme il convient. »
Mais ce n’est pas pour autant qu’il va guider sa vie selon des abstractions, des concepts creux, une foi aveugle dans les constructions intellectuelles progressistes qui ne feraient que masquer les interrogations existentielles les plus radicales. Klaus doute tout le temps : de ce qui l’écrit, de la capacité des œuvres à changer le monde. Il connaît la vanité, la repère, n’est pas dupe de ses emportements, de sa fougue haletante. La drogue pour Annemarie comme pour Klaus matérialise sans aucun doute ces contradictions, mais la ligne reste pure, et étincelle. Entre la force de la vie, et le couperet des concepts, ils ne choisissent pas, et préfèrent, artistes, se faire oreille et regard, aiguiser les réflexes, et construire des mondes vivables pour tous. On l’a dit. La clairvoyance de Klaus par rapport au jeu soviétique, à la force des grandes idées généreuses sur le réel des gens, a nourri son désarroi, sa profonde mélancolie, comme son jugement sans appel contre les ennemis de la démocratie et du cosmopolitisme. Relisons, ces lignes du Tournant : «  On peut, je pense, être pour l’abolition ou l’adoucissement des souffrances humaines évitables et cependant ressentir la situation de l’homme dans l’univers et sur cette terre comme essentiellement tragique, le problème de l’homme comme essentiellement insoluble, le tourment de l’existence individuelle comme finalement sans remède. Oui, il devrait être possible à un esprit mûr et libre de combattre la superstition et l’obscurantisme, de faire progresser la lumière et de préserver pourtant en soi l’horreur sacrée qu’éveille le mystère. L’amour reste un mystère, même dans l’Etat socialiste ; la raison pour laquelle nous devons disparaître dans la mort, Marx et Lénine eux-mêmes ne nous l’ont pas dévoilée. Les voiles demeurent, les énigmes sont toujours là, le phénomène de la vie ne nous révèle pas sa signification, nous ne savons rien. »
Politique et poétique indissociablement liées, oui, nous ne savons rien. Nous ne savons rien, sinon la force de certains gestes. Questions de physiologie, question d’oreille, question de réflexe. Simple rappel.

Joaquín Vaquero Palacios

Joaquín Vaquero Palacios
communedesign:

Expressionist architecture (roughly, 1905-1935) utilized emerging technology and unexpected building blocks to realize organic forms. This meant that structures were inspired largely by the forces of nature (rock formations, sloping mountain sides, seashells…) but were built under modernist principles. Consequently, there was a large focus on unconventional massing; novel materials created shapes that served function as equally as the pursuit of emotional expression. There was nothing subtle about this sort of architecture and the urge to push the boundaries of proper form has afforded us with incredible buildings to admire many years later. Not least of which are Joaquin Vaquero Palacios’ hydroelectric plants.
Though he began to design his famed hydroelectric plants in the 50’s (far after the heyday of expressionism), the links to it are undeniable. He came of age exactly as this movement’s trajectory swelled. Born to a father who was one of the founders of Spain’s Hidroeléctrica del Cantábrico, it wasn’t a far stretch for Vaquero Palacios to lend his imaginative mind to this unlikely branch of engineering, and to take the principals of expressionism along with him. The Proaza plant, for example, opened in 1968. The multi-planar facade resembles the rocky side of a mountain, concrete “glaciers” pierce the landscape. It’s bold and unconventional, and seems to far outshine its singular purpose as a hydroelectric plant. This is what is so beautiful about Vaquero Palacios and his dedication to the seemingly mundane.
It’s easy to question why one would spend a career on the design of these sorts of buildings. Why do they deserve such thoughtful attention? To this, Vaquero Palacios responded: “All our day-to-day activities are saturated so we need to be appeased in some way to survive the tensions which we are subjected to.” It’s simple, he believed in the power of granting attention to the simple things, to the the places and the routines we take for granted. This idea, to bring artistic dignity to every aspect of our lives, is something we work towards as well, and it’s a philosophy we are so happy he had.
The images we have here are of various plants he completed during his over thirty year career.

Architecture of Doom

LA basketball court using Japanese art of Kintsugi

Victor Solomon mends dilapidated LA basketball court using Japanese art of Kintsugi

Jennifer Hahn

Artist Victor Solomon has patched up the cracks in a Los Angeles basketball court with gold-coloured resin to highlight the role that sport can play in our collective healing process.
Called Kintsugi Court, the public artwork is a nod to the titular Japanese craft practice, in which broken pottery is put back together with a lacquer that has been infused with powdered, precious metals in order to highlight rather than conceals its tumultuous history.

"I fell in love with the aesthetics and symbolism of the Kintusgi process and this idea of celebrating imperfections as a formative part of an object's journey," Solomon told Dezeen.
"To me, the court has always represented a place for everyone, from every background, to come together with a common purpose. And with the heartbreaking beginning of this year and our polarised culture, I thought it would be poetic to show that healing is possible through a platform that unites us."

The unveiling of the Kintsugi Court coincides with the return of the NBA season, which was suspended at the start of March on the same day that the coronavirus outbreak was officially declared a pandemic by the World Health Organisation.
To create the installation, Solomon and the team behind his basketball-focused art practice Literally Balling first cleared the largest cracks in the concrete of any weeds, dirt and debris.
These were then filled with a resin mixed with glitter before another layer of pigment was dusted on top. The result is a network of lines, running like vibrant golden veins across the entire court.
To finish off the project, the court markings were given a refresh with gold and white paint while the goals were exchanged for a matching set of gold-coloured hoops with transparent backboards.

The court is located in South Los Angeles, which is home to some of the city's most disenfranchised communities. Here, Solomon hopes it can provide a space for healing and togetherness via basketball – a sport he describes as a "universally accessible, class-agnostic, race-indifferent platform".
"When I was growing up in Boston, I begged and pleaded with my parents to let me play ice hockey but because of the expensive equipment plus the cost of even getting on the ice, we just couldn’t afford it," he said.
"Basketball is unique because it lacks those barriers to entry, its clean meritocracy transcends the toxic divisions our culture is dealing with. That's why I think sport's ability to connect and heal is its most powerful offering to society."

Basketball courts have proven popular canvases for artists and designers in recent years, with Mexican studio All Arquitectura overhauling a local court with a chequered blue pattern while Belgian artist Katrien Vanderlinden paid homage to toy bricks in her makeover of a site in the city of Aalst.
Photography is by Shafik Kadi.


 dezeen.com