POET BORN | July 28 – John Ashbery

Ashbery Receives National Humanities
Medal from President Barack Obama in 2011.

This day in Rochester, NY in 1927 was born John Ashbery. He is a time traveler in the way people thought of it before Einstein's followers started to think of it in scientific terms.

Ashbery grew up on his family's fruit farm near Lake Ontario. He went to a small, rural school, where they read some poetry, all of it classical.

Then he won, as a prize in a contest, Louis Untermeyer's anthology, Modern American and British Poetry. He said he didn't understand many of these contemporary poems, but he was fascinated by them – poems by Auden and Eliot and Wallace Stevens.

Ashbery attended Deerfield for his last two years of high school, from which he went to Harvard. He started writing poetry seriously and published his first book, Some Trees, in 1956, when he was 29.

I first met John Ashbery in the early 1970s, when I became a neighbor in Chelsea, NYC. His newest book was Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975). Subsequently he published A Wave (1984), Where Shall I Wander (2005), and Planisphere (2009).

Garrison Keillor describes Ashbery as having been helped by a generous neighbor. As neighbors in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York, John Ashbery and David Kerman  have themselves been generous.

An article in the NY Observer says that when Ashbery grew up on a farm, he didn't like it. He preferred living with his grandparents in the city to attend school. His grandfather was a professor at the University of Rochester. When he was 12, Ashbery's younger brother died of leukemia. Ashbery spent most of his time by himself until a wealthy friend of his mother (the "generous neighbor") put up the money for him to finish high school at Deerfield. Ashbery explains:

By that time I had already discovered modern poetry. High schools used to have current events contests sponsored by Time, if the class subscribed to the magazine. They were quite easy. I won the prize of a book. Of the four that they offered, the only one I was vaguely interested in was an anthology of modern American and British poetry by Louis Untermeyer.

Garrison Keillor in a bio of Ashbery in 2014 gives us two quotes from Ashbery. One is about the fact that Ashbery's poetry is not easy. People say they don't understand it. Especially freshman students in college or high school who have to read it for their English courses. 

I don't quite understand about understanding poetry. I experience poems with pleasure: whether I understand them or not I'm not quite sure. I don't want to read something I already know or which is going to slide down easily: there has to be some crunch, a certain amount of resilience. [Italics added.]

Dorothy Parker once said: "Millay did a great deal of harm making poetry seem so easy that we could all do it but, of course, we couldn’t." Ashbery tries not to make poetry too easy because he believes it should stop you in your tracks – he wants his poems to stop you and make you spend some time. Keillor cites Ashbery's poem "At North Farm", which follows. It has a time-travel aspect. 

Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you,
At incredible speed, traveling day and night,
Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes.
But will he know where to find you,
Recognize you when he sees you,
Give you the thing he has for you? 

Hardly anything grows here,
Yet the granaries are bursting with meal,
The sacks of meal piled to the rafters.
The streams run with sweetness, fattening fish;
Birds darken the sky. Is it enough
That the dish of milk is set out at night,
That we think of him sometimes,
Sometimes and always, with mixed feelings?

The basic problem with the science of time travel is that in order to travel in time, we would need to travel "at incredible speed" – incredible because weight is a function of speed. We would need to be very light, preferably weightless. The only way that science knows how to time-travel so far is in the mind. But that gives us an important degree of freedom.

Physicists have been driven by unexplained phenomena to come up with a hypothetical fifth dimension that could unite the dimensions of space and time. Until they tie up the loose ends, we will have to rely on time-travel in the mind. We will have to rely on poetry.

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BIRTH | Sept. 21–H.G. Wells ("The Time Machine")

H. G. Wells 

This day was born in 1866, in Bromley, England, writer H[erbert] G[eorge] Wells, father of Futurism and Sci Fi.

He was born to shopkeeper parents who were not successful and had to give up their store. Instead, his mother worked as a housekeeper on an estate with a large library, from which she brought books to young H.G. to read. He was sickly as a child and his older sister died in childhood.

He won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science and this set him up for a life writing on scientific themes, with a focus on predicting and envisioning the future.

Wells' first book in the Sci Fi genre was his classic The Time Machine (1895), which was an instant success. It is a look at the human race many millennia from now.  The narrator is called simply "the Time Traveller". The book has been described as a ghost story that takes Darwinian theories and spins them way out into the future.

The book and others make him one of the fathers of science fiction and time travel literature, although The Time Machine does not have any practical guide to time travel, or even a hint of how it might happen, unlike Willem van Stockum who at least had a theory of how closed time-like loops could enable time travel.

Much of what was just fancy when Wells first wrote about it happened soon enough, such as his predictions that:

• Airplanes would be used to wage war. 
• Advanced transportation would lead to an explosion of suburbs. 
• An encyclopedia would emerge that was constantly reviewed and updated and would be accessible to all people.
• Bombs would be developed that explode repeatedly based on their radioactivity (The World Set Free, 1914).

Wells wrote in The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) about an island where a scientist is engaged in what we might call genetic experimentation with animals. An excerpt from Hitchcock's 1938 movie based on The War of the Worlds (1898) was read out as a radio play by Orson Welles on Halloween two weeks after the movie came out. While it was famously so realistic that listeners who tuned in late were panicked about the purported invasion from outer space, it wasn't considered a success - which prompted Welles to say goodbye to radio and take up movies, starting with his masterpiece, Citizen Kane (1941).

Wells had a genuine interest in science, which was married to a socialist vision for the future. In The War in the Air (1908), he predicted World War I and use of airplanes to wage war, which came true.

In his nonfiction three-volume History of the World (1920) he predicted that innovations in horseless railway transportation would permit larger cities. Wells is even said to have anticipated the Internet, long before Al Gore or Oxonian Tim Berners-Lee (more formally, Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee, OM, KBE, FRS, FREng, FRSA, DFBCS), when in the 1930s he espoused an encyclopedia that anyone could read and at the same time edit.

The success of his predictions in both his nonfiction and fictional books is something he took great pride in pointing out. In the 1941 edition of The War in the Air, he said in the preface:

[M]y epitaph,... when the time comes, will manifestly have to be: "I told you so. You damned fools."

Wells died in London in 1946, less than one month before his 80th birthday.

Willem Jacob van Stockum - What Air Force Was He In? (Comment)

Dr. Robert Wack signing his book, Time Bomber
at a book fair in suburban Baltimore.

Dr. Robert Wack, author of Time Bomber - a Five Star book on Amazon based on five reviews - recently reported that he had received multiple inquiries from readers of his book.

The readers were curious about details of some aspects of the life of Willem van Stockum, the bomber pilot and time-travel thinker who is the subject of the book.

One question was the flag under which Willem van Stockum flew as a bomber pilot. His life story is accurately told by Dr. Wack except for some time-travel additions that are acknowledged in a note to the reader.

The reader asked whether Willem flew for the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) or the British RAF. Here is Dr. Wack's response:

The answer is, both. How could this be? Part of the answer lies in the circumstances of Willem’s enlistment, as well as the relationship between Canada and Britain as part of the Commonwealth, and lastly the specific needs of the war time Bomber Command. Willem initially enlisted with the Canadian RAF purely for logistical reasons: it was the closest place he could go to get into the war. 

In 1940 and early 1941 (before Pearl Harbor), there already were Americans frustrated with isolationism traveling north to enlist, and Willem took that path, leading him to the new recruit depot in Toronto. Canada had already been supplying England with food and weapons since the outbreak of the war in 1939. The relationship between Canada and England was still very close, despite the Statute of Westminster in 1931 granting autonomy to all the Dominions of the Commonwealth. The Canadian RAF assembled units and sent them to England as separate units under British command, and it was one of those that Willem wanted to join. 

However, his value as an instructor was of more interest to his Canadian military superiors, so they repeatedly denied his requests to be assigned to combat units. Eventually, he applied for transfer directly to the British RAF, which was finally granted, resulting in his transfer and assignment to No. 10 squadron at Melbourne Station, a few miles southeast of York. The British RAF took volunteers and assigned units from anywhere willing to send them. No. 10 Squadron was a particularly diverse group, with members from all the occupied countries, as well as other Commonwealth nations. Willem wrote home about other Dutch members of the squadron, as well as French, South African, Canadian, and even American flyers. It was a tumultuous time, with citizens of many countries all joining efforts to defeat the Nazis, regardless of nationality or native origins.

Comment

I would like to add two things to this admirably thorough response:

1. Willem's gravesite is the only one of the 14 gravesites with a non-RAF gravestone. There were other flyers from Australia and Canada - the RAF was desperate for experienced pilots and other airmen then because so many airmen were being shot down and the training period for a pilot is long. Although Willem was flying under RCAF and RAF colors, he was a Dutch citizen (he was in the process of getting American citizenship). My mother, sadly, arrived with her husband and children in 1954 to find there were 13 gravestones and only a wooden cross for her brother, because the Dutch hadn't gotten around to putting in a gravestone. (I have posted her diary entry for that day, December 26, and the next day.) Willem now has a proper gravestone, as well as a monument to him and his crew contributed by the French people who live in the area. To add to the confusion about Willem van Stockum's national identity, he received his undergraduate education at Trinity College, Dublin, and his Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Edinburgh.

2. No. 10 Squadron has an illustrious history. In 2015 it celebrates the 100th anniversary of its creation.

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BIRTH | May 23–Edward Lorenz, Chaos Theorist

Edward Norton Lorenz,
Chaos Theorist Who Gave
the Name to the Butterfly
Effect. 

This day in 1917 was born Edward Lorenz, in West Hartford, Connecticut. Originally trained in mathematics, he became a weather forecaster in the US Army, following which most of his career was spent in MIT's Meteorology Department.

He is responsible for chaos theory and for popularizing its explanation through what he called "the butterfly effect".  Lorenz originally used the image of a gull flapping in trying to explain how small actions in the atmosphere could trigger vast and unexpected changes.

The concept actually predates Lorenz's discovery and name. Sci-fi writers had been aware of this idea in time-travel or sci-fi stories, when a hero goes back in time. A seemingly insignificant choice ends up changing the course of history.

Lorenz showed how mathematics supports the idea that tiny changes can have huge effects. His discovery of this effect in the 1960s occurred when he tried to save time entering values in a computer weather-prediction program. He rounded off six decimal places to three. The resulting weather pattern was completely different. He changed the image from a gull to a butterfly in his 1972 presentation, "Does the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?"

The paradigm shift caused by Lorenz's work rivals that of relativity theory. The complex or seemingly random behavior of many physical or biological systems does not require that equations which describe these systems are themselves highly complex or random. They indicate the presence of the fractal geometry of the strange attractor. Ian Stewart says in his book Does God Play Dice? (Stewart, 1997):

When I read [Lorenz’s] words I get a prickling at the back of my neck and my hair stands on end. He knew! Thirty-four years ago, he knew! And when I look more closely, I’m even more impressed. In a mere 12 pages, Lorenz anticipated several major ideas of non-linear dynamics before it became fashionable, before anyone else had realized that new and baffling phenomena such as chaos existed.

What Lorenz achieved can only be explained in terms of his predecessors. He studied highly truncated versions of the equations for the Rayleigh-Benard convection problem. Following a thread started by Saltzman, he theorized that much of the irregularity of these equations was contained in a three-dimensional core. He used linear stability analysis to focus on Rayleigh numbers that make the system linearly unstable. To investigate the non-linear behavior of this linearly unstable system, he coded his truncated equations on a digital computer. After an initial period, when the system evolved in a regular way away from an unstable fixed point, it then behaved completely irregularly.

Lorenz analyzed this irregularity. He plotted trajectories of the system in the three-dimensional state space on a geometric subset of state space. This geometry actually had the shape of a butterfly with two wings at the back (hence perhaps Lorenz's reference to a butterfly in 1972), but merged into a single layer at the front. Lorenz knew that the trajectories of a deterministic differential equation cannot merge. What looked like a single sheet at the front must really be two sheets together. But that meant that each sheet at the back was double, too. He wrote:

We conclude that there is an infinite complex of surfaces each extremely close to one or the other, of two merging surfaces.

Lorenz had discovered the fractal structure associated with the attractors of chaotic systems. He wanted to study a piece of the solution in greater detail. He re-ran the equations from a saved “dump”. But the numbers in the dump had been truncated and he found that the solution diverged totally from the original solution. The irregularity of the solutions also gave rise to an inherent unpredictability. Lorenz provides a layperson’s account of chaos theory in his book The Essence of Chaos, 1993.

He married Jane Loban in 1948 and they had two daughters and a son.

 (Thanks to Garrison Keillor for noting Lorenz's contribution. He is one of the sources for this summary.)