Winter VI. Tea + Consonance and dissonance, again

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Winter V. Self regained

One of the shining moments of my day is that when, having returned a little weary from an afternoon walk, I exchange boots for slippers, out-of-doors coat for easy, familiar, shabby jacket, and, in my deep, soft-elbowed chair, await the tea-tray. Perhaps it is while drinking tea that I most of all enjoy the sense of leisure. In days gone by, I could but gulp down the refreshment hurried, often harassed, by the thought of the work I had before me; often I was quite insensible of the aroma, the flavour, of what I drank. Now, how delicious is the soft yet penetrating odour which floats into my study, with the appearance of the teapot! What solace in the first cup, what deliberate sipping of that which follows! What a glow does it bring after a walk in chilly rain! The while, I look around at my books and pictures, tasting the happiness of their tranquil possession. I cast an eye towards my pipe; perhaps I prepare it, with seeming thoughtfulness, for the reception of tobacco...

In nothing is the English genius for domesticity more notably declared than in the institution of this festival -- almost one may call it so -- of afternoon tea. Beneath simple roofs, the hour of tea has something in it of sacred; for it marks the end of domestic work and worry, and beginning of restful, sociable evening. The mere chink of cups and saucers tunes the mind to happy repose... it is -- again in the true sense -- the homeliest meal of the day. Is it believable that the Chinese, in who knows how many centuries, have derived from tea a millionth part of the pleasure or the good which it has brought to England in the past one hundred years?

Alpha.

That last sentence got me thinking. It seems that “afternoon tea” in the sense Gissing uses it, only dates from the 1840s, less than a century before. And tea was introduced to the English court in the 1660s, about 240 years before. It’s hard to imagine the English without tea. His claim that they have derived more enjoyment from tea than have the Chinese, or Japanese, suggests a veritable festival of hyperbole. I am also reminded of a favorite passage from Proust, “What fun it would be to have a little woman like that in a place where one could always be certain of finding, what one never can be certain of finding, a really good cup of tea”. This is one of the sections of this book I would want to read more frequently, maybe even daily, to remind me to pay attention -- to celebrate -- the moment and my meals. The traditional Chinese and Japanese tea ceremony has this some function, of focusing the mind on the moment and heightening the senses. The truth is that most days I just have iced tea, and don’t pay much attention even to that.

Consonance and dissonance, again.

...What congruence links a Claesz, a Raphael, a Rubens and a Hopper? We need not search, our eye locates the form that will elicit a feeling of consonance, the one particular thing in which everyone can find the very essence of beauty, without variations or reservations, context or effort. In the still life with a lemon, for example, this essence cannot merely be reduced to the mastery of execution; it clearly does inspire a feeling of consonance, a feeling that this is exactly the way it ought to have been arranged. This in turn allows us to feel the power of objects and of the way they interact, to hold in our gaze the way they work together and the magnetic fields that attract and repel them, the ineffable ties that bind them and engender a force, a secret and inexplicable wave born of both tension and the balance of the configuration -- this is what inspires the feeling of consonance. The disposition of the objects and the dishes achieves the universal in the singular: the timeless nature of the consonant form.

-Renee Michel in Hedgehog

Previously, when reading this passage, I focused on the mysterious consonance of art and objects Muriel Barbery is drawing our attention to here. Combining our instinctual appreciation of art with what we can guess of the phenomenological and Quantum reality that underlies what we apprehend (we can leave String theory to the apprehension of music, though it also applies here) leaves us to wonder at the inner workings of beauty and to marvel how much more complex and mysterious the everyday world really is. But this time, reading Hedgehog, I was struck by the first meeting of all the central characters: Renee and Manuela, Paloma, and finally Kakuro. This meeting doesn’t take place until page 267 (with only 58 pages left in the book). By now we know all these characters and how well they fit together -- how well they belong together. In a word, how consonant their personalities are.

What Barbery has been saying about art applies even more to people. Kakuro recognizes in both Renee and Paloma congruent spirits. The three of them instantly fit together because of all they share, including the commonality of how they differ from all the others. We’ve all had this experience many times, of suddenly, after not having anything at all in common with those around us, coming into contact -- communion -- with someone we can actually talk to with some hope of being understood.

How this works is as much a mystery as a Dutch still life. Suddenly, after becoming used to avoiding people or limiting contact or straining to find some common ground, we run into a person we can’t stop talking to, and look forward to engaging again. It can be a shock to the system.

And it isn’t always quite that simple. The woman who most shaped my character, who I best meshed with, was not an immediate fit. She was someone I had to grow into -- too slowly, as it turned out. Yet even then, there was a shared intelligence and way of seeing the world that first drew us together, despite the discrepancies in our personalities. Interpersonal confrontations like this mirror the “shock of the new” in art. And this is also where dissonance comes in, just as I argued that it does in art (Spring XXI. Consonance) in both painting and especially in music. Complete consonance would be bland and insipid when it comes to new people. It’s the level of dissonance that spikes our interest and challenges us to grow.

So, alluding once again to synesthesia and the ability of some people to “see” things differently, could there be people who perceive personalities like my friend as a new type of art. Rather than seeing hair and features and clothes and jewelry (a Renoir portrait, let’s say,

...do they instead see a Van Gogh? 

Next: Winter VII. English cooking.

Interlude VII. The God Delusion

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Interlude VI. Foucault - part 2

On The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins.

I don't recall reading anyone I've agreed with so much. Most of his positions on religion are things I've thought of myself, and his intolerance of mild forms of faith (that being a little bit religious is like being a little bit pregnant) is an interesting point of view I hadn't considered before.

That said, I started wondering when he was going to get into epistemology and metaphysics around page 125, so I was pretty excited when he finally did get around to it on the last four pages of the book. He made, in a very nice but different way, points similar to the ones Annie Dillard made about "the tree with the lights in it" and Muriel Barbery made with her passage about Husserl. He even, a few pages before that, went into Quantum physics. He laid out the basics of the relativity of our experience of reality -- that science, at best, can tell us about what we perceive but almost nothing definitive about the reality behind that perception. And yet he shows no inkling of comprehending that this is a problem for someone who wants to say that God doesn't exist. I am gobsmacked.

What I am left with is that some people are so focused on science that they are blind to the undermining of the foundation of that science in exactly the same way religious people are blind to how science undermines their positions.

Nietzsche. posits a synthesis of the artistic (Apollinian) with the mystical (Dionysian) to create Attic tragedy and the Greek peace with reality (with the human fate of individuation). Then he sees this synthesis destroyed by the Socratic preference for reason and science, which rests on the premise that there is an objective reality that can be known and reasoned about to unlock all its secrets. The new scientific view worked fine into the 19th century, but no longer.

Quantum theory was the death of a Socratic belief system based on reason and objective scientific observation of an independently existing universe. String theory posits that subatomic "particles" are just bundles of energy at varying pitches in a cosmic harmony. Which sounds pretty damn mystical.

That consciousness seems to play a key role in actualizing quantum states, also removes the foundation of "objective" reality. The universe seems to be fundamentally interactive. All this leaves the door open for a pantheistic interpretation of reality (my preference) but at the least it needs to be addressed by someone like Dr. Dawkins who is, in effect, as a scientist, standing on thin air.

This doesn't undermine most of what he wrote against the various popular cults of our time, but it concerns me that he either doesn't wish to address it or, even worse, doesn't see the problem.

Next: Interlude VIII. The Passion of Michel Foucault - part 3.

Spring XXI. Bird song + consonance

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: XX. Art

All about my garden to-day the birds are loud. To say that the air is filled with their song gives no idea of the ceaseless piping, whistling, trilling, which at moments rings to heaven in a triumphant unison, a wild accord.  Now and then I notice one of the smaller songsters who seems to strain his throat in a madly joyous endeavour to outcarol all the rest. It is a chorus of praise such as none other of earth’s children have the voice or the heart to utter. As I listen, I am carried away by its glorious rapture; my being melts in the tenderness of an impassioned joy; my eyes are dim with I know not what profound humility.

Alpha.

Here I can not really compete with Ryecroft’s world. Our wrens and sparrows are more chatterers than songsters. Our pigeons and seagulls add nothing in the way of music while our crows, while loud, are fairly disagreeable. Even our old standby doves are, while not unpleasant, rather monotonous.  Our parrots are, if anything, worse than the crows. The occasionally heard cry of the hawks that soar perpetually over park and tower alike, while stirring, is a weak basis for rapture.

Beta.

I was struck in this passage by Gissing’s use of the word “accord.”  For one thing, "wild accord" suggests both the overall consonance of the birdsong in his garden and also the life affirming quality all that sound implies or creates in the heart of the person listening. 

Obviously accord/discord are mirror terms, closely related to consonance/dissonance. Both sets have both a musical and a metaphorical meaning the profoundness of which I frequently struggle to grasp. Muriel Barbery, in The Elegance of the Hedgehog first got me really thinking about this

Beauty is consonance is a sublime thought... aesthetics are really nothing more than an intuition to the Way of Consonance, a sort of Way of the Samurai applied to the intuition of authentic forms. We all have a knowledge of harmony, anchored deep within. It is this knowledge that enables us, at every instant, to apprehend quality in our lives and, on the rare occasions when everything is in perfect harmony, to appreciate it with the apposite intensity... those who feel inspired... by the greatness of small things will pursue them to the very heart of the essential where, cloaked in everyday attire, this greatness will emerge from within a certain ordering of ordinary things and from the certainty that all is as it should be, the conviction that it is fine this way.

-Renee, p 165 - The Elegance of the Hedgehog

That Barbery uses “consonance” (what is primarily a musical term contrasted with dissonance) in this way is interesting because the history of western music has seen a trend toward the acceptance of ever greater levels of dissonance in music. You could say that today, the music we experience as beautiful is spiced with levels of dissonance that would have been objectionable a thousand, or even a hundred years ago.

I am not well enough educated in musicology to know what is and isn’t dissonance in the technical sense, but I think it’s something you know when you hear it for the most part. But I may be stretching the term when I use it with respect to jazz and rock. But, having said all that, I think the history of jazz since WW2 is a good example of the acceptance of -- even the craving for -- ever greater levels of dissonance. The saxophone playing of Johnny Hodges...

...is the epitome of consonance while the playing of Charlie Parker...

...and John Coltrane introduced heightened levels of at least figurative dissonance. The same phenomenon is at work in the piano playing of Bill Evans...

...and the playing and music of Thelonious Monk...

But the most striking example of this trend is in the playing of the electric guitar. I’m not sure that people in the past would even recognize the playing of Santana, Jimmy Page, Hendrix, or Eric Clapton as music. Here's one of my favorite examples of this new sound, Hendrix's Little Wing played by Stevie Ray Vaughan...

So saying that “Beauty is consonance,” while probably true, doesn’t explain what an acceptable mixture of consonance and dissonance might be. Also, it doesn’t explain why certain sounds -- or certain patches of color on canvas -- appear to us as consonant in the first place. You could also see wabi-sabi as a recognition of the limits of consonance and the need for some touch of dissonance.

(Wabi-sabi represents a comprehensive Japanese world view or aesthetic centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection. The aesthetic is sometimes described as one of beauty that is “imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.”)

...great works are the visual forms which attain in us the certainty of timeless consonance... our eye locates the form that will elicit a feeling of consonance, the one particular thing in which everyone can find the very essence of beauty, without variations or reservations, context or effort.

-Renee, p 201 - The Elegance of the Hedgehog

And then Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy, pushed me even further. The notion, derived from String Theory, of the universe and all its “particles” and waves as a sort of cosmic music, pushes me further still. I will come back to this in the future.

What interests me most, I think, is the value of dissonance... and also discord. If you think of God as the cosmic author or artist, then discord is an essential tool in her arsenal. Without discord there is no story.

Here’s a quote from Dr. Michio Kaku, theoretical physicist and co-inventor of String theory:

The latest version of String Theory is called M-Theory, “M” for membrane. So we now realize that strings can coexist with membranes. So the subatomic particles we see in nature, the quark, the electrons are nothing but musical notes on a tiny vibrating string.

What is physics?

Physics is nothing but the laws of harmony that you can write on vibrating strings.

What is chemistry?

Chemistry is nothing but the melodies you can play on interacting vibrating strings.

What is the universe?

The universe is a symphony of vibrating strings.

And then what is the mind of God that Albert Einstein eloquently wrote about for the last 30 years of his life?

We now, for the first time in history have a candidate for the mind of God. It is, cosmic music resonating through 11 dimensional hyperspace.

We are nothing but melodies. We are nothing but cosmic music played out on vibrating strings and membranes. Obeying the laws of physics, which is nothing but the laws of harmony of vibrating strings.

Next: Spring XXII. Literary journals a poor mirror.

Spring I. Exposition

Intro & Preface & Contents

For more than a week my pen has lain untouched I have written nothing for seven whole days, not even a letter. Except during one or two bouts of illness, such a thing never happened in my life before. In my life; the life, that is, which had to be supported by anxious toil; the life which was not lived for living’s sake, as all life should be, but under the goad of fear. The earning of money should be a means to an end; for more than thirty years -- I began to support myself at sixteen -- I had to regard it as the end itself.

... How I dreaded the white page I had to foul with ink! Above all, on days such as this, when the blue eyes of Spring laughed from between rosy clouds, when the sunlight shimmered upon my table and made me long, long all but to madness, for the scent of the flowering earth, for the green of hillside larches, for the singing of the skylark above the downs. There was a time -- it seems further away than childhood -- when I took up my pen with eagerness; if my hand trembled it was with hope. But a hope that fooled me, for never a page of my writing deserved to live. I can say that now without bitterness. It was youthful error, and only the force of circumstances prolonged it. The world has done me no injustice; thank Heaven I have grown wise enough not to rail at it for this! And why should any man who writes, even if he writes things immortal, nurse anger at the world’s neglect? Who asked him to publish? Who promised him a hearing? Who has broken faith with him? If my shoemaker turn me out an excellent pair of boots, and I, in some mood of cantankerous unreason, throw them back upon his hands, the man has just cause for complaint. But your poem, your novel, who bargained with you for it? ... If you have written a great book, the world to come will know of it. But you don’t care for posthumous glory. You want to enjoy fame in a comfortable armchair...

Alpha.

In my case it was not a bequest but Social Security and savings, some, it's true, inherited from my parents, that has placed me in my secure position. I own my apartment outright and -- between Social Security and the fixed income from gift annuities to some of my favorite charities -- I have a bit more in income than I spend in a year. I don't have enough to buy a cottage in the country, like Ryecroft, but then I shouldn't want to anyway. I am content to live in the city and enjoy city life. For one thing this saves me from needing to own a car.

Since my income was almost always irregular and I frequently needed to live on savings between jobs, I had always lived on a tight budget. You get so you don't even think about making unnecessary purchases or taking vacations. Now, I find it a strange pleasure to consider what I might do with the somewhat more than I need that I have. I will talk about one of the bigger items next time (I do sometimes look ahead in the book), but I've only made a few changes to my usual routine.

First, I contracted with a cleaning service to have people come in every two months and give the place a good cleaning. I've always done my own cleaning -- and I still do my own laundry and cooking -- but having someone come in regularly forces me to keep the place tidy. Left to my own devices I might let things slide for months at a time. Second, I obtained a cellular phone plan that also offers WiFi-hotspot service so I can use my laptop nearly anywhere. Finally, I now have wicked fast Internet service at home. Two of these items would be a complete mystery to Ryecroft, and the third would be almost as puzzling -- to be dependent on a servant in the 21st century just seems to be more bother than it's worth.

I expect there will be regular, if relatively short, vacations in my future but I'm still taking things slowly.

Beta. The Matrix and Lucy

Making a film about Epistemology or Metaphysics is, of course, a ridiculous idea since no sane American concerns himself with such things. And yet if you incorporate concepts derived from the study of such arcane fields into an action film, and throw in enough gratuitous violence, you can have a hit on your hands. The Matrix did very well playing with the idea that the world we experience may not be the real world. Without talking about māyā or broaching the finer points of Existential Phenomenology, The Matrix at least introduced this concept to a mass audience.

At this point I feel I need to quote extensively from one of my favorite novels, The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery:

Which brings us to the second question: what do we know of the world? Idealists like Kant have an answer to this question. What do they answer? They answer: not a great deal. Transcendental idealism holds that we can know only that which appears to our consciousness, that semi-devine entity that rescues us from our animal self. What we know of the world is what our consciousness can say about it because of what it has perceived -- and nothing else. Let us take an example, at random: a sweet cat by the name of Leo [Madame Michel's cat]. Why? Because I find it easier with a cat. And let me ask you: how can you be certain that it really is a cat and, likewise, how can you even know what a cat is? A healthy reply would consist in emphasizing the fact that your perception of the animal, complemented by a few conceptual and linguistic mechanisms, has enabled you to constitute your knowledge. But the response of the transcendental idealist would be to illustrate how impossible it is to know whether what we perceive and conceive of as a cat -- if that which appears to our consciousness as a cat -- is actually true to what the cat is in its deepest being. It may well be that my cat -- at present I perceive him as an obese quadruped with quivering whiskers and I have filed him away in my mind in a drawer labeled 'cat' -- is in actual fact, and in his essence, a blob of green sticky stuff that does not meow. My senses, however, have been fashioned in such a way that this is not apparent to me, and the revolting blob of green sticky stuff, deceiving both my disgust and my earnest trust, is masquerading before my consciousness beneath the appearance of a silky and gluttonous house pet. So much for Kantian idealism. What we know of the world is only the idea that our consciousness forms of it. But there is an even more depressing theory than that one, a theory that offers a prospect even more terrifying than that of innocently caressing a lump of green drool or dropping our toast every morning into a pustular abyss we had mistaken for a toaster. There is the idealism of Edmund Husserl... According to Husserl's theory, all that exists is the perception of the cat. And the cat itself? Well, we can just do without it. Bye-bye kitty. Who needs a cat? What cat? Henceforth, philosophy will claim the right to wallow exclusively in the wickedness of pure mind. The world is an inaccessible reality and any effort to try to know it is futile. What do we know of the world? Nothing. As all knowledge is merely reflective consciousness exploring its own self, the world, therefore, can merrily go to the devil. This is phenomenology: the 'science of that which appears to our consciousness.' How does a phenomenologist spend his day? He gets up, fully conscious as he takes his shower that he is merely soaping a body whose existence has no foundation, then he wolfs down a few slices of toast and jam that have been nihilized, slips on some clothes that are the equivalent of an empty set of parentheses, heads for his office, and then snatches up a cat. It matters little to our phenomenologist whether the cat exists or does not exist or even what a cat is in its very essence. The indemonstrable does not interest him. What cannot be denied, however, is that a cat appeared to his consciousness, and it is this act of appearing that is of concern to our good fellow.

Today I saw the movie Lucy, and while it is too soon to know how popular it will be (and I really need to see it a second time), it at least broaches the subject of the nature of reality in a Quantum universe, where matter is a state of energy, or possibly a harmonic state of energy if you are fond of String Theory. Luc Besson is a tricky director to watch as you have to turn off much of the reasoning portions of your brain (to get past the scientific nonsense, in The Fifth Element the notion that you can recreate, not just the physical person, but also the memories and even the bad, hair dye job of a person from her DNA. In Lucy the idea that using more of your brain allows you to violate the laws of physics). At the same time, you have to be alert for the interesting scientific/philosophical ideas being played with. The true premise of Lucy is: What would happen if you could interact with the universe as energy rather than as matter? -- ignoring the way it “appears” to us. The drug that allows her to use more of her brain, is just a clunky device for establishing a more profound connection with the "stuff" of the universe. Also a way of transcending classic mind-body dualism.

Maybe if you gave Scarlett Johansson enough guns she could even get Americans to learn algebra.

Another passage, again of Madam Michel, from Hedgehog is worth quoting here,

An interesting phenomenological experiment might consist in exploring the reasons why some phenomena fail to appear to the consciousness of some people but do appear to the consciousness of others. The fact that my image can at one and the same time make an impression in Neptun's skull [a dog] and bounce off that of Chabrot [the private physician to one of the wealthy residents] altogether is indeed a fascinating concept.

This is a very interesting line of thought. For example, by this same standard, we would have to grant to animals in general and even to plants a degree of consciousness since they are aware of and respond to things -- like the sun -- in their environment. (I recently saw an interesting time-lapse of plants showing how they move in anticipation of the sun's rising.) Some kind of phenomenological reality must be "present" for plants and "lower" life forms. Which, given our fairly tenuous position in a phenomenological world, makes them our equals.

Here is an interesting TED talk on reality and perception that arrives at the same conclusion Husserl did but starting with Darwin rather than with Kant.

Next: Spring II. Home

Spring IX. Independence, forsooth! + annotated books

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: VIII. Nature and society

For more that six years I trod the pavements, never stepping once upon mother earth -- for the parks are but pavements disguised with a growth of grass. Then the worst was over. Say I the worst? No, no; things far worse were to come; the struggle against starvation has its cheery side when one is young and vigorous.  But at all events I had begun to earn a living; I held assurance of food and clothing for half a year at a time; granted health, I might hope to draw my not insufficient wages for many a twelvemonth. And they were the wages of work done independently, when and where I would. I thought with horror of lives spent in an office, with an employer to obey. The glory of the career of letters was its freedom, its dignity!

The fact of the matter was, of course, that I served, not one master, but a whole crowd of them. Independence, forsooth! If my writing failed to please editor, publisher, public, where was my daily bread? ... I marvel at the recollection that for a good score of years this pen and a scrap of paper clothed and fed me and my household, kept me in physical comfort, held at bay all those hostile forces of the world ranged against one who has no resource save in his own right hand.

But I was thinking of the year which saw my first exodus from London. On an irresistible impulse, I suddenly made up my mind to go into Devon, a part of England I had never seen. At the end of March I escaped from my grim lodgings, and, before I had time to reflect on the details of my undertaking, I found myself sitting in sunshine at a spot very near to where I now dwell -- before me the  green valley of the broadening Exe and the pine-clad ridge of Haldon. That was one of the moments of my life when I have tasted exquisite joy... The light, the air, had for me something of the supernatural -- affecting me, indeed, only less than at a later time did the atmosphere of Italy...

I had stepped into a new life. Between the man I had been and that which I now became there was a very notable difference. In a single day I had matured astonishingly; which means, no doubt, that I suddenly entered into conscious enjoyment of powers and sensibilities which had been developing unknown to me...

... so intense was my delight in the beautiful world about me that I forgot even myself; I enjoyed without retrospect or forecast; I, the egoist in grain, forgot to scrutinize my own emotions, or to trouble my happiness by comparison with others’ happier fortune. It was a healthful time; it gave me a new lease of life, and taught me -- in so far as I was teachable -- how to make use of it.

Alpha.

I experienced a 20th century equivalent of his life of the “independent” man of letters. For about a decade I made my living as a freelance computer programer. I too was proud not to be a mere employee, only to end up a contractor dependent on a variety of bosses who were pleased to leave me to my own devices whenever there was no work to be done. It all worked out well enough, but the only security was in the knowledge that I was always on my own. Others might be blindsided by a layoff but for me the future was always contingent.

Perhaps this is a bit like the difference between being a theist and an atheist. The theist believes there is a Guiding Hand conducting his life while the atheist realizes he’s on his own. An analogy could be that the atheist is like a free climber on the side of a cliff, carefully negotiating the hand and foot holds, while the theist boldly climbs the rock face secure in his reliance on his safety line -- which is not actually secured to anything.

Beta.

Since my last rereading of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, I’ve been wanting an illustrated and hyper-annotated versions of all the books I read which are set in an earlier time. Rereading Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End added another aspect to this desired annotation, as I also want to know not just what a word like “Tory” means, but what it means to the author. A quick trip to Wikipedia tells you too little or too much in such a case, as the meaning of the term changed from generation to generation and, at times, almost from year to year.

Ideally, I want texts that make clear what the author meant by his use of every word, since the meaning of words changes so quickly. And this doesn’t even touch on the additional issue of a character using a word or term incorrectly. Here’s an example, in The Elegance of the Hedgehog, one of Muriel Barbery’s characters uses the word “Epicurean.” The common usage of that term means the opposite of the word’s original, philosophical, meaning. Epicurus wanted a diet that would be so simple to obtain that there would be little chance of your ever craving something you couldn’t easily supply. The world, however, thinks of an Epicurean as a gourmand, with highly refined tastes.

Given Barbery’s background in philosophy, I’m sure she knows the correct usage. There’s every reason to think her character also should know this, but could Barbery be using it in the more conventional way to be less confusing to her readership? I’m not positive.

There are many other cases where the correct meaning of a term is less certain and where the author or character could well be under the impression that the term means something other than your understanding. If only we could see an image of all the artifacts referenced, hear the music mentioned, and get a quick definition of all the terms used. Is that asking too much?

This is a bit random (joke) but I’m including this Vsauce video here because it discusses the change over time in the use of the word “random”, and also because it talks about Quantum entanglement, something I will refer to later.

Next: Spring X. Salad days