Gode internet skribenter.

Egentlig bare en huskeseddel til mig selv.
1. Dahr Jamail
2. Amy Worthington
3. Michel Chossudovsky
4. Webster Tarpley
5. Joe Vialls
6. Dave MacGowan
7. Chris Floyd
8. Mark Morford
9. Christopher Bollyn
10. Xymphora

+
Et interview med den mærkelige helt Daniel Ellsberg. http://vimeo.com/8129340

Paternak.

Gentleness



With blinding brilliance
The evening dawns at seven.
From streets toward awnings
Darkness marches apace.
People – they are manikins;
Only lust and sadness lead
Them across the universe
Feeling their way by touch.
The heart under the palm
Betrays with its shuddering
Tension of chase and escape,
Glimmers of fright and flight.
Feelings take to liberty
And freedom with ill-ease,
Tearing just like a horse
At the bit of its mouthpiece.


Links til andre Psternak ting.
http://books.google.com/books?id=9IcclDJ4QrYC&printsec=frontcover&dq=boris+pasternak&hl=da&ei=goijTJ3GIJWTOIy3saYD&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCsQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false

http://books.google.com/books?id=Tle7SAlWFRkC&printsec=frontcover&dq=boris+pasternak&hl=da&ei=goijTJ3GIJWTOIy3saYD&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CDcQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q&f=false

Heller og Vonnegut - interview i playboy.

The Joe & Kurt Show
with Carole Mallory
Playboy 39:5, May 1992
© Playboy 1992

We are settled on the patio Joe's house in Amagansett on Long Island. Kurt sits in the shade, Joe nearer the lawn and in the sun. Both men wear khaki shorts.

PLAYBOY: You said last night that Joe was older.

HELLER: It depends on how we feel at the time.

VONNEGUT: Based on the thickness of his books, he's senior.

HELLER: You probably worked it out to the number of pages. You have twenty-seven books. They're all short. I have five books. They're all long.

PLAYBOY: How long have you been friends?

HELLER: I don't think we're friends now. I see him maybe twice a year.

VONNEGUT: We're associates. We're collegues.

HELLER: We call each other when one of us needs something.

VONNEGUT: I don't know. We were both sort of PR people and promotional people at one time. I used to work for GE and I had ambitions to be a writer and I'd go to New York. I'd say we probably met about 1955 or so.

HELLER: No, no, I didn't meet you then. I met you at Notre Dame.

VONNEGUT: When was that?

HELLER: It was 1968, when Martin Luther King was shot. He was shot the night we were there. I remember flying back from South Bend to Chicago with Ralph Ellison and reading the papers. They were worrying that Chicago was on fire. I think he was supposed to stop there and decided no to. So that would be the time I met you. And that turned out to be a cataclysmic year. Bobby Kennedy was shot in 1968. Martin Luther King. The Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia.

VONNEGUT: Can I tell the story about you and the shooting of Martin Luther King?

HELLER: No. Of course you can.

VONNEGUT: It was a literary festival at Notre Dame and it went on for about three or four days and we took turns going on stage. It was Heller's turn to be screamingly funny and he got up there and he was just about to speak, no doubt with prepared material, and some sort of academic, a professor, came up over the footlights to the lectern and shouldered Joe aside politely and aid, ''I just want to announce that Martin Luther King has been shot.'' And then this guy went back over the footlights and took his seat, and Heller said, ''Oh, my God. Oh, my God. I wish I were with Shirley now. She's crying her eyes out.''

HELLER: Shirley was my first wife. And then I went into my prepared speech. It was a tough beginning. That's how we met. Kurt Vonnegut gave a speech that was probably the best speech I've ever heard. I think I haven't heard a better one since. He was so casual and so funny and it all seemed extemporaneous and and when I came up afterward to shake this hand, I noticed be was drenched with sweat. I asked him a few years later if he had written the speech or was speaking off the cuff.

VONNEGUT: Every writer has to write his speech.

HELLER: I don't do that.

VONNEGUT: You don't?

HELLER: Nope. I have only one speech I give depending on whether or not Martin Luther King has been shot that day.

PLAYBOY: Would you like to give a speech now?

HELLER: Nope. I get paid for the speeches. And it's still nothing compared to what Ollie North gets when he's in his prime. Or Leona Helmsley -- she can get more than that. Usually there is a year when certain people are very hot. Angela Davis was. Abbie Hoffman was.

VONNEGUT: Bork had about six months. But that was a scandal.

HELLER: I don't think it's a scandal.

VONNEGUT: The students come only to see reputed pinwheels and freaks. If you get an enormously dignified, intelligent, experienced man like Harrison Salisbury, nobody comes.

HELLER: You have a small audience and a few people walking out.

VONNEGUT: The best audience in the world is the 92nd Street Y. Those people know everything and they are wide awake and responsive.

HELLER: I was part of a panel there on December seventh. The fiftieth anniversay of Pearl Harbor.

VONNEGUT: Were you bombed at Pearl Harbor, Joe?

HELLER: No.

VONNEGUT: Of course, James Jones was. I was saying this would be sort of a valedictory interview because our generation is taking its leave now. James Jones is gone. Irwin Shaw is gone. Truman Capote is gone.

HELLER: Yeah, but nobody's replaced us.

VONNEGUT: No. Laughter

HELLER: By the way, that's the subject of a novel I'm doing now to be called Closing Time. It has to do with a person about my age realizing not only that he's way past his prime but also that life is nearing its end. The aptness of the invitation from the Y fits in because this novel begins with these lines, ''When people my age speak of the war, it's not of Vietnam, but the one that broke out a half a century ago.''

PLAYBOY: What are you working on, Kurt?

VONNEGUT: On a divorce. Which is a full-time job. Didn't you find it a full-time job?

HELLER: Oh, it's more than a full-time job. You ought to go back and read that section in No Laughing Matter on the divorce. I went through all the lawyers. But yours is going to be a tranquil one, you told me.

VONNEGUT: It seems to me divorce is so common now. It ought to be more institutionalized. It's like a head-on collision every time. It's supposed to be a surprise but it's commonplace. Deliver your line about never having dreamed of being married.

HELLER: It's in Something Happened: ''I want a divorce; I dream of a divorce. I was never sure I wanted to get married. But I always knew I wanted a divorce.''

VONNEGUT: Norman Mailer has what--five divorces now?

HELLER: One of my idols used to be Artie Shaw. He used to marry these beautiful women who were very famous and be able to afford to divorce them. At that time, divorces were hard to get. You had to go to Nevada. The second thing, you needed a great deal of alimony because the women were always getting it. And I was wondering how a clarinet player could afford-was it Ava Gardner? Lana Turner? Kathleen Winsor? Oh, I've forgotten the others. He had about eight wives. All glamourous.

VONNEGUT: I used to play the clarinet and I thought he was the greatest clarinet player ever.

HELLER: You thought he was a better clarinetist than Benny Goodman or Pee Wee Russell?

VONNEGUT: It was explained to me by some musicologist. I said to him, ''I've got these vaudeville turns and the clarinet thing is one of them,'' and he said, ''Shaw used a special reed that nobody else used and a special mouthpiece that allowed him to get a full octave above what other people were playing.'' And that's what I kept hearing him do. Christ, he was getting way up there where nobody else was getting. But no I think probably the greatest clarinet player in history was Benny Goodman.

HELLER: I would think so.

VONNEGUT: I wound up going home from Mailer's one time in a limo with Goodman and I said to him, ''I used to play a little licorice stick myself.''

PLAYBOY: Why are men more readily able than women to distinguish the differece between sex and love?

HELLER: Your question implies that when a woman engages in sex, she does so only when she's in love. Or she thinks of it as an act of love. Our vocabulary has become corrupt in a way that's embarrassing to me. Have you ever heard a man use the word ''lover'' about a woman? Have you ever heard a man say, ''This gal, she's my lover?''

VONNEGUT: I'll say it of a woman. To close friends.

HELLER: I used the word only once in a book, when the character Gold is reacting exactly the way I am and the woman says, ''You are my lover.'' He never thought of himself as a lover. He says he always thought of himself as a fucker, not a lover.

VONNEGUT: Well, this is Joe. Joe doesn't vote either. Is that right, Joe?

HELLER: I will say -- Sound of a lawn mower -- Oh, shit! Is he coming to do the lawn now? He is.

PLAYBOY: Shall we stop him? Or shall we go inside?

HELLER: We can go over there. No, we can't stop him. You're lucky to get him.

We move inside Heller's modern country home. Kurt sits on a hassock between two sofas. Joe reclines on the middle of a sofa perpendicular to the hassock. They begin talking about the war.

VONNEGUT: Only one person came home from World War Two who was treated like a hero and that was Audie Murphy. Everybody knew he was the only hero.

HELLER: I felt like a hero when I came home. And I still feel like a hero when people interview me. People think it quite remarkable that I was in combat in an airplane and I flew sixty missions even though I tell them that the missions were largely milk runs.

VONNEGUT: And what kind of medals did you get?

HELLER: I got the conventional medals, which came automatically. Air Medal with five or six clusters. You know, you're in my new book. Unless you object.

VONNEGUT: Good. Good.

HELLER: In that sense it's not a sequel. One of the characters does end up in Dresden and he's talking to a guy named Vonnegut. You're not in Catch-22, so it's not properly a sequel.

VONNEGUT: Joe, when he was working on this book earlier, wanted to get an officer or a high-ranking noncom into Dresden. You know, the guy who had done bombing. Then, finally, he's bombed, and this is technically impossible. Noncoms and officers were not allowed to work. They were kept in big stalags out in the countryside.

PLAYBOY: How did you feel when Iraq was bombed?

HELLER: I felt awful about the whole Gulf war. My feeling is that at that time Bush still hadn't figured out why he had invaded Panama, and he didn't know why he was making war in Iraq. And he still doesn't. I think it was an atrocity.

VONNEGUT: I can see where you might catch a whole lot of people and have to kill them that way, particularly from the air. But people in our war, the good war, were sickened by it afterward and would not talk about it. When we went to war, we had two fears. One was that we'd get killed. The other was that we might have to kill someone. Imagine somebody coming back from the Gulf, particularly a pilot, saying, ''Gee, I'm lucky. I didn't have to kill anybody.'' TV has dehumanized us to the point where this is acceptable. It was like shooting up a crowd going home from a football game on a Saturday afternoon. Shoot the front vehicle and the back vehicle and then go up and down and kill everybody dead. A disgraceful way to act. In the SS-probably a tough branch of the SS and maybe just officers--they had to strangle a cat during their training. With their hands. And I think TV has done this to a whole lot of people without anybody's having to strangle a cat.

HELLER: I would guess that after one strangled the first cat, the rest are easier. The next five or six are pure fun. Then it becomes a kind of pastime. A careless hobby. Like lighting a cigarette.

PLAYBOY: Why do we celebrate war with a parade?

HELLER: I think it's dangerous to use the expression ''we'' in dealing with war. One of the fallacies has to do with democracy. I don't think we've had a President in my lifetime who came to the White House with a significant proportion of the eligible voters voting.

VONNEGUT: Yeah, but you got at least one great President, didn't you?

HELLER: Which one?

VONNEGUT: Roosevelt.

HELLER: I often wonder, if I were an adult in Roosevelt's time, whether I would have revered him and loved him the way I do in retrospect.

VONNEGUT: The Russians loved the czar as long as they could. right up until the last minute, because he was the father.

HELLER: Once the war broke out, I think everyone wanted it over quickly and did not want to see a U.S. defeat. There was so much bunkum and deception.

PLAYBOY: Instead of killing several hundred thousand Iraqis, why wasn't Saddam Hussein ''disappeared''?

HELLER: It's not that easy. I think they were bombing places selectively in the hope of getting him. The way they missed Qaddafi and got his daughter.

VONNEGUT: There's a wonderful documentary Canadians made when people were really sick of the war--World War Two, that is. People were dying in industrial quantities. Fifty thousand nameless guys going over the top and they focused on these romantic figures up there in the airplanes and revived interest in the war.

HELLER: Is this in the U.S. or France?

VONNEGUT: All fighter pilots. Everybody loved Von Richthofen as much as anybody else. It was, Who was going to get him? My agent, incidentally, Ken Littauer, who is dead now, was Lieutenant Colonel Littauer, who in military history was the first man to strafe a trench. He was a full colonel at the age of twenty-two and he and Rickenbacker and Nordoff and Hall were all in the Lafayette Flying Corps. They were the only guys in the American Air Force who really knew how to fly and fight. Littauer was supposed to be just an observation guy, out for artillery. He decided, ''What the hell! The object is to kill people.'' And he peeled off and I guess he had a machine gun.

HELLER: It was fun in the beginning. We were kids, nineteen, twenty years old, and had real machine guns in our hands. Not those things at the penny arcades at Coney Island. You got the feeling that there was something glorious about it. Glorious excitement. The first time I saw a plane on fire and parachutes coming down, I looked at it with a big grin on my face. I was disappointed in those early missions of mine where nobody shot at us.

VONNEGUT: Morley Safer wrote about going in after B-52s dropped these enormous bombs on an area suspected of sheltering Viet Cong. He said the small was terrible, there were parts of human bodies hanging in treetops. The poor pilots don't usually see that.

HELLER: Air Force people don't see it. I didn't realize until I read Paul Fussel's book on World War One that almost everybody who took my artillery shell or bombing grenade was going to be dismembered, mutilated. Not the way it is in the movies where somebody gets hit, clutches his chest and falls down dead. They are blown apart. Blown into pieces.

PLAYBOY: Is there a hidden agenda behind our romance with war?

HELLER: American rulers are discovering that the way to get instant popularity is to go to war. I think if the Vietnam war had been over in a month or two, Johnson might still be President--and might still be alive.

PLAYBOY: Do you think there's a relationship between the CIA and the war?

VONNEGUT: I know Allen Ginsberg made a bet with Richard Helms, who was the head of the CIA. When the Vietnam war was going on, Allen bet him his little bronze dumbbell or some sacred object that the CIA was in the drug business and it would come out sooner or later. Flying drugs in and out of East Asia. I don't know whether Allen won the bet or what Helms was supposed to have given him, but I'm sure it's true.

HELLER: There's one thing about being involved in a drug trade. There's another thing about being the drug trade.

PLAYBOY: Were we in Iraq and concentrating on foreign affiars to cover up problems at home?

HELLER: Doing this last novel of mine, I find that Thucydides filed the same charge against Pericles in the war against Sparta - -to divert attention from allegations of personal scandal. It's so much easier than administering your country. It's also extremely dangerous because of the temptation in a democracy.

VONNEGUT: It's also very bad if the enemy shoots back.

HELLER: Well, you have to pick enemies that won't. During the Spanish-American War, American casualities at Manila Bay were four or seven. Panama was instructive to me because such a high percentage of the number of people who went were either killed or wounded.

VONNEGUT: What was that island we attacked before, with that long runway?

HELLER: Grenada.

VONNEGUT: some of the first guys we lost were SEALs. Because they were dropped into the ocean and never heard of again. Nobody knows what the hell happened to them.

PLAYBOY: Let's switch to censorship. Are you at all concerned about the government's intrusion into our privacy?

HELLER: Do I think, for example, this guy Pee-wee Herman should be arrested for playing with himself in an adult theater?

VONNEGUT: Did he play to climax? I really haven't kept up with the news as I should.

HELLER: But is that a crime? I would say no.

VONNEGUT: I agree with Joe.

HELLER: We may have an aversion to the idea of somebody's masturbating in a theater or in a bathroom but so long as he didn't call attention to himself--that's what we call exhibitionism.

VONNEGUT: This is a huge country. There are primitive tribes here and there who have customs and moral standards of their own. It's the way I feel about religious fundamentalists. They really ought to have a reservation. They have a right to their culture and I can see where the First Amendment would be very painful for them. The First Amendment is a tragic amendment because everyone is going to have his or her feelings hurt and your government is not here to protect you from having your feelings hurt.

PLAYBOY: What about the hurt being done to women deprived of the freedom of choice?

VONNEGUT: I think Bush is utterly insincere on the abortion issue. He probably feels about it the way most Yale graduates do. There's just political capital in pretending to be concerned about abortion. He doesn't want to push it any harder than he has to because he'd lose a big part of the electorate.

HELLER: Even if he's pretending. I'm going to quote from the introduction of Mother Night, ''We are what we pretend to be.'' If those people in government are only pretending to object to sex displays or abortion, the effect is the same as if they were sincere.

PLAYBOY: Do you think Senator Helms is pretending?

VONNEGUT: Yes. There are several famous hypocrites in the South and he's surely one of them. Like the illegible thumpers. To attract a crowd.

PLAYBOY: Do you see him illegible a real threat?

VONNEGUT: He has a good many Christian fundamentalist followers. So he is, in fact, serving his constituents--and they are not hypocrites, I would say. But in that little railroad car that runs under Congress, I rode with a guy who worked for Helms, one of his assistants. This guy was as hip and sane and liberal as anyone. He simply had a job to do.

PLAYBOY: Let's turn to books. Are you alarmed about the corporate role in publishing?

HELLER: ''Alarmed'' is a strong word. I'm aware of it and I don't think the effects will be beneficial toward literature. As I get older, I begin thinking that not only are certain things inevitable, everything is inevitable.

PLAYBOY: How about censorship in publishing? What about when Simon and Schuster decided not to publish a book it had contracted for -- Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho -- because of pressure?

HELLER: The allegation was made that the decision came from the head of Paramount which owns Simon and Schuster. But the book was published. I don't think censorship is a widespread threat in this country.

VONNEGUT: You can publish yourself. During the McCarthy era, Howard Fast published Spartacus. Sold it to the movies. Nobody would publish him because he was a Communist.

PLAYBOY: Are writers supportive of one another or resentful?

VONNEGUT: Writers aren't envious of one another.

HELLER: We may be envious of the success but not of one another.

VONNEGUT: Painters and poets can be deeply upset by the good luck of a colleague. Writers and novelists really don't seem to give a damn.

PLAYBOY: Are nonfiction writers more jealous and envious of one another than novelists?

VONNEGUT: I know one very close friendship that ended when one guy was working on a book and his best friend came in right behind him.

PLAYBOY: Is it more difficult to get blurbs for nonfiction than fiction because of jealousy?

VONNEGUT: Blurbs are baloney. Anybody who reads a blurb is crazy. Calvin Trillin said that ''anybody who gives a blurb should he required right on the jacket to reveal his relationship to the author.'' It's a good way to advertise. Keep your name around.

HELLER: That's one reason, but they don't advertise as voluminously as they used to do.

VONNEGUT: When Alger Hiss wrote a book--his most recent, his side of the story--I wrote a blurb for it and I was the only blurb on the book. Starting! I thought other people would be on there with me. Howard Fast or somebody. . . .

PLAYBOY: Did you ever review each other's books?

HELLER: No.

VONNEGUT: Yes. We hadn't known each other very well. And then we were neighbors out here and Joe had finally written another book.

HELLER: That was 1974.

VONNEGUT: Since Something Happened was only his second book, he was rather anxious to find out who was reviewing it for the Times.

HELLER: I'm going to correct this impression when you finish.

VONNEGUT: It wasn't unethical at the beginning of the summer because I really didn't know him that well. But I spent most of the summer writing the review and I got to see more and more of Joe. Who did they tell you was reviewing it for the Times? You change the story.

HELLER: I knew fairly early you were doing it because Irwin Shaw brought it out. And I said, ''You never should have told me that.'' I knew enough about you to know that you would not undertake it unless you were going to write favorably about it. Then I began to get anxious about you and myself. Each time they got word of a good review from somewhere else, I made it a point to tell you.

VONNEGUT: Talk about disinformation.

HELLER: I didn't want you to feel inhibited in your praise.

VONNEGUT: Was there anyone who really tied a can to your tail? Anybody who really hated the book?

HELLER: There were reviewers who were disappointed, because it was not another Catch-22 and they expected it to be.

VONNEGUT: Well, Catch-22 was sort of a fizzle when it first came out, wasn't it?

HELLER: Despite an advertising campaign that has never been equaled or surpassed in terms of the number of ads.

VONNEGUT: Did Bertrand Russeil praise the book?

HELLER: He not only praised the book, he had his secretary call me up and arrange for us to meet. It was one of the few thrilling encounters I've had in my lifetime. It's a long drive to Wales from London. Russell was already ninety. And he looked exactly like his photographs. I had that experience with Venice the first time I went to Venice. It looks exactly like Venice. Paris doesn't. London doesn't. New York doesn't. Venice looks exactly like Venice and Bertrand Russell looked exactly like Bertrand Russell.

VONNEGUT: I suppose it was the first unromantic book about the Air Force.

HELLER: I don't know about first. It's not a romantic book. It is romantic. I know the underlying sentimentality. Phillip Toynbee began a review of it with a paragraph that embarrasses me still. He begins listing the great works of satire in the English language and he puts this among them. I think he was the one who said it was the first war book in which fear and cowardice become a virtue.

PLAYBOY: So, who are the new Kurt Vonneguts or Joe Hellers?

HELLER: Oh, I don't think there has been anybody after us.

VONNEGUT: Well, we haven't seen Schwarzkopf's memoirs yet. Laughs

HELLER: You've got the name wrong. Scheisskopf.

VONNEGUT: I remember Schwarzkopf's father, a police commissioner in New Jersey. Then he was the host on a radio show called Gangbusters.

HELLER: Somebody told me his father was also the head of the regional Selective Service department in New Jersey and New York.

VONNEGUT: Four stars is a lot of stars. That's all Pershing had was four stars.

HELLER: They didn't have five stars then. Five stars was a rank in World War Two.

PLAYBOY: I had a little trouble when he said that being under a missile attack was no more dangerous than being in a thunderstorm.

VONNEGUT: His comment on the Scud, I think, was that shooting down a Scud was like shooting down a Goodyear blimp, because these things are not very fast or hard to hit. There was a story in World War Two about a Dutch cruiser that escaped from the Nazis just as they were occupying Holland. The ship pulled into a fiord somewhere and put on war paint, purple and green stripes, and sailed into the Firth of Clyde, where the British navy was anchored in Scotland, and the skipper of the cruiser called to the flagship and asked, ''How do you like our new camouflage?'' And the answer that came back was ''Where are you?''

PLAYBOY: Is that true?

HELLER: Would Vonnegut joke?

PLAYBOY: Do either of you read any contemporary writers?

VONNEGUT: Well, it's not like the medical profession where you have to find out the latest treatments. I've been reading Nietzsche.

HELLER: And I've been reading Thomas Mann. I hesitate because maybe I'm reading more difficult books to grasp than nonfiction. Scientific books. Philosophy, I would not be able to read rapidly. I have a definite impression that I'm reading more slowly than I used to.

VONNEGUT: There's no urgency about reading anymore. We're not trying to keep up. I have that big book by Mark Helprin and I don't think I'm going to read it because I'm too lazy.

PLAYBOY: What about Norman Mailer's?

VONNEGUT: That's none of your business. Norman's a friend of mine.

HELLER: I intend to read it at one sitting. I read contemporary writers.

PLAYBOY: Such as whom?

HELLER: It wouldn't be whom. It would be a particular work. If the work is described in a way I feel would be interesting to me. Not enjoyable. Interesting. I look into every galley I'm sent. I don't have time to read them. Just the way I don't get as many invitations to parties as Kurt Vonnegut does.

VONNEGUT: They've stopped coming. Well, I'm reading Martin Amis.

HELLER: The last book?

VONNEGUT: It's a new one. The whole thing runs backward. Time runs backward. It's very hard to follow.

HELLER: I will read Julian Barnes's new novel. I like Julian Barnes for reasons I can't explain.

PLAYBOY: Any women?

HELLER: You have to name some.

PLAYBOY: Ann Beattie.

HELLER: I've read Ann Beattie.

VONNEGUT: I read Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and thought it was terrific. I wrote her a fan letter. Joe said one time in an interview or somewhere that people in advertising are better read and wittier than most novelists.

HELLER: And most academics. That was my experience when Catch-22 came out.

PLAYBOY: What is your favorite book of Joe's?

VONNEGUT: He hasn't written enough to choose from.

HELLER: There's no answer that would be convincing and satisfying.

VONNEGUT: You know about the frog-and-peach restaurant? Well, there are four things on the menu. You can have a frog. You can have a peach. You can have a frog stuffed with a peach or a peach stuffed with a frog. When you ask what is my favorite of Heller's, you don't have a very long menu. I have gone the extra mile with Joe. I have seen ''We Bombed in New Haven'' performed at Yale. Not many people can say that.

HELLER: More at Yale than on Broadway. I used to think Catch-22 was my best novel until I read Kurt's review of Something Happened. Now I think Something Happened is.

PLAYBOY: What is your favorite book of Kurt's?

HELLER: OH, I DON'T LIKE ANY OF HIS WORKS. I just give blurbs to his books so we can remain friends.

VONNEGUT: I'm sure Joe doesn't mind this beign discussed. It takes him a while to write a book. He might be a different author in each case because he's a decade older. Nietzsche says the philosopher's view of the world makes his reputation and he doesn't change it. It reflects how old he was then. Plato's philosophy is the philosophy of a man thirty-five.

PLAYBOY: You're writing a movie, we hear.

VONNEGUT: Yes, with Steven Wright.

HELLER: Boy, I'd love to write a movie script.

PLAYBOY: Why don't you collaborate?

HELLER: Take me as a secret collaborator? Pay me just enough to qualify for the medical plan of the Writers' Guild.

VONNEGUT: It's hack work. I just got interested in Steven Wright. He was out here and stayed with me for a couple of days. You know who he is?

HELLER: Not really.

VONNEGUT: He has sort of the build of a Woody Allen and that melancholy and he doesn't know what the hell he's going to say next. And so you're listening and finally he says it, but he never says where he is from, what he is. He is in fact a Roman Catholic. Most people assume he's Jewish. But he's very smart not to say, ''I'm from Boston.'' He's very hot on the college circuit. He gets fifteen thousand dollars an appearance and he does fifty a year.

HELLER: Are you being paid for the screenplay?

VONNEGUT: I'm doing it on spec. But I won't show it to them until they pay me.

PLAYBOY: What about Hollywood?

HELLER: I love it. I don't work that much and I will accept every offer I get. I love going to Hollywood because I know people there. When I go there, somebody else is always paying the expenses.

VONNEGUT: How do you know people there?

HELLER: Almost every friend I had on the Island moved out there after the war. Then my nephew was out there working for Paramount TV.

PLAYBOY: Kurt, we gather you're less enthralled in dealing with Hollywood.

VONNEGUT: No. There are two novelists who should be very grateful to Hollywood. Margaret Mitchell is one and I'm the other one.

HELLER: ''Thelma & Louise'' is the first movie I've seen in years. I liked it. Well, a year ago I saw that Italian film ''Cinema Paradiso.'' I usually don't like the movies.

PLAYBOY: Did it bother you that in ''Thelma & Louise'' the heroines killed a man?

HELLER: No. It doesn't bother me when they kill cowboys or Indians. It's only the movies. There are so many movies where the woman turns out to be the murderess. I didn't see it as a movie with any kind of morality. It was a movie about two women who get into trouble.

PLAYBOY: Does a movie like ''Thelma & Louise'' indicate a change in the culture?

VONNEGUT: You have forgotten that we are so old we are contemporaries of Bonnie and Clyde and of Ma Barker. She was the head of the family. We know about some really rough women.

PLAYBOY: Bonnie still followed Clyde, didn't she?

HELLER: You're not asking us about women. You're asking us about characters in motion pictures.

PLAYBOY: At the recent St. John's rape trial in New York, one of the jurors wore a T-shirt that read, UNZIP MY FLY. What is that all about?

VONNEGUT: I don't know, but it's a very popular T-shirt.

PLAYBOY: Where is that coming from?

VONNEGUT: A T-shirt factory, obviously.

PLAYBOY: Why would someone want to wear that?

VONNEGUT: Joe and I had a publisher in England for a while and his fly was always unzipped.

PLAYBOY: Does sex get better when you're older?

HELLER: Does what?

PLAYBOY: Does it get better when you're older or not?

HELLER: I don't know. I haven't had it since I was young.

VONNEGUT: I don't know if he's kidding or not.

HELLER: Oh, I've had no sex as an adult.

VONNEGUT: He's a comedian.

PLAYBOY: Well, what about you, Kurt? Does sex get better when you get older?

VONNEGUT: You get to be a better lover.

HELLER: I find I'm much more virile now than I was.

PLAYBOY: More what?

HELLER: More potent. I want to do it more often than when I was seventeen or eighteen.

PLAYBOY: Why don't you guys write more explicitly about sex and its emotional trappings?

HELLER: More explicitly than what? You keep projecting. You keep attaching emotional reactions to sexual reactions. Earlier you used the words ''love'' and ''sex'' and now you're suggesting emotional reactions to sex. By emotional I'm sure you mean something different from the sensory responses.

PLAYBOY: Well, emotions are different from senses.

HELLER: I don't think there is a necessary correlation between emotional responses and sex.

PLAYBOY: Didn't D. H. Lawrence write about emotions?

HELLER: That was the content of his artistic or literary consciousness. I don't think writers have a choice, by the way. I think we discover a field in which we can be proficient and that's our imagination. My imagination cannot work like Kurt's and I don't think his can work like mine. Neither of us could write like Philip Roth or Norman Mailer. I know John Updike has a lot of tales of the sexual encounter. And I suppose there are writers who can do it and will do it and want to do it.

PLAYBOY: Henry Miller?

HELLER: What you get there is the raw activity.

PLAYBOY: Anais Nin?

VONNEGUT: I haven't read the porn she wrote. If you have an attractive man and woman coming together, the reader is going to want to see them do it or find out why they didn't do it. And so you can't talk about anything else. The example I use is Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. It's about this black guy who is looking for comfort and englightenment somewhere in American society. It's a picaresque novel. If he ever ran into a woman who really loved him and he loved her, that would be the end of the book. It would be as short as my books. And Ellison has to keep him away from women.

HELLER: I must say, for me, it doesn't normally make good literature. Fiction having extensive detail about the gymnastics of copulation or sexual congress--or even the alleged responses to it--does not make interesting reading to me. It's like trying to describe the noise of a subway train. There are people who can do it. Young writers go in for that type of description. But when they're finished, all they've done is described the noise of a subway train coming into a station or pulling out of a station. Is that the noblest objective of a work of fiction? To convince the reader that what you're writing about is really happening? I don't think so.

PLAYBOY: Isaac Bashevis Singer said, ''In sex and love, human character is revealed more than anywhere else.''

VONNEGUT: He is liable to say anything to be interesting. He entertains in that way. Do you know what he said about free will? ''We have no choice.''

HELLER: That's not been proved. I would not agree with that. The same two people could have come together sexually numerous times and it could be a different experience and the person's character doesn't change from copulation to copulation.

PLAYBOY: But one gets to know the other better with increased copulation.

HELLER: I don't think so.

VONNEGUT: Well, this is the French theory of the golden key.

HELLER: You learn more at lunch than you do in the meeting before. In phone conversation.

VONNEGUT: Nietzsche had a little one-liner on how to choose a wife. He said, ''Are you willing to have a conversation with this woman for the next forty years?'' That's how to pick a wife.

HELLER: If people were more widely read, there'd be fewer marriages.

VONNEGUT: I will give you all the money that's left after the divorce if you can get me a film clip of Frank Sinatra making it with Nancy Reagan. I think that is the funniest damn thing.

PLAYBOY: In the White House?

VONNEGUT: I don't care where. Those two scrawny people.

PLAYBOY: Have you read Kitty Kelley?

VONNEGUT: Sure. Parts of it. Joe gets all those books. And I just leaf through them. About the Kenney or about any scandal.

HELLER: I didn't look at it.

PLAYBOY: Why do you think we're so interested in scandal?

VONNEGUT: Just because it's in the papers. The same way we pretend to be interested in sports, a way to say hello to a stranger. ''What did you think of the second game of the World Series? What did you think of this? What do you think of the Super Bowl?'' It's a way of saying hello.

HELLER: I agree with him. I have a slight, diminishing taste for gossip and for scandal. If you're taking about the most interesting things in the newspapers, I think our news reporting is abominable. There shouldn't be daily papers. Maybe once a week they ought to publish.

VONNEGUT: John F. Kennedy was off the scale. He was a freak! I mean, he was in the Guinness Book of Records for the number of women he screwed, apparently.

HELLER: I would have liked him a lot more if I had known at the time what was going on.

PLAYBOY: Why is a man respected for having many sexual relationships and a woman disrespected or scorned?

HELLER: The explanation would be the terrible fears of impotency men have and the jealousy that's concomitant with that. Mark Twain says that the only reason the Bible was against adulery was to keep the woman from screwing someone else. His explanation is that a man is like a candle and he's going to burn out, and the woman is like a candlestick and she can hold a million candles.

PLAYBOY: But women also scorn women who have had many sexual experiences.

HELLER: Women with bad reputations can be attractive to a man. They are to me. But a wife or a daughter like that would be a terrible embarrasment to me.

VONNEGUT: Joe's got the Freudian explanation. I think that men can't help suspecting that women are stronger and better people than they are and they learn that from their mother. I would agree with that.

PLAYBOY: Do you think younger women are sexier than older women?

VONNEGUT: No.

HELLER: I agree with Kurt.

VONNEGUT: I taught at Iowa for a year and there were a whole lot of blondes there because of our Scandinavian population. I was not interested in these undergraduate girls at all.

HELLER: Even when I was young, I found older women more attractive than young girls.

PLAYBOY: Is there anyone for whom you lust in your heart?

VONNEGUT: My goodness!

HELLER: Madonna. Madonna.

VONNEGUT: Joe mentioned one of Artie Shaw's wives. Seemed to me the sexiest woman I ever saw was Ava Gardner.

HELLER: Kathleen Winsor was pretty hot.

VONNEGUT: Rita Hayworth. I took it hard when she came down with Alzheimer's.

PLAYBOY: Joe, were you serious about Madonna?

HELLER: No.

PLAYBOY: Who's going to win the Democratic nomination?

HELLER: I have a feeling it might be me.

PLAYBOY: You? Are you going to vote for yourself?

VONNEGUT: He will have to register first.

HELLER: I'd register and I'd pose. I would if I ran.

PLAYBOY: Kurt, would you vote for Joe?

VONNEGUT: Certainly. It's a figurehead job in any case.

HELLER: I'd run on two issues. And I believe I'd win. The first would be, as President of the federal government, I would take no steps whatsoever to interfere with a woman's right to terminate a pregnancy. The second is I would find some way to institute a national health program in this country. Don't ask me where the money's going to come from, I will find a way to do it.

VONNEGUT: The big difference between conservatives and liberals is that killing doesn't seem to bother the conservatives at all. The liberals are chickenhearted about people dying. Conservatives thought that the massacre, the killing, of so many people in Panama was OK. I think they're really Darwinians. It's all right that people are starving to death on the streets because that's the nature of work.

HELLER: Western civilization has made a pact with the Devil. I think the story of Faust has to do with Western civilization. You might say white civilization. The Devil or God said, ''I'll give you knowledge to do great things. But you're going to use that knowledge to destroy the environment and to destroy yourself.'' You mentioned Darwin. I think what we're experiencing now is the natural state of evolution. Half the society is underprivileged and maybe a third of the rest is barely surviving. The trouble with the Administration is that it doesn't want to deal with the problem. It doesn't want to define it as a problem because then it will have to deal win it.

Shirley Jackson og wikipedia.

Dette er et plot summary fra Wikipedia af bogen 'we have always lived in castles', tror jeg. Der er vist en diskusion, en akademisk diskusion (i den dobbelte betydning af både virkelig at være akademisk og ligegyldig.) der handler om wikipedias unøjagtighed og måske mere generelt om nettets tendenser til at udflade, bl.a. fakta. Som sagt er diskusionen ligegyldig. Der sker hvad der sker og hvis man vil have noget at sige der til, må man skabe noget. Man skaber noget ved at være bagrstræberisk, men det har visse tendser til at afmontere sig selv igen, det man har skabt.
Nå men der er i hvert fald et punkt hvor Wikipedia nogen gange er mange gange mere suverænt end et hvilket som helst opslagsværk, det være et leksikon, eller mere specefikke bøger om forskellige emner og det er i plot opsurmeringer. Wikipedia er den perfekte blanding af saglighed og lidenskab. Der er i nogle af dem en sjælden evne til at kondensere ikke bare handlingens ydre træk, men også handlingens kondeseren af sig selv. Denne opsumering(nedenfor) er et eksempel. Den formår på ret godt tid, at skrue de forskellige elementer ind i hinanden, på en måde så den faktisk også opsurmere historiens bevægelse og ikke bare dens elementer. Det lyder fint, er sikkert ret ligegyldigt, men en vældig nydelse at læse ikke desto mindre.

Plot summary

The people in the village have always hated us.

The novel, narrated in first-person by 18-year-old Mary Katherine "Merricat" Blackwood, tells the story of the Blackwood family. A careful reading of the opening paragraphs reveals that the majority of this novel is a flashback.

Merricat, her elder sister Constance, and their ailing uncle Julian live in isolation from the nearby village. Constance has not left their home in six years, going no farther than her large garden and seeing only a select few family friends. Uncle Julian, slightly demented and confined to a wheelchair, obsessively writes and re-writes notes for an autobiography, while Constance cares for him. Through Uncle Julian's ramblings the reader begins to understand what has happened to the remainder of the Blackwood family: six years ago, both the Blackwood parents, an aunt (Julian's wife), and a younger brother were murdered — poisoned with arsenic, mixed into the family sugar and sprinkled onto blackberries at dinner. Julian, though poisoned, survived; Merricat, having been sent to bed without dinner as a punishment for an unspecified misdeed, avoided the arsenic, and Constance, who did not put sugar on her berries, was arrested for and eventually acquitted of the crime. The people of the village believe that Constance has gotten away with murder (her first action on learning of the family's illnesses was to scrub the sugar bowl), and the family is ostracized, leading Constance to become something of an agoraphobe. Nevertheless, the three Blackwoods have grown accustomed to their isolation, and lead a quiet, happy existence. Merricat is the family's sole contact with the outside world, walking into the village twice a week and carrying home groceries and library books, often followed by groups of the village children, who taunt her with a singsong chant:

Merricat, said Connie, would you like a cup of tea?
Oh no, said Merricat, you'll poison me.
Merricat, said Connie, would you like to go to sleep?
Down in the boneyard ten feet deep!

Merricat is a strange young woman, fiercely protective of her sister, prone to daydreaming and a fierce believer in sympathetic magic. As the major action unfolds, she begins to feel that a dangerous change is approaching; her response is to reassure herself of the various magical safeguards she has placed around their home, including a box of silver dollars buried near the creek and a book nailed to a tree. After discovering that the book has fallen down, Merricat becomes convinced that danger is imminent. Before she can warn Constance, a long-absent cousin, Charles, appears for a visit.

It is immediately apparent to the reader that Charles is pursuing the Blackwood fortune, which is locked in a safe in the house. Charles quickly befriends the vulnerable Constance. Merricat perceives Charles as a demon, and tries various magical means to exorcise him from their lives. Tension grows as Charles is increasingly rude to Merricat and impatient of Julian's foibles, ignoring or dismissing the old man rather than treating him with the gentle courtesy Constance has always shown. In an angry outburst between Charles and Julian, the level of the old man's dementia is revealed when he claims he has only one living niece: Mary Katherine, he believes, "died in an orphanage, of neglect" during Constance's trial.

In the course of her efforts to drive Charles away, Merricat breaks things and fills his bed with dirt and dead leaves. When Charles insists she be punished, Merricat demands, "Punish me?... You mean, send me to bed without my dinner?" She flees to an abandoned summerhouse on the property and loses herself in a fantasy in which all her deceased family members obey her every whim. She returns for dinner, but when Constance sends her upstairs to wash her hands, Merricat pushes Charles' still-lit pipe into a wastebasket filled with newspapers. The pipe sets fire to the family home, destroying much of the upper portion of the house. The villagers arrive to put out the fire, but, in a wave of long-repressed hatred for the Blackwoods, break into the remaining rooms and destroy them, chanting their children's taunting rhyme. In the course of the fire, Julian dies of what is implied to be a heart attack, and Charles shows his true colors, attempting to take the family safe (unsuccessfully, as is revealed later). Merricat and Constance flee for safety into the woods. Constance confesses for the first time that she always knew Merricat poisoned the family; Merricat readily admits to the deed, saying that she put the poison in the sugar bowl because she knew Constance would not take sugar.

Upon returning to their ruined home, Constance and Merricat proceed to salvage what is left of their belongings, close off those rooms too damaged to use, and start their lives anew in the little space left to them: hardly more than the kitchen and cellar. The house, now without a roof, resembles a castle "turreted and open to the sky". Merricat tells Constance they are now living "on the moon." The villagers, awakening at last to a sense of guilt, begin to treat the two sisters as mysterious creatures to be placated with offerings of food left on their doorstep. The story ends with Merricat observing, "Oh, Constance...we are so happy."

Det her er det mest klare udtryk for en romantisk arv, som gennemsyrer al visionær tænkning, alle forestillinger om en anden overskridende verden. Den er åbenlys smuk og den er åbenlys naiv. På mange måder er skønheden dens pragmatiske ledetråd, det som stadig holder den i live og gør den relevant. Naiviteten er det som vi stadig har temmelig store problemer med at overskride og således undgår skønheden os.

When no longer numbers and figures
Are the keys to all God’s creatures,
When those who sing or kiss
Know more than the greatest wits,
When the world is given back to life
And frees itself from earthly strife,
When light and shade in unity
Create a higher clarity,
And people see world-history
In fairy tales and poetry,
Then all confusion will fly away
At a single secret word.


Filosofien havde en drøm om virkelighed: Borges siger “Verden er ifølge Mallarme, skabt til at blive en bog; ifølge Bloy er vi versikler eller ord eller bogstaver i en magisk bog, og denne uophørlige bog er det eneste, som er i verden: Den er, for at sige det bedre, verden.” (s. 156, Andre inkvisitioner).
Drømmen har på mange måder aldrig udviklet sig udover en nærmest kompulsiv trang til at skrive huskesedler, for jeg fik hurtig færden af at det ikke var den drøm jeg ønskede. Jeg vil ikke have orden, jeg tror ikke på den, det er meget svært at tro på den. Men det er endnu sværere i Bloys version, hvis vi skal tage den et skridt videre. Forestillingen kunne være denne, at vi kunne blive istand til at skrive verden. Der er dette forhold mellem talen og skriften, nemlig at talen er givet i tredimensionelt men ikke tidsligt blivende og skriften er givet todimensionelt men tidsligt blivende. Drømmen er måske en kombination, hvor man så og sige skriver verden, mens man er i den, sådan at den foreligger og måske endda så den foreligger som ens eget værk. Dette er en drøm om at være skabende, samtidgt med at man skriver, at det at skrive, sætte ord på, er skabelse af farver osv.

På mange måder er computeren grobunden for at vi overhoved kan forestille os noget der kunne være en sådan forening.

Novalis.

Novalis and Philo-Sophie
Works now being published in English reveal the key role Novalis played in German culture
Jeremy Adler

The success of the French Encyclopédie and its place in the Enlightenment has tended to obscure the role of encyclopaedism in German culture. Yet the ideal of universal knowledge has been a potent force in Germany, shaping the way the nation defined itself ever since the seventeenth century. Novalis played a key part in this debate, not least in seeking to redefine what he called “total science” – his name for encyclopaedism – as a means to achieve cultural renewal. Yet he was sentimentalized after his early death as the dreamy poet of the Blue Flower, and while this ensured his posthumous appeal, it resulted in the comparative neglect of his philosophy. His contribution to German idealism was only fully revealed, a century and a half after his death, by the editors of the critical edition of his works, a literary monument forty years in the making (reviewed in the TLS, October 13, 2000). The edition showed the full extent of the unpublished journals and notebooks, including hundreds of jottings and aphorisms, often circling round a plan for a Romantic encyclopaedia. The new image of Novalis, not unlike that of Coleridge brought about by the editing of his Notebooks, led to a wider revaluation, in which the Romantic dreamer has given way to the incisive philosopher. Now, two centuries after his death, the new material is at long last becoming available in English in versions beginning with Margaret Mahony Stoljar’s Philosophical Writings (1997) and Jane Kneller’s Fichte Studies (2003), and continuing with the volumes under review.

The new Novalis more than confirms Thomas Carlyle’s view of him as “the German Pascal”. Both men had practical talents, yet they both evinced a radical purity that drove them to treat the infinite as the only measure, and hence to redefine the thinking of the age; moreover, they both pursued a trajectory from mathematics to theology and did so with such intensity that their precocious beginnings could perhaps only be fulfilled in an equally premature death; while the search for a higher, absolute truth ended in fragmentary utterance. Yet if Pascal’s Pensées were the anguished conscience of the neoclassical age, Novalis’s Fragmente were rather the electrifying consciousness of modernity.

With Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis regarded Germany’s task in modern Europe as a dialectical reversal of the French Revolution: the reflective German Geist should respond to and transcend the materialistic excesses of the Terror. Novalis’s speech “Christendom or Europe” (1799), though on Goethe’s advice excluded from the founding journal of German Romanticism, the Athenaeum, constitutes the most potent political manifesto of the first Romantic school. At its core lies an encyclopaedic vision of European diversity that goes back to the Middle Ages, when the opposing states were spiritually united under Catholic hegemony, a period Novalis treats as a golden age. The German tradition from Kant and Lessing to Goethe and Schiller regarded enlightenment as the means for humanity to prevail over strife, and Novalis explicitly invites the enlightened “encyclopaedists” to participate in the movement towards not just a German revival, but a new, spiritually self-aware Europe.

The ultimate reliance of the political visionary on the mystical poet of the Blue Flower is evident in later poems such as the Hymns to the Night and in “Wenn nicht mehr Zahlen und Figuren . . .”. The latter, as Ludwig Tieck recognized, distils Novalis’s belief into its most limpid form:

When no longer numbers and figures
Are the keys to all God’s creatures,
When those who sing or kiss
Know more than the greatest wits,
When the world is given back to life
And frees itself from earthly strife,
When light and shade in unity
Create a higher clarity,
And people see world-history
In fairy tales and poetry,
Then all confusion will fly away
At a single secret word.

This is the doctrine of a world history founded on inwardness that the late Penelope Fitzgerald so admired. In an essay on Yeats, she rehearses the credo almost verbatim: “the world will not be right till poetry is pronounced to be life itself, our own lives but shadows and poor imitations”. The Birth of Novalis, edited by Bruce Donehower, the title of which recalls the outworn image, actually dismantles the Novalis legend. This invaluable biographical collection concentrates on the engagement to Sophie von Kühn, from the poet’s meeting with the twelve-year-old to her excruciating death at just fifteen. It includes letters by Novalis, his brother Erasmus and Schlegel, and Sophie’s pathetic journal with its jottings such as “today was like yesterday nothing at all happened” – four days before her engagement to Novalis, which didn’t even rate an entry. The texts culminate in Novalis’s Journal of 1797, and conclude with the most important sources: the life by his brother Karl (1802), that by his mentor, August Cölestin Just (1805) and, still the best essay, that by Ludwig Tieck (1815). As Donehower aptly comments: “contrary to the stereotypical image of the otherworldly, solitary romantic”, Novalis is rarely alone. The diaries are filled with references to social events, to conversations, meals, walks, and so on. There are also some fairly frank notes on his sexual activity, what Novalis calls “the satisfaction of my fantastical desires”. Apart from occasional solecisms (“the father” for “father”, for example) the translation reads well.

Donehower follows recent scholarship in teasing out the poet’s changing identities, from the philosophy student, aspiring lawyer and gallant (“Fritz the flirt”), to Sophie’s admirer, her grief-stricken fiancé, the committed student at the Freiberg Mining Academy and the conscientious mining engineer. Sophie’s forbearance in her suffering became a cult – even Goethe visited her sickbed. She suffered three operations, but her liver tumour was incurable. Yet it was less the by all accounts remarkable living Sophie than the experience at her grave, the stimulus for the Hymns to the Night, which proved the defining factor in the poet’s life. The journal – as translated by Donehower – narrates:

"In the evening I went to Sophie. There I was indescribably joyful – lightning-like moments of enthusiasm – I blew the grave away from me like dust – centuries were as moments – her presence was palpable – I believed she would appear at any moment – "

Novalis anatomizes his unio mystica with Sophie in quasi-scientific detail, dissecting his actions and emotions to disclose the physical basis for the transcendental:

"As the mortal pain subsides, the spiritual sorrow grows stronger, along with a certain calm despair. The world becomes ever stranger – I feel increasing indifference towards the things around me and inside me. The brighter it gets around me and inside me – "

The narrative recalls the spiritual exercises practised by the Pietists to encourage the “inner light” to emerge. In following this goal, Novalis unites the mental with the affective sides of his personality to establish what he calls his “Philo-Sophie”. In his elevation of her into his ideal, Sophie becomes a mythical cult-figure, sharing aspects of the Virgin Mary and Christ, and personifying knowledge and wisdom. Human identity in general becomes a complex phenomenon for Novalis:

"A truly synthetic person is one who resembles many persons at once – a genius. Each person is the germinal point of an infinite genius. He is able to be divided into many persons, yet still remain one. The true analysis of person as such brings forth many persons – the person can only be individualized as persons, dissolution and dispersion. A person is a harmony – no admixture no movement – no substance such as “soul”. Spirit and person are one. (Energy is origin)"

It remained for Proust to realize Novalis’s starry dream, and to complete a novel as memory (“Er-Innerung”), a fiction that recreates the plural self by manifesting society as an inner cosmos.

Collectivism, on this Romantic view, was the social correlative of the plural self, and with Schlegel Novalis pursued what they called “symphilosophical” collaboration, a central axis of Jena Romanticism. The chief impetus for Novalis’s intellectual development, however, came from his encounter with Fichte at the University of Jena, and his breakthrough as a thinker is documented in the notebooks now known as the Fichte Studies. These form the philosophical counterpoint to his relations with Sophie. Jane Kneller’s translation of these is now followed by David W. Wood’s excellent version of the fragments from the next major phase in Novalis’s thought, generally known as The Universal Brouillon, to which Wood gives the more plausible and attractive title, Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia. It is to be hoped that this dextrous change will help establish the notebooks as a central text of early German Romanticism. Like other recent translators, Wood follows the historico-critical edition, and thereby confirms that the apparently intuitive thinker presented in the Athenaeum aphorisms (1798) was in fact a systematic seeker after truth. Wood’s volume also includes a short selection from the Freiberg Studies in Natural Science (1798–9). With its lucid introduction and notes, this essential volume enables the English-speaking reader to approach the Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia (1798–9) for the first time as a coherent text, part of a wider search in Germany for a new scientific method, a plan only later realized in modern physics. It should now take its rightful place alongside the “Oldest System-Programme of German Idealism” (1796) by Hegel, Hölderlin and Schelling, the first Romantic work to herald a poetically orientated physics; and Goethe’s exemplary fusion of science and poetry, On Morphology – which partly prompted, partly responded to the younger men’s theses. From anti-Newtonian musings such as these, the German scientific revolution associated with Planck, Einstein and Heisenberg was to draw a significant cultural inspiration.

Novalis called the philosophy of his Encyclopaedia “magical idealism”. Perhaps the nearest he came to explaining it was in a jotting of July 1798:

"To be an empiricist means to see thinking as conditioned by the influence of the outer world and things – empiricists are passive thinkers. Voltaire is a pure empiricist and so are many of the French philosophes . . . . the transcendental empiricists . . . make the transition to the dogmatists – from there to the visionaries – or transcendental dogmatists – then to Kant – from there to Fichte – and finally to magical idealism."

The magical idealist “wonderfully refracts the higher light”, and poetically transforms nature by “the magical, powerful faculty of thought”. This involves reinstating the Renaissance concept of the magus and applying it systematically to modern science.

On one occasion, Novalis also compares his project to a voyage of discovery:

"I have been on my journey of discovery, or on my pursuit, since I saw you last, and have chanced upon extremely promising coastlines – which perhaps circumscribe a new scientific continent. – This ocean is teeming with fledgeling islands.

The Athenaeum aphorisms, Blüthenstaub, only intimated the greater project:

"We are connected to every part of the universe, as with future and prehistory. It only depends on the direction and length of our concentration which relation we particularly wish to develop, which will become the most important for us, which will take effect. A true method of this procedure is probably nothing less than the long-sought art of invention; in fact it is probably more . . . ."

The newly translated notes go much further in exploring the new science Novalis calls “encylopaedistics”. The name for this “science of the sciences” may echo Diderot’s Encyclopédie, but Novalis seeks to outdo the French model by introducing dynamism to the idea of an Encyclopaedia, to study the “relationships – similarities – equalities – effects of the sciences on each other” to create “a scientific Bible”. His procedure instances the root meaning of the word “encyclo-paedia”, that is, a “circle of learning”. The approach entails turning scientific method on its head, as when Novalis claims to transform Bacon’s inductivism into a deductive method for “generating truths and ideas writ large – of generating inspired thoughts – of producing a living scientific organon”. As the Freiberg notebook records: “The combinatorial analysis of physics might be the indirect art of invention that was sought by Francis Bacon”.

The “circles” Novalis envisages in his “combinatorial analysis” are inspired by the medieval ars combinatoria, whose ideas retained an attraction for German thinkers down to Leibniz and Kant. The concentric wheels that Ramon Lull devised as a tool for inventing new ideas also serve Novalis as a model, and provide him with a motor for recombining existing ideas to create new ones. This method is, incidentally, related to the ones which the late Mary Douglas traces with such passion in Thinking in Circles (2007). As Novalis writes:

"There exists a sphere in which every proof is a circle – or an error – where nothing can be demonstrated – that is the sphere of the developed Golden Age. This and the polar sphere also harmonize. I realize the Golden Age – by developing the polar sphere. I am unconsciously in [the Golden Age], insofar as I am unconsciously in the polar sphere – and consciously, insofar as I am consciously in both."

The encyclopaedic Bible inducts the reader into the Golden Age: man returns to the prelapsarian state by rearranging the totality of all knowledge, thereby achieving a higher, paradisal consciousness. Man’s intellectual versatility reflects the universality of his creator. Yet the construct, like the self, remains unstable:

"Philosophy disengages everything – relativizes the universe – And like the Copernican system, eliminates the fixed points – creating a revolving system out of one at rest."

Novalis musters a dazzling array of disciplines to constitute his Romantic Encyclopaedia including mathematics, mineralogy, medicine, law, economics and music. Everything he touches he illuminates. Yet the totalizing aesthetic has its risks, both in precipitate insights, and in aspects of his theory of the State, understood as a “spiritual being” comparable to God. To combat absolutism, however, the Romantic Encyclopaedia looks for Kantian limitations: “Resolution of the main political problem . . . . Are combinations of opposed political elements possible a priori?”.

The philosophy of magical idealism led inevitably to the practice of literature. When Novalis abandoned the Romantic Encyclopaedia, it was to write the poetry it preaches, the “art of transforming everything into Sophie – or vice versa”. The Hymns to the Night brilliantly exemplify the turn: the poem’s success stems in no small part from the way it illumines the poet’s grief and mystically resolves his problems by an exegesis of world history. It is the first modern panoptic lyric, unmatched in visionary compass before Eliot’s Waste Land and Rilke’s Duino Elegies. In The Novices at Sais, his fragmentary Bildungsroman, Novalis develops the conceit of encyclopaedic circles to educate its main character, thereby also showing how world history advances by the combinatorial progress of humanity. The novel stems from an infatuation and later disappointment with Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. Goethe may not have approved, but he listened. In Wilhelm Meister’s Travels, he likewise favours the scientific path for his central character, and adapts Novalis’s method to represent the circles (“Kreise”) that compose society. In so doing, he replaces the abstract ars combinatoria used by Novalis with a sociological principle, more in tune with his own novel’s social theory, which offers a peaceful alternative to the route later proposed by Marx: a revaluation of labour, to remove the alienation that might lead to revolution, and a new respect for collectivism as a value.

For a fragile moment around 1800, then, there was a balance between individualism and collectivity in German culture, recalling the “Symphilosophie” envisaged by Schlegel: “Perhaps a whole new era will begin in the arts and sciences if Symphilosophie and Sympoesie become so general . . . that . . . complementary natures produce collective works”. Goethe paid homage to this ideal, when he called his Faust an “être collectif”. Novalis’s Romantic Encyclopaedia translates this joint activity to the political sphere, as in an entry on “Theory of a Nation. Pedagogy of a Nation”, concerning the interdependence of individual and collective. The protean method of his Romantic Encyclopaedia underpins much of his writing, where the disarming negations, reversals and pirouettes dissolve the rigidities of linear thought into a supple, lyrical dialectic. Thus Novalis the advocate of the State can also conclude: “In many places States should not be established at all . . .”. Such provocations retain a startling topicality.

Bruce Donehower, editor
THE BIRTH OF NOVALIS
Friedrich von Hardenberg’s Journal of 1797, with selected letters and documents
159pp. State University of New York Press. $25.
978 0 7914 6969 9

Novalis
NOTES FOR A ROMANTIC ENCYCLOPAEDIA
Das Allgemeine Brouillon
Translated, edited, and with an Introduction by David W. Wood
290pp. State University of New York Press. $35.
978 0 7914 6973 6


Jeremy Adler's translation of Hoelderlin's philosophical essays will be published next year.

Chaitin - Chaitin! Chaitin!

The Omega Man
Photo: Kevin Knight
Photo: Kevin Knight
He shattered mathematics with a single number. And that was just for starters, says Marcus Chown
TWO plus two equals four: nobody would argue with that. Mathematicians can rigorously prove sums like this, and many other things besides. The language of maths allows them to provide neatly ordered ways to describe everything that happens in the world around us.
Or so they once thought. Gregory Chaitin, a mathematics researcher at IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, has shown that mathematicians can't actually prove very much at all. Doing maths, he says, is just a process of discovery like every other branch of science: it's an experimental field where mathematicians stumble upon facts in the same way that zoologists might come across a new species of primate.
Mathematics has always been considered free of uncertainty and able to provide a pure foundation for other, messier fields of science. But maths is just as messy, Chaitin says: mathematicians are simply acting on intuition and experimenting with ideas, just like everyone else. Zoologists think there might be something new swinging from branch to branch in the unexplored forests of Madagascar, and mathematicians have hunches about which part of the mathematical landscape to explore. The subject is no more profound than that.

The reason for Chaitin's provocative statements is that he has found that the core of mathematics is riddled with holes. Chaitin has shown that there are an infinite number of mathematical facts but, for the most part, they are unrelated to each other and impossible to tie together with unifying theorems. If mathematicians find any connections between these facts, they do so by luck. "Most of mathematics is true for no particular reason," Chaitin says. "Maths is true by accident."

This is particularly bad news for physicists on a quest for a complete and concise description of the Universe. Maths is the language of physics, so Chaitin's discovery implies there can never be a reliable "theory of everything", neatly summarising all the basic features of reality in one set of equations. It's a bitter pill to swallow, but even Steven Weinberg, a Nobel prizewinning physicist and author of Dreams of a Final Theory, has swallowed it. "We will never be sure that our final theory is mathematically consistent," he admits.

Chaitin's mathematical curse is not an abstract theorem or an impenetrable equation: it is simply a number. This number, which Chaitin calls Omega, is real, just as pi is real. But Omega is infinitely long and utterly incalculable. Chaitin has found that Omega infects the whole of mathematics, placing fundamental limits on what we can know. And Omega is just the beginning. There are even more disturbing numbers--Chaitin calls them Super-Omegas--that would defy calculation even if we ever managed to work Omega out. The Omega strain of incalculable numbers reveals that mathematics is not simply moth-eaten, it is mostly made of gaping holes. Anarchy, not order, is at the heart of the Universe.

Chaitin discovered Omega and its astonishing properties while wrestling with two of the most influential mathematical discoveries of the 20th century. In 1931, the Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel blew a gaping hole in mathematics: his Incompleteness Theorem showed there are some mathematical theorems that you just can't prove. Then, five years later, British mathematician Alan Turing built on Gödel's work.

Using a hypothetical computer that could mimic the operation of any machine, Turing showed that there is something that can never be computed. There are no instructions you can give a computer that will enable it to decide in advance whether a given program will ever finish its task and halt. To find out whether a program will eventually halt--after a day, a week or a trillion years--you just have to run it and wait. He called this the halting problem.

Decades later, in the 1960s, Chaitin took up where Turing left off. Fascinated by Turing's work, he began to investigate the halting problem. He considered all the possible programs that Turing's hypothetical computer could run, and then looked for the probability that a program, chosen at random from among all the possible programs, will halt. The work took him nearly 20 years, but he eventually showed that this "halting probability" turns Turing's question of whether a program halts into a real number, somewhere between 0 and 1.

Chaitin named this number Omega. And he showed that, just as there are no computable instructions for determining in advance whether a computer will halt, there are also no instructions for determining the digits of Omega. Omega is uncomputable.

Some numbers, like pi, can be generated by a relatively short program which calculates its infinite number of digits one by one--how far you go is just a matter of time and resources. Another example of a computable number might be one that comprises 200 repeats of the sequence 0101. The number is long, but a program for generating it only need say: "repeat '01' 400 times".

There is no such program for Omega: in binary, it consists of an unending, random string of 0s and 1s. "My Omega number has no pattern or structure to it whatsoever," says Chaitin. "It's a string of 0s and 1s in which each digit is as unrelated to its predecessor as one coin toss is from the next."

The same process that led Turing to conclude that the halting problem is undecidable also led Chaitin to the discovery of an unknowable number. "It's the outstanding example of something which is unknowable in mathematics," Chaitin says.

An unknowable number wouldn't be a problem if it never reared its head. But once Chaitin had discovered Omega, he began to wonder whether it might have implications in the real world. So he decided to search mathematics for places where Omega might crop up. So far, he has only looked properly in one place: number theory.

Number theory is the foundation of pure mathematics. It describes how to deal with concepts such as counting, adding, and multiplying. Chaitin's search for Omega in number theory started with "Diophantine equations"--which involve only the simple concepts of addition, multiplication and exponentiation (raising one number to the power of another) of whole numbers.

Chaitin formulated a Diophantine equation that was 200 pages long and had 17,000 variables. Given an equation like this, mathematicians would normally search for its solutions. There could be any number of answers: perhaps 10, 20, or even an infinite number of them. But Chaitin didn't look for specific solutions, he simply looked to see whether there was a finite or an infinite number of them.

He did this because he knew it was the key to unearthing Omega. Mathematicians James Jones of the University of Calgary and Yuri Matijasevic of the Steklov Institute of Mathematics in St Petersburg had shown how to translate the operation of Turing's computer into a Diophantine equation. They found that there is a relationship between the solutions to the equation and the halting problem for the machine's program. Specifically, if a particular program doesn't ever halt, a particular Diophantine equation will have no solution. In effect, the equations provide a bridge linking Turing's halting problem--and thus Chaitin's halting probability--with simple mathematical operations, such as the addition and multiplication of whole numbers.

Chaitin had arranged his equation so that there was one particular variable, a parameter which he called N, that provided the key to finding Omega. When he substituted numbers for N, analysis of the equation would provide the digits of Omega in binary. When he put 1 in place of N, he would ask whether there was a finite or infinite number of whole number solutions to the resulting equation. The answer gives the first digit of Omega: a finite number of solutions would make this digit 0, an infinite number of solutions would make it 1. Substituting 2 for N and asking the same question about the equation's solutions would give the second digit of Omega. Chaitin could, in theory, continue forever. "My equation is constructed so that asking whether it has finitely or infinitely many solutions as you vary the parameter is the same as determining the bits of Omega," he says.

But Chaitin already knew that each digit of Omega is random and independent. This could only mean one thing. Because finding out whether a Diophantine equation has a finite or infinite number of solutions generates these digits, each answer to the equation must therefore be unknowable and independent of every other answer. In other words, the randomness of the digits of Omega imposes limits on what can be known from number theory--the most elementary of mathematical fields. "If randomness is even in something as basic as number theory, where else is it?" asks Chaitin. He thinks he knows the answer. "My hunch is it's everywhere," he says. "Randomness is the true foundation of mathematics."

The fact that randomness is everywhere has deep consequences, says John Casti, a mathematician at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico and the Vienna University of Technology. It means that a few bits of maths may follow from each other, but for most mathematical situations those connections won't exist. And if you can't make connections, you can't solve or prove things. All a mathematician can do is aim to find the little bits of maths that do tie together. "Chaitin's work shows that solvable problems are like a small island in a vast sea of undecidable propositions," Casti says.
Photo: Kevin Knight
Photo: Kevin Knight

Take the problem of perfect odd numbers. A perfect number has divisors whose sum makes the number. For example, 6 is perfect because its divisors are 1, 2 and 3, and their sum is 6. There are plenty of even perfect numbers, but no one has ever found an odd number that is perfect. And yet, no one has been able to prove that an odd number can't be perfect. Unproved hypotheses like this and the Riemann hypothesis, which has become the unsure foundation of many other theorems (New Scientist, 11 November 2000, p 32) are examples of things that should be accepted as unprovable but nonetheless true, Chaitin suggests. In other words, there are some things that scientists will always have to take on trust.

Unsurprisingly, mathematicians had a difficult time coming to terms with Omega. But there is worse to come. "We can go beyond Omega," Chaitin says. In his new book, Exploring Randomness (New Scientist, 10 January, p 46), Chaitin has now unleashed the "Super-Omegas".

Like Omega, the Super-Omegas also owe their genesis to Turing. He imagined a God-like computer, much more powerful than any real computer, which could know the unknowable: whether a real computer would halt when running a particular program, or carry on forever. He called this fantastical machine an "oracle". And as soon as Chaitin discovered Omega--the probability that a random computer program would eventually halt--he realised he could also imagine an oracle that would know Omega. This machine would have its own unknowable halting probability, Omega'.

But if one oracle knows Omega, it's easy to imagine a second-order oracle that knows Omega'. This machine, in turn, has its own halting probability, Omega'', which is known only by a third-order oracle, and so on. According to Chaitin, there exists an infinite sequence of increasingly random Omegas. "There is even an all-seeing infinitely high-order oracle which knows all other Omegas," he says.

He kept these numbers to himself for decades, thinking they were too bizarre to be relevant to the real world. Just as Turing looked upon his God-like computer as a flight of fancy, Chaitin thought these Super-Omegas were fantasy numbers emerging from fantasy machines. But Veronica Becher of the University of Buenos Aires has shown that Chaitin was wrong: the Super-Omegas are both real and important. Chaitin is genuinely surprised by this discovery. "Incredibly, they actually have a real meaning for real computers," he says.

Becher has been collaborating with Chaitin for just over a year, and is helping to drag Super-Omegas into the real world. As a computer scientist, she wondered whether there were links between Omega, the higher-order Omegas and real computers.

Real computers don't just perform finite computations, doing one or a few things, and then halt. They can also carry out infinite computations, producing an infinite series of results. "Many computer applications are designed to produce an infinite amount of output," Becher says. Examples include Web browsers such as Netscape and operating systems such as Windows 2000.

This example gave Becher her first avenue to explore: the probability that, over the course of an infinite computation, a machine would produce only a finite amount of output. To do this, Becher and her student Sergio Daicz used a technique developed by Chaitin. They took a real computer and turned it into an approximation of an oracle. The "fake oracle" decides that a program halts if--and only if--it halts within time T. A real computer can handle this weakened version of the halting problem. "Then you let T go to infinity," Chaitin says. This allows the shortcomings of the fake to diminish as it runs for longer and longer.

Using variations on this technique, Becher and Daicz found that the probability that an infinite computation produces only a finite amount of output is the same as Omega', the halting probability of the oracle. Going further, they showed that Omega'' is equivalent to the probability that, during an infinite computation, a computer will fail to produce an output--for example, get no result from a computation and move on to the next one--and that it will do this only a finite number of times.

These might seem like odd things to bother with, but Chaitin believes this is an important step. "Becher's work makes the whole hierarchy of Omega numbers seem much more believable," he says. Things that Turing--and Chaitin--imagined were pure fantasy are actually very real.

Now that the Super-Omegas are being unearthed in the real world, Chaitin is sure they will crop up all over mathematics, just like Omega. The Super-Omegas are even more random than Omega: if mathematicians were to get over Omega's obstacles, they would face an ever-elevated barrier as they confronted Becher's results.

And that has knock-on effects elsewhere. Becher and Chaitin admit that the full implications of their new discoveries have yet to become clear, but mathematics is central to many aspects of science. Certainly any theory of everything, as it attempts to tie together all the facts about the Universe, would need to jump an infinite number of hurdles to prove its worth.

The discovery of Omega has exposed gaping holes in mathematics, making research in the field look like playing a lottery, and it has demolished hopes of a theory of everything. Who knows what the Super-Omegas are capable of? "This," Chaitin warns, "is just the beginning."
Further reading:

* Exploring Randomness by G. J. Chaitin, Springer-Verlag (2001)
* "A Century of Controversy Over the Foundations of Mathematics" by G. J. Chaitin, Complexity, vol 5, p 12 (2000)
* The Unknowable by G. J. Chaitin, Springer-Verlag (1999)
* "Randomness everywhere" by C. S. Calude and G. J. Chaitin, Nature, vol 400, p 319 (1999)
* http://www.cs.umaine.edu/~chaitin/

Chai

The Omega Man
Photo: Kevin Knight
Photo: Kevin Knight
He shattered mathematics with a single number. And that was just for starters, says Marcus Chown
TWO plus two equals four: nobody would argue with that. Mathematicians can rigorously prove sums like this, and many other things besides. The language of maths allows them to provide neatly ordered ways to describe everything that happens in the world around us.
Or so they once thought. Gregory Chaitin, a mathematics researcher at IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, has shown that mathematicians can't actually prove very much at all. Doing maths, he says, is just a process of discovery like every other branch of science: it's an experimental field where mathematicians stumble upon facts in the same way that zoologists might come across a new species of primate.
Mathematics has always been considered free of uncertainty and able to provide a pure foundation for other, messier fields of science. But maths is just as messy, Chaitin says: mathematicians are simply acting on intuition and experimenting with ideas, just like everyone else. Zoologists think there might be something new swinging from branch to branch in the unexplored forests of Madagascar, and mathematicians have hunches about which part of the mathematical landscape to explore. The subject is no more profound than that.

The reason for Chaitin's provocative statements is that he has found that the core of mathematics is riddled with holes. Chaitin has shown that there are an infinite number of mathematical facts but, for the most part, they are unrelated to each other and impossible to tie together with unifying theorems. If mathematicians find any connections between these facts, they do so by luck. "Most of mathematics is true for no particular reason," Chaitin says. "Maths is true by accident."

This is particularly bad news for physicists on a quest for a complete and concise description of the Universe. Maths is the language of physics, so Chaitin's discovery implies there can never be a reliable "theory of everything", neatly summarising all the basic features of reality in one set of equations. It's a bitter pill to swallow, but even Steven Weinberg, a Nobel prizewinning physicist and author of Dreams of a Final Theory, has swallowed it. "We will never be sure that our final theory is mathematically consistent," he admits.

Chaitin's mathematical curse is not an abstract theorem or an impenetrable equation: it is simply a number. This number, which Chaitin calls Omega, is real, just as pi is real. But Omega is infinitely long and utterly incalculable. Chaitin has found that Omega infects the whole of mathematics, placing fundamental limits on what we can know. And Omega is just the beginning. There are even more disturbing numbers--Chaitin calls them Super-Omegas--that would defy calculation even if we ever managed to work Omega out. The Omega strain of incalculable numbers reveals that mathematics is not simply moth-eaten, it is mostly made of gaping holes. Anarchy, not order, is at the heart of the Universe.

Chaitin discovered Omega and its astonishing properties while wrestling with two of the most influential mathematical discoveries of the 20th century. In 1931, the Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel blew a gaping hole in mathematics: his Incompleteness Theorem showed there are some mathematical theorems that you just can't prove. Then, five years later, British mathematician Alan Turing built on Gödel's work.

Using a hypothetical computer that could mimic the operation of any machine, Turing showed that there is something that can never be computed. There are no instructions you can give a computer that will enable it to decide in advance whether a given program will ever finish its task and halt. To find out whether a program will eventually halt--after a day, a week or a trillion years--you just have to run it and wait. He called this the halting problem.

Decades later, in the 1960s, Chaitin took up where Turing left off. Fascinated by Turing's work, he began to investigate the halting problem. He considered all the possible programs that Turing's hypothetical computer could run, and then looked for the probability that a program, chosen at random from among all the possible programs, will halt. The work took him nearly 20 years, but he eventually showed that this "halting probability" turns Turing's question of whether a program halts into a real number, somewhere between 0 and 1.

Chaitin named this number Omega. And he showed that, just as there are no computable instructions for determining in advance whether a computer will halt, there are also no instructions for determining the digits of Omega. Omega is uncomputable.

Some numbers, like pi, can be generated by a relatively short program which calculates its infinite number of digits one by one--how far you go is just a matter of time and resources. Another example of a computable number might be one that comprises 200 repeats of the sequence 0101. The number is long, but a program for generating it only need say: "repeat '01' 400 times".

There is no such program for Omega: in binary, it consists of an unending, random string of 0s and 1s. "My Omega number has no pattern or structure to it whatsoever," says Chaitin. "It's a string of 0s and 1s in which each digit is as unrelated to its predecessor as one coin toss is from the next."

The same process that led Turing to conclude that the halting problem is undecidable also led Chaitin to the discovery of an unknowable number. "It's the outstanding example of something which is unknowable in mathematics," Chaitin says.

An unknowable number wouldn't be a problem if it never reared its head. But once Chaitin had discovered Omega, he began to wonder whether it might have implications in the real world. So he decided to search mathematics for places where Omega might crop up. So far, he has only looked properly in one place: number theory.

Number theory is the foundation of pure mathematics. It describes how to deal with concepts such as counting, adding, and multiplying. Chaitin's search for Omega in number theory started with "Diophantine equations"--which involve only the simple concepts of addition, multiplication and exponentiation (raising one number to the power of another) of whole numbers.

Chaitin formulated a Diophantine equation that was 200 pages long and had 17,000 variables. Given an equation like this, mathematicians would normally search for its solutions. There could be any number of answers: perhaps 10, 20, or even an infinite number of them. But Chaitin didn't look for specific solutions, he simply looked to see whether there was a finite or an infinite number of them.

He did this because he knew it was the key to unearthing Omega. Mathematicians James Jones of the University of Calgary and Yuri Matijasevic of the Steklov Institute of Mathematics in St Petersburg had shown how to translate the operation of Turing's computer into a Diophantine equation. They found that there is a relationship between the solutions to the equation and the halting problem for the machine's program. Specifically, if a particular program doesn't ever halt, a particular Diophantine equation will have no solution. In effect, the equations provide a bridge linking Turing's halting problem--and thus Chaitin's halting probability--with simple mathematical operations, such as the addition and multiplication of whole numbers.

Chaitin had arranged his equation so that there was one particular variable, a parameter which he called N, that provided the key to finding Omega. When he substituted numbers for N, analysis of the equation would provide the digits of Omega in binary. When he put 1 in place of N, he would ask whether there was a finite or infinite number of whole number solutions to the resulting equation. The answer gives the first digit of Omega: a finite number of solutions would make this digit 0, an infinite number of solutions would make it 1. Substituting 2 for N and asking the same question about the equation's solutions would give the second digit of Omega. Chaitin could, in theory, continue forever. "My equation is constructed so that asking whether it has finitely or infinitely many solutions as you vary the parameter is the same as determining the bits of Omega," he says.

But Chaitin already knew that each digit of Omega is random and independent. This could only mean one thing. Because finding out whether a Diophantine equation has a finite or infinite number of solutions generates these digits, each answer to the equation must therefore be unknowable and independent of every other answer. In other words, the randomness of the digits of Omega imposes limits on what can be known from number theory--the most elementary of mathematical fields. "If randomness is even in something as basic as number theory, where else is it?" asks Chaitin. He thinks he knows the answer. "My hunch is it's everywhere," he says. "Randomness is the true foundation of mathematics."

The fact that randomness is everywhere has deep consequences, says John Casti, a mathematician at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico and the Vienna University of Technology. It means that a few bits of maths may follow from each other, but for most mathematical situations those connections won't exist. And if you can't make connections, you can't solve or prove things. All a mathematician can do is aim to find the little bits of maths that do tie together. "Chaitin's work shows that solvable problems are like a small island in a vast sea of undecidable propositions," Casti says.
Photo: Kevin Knight
Photo: Kevin Knight

Take the problem of perfect odd numbers. A perfect number has divisors whose sum makes the number. For example, 6 is perfect because its divisors are 1, 2 and 3, and their sum is 6. There are plenty of even perfect numbers, but no one has ever found an odd number that is perfect. And yet, no one has been able to prove that an odd number can't be perfect. Unproved hypotheses like this and the Riemann hypothesis, which has become the unsure foundation of many other theorems (New Scientist, 11 November 2000, p 32) are examples of things that should be accepted as unprovable but nonetheless true, Chaitin suggests. In other words, there are some things that scientists will always have to take on trust.

Unsurprisingly, mathematicians had a difficult time coming to terms with Omega. But there is worse to come. "We can go beyond Omega," Chaitin says. In his new book, Exploring Randomness (New Scientist, 10 January, p 46), Chaitin has now unleashed the "Super-Omegas".

Like Omega, the Super-Omegas also owe their genesis to Turing. He imagined a God-like computer, much more powerful than any real computer, which could know the unknowable: whether a real computer would halt when running a particular program, or carry on forever. He called this fantastical machine an "oracle". And as soon as Chaitin discovered Omega--the probability that a random computer program would eventually halt--he realised he could also imagine an oracle that would know Omega. This machine would have its own unknowable halting probability, Omega'.

But if one oracle knows Omega, it's easy to imagine a second-order oracle that knows Omega'. This machine, in turn, has its own halting probability, Omega'', which is known only by a third-order oracle, and so on. According to Chaitin, there exists an infinite sequence of increasingly random Omegas. "There is even an all-seeing infinitely high-order oracle which knows all other Omegas," he says.

He kept these numbers to himself for decades, thinking they were too bizarre to be relevant to the real world. Just as Turing looked upon his God-like computer as a flight of fancy, Chaitin thought these Super-Omegas were fantasy numbers emerging from fantasy machines. But Veronica Becher of the University of Buenos Aires has shown that Chaitin was wrong: the Super-Omegas are both real and important. Chaitin is genuinely surprised by this discovery. "Incredibly, they actually have a real meaning for real computers," he says.

Becher has been collaborating with Chaitin for just over a year, and is helping to drag Super-Omegas into the real world. As a computer scientist, she wondered whether there were links between Omega, the higher-order Omegas and real computers.

Real computers don't just perform finite computations, doing one or a few things, and then halt. They can also carry out infinite computations, producing an infinite series of results. "Many computer applications are designed to produce an infinite amount of output," Becher says. Examples include Web browsers such as Netscape and operating systems such as Windows 2000.

This example gave Becher her first avenue to explore: the probability that, over the course of an infinite computation, a machine would produce only a finite amount of output. To do this, Becher and her student Sergio Daicz used a technique developed by Chaitin. They took a real computer and turned it into an approximation of an oracle. The "fake oracle" decides that a program halts if--and only if--it halts within time T. A real computer can handle this weakened version of the halting problem. "Then you let T go to infinity," Chaitin says. This allows the shortcomings of the fake to diminish as it runs for longer and longer.

Using variations on this technique, Becher and Daicz found that the probability that an infinite computation produces only a finite amount of output is the same as Omega', the halting probability of the oracle. Going further, they showed that Omega'' is equivalent to the probability that, during an infinite computation, a computer will fail to produce an output--for example, get no result from a computation and move on to the next one--and that it will do this only a finite number of times.

These might seem like odd things to bother with, but Chaitin believes this is an important step. "Becher's work makes the whole hierarchy of Omega numbers seem much more believable," he says. Things that Turing--and Chaitin--imagined were pure fantasy are actually very real.

Now that the Super-Omegas are being unearthed in the real world, Chaitin is sure they will crop up all over mathematics, just like Omega. The Super-Omegas are even more random than Omega: if mathematicians were to get over Omega's obstacles, they would face an ever-elevated barrier as they confronted Becher's results.

And that has knock-on effects elsewhere. Becher and Chaitin admit that the full implications of their new discoveries have yet to become clear, but mathematics is central to many aspects of science. Certainly any theory of everything, as it attempts to tie together all the facts about the Universe, would need to jump an infinite number of hurdles to prove its worth.

The discovery of Omega has exposed gaping holes in mathematics, making research in the field look like playing a lottery, and it has demolished hopes of a theory of everything. Who knows what the Super-Omegas are capable of? "This," Chaitin warns, "is just the beginning."
Further reading:

* Exploring Randomness by G. J. Chaitin, Springer-Verlag (2001)
* "A Century of Controversy Over the Foundations of Mathematics" by G. J. Chaitin, Complexity, vol 5, p 12 (2000)
* The Unknowable by G. J. Chaitin, Springer-Verlag (1999)
* "Randomness everywhere" by C. S. Calude and G. J. Chaitin, Nature, vol 400, p 319 (1999)
* http://www.cs.umaine.edu/~chaitin/