Glass Bead Games – Page 2 – The Imaginative Universal

Memes and Goat’s Milk

March 3, 2008 James Ashley1 Comment

masterand

What does eighteenth century naval warfare have to do with life today? Nothing, as far as I can tell, yet one of the pleasures of reading Patrick O’Brian’s novels about Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin — one of the great portraits of male friendship in English literature — is the anachronistic affinities one finds between the bygone world of wood and canvas and quotidian modern life, thanks to Mr. O’Brian’s ingenuity.

Take, for instance, this passage from Master And Commander in which Jack, while at sea, is obliged to sign a legal document drafted by his predecessor, the previous captain of the sloop Sophie:

My Lord,

I am to beg you will be pleased to order a Court Martial to be held on Isaac Wilson (seaman) belonging to the Sloop I have the honour to Command for having committed the unnatural Crime of Sodomy on a Goat, in the Goathouse, on the evening of March 16th. I have the Honour to remain, my Lord, Your Lordship’s most obedient very humble servant ….

Like the modern reader, Jack is not pleased with the rules and procedures one must comply with in the course of fulfilling one’s duties. For his friend, Stephen, the matter is simply one that inspires perplexity.

‘It is odd how the law always harps upon the unnaturalness of sodomy,’ observed Stephen. ‘Though I know at least two judges who are paederasts; and of course barristers … What will happen to him?’

‘Oh, he’ll be hanged. Run up at the yard-arm, and boats attending from every ship in the fleet.’

‘That seems a little extreme.’

‘Of course it is. Oh, what an infernal bore — witnesses going over to the flagship by the dozen, days lost … the Sophie a laughing-stock. Why will they report these things? The goat must be slaughtered — that’s but fair — and it shall be served out to the mess that informed on him.’

‘Could you not set them both ashore — on separate shores, if you have strong feelings on the moral issue — and sail quietly away?’

‘Well,’ said Jack, whose anger had died down. ‘Perhaps there is something in what you propose. A dish of tea? You take milk, sir?’

‘Goat’s milk, sir?’

‘Why, I suppose it is.’

‘Perhaps without milk, then, if you please.’

The connection to be found between this passage and today’s headlines is no doubt as obvious to you as it is to me, reader. The notion of contamination which runs thematically through this brief anecdote is a clear analog for the theory of memes. Terms such as "viral", often used to describe memes, reveal the epidemiological roots of memetic theory. While the vectors are different, the notion that the sin of seaman Isaac Wilson has somehow been transmitted to the hapless goat, for which reason the goat "must be slaughtered," mirrors the theory that ideas such as "freedom", "God", and "revolution" can be transmitted from person to person, carrying with them certain properties that will affect the behavior of the infected.

At the same time, this anecdote reveals one of the chief problems with memetic theory. The idea of memes depends on a peculiar notion about the identity of memes when they inhabit different hosts. But is this identity really something we can take for granted? Is the "freedom" meme really the same from person to person? What is missing from the meme theory is an acknowledgement of the inherent ambiguity of all ideas. One man’s meat is another man’s poison, after all.

For instance, what is the intent behind serving the slaughtered goat, the unwarranted victim of seaman Isaac Wilson’s wantonness, to the seamen who informed on him? Is it a reward for their dutifulness with regard to the Royal Navy or a punishment for their faithlessness with regard to their comrade? Is the intent to let them taste a bit of Mr. Wilson’s humiliation, or to fill their bellies with a rare treat?

Memetics seems to completely ignore the much more interesting phenomenon of the association of ideas — perhaps necessarily so, since while the affinity between various notions and concepts, the way one idea leads to another, depends on the malleability of thought, memetics depends on its immutability.

The point is brought across in Stephen Maturin’s aversion toward the goat’s milk. Why does he refuse the milk? Because, in his mind, he associates it with Mr. Wilson’s goat. One idea leads naturally to the other and the properties of Mr. Wilson’s crime are mysteriously transferred to the goat’s milk — an entirely different goat, certainly.

kant Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), normally thought of as a dour man though a great philosopher, is duly famous within certain disreputable circles for inserting the goat’s milk meme into his seminal work, the Critique of Pure Reason, sometimes known as the First Critique. In Section III of the Second Part of the Doctrine of Elements, after he has explained the meaning of the term transcendental logic, and after he has assented to the traditional definition of truth as the agreement between knowledge and its object, Kant drops this witty passage:

To know what questions may reasonably be asked is already a great and necessary proof of sagacity and insight. For if a question is absurd in itself and calls for an answer where none is required, it not only brings shame on the propounder of the question, but may betray an incautious listener into absurd answers, thus presenting, as the ancients said, the ludicrous spectacle of one man milking a he-goat and the other holding a sieve underneath.

Kant alludes to the fact that this particular meme has classical antecedents, and indeed one can find it in Lucian’s (c. 125-180 AD) Life of Demonax (c. 70-170 AD). That particular version of the meme was later replicated in Erasmus’s (1466-1536) collection of Adages.

When [Demonax] saw a pair of philosophers, each as ignorant as the other, disputing together, one propounding absurd questions and the other giving crazy answers, entirely off the point: ‘Why friends,’ said he, ‘is not one of these fellows milking a he-goat and the other putting a sieve under it?’

To Polybius (c. 203-120 BC), in turn, is ascribed the following version of the trope:

But I fear that the well-known adage may apply to me unknown to myself: "Which is the greater simpleton, the man who milks a he-goat or he who holds a sieve to catch the milk?" For it may be said of me that by confuting in detail what is confessed to be a lie, and doing so at great length, I am behaving in a very similar manner. So I shall be told I entirely waste my time in speaking of this matter, unless indeed I wish to record dreams and take into serious consideration the visions of a man with his eyes open.

Erasmus ascribes this same variation to Diogenes of Sinope (c. 404-323 BC) (aka Diogenes the Cynic).

Another variation can be found in Boswell’s Life of Johnson, though in this case, we move from goats to bovines, and interestingly Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) is mocking the Scottish philosopher (1711-1776) whom Kant credited with waking him from his dogmatic slumber.

Hume, and other sceptical innovators, are vain men, and will gratify themselves at any expence. Truth will not afford sufficient food to their vanity; so they have betaken themselves to errour. Truth, Sir, is a cow that will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull.

(I recommend that the curious reader not attempt googling on the phrase "milk the bull", since this seems to have taken on a different meaning in recent times. "Milk the he-goat", however, is quite safe for searching.)

An obvious question is raised by these variations on a meme. While they are obviously dependent on one another, and perhaps some sort of history can be traced showing how the trope has been transmitted over time from this thinker to that one, are they in fact the same meme? Do memes admit of variation, or must a meme always have the same form? In the latter case, are we then dealing with two memes, for instance the Polybius version and the Demonax version, with the Demonax variation later mutating into the Samuel Johnson version, or is it the case that each host (Demonax, Diogenes, Polybius, Erasmus, Johnson, Kant, O’Brian [1914-2000]) actually possesses a different meme altogether?

The rules by which a meme is transmitted from host to host is a central concern for memetics, and the problem of identity will remain a problem for it. More interesting, from my point of view, is the problem of similarity. What are the rules by which we associate certain ideas with other ideas? Why does Stephen Maturin associate goat’s milk with a seaman’s indiscretion, to the point that he will not drink the milk? How are we able to find a resemblance between these different variations on the he-goat anecdote, derived from different sources, to the point that we associate them all together?

In the First Critique, Kant raises a similar question about the character of experience. Why should it be that events happen in a certain sequence? Why do causes always precede their effects, instead of the other way around? For Kant — and for you too, perhaps, if you have read the Critique — this is a perplexing and ultimately uncanny feature of our experience of the external world. That events should happen in a certain sequence, and not in another, Kant calls Affinity (in philosophical jargon, it is known as the transcendental affinity of the manifold of intuition).

While Kant would not — for those interested, this is because according to Kant inner sense is not associated with a manifold –, we might ask the same question about the way in which one idea follows from another in the stream of consciousness. What are the rules by which, say, the idea of a madeline leads a man to think back on his childhood and wonder about the nature of remembrance? Like memes, the flow of ideas have a viral, irrational, and uncontrollable character to them. It is something like the way in which you get on the Internet to look up how to throw a cocktail party and end up, hours later, reading about cooking with monkey. Whereas memes are objects of a germinal science about how ideas are transmitted between people, shouldn’t there also be a science concerned with the logic by which ideas are linked together within the same person?

But perhaps this is not possible, since a universal logic of how ideas follow upon one another depends on all people being basically the same, and this cannot be guaranteed. Certain people find affinities and make connections that others simply do not. The point is well illustrated in T. S. Elliot’s (1888-1965) play The Cocktail Party — again, contamination is a central theme, here. The setting is simple enough. Edward and Lavinia host a cocktail party, and Alex, a guest, explains current affairs in colonial Africa.

Eliot

Edward: But how do monkeys cause unrest?

Alex: To begin with, the monkeys are very destructive …

Julia: You don’t need to tell me that monkeys are destructive. I shall never forget Mary Mallington’s monkey, The horrid little beast — stole my ticket to mentone and I had to travel in a very slow train and in a couchette. She was very angry when I told her the creature ought to be destroyed.

Lavinia: But can’t they exterminate these monkeys if they are a pest?

Alex: Unfortunately, the majority of the natives are heathen: they hold these monkeys in particular veneration and do not want them killed. So they blame the Government for the damage that the monkeys do.

Edward: That seems unreasonable.

Alex: it is unreasonable, but characteristic. And that’s not the worst of it. Some of the tribes are Christian converts, and, naturally, take a different view. They trap the monkeys. And they eat them. The young monkeys are extremely palatable: I’ve cooked them myself …

Edward: And did anybody eat them when you cooked them?

Alex: Oh yes, indeed. I invented for the natives several new recipes. But you see, what with eating the monkeys and what with protecting their crops from the monkeys the Christian natives prosper exceedingly: and that creates friction between them and the others. And that’s the real problem. I hope I’m not boring you?

Edward: No indeed: we are anxious to learn the solution.

Alex: I’m not sure that there is any solution. But even this does not bring us to the heart of the matter. There are also foreign agitators, stirring up trouble …

Lavinia: Why don’t you expel them?

Alex: They are citizens of a friendly neighboring state which we have just recognised. You see, Lavinia, there are very deep waters.

Edward: And the agitators; how do they agitate?

Alex: By convincing the heathen that the slaughter of monkeys has put a curse on them which can only be removed by slaughtering the Christians. They have even been persuading some of the converts — who, after all, prefer not to be slaughtered — to relapse into heathendom. So, instead of eating monkeys they are eating Christians.

Julia: Who have eaten monkeys.

Alex: The native is not, I fear, very logical.

Meme Manqué

September 3, 2007 James Ashley3 Comments

treefrog

Pronunciation: mäⁿ-‘kA
Function: adjective
Etymology: French, from past participle of manquer to lack, fail, from Italian mancare, from manco lacking, left-handed, from Latin, having a crippled hand, probably from manus
: short of or frustrated in the fulfillment of one’s aspirations or talents — used postpositively <a poet manqué>

— Merriam-Webster Online

During my perusal of the August 27th New Yorker, I came across the word manqué in two different articles, which struck me as noteworthy as I don’t think I have come across this word in several years. A quick search of the New Yorker archives indicates that besides these two recent uses, one in a snarky article about Nicolas Sarkozy by Adam Gopnik:

“People close to Sarkozy like to say that he is an American manqué….”

and the other in a fawning review of Michelangelo Antonioni’s film opus by Anthony Lane:

“This is not to say that the Italian was a novelist manqué.”

the word had been used in an April review of a Richard Gere film, and prior to that had not appeared in the pages of The New Yorker since September of last year, in a short story by Henry Roth.

Occasionally an unusual word achieves a brief period of fashionability due to its rarity, such as was the case with the term disestablishmentarianism, and its dopplegänger anti-disestablishmentarianism, a few years back. Once it is recognized that such a word has become le mot juste in just too many instances, however, it quickly recedes back into obscurity, like boy bands and one hit wonders.

Playing with The New Yorker archives reveals similarly suggestive, if not definitive, phenomenological gold about the way rare words become popular for a brief time, and then go underground for a year or more. Try, for instance, a search on sartorial, zeitgeist, or pusillanimous. A more interesting project, of course, would involve sifting through the archives of several high-brow publications and graphing the frequency of rare words. What a memetic field day that would be.

Perhaps this is peculiar to me, but I feel sometimes that using a given word more than once in a blue moon is already an overuse. Such is my feeling about swearing, which should be used judiciously in order to achieve maximum impact, as well as my feeling about obscure words. Obscure words, used judiciously, demonstrate erudition and good taste. Rare words, when abused, simply demonstrate boorishness, false eloquence, and a supercilious character, as well as a proclivity toward intellectual bullying. That’s fucked up.

My sense that the obscure should be kept obscure does not pertain to words alone. In the early 90’s I came across an anecdote while watching Star Trek: Next Generation called the frog and the scorpion, which was ascribed to Aesop. In the version I heard, a scorpion asks a frog to take him across a river and after much deliberation and rationalization, the frog finally agrees. Unfortunately, the scorpion does decide to sting the frog midstream, after all, and when the frog asks why, the scorpion replies, “It is my nature.” The punchline is that they both drown.

Oddly I came across the same anecdote again, a few weeks later while watching Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia deliver a speech on the Senate floor. It probably was over an important international event, but I only remember the anecdote and no longer recall what the anecdote was meant to illustrate. What was interesting about Senator Byrd’s version is that he ascribed the story to Chaucer, rather than Aesop.

A while after that (was it months or years?) the anecdote came before me once again in another Star Trek franchise, Voyager, except this time it was described as a Native American myth and was told by the space-faring Indian Commander Chokote, and the protagonists were now a coyote and a scorpion rather than a frog and a scorpion.

A little research indicates that this particular anecdote may have originally been revived from its antique sleep in the movie The Crying Game, before it made its way through public policy papers, senate speeches, and finally into televised science fiction, where I came across it.

The first time I heard it, I found it charming. The second time, I thought it platitudinous. The third time, I thought it was idiotic and vowed to boycott the next show, politician or foreign policy that attempted to leverage it in order to make a point. Such is my nature.

Then again, I recall Benjamin Franklin’s prescription that once one has found a word that works, it is unnecessary to go out of one’s way to find synonyms in order simply to avoid overusing the word in a given piece of journalism or essay. One should just reuse the word as often as one requires it — which is common-sensical advice, I must admit.

philosophia perennis

March 7, 2007 James Ashley7 Comments

In the Valentine’s edition of The New Yorker, there was a rather nice portrait by Larissa MacFarquhar of Paul and Pat Churchland, connubial philosophers of the mind-body problem at UC San Diego. For years they have been basically decrying in the wilderness against the way that philosophy of mind was being done without any regard for the experimental data being produced by studies in neurophysiology. In the article, Pat Churchland says this prevalent approach was the result of Anglo-American common language philosophy, which holds that the object of philosophy is to clarify our ideas by analyizing language. The problem, as she sees it, is that clarifying incorrect notions about the relationship between mind and body does not get us to truth, but rather leads us simply to have sophisticated bad ideas. The mind-body problem had become a problematic (to borrow from Foucault), when the evidence from neurophysiology was very clear — there is the brain and that’s it. Everything else is language games.

The article continues on a disappointed note:

These days, many philosophers give Pat credit for admonishing them that a person who wants to think seriously about the mind-body problem has to pay attention to the brain. But this acknowledgment is not always extended to Pat herself, or to the work she does now.

The common language philosophy that Pat Churchland critisizes has its roots in german philosophy and the general post-Kantian diminishing of the relevance of Metaphysics. The deathknell for metaphysics in the 20th century may have arrived with Wittgenstein’s pronouncement in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus that “[w]ovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.” There are different ways to take this, of course, one of which is to say that, as with the dove-tailing of Kant’s first and second critiques, it delimits metaphysics in order to make room for faith (or occultism, or theosophy, or whatever).

The other is that it states what is already well known, that Metaphysic is dead, and there is nothing more to say about her. But if philosophers can no longer talk about metaphysics, then what shall they talk about? For years in Anglo-American philosophy, they talked about language. Instead of the relation between appearance and reality in the world, they talked about appearance and meaning in language instead. What the Churchlands found disturbing about this was that this seemed simply to be a way to practice metaphysics underground. Philosophers could dismiss metaphysics on the one hand, but then reintroduce it in their conversations about language instead — though insisting that all they were doing was discussing how we talk about metaphysical notions, not metaphysics itself. Like vampire hunters to the rescue (though under-appreciated, as indicated above) the Churchlands moved in and reapplied Wittgenstein’s dictum to this underground metaphysics. I like to think of them as latter day versions of Maximus the Confessor, pointing out that the compromise monothelite christology was in fact simply the monophysite heresy under a new guise. Claiming that Christ has two natures but one will is no better than claiming that he has one nature. Claiming that mind and body are the same in the world but separated in language is no better than claiming that they are different in the world, also.

The natural endpoint for the Churchlands is, then, to make our language conform to the world, in order to remove these errors of thought.

One afternoon recently, Paul says, he was home making dinner when Pat burst in the door, having come straight from a frustrating faculty meeting. “She said, ‘Paul, don’t speak to me, my serotonin levels have hit bottom, my brain is awash in glucocorticoids, my blood vessels are full of adrenaline, and if it weren’t for my endogenous opiates I’d have driven the car into a tree on the way home. My dopamine levels need lifting. Pour me a Chardonnay, and I’ll be down in a minute.'” Paul and Pat have noticed that it is not just they who talk this way — their students now talk of psychopharmacology as comfortably as of food.

But if we cannot do metaphysics, and we should not even talk of it anymore, what should philosophers do with themselves? Open Court Press may have found an answer with their Popular Culture and Philosophy series. Not all the books listed below are from their press, but they do emphasize the point that if we cannot speak of metaphysics, that is if we cannot use philosophy to go beyond what we already know, then we ought to use her instead to explore those things that we are familiar with. We should practice the perennial philosophy.

The Beatles and Philosophy
Monty Python and Philosophy
U2 and Philosophy
Undead and Philosophy
Bob Dylan and Philosophy
The Simpsons and Philosophy
Harry Potter and Philosophy
Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy
James Bond and Philosophy
The Sopranos and Philosophy
Star Wars and Philosophy
Baseball and Philosophy
The Matrix and Philosophy
More Matrix and Philosophy
Woody Allen and Philosophy
South Park and Philosophy
The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy
Poker and Philosophy
Hip-Hop and Philosophy
Basketball and Philosophy
Hitchcock and Philosophy
The Atkins Diet and Philosophy
Superheroes and Philosophy
Harley-Davidson and Philosophy
The Grateful Dead and Philosophy
Seinfeld and Philosophy
Mel Gibson’s Passion and Philosophy
The Chronicles of Narnia and Philosophy
Bullshit and Philosophy
Johnny Cash and Philosophy

Surrendering to Technology

December 29, 2006 James Ashley6 Comments

My wife pulled into the garage yesterday after a shopping trip and called me out to her car to catch the tail end of a vignette on NPR about the Theater of Memory tradition Frances Yates rediscovered in the 60’s — a subject my wife knows has been a particular interest of mine since graduate school. The radio essayist was discussing his attempt to create his own memory theater by forming the image of a series of rooms in his mind and placing strange mnemonic creatures representing different things he wanted to remember in each of the corners. Over time, however, he finally came to the conclusion that there was nothing in his memory theater that he couldn’t find on the Internet and, even worse, his memory theater had no search button. Eventually he gave up on the Renaissance theater of memory tradition and replaced it with Google.

I havn’t read Yates’s The Art of Memory for a long time, but it seemed to me that the guy on the radio had gotten it wrong, somehow. While the art of memory began as a set of techniques allowing an orator to memorize topics about which he planned to speak, often for hours, over time it became something else. The novice rhetorician would begin by spending a few years memorizing every nook and cranny of some building until he was able to recall every aspect of the rooms simply by closing his eyes. Next he would spend several more years learning the techniques to build mnemonic images which he would then place in different stations of his memory theater in preparation for an oration. The rule of thumb was that the most memorable images were also the most outrageous and monstrous. A notable example originating in the Latin mnemonic textbook Ad Herennium is a ram’s testicles used as a place holder for a lawsuit, since witnesses must testify in court, and testify sounds like testicles.

As a mere technique, the importance of the theater of memory waned with the appearance of cheap paper as a new memory technology. Instead of working all those years to make the mind powerful enough to remember a multitude of topics, topics can now be written down on paper and recalled as we like. The final demise of the theater of memory is no doubt realized in the news announcer who reads off a teleprompter, being fed words to say as if they were being drawn from his own memory. This is of course an illusion, and the announcer is merely a host for the words that flow through him.

A variation on the theater of memory not obviated by paper began to be formulated in the Renaissance in the works of men like Marsilio Ficino, Giulio Camillo, Giordano Bruno, Raymond Lull, and Peter Ramus. Through them, the theater of memory was integrated with the Hermetic tradition, and the mental theater was transformed into something more than a mere technique for remembering words and ideas. Instead, the Hermetic notion of the microcosm and macrocosm, and the sympathetic rules that could connect the two, became the basis for seeing the memory theater as a way to connect the individual with a world of cosmic and magical forces. By placing objects in the memory theater that resonate with the celestial powers, the Renaissance magus was able to call upon these forces for insight and wisdom.

Since magic is not real, even these innovations are not so interesting on their own. However the 18th century thinker, Giambattista Vico, both a rationalist and someone steeped in the traditions of Renaissance magic, recast the theater of memory one more time. For Vico, the memory theater was not a repository for magical artifacts, but rather something that is formed in each of us through acculturation; it contains a knowledge of the cultural institutions, such as property rights, marriage, and burial (the images within our memory theaters), that are universal and make culture possible. Acculturation puts these images in our minds and makes it possible for people to live together. As elements of our individual memory theaters, these civilizing institutions are taken to be objects in the world, when in actuality they are images buried so deeply in our memories that they exert a remarkable influence over our behavior.

Some vestige of this notion of cultural artifacts can be found in Richard Dawkins’s hypothesis about memes as units of culture. Dawkins suggests that our thoughts are made up, at least in part, of memes that influence our behavior in irrational but inexorable ways. On analogy with his concept of genes as selfish replicators, he conceives of memes as things seeking to replicate themselves based on rules that are not necessarily either evident or rational. His examples include, at the trivial end, songs that we can’t get out of our heads and, at the profound end, the concept of God. For Dawkins, memes are not part of the hardwiring of the brain, but instead act like computer viruses attempting to run themselves on top of the brain’s hardware.

One interesting aspect of Dawkins’s interpretation of the spread of culture is that it also offers an explanation for the development of subcultures and fads. Subcultures can be understood as communities that physically limit the available vectors for the spread of memes to certain communities, while fads can be explained away as short-lived viruses that are vital for a while but eventually waste their energies and disappear. The increasing prevalence of visual media and the Internet, in turn, increase the number of vectors for the replication of memes, just as increased air-travel improves the ability of real diseases to spread across the world.

Dawkins describes the replication of memetic viruses in impersonal terms. The purpose of these viruses is not to advance culture in any way, but rather simply to perpetuate themselves. The cultural artifacts spread by these viruses are not guaranteed to improve us, no more than Darwinian evolution offers to make us better morally, culturally or intellectually. Even to think in these terms is a misunderstanding of the underlying reality. Memes do not survive because we judge them to be valuable. Rather, we deceive ourselves into valuing them because they survive.

How different this is from the Renaissance conception of the memory theater, for which the theater existed to serve man, instead of man serving simply to host the theater. Ioan Couliano, in the 80’s, attempted to disentangle Renaissance philosophy from its magical trappings to show that at its root the Renaissance manipulation of images was a proto-psychology. The goal of the Hermeticist was to cultivate and order images in order to improve both mind and spirit. Properly arranged, these images would help him to see the world more clearly, and allow him to live in it more deeply.

For after all what are we but the sum of our memories? A technique for forming and organizing these memories — to actually take control of our memories instead of simply allowing them to influence us willy-nilly — such as the Renaissance Hermeticists tried to formulate could still be of great use to us today. Is it so preposterous that by reading literature instead of trash, by controlling the images and memories that we allow to pour into us, we can actually structure what sort of persons we are and will become?

These were the ideas that initially occurred to me when I heard the end of the radio vignette while standing in the garage. I immediately went to the basement and pulled out Umberto Eco’s The Search For The Perfect Language, which has an excellent chapter in it called Kabbalism and Lullism in Modern Culture that seemed germane to the topic. As I sat down to read it, however, I noticed that Doom, the movie based on a video game, was playing on HBO, so I ended up watching that on the brand new plasma TV we bought for Christmas.

The premise of the film is that a mutagenic virus (a virus that creates mutants?) is found on an alien planet that starts altering the genes of people it infects and turns them into either supermen or monsters depending on some predisposition of the infected person’s nature. (There is even a line in the film explaining that the final ten percent of the human genome that has not been mapped is believed to be the blueprint for the human soul.) Doom ends with “The Rock” becoming infected and having to be put down before he can finish his transformation into some sort of malign creature. After that I pulled up the NPR website in order to do a search on the essayist who abandoned his memory theater for Google. My search couldn’t find him.