In the dark

In 2009 (see Echoes of SF) I mentioned Daniel F Galouye's SF novel Dark Universe, in post-apocalypse survivors live in a cave system in total darkness, finding their way by echolocation using "clickstones".  At the time, I'd only just encountered the reality that human echolocators exist in the real world. At the time, a Times article - Blind taught to ‘see’ like a bat - mentioned that no scientific research had been done on the technique. However, Felix Grant just sent me the 2011 paper "Neural Correlates of Natural Human Echolocation in Early and Late Blind Echolocation Expert" 1, which reports functional brain scan results on blind users of the technique, showing that they actually use the primary visual cortex to process the sound data. As the work of Daniel Kish shows, the method is teachable, but it appears unclear if it's generally learnable or if you need a innate aptitude to excel at it.

Addendum: PLoSBLOGs has a very good overview of the subject: Getting around by sound: Human echolocation, by Greg Downey.

This brings me to an Exeter connection: James Holman FRS, aka "The Blind Traveller". An Exeter-born naval officer, he went blind at 25. Kicking against the restrictions of being pensioned-off to a ghastly ritual posting at Windsor Castle that involved twice-daily church attendance, he instead went to university, then on a Grand Tour of Europe, and then on extensive and intrepid world travels. He's the historical poster boy for human echolocation, and is said to have accomplished this using a tapped cane or ambient sounds such as the hoofbeats of horses.

I say "said to" because while his echolocation methods are mentioned in many modern books and articles, I can't find mention of them in any of Holman's travelogues, nor in other contemporary accounts of him; William Jerdan's 1866 Men I Have Known, for instance, just talks of his other senses being intensified in a general way, and Holman's own preface to his 1834 The narrative of a journey, undertaken in ... 1819, 1820 & 1821, through France, Italy, Savoy, Switzerland, parts of Germany bordering on the Rhine, Holland, and the Netherlands says

... it must, however, not be forgotten, that the loss of one sense, is uniformly compensated by superior powers of those that remain unimpaired, in consequence of their being more called into action; and it is well known, that the sense of touch, in particular, acquires so great a delicacy, as to afford degrees of information, which under ordinary states it is incapable of: besides this advantage, he acquired an undefinable power, almost resembling instinct, which he believes in a lively manner gives him ideas of whatever may be going forward externally.

But however he did it, the achievement is remarkable. His travel works are online at the Internet Archive.

Such extensive travel journals require notes, and a point of of interest is how Holman made them.  Mostly, as you'd expect, by dictation, but described in A Voyage round the World: Volume 1, pages 6-7, he also used a device he called the "Nocto via Polygraph", shown in the frontispiece of the fifth edition of The Narrative of a Journey (here). Invented and sold by Ralph Wedgwood of London, the device - variously called a Noctograph or Noctopolygraph ("nocto" for night, "poly" because it produced duplicates) comprised a rectangular frame crossed by parallel brass wires, that held two sheets of plain paper with carbon paper sandwiched between. The user wrote with a stylus, guided by the wires, the carbon creating the prints (one original, one reversed copy) on the plain paper. The top-of-range modes had stretchy spring grids so that you could write proper descenders on letters. There's an detailed account of the device , and its advantages and difficulties, on pages 117-118 of George Ticknor's 1864 Life of William Hickling Prescott.

Although Wedgwood's device was a well-known, and patented, one, the idea wasn't wildly original. The Catholic Encyclopedia's section Education of the Blind has a good historical overview of the many similar devices assisting the blind in writing:

... the tablets of Généresse (1807) and of Bruno, the typhlograph of Passard, Dr. Nord's skotograph, Dr. Woizechowsky's amaurograph, Count de Beaufort's stylograph, Wedgewood's noctograph, and the writing-frames of the Elliot brothers, of Thursfield, Dooley, and Levitte.
...
line-cell frames or tablets, the best known are those devised by the Rev. Joseph Engelmann of Linz (1825), James Gall of Edinburgh, Mercier-Capette, Hebold, Dr. Llorens of Barcelona, by C. E. Guldberg of Copenhagen (1858), Galimberti of Milan, Martuscelli of Naples, Moon of Brighton, England, Kemps of Grave, Holland, Ballu, Brother Isidore of Woluwe-Saint-Lambert, Belgium, and Mlle Mulot of Angers, France.

These gadgets weren't solely for blind users. One with a literary connection is the Nyctograph, a fairly low-tech version devised by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (a.k.a. Lewis Carroll) for making notes in the night. This constrained the writing even more into a shorthand, each letter written in a square pigeonhole in a card grid.

Any one who has tried, as I have often done, the process of getting out of bed at 2 a.m. in a winter night, lighting a candle, and recording some happy thought which would probably be otherwise forgotten, will agree with me it entails much discomfort. All I have now to do, if I wake and think of something I wish to record, is to draw from under the pillow a small memorandum book containing my Nyctograph
- Lewis Carroll, letter to The Lady magazine, October 29, 1891

It's an odd thought that over a century later, I'm still using a very similar setup; the Graffiti input system on my Palm M100 organiser, which uses a cut-down shorthand alphabet written with a stylus in a square area, doesn't seem conceptually far different.

- Ray

1. Thaler L, Arnott SR, Goodale MA (2011) Neural Correlates of Natural Human Echolocation in Early and Late Blind Echolocation Experts. PLoS ONE 6(5): e20162. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0020162.

Breaking out of the game

A recommendation: Ian Watson's Queenmagic, Kingmagic (Grafton, 1988, ISBN-10: 0586074147), which Felix just lent me (I re-used the Flammarion woodcut as this is another conceptual breakthrough novel).

An expanded version of Watson's novella Queenmagic, Pawnmagic, it tells the story of Pedino, a "pawn-squire" in a world modelled on chess. Two kingdoms, Bellogard and Chorny, are locked in a centuries-long battle fought by assassination and counter-assassination among the few important individuals (kings, queens, knights, and so on) who have powers of magical teleportation and attack. The story initially follows Pedino's schooling in Bellogard, his elevation to a role in the battle, and his liaison with Sara, a young prostitute who is a spy for Chorny, but it then takes a more cosmic turn. Both sides know that the end of the war is the end of their world, and both have vague awareness of previous cycles of existence; this is leading a few mystics and academics to look for ways to break out of that cycle.

Eventually Pedino finds a way to jump with Sara into other realities based on other games: one world where snakes and ladders provide portals to enclaves of higher and lower standards of living; another based on Monopoly, where society is based on a lethal property ladder run by lottery; and a third, in which soldiers and civilians are muddling through during confused movements of military encampments, based on the scoring stage of Go. Finally he finds himself in a new cycle of existence of the Bellogard-Chorny war, his options cramped by elevation to ineffectual kingship, but with sufficient acquired knowledge to guide more focused efforts to break through the "bubbles" into other planes of existence.

I enjoyed Queenmagic, Kingmagic a lot, with some reservations; it does go on fast-forward toward the end, and some parts I suspect wouldn't be widely understood. Recognising the Russian in-jokes in proper names is a bonus - for instance, Bishop Slon = Bishop Elephant, referring to the piece's form prior to Westernisation. That's not crucial (though I'd like to know what exactly Watson meant by the repeated incantation "Opasnost po Zhivot!" which transliterates as "Опасность по живот" - "Peril to stomach". Maybe flank attack?). However, while most readers know chess at least theoretically, fewer will know Go, much less recognise the troop movements in that section of the book as a description of the rearrangement of stones during the scoring phase). But overall it's great fun, and manages to stay fresh and witty despite the fairly dark scenario of characters fighting the dissolution of their universe.

Queenmagic, Kingmagic obviously isn't the first fiction to be set inside a chess game; the best-known prototype is Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (Gutenberg EText-No. 12). 1 whose story is integrated with a real chess problem (see Gardner's classic concordance The Annotated Alice) though one that contains illegal moves. There's a detailed analysis in Glen Robert Downey's PhD dissertation The Truth about Pawn Promotion: the Development of the Chess Motif in Victorian Fiction which is very worth reading for its exploration of the long history, pre-Carroll, of allegorical chess motifs in Western fiction. In mediaeval times, a succession of authors wrote "chess moralities" that mapped the roles of pieces map on to the real-world hierarchy to morally instructive intent: for instance, John of Wales' Quaedam moralitas de scaccario per Innocentium papum (The Innocent Morality) and Jacobus de Cessolis' Liber de moribus hominum et officiis nobilium (see Power play: the literature and politics of chess in the Late Middle Ages, Jenny Adams, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006, ISBN 081223944X). The drift of such works was generally to reinforce conventional moralities, often via edifying pseudo-origins to the game, but later, Middleton's play A Game at Chess took a more subversive stance and used the chess format for political satire.

Post-Carroll, chess continued to be a popular theme for fiction, particularly science fiction; Poul Anderson's The Immortal Game (F&SF, 1954) is also worth finding for its vivid insider view of a chess game:

The first trumpet sounded far and clear and brazen cold, and Rogard the Bishop stirred to wakefulness with it. Lifting his eyes, he looked through the suddenly rustling, murmuring line of soldiers, out across the broad plain of Cinnabar and the frontier, and over to the realm of LEUKAS. Away there, across the somehow unreal red-and-black distances of the steppe, he saw sunlight flash on armor and caught the remote wild flutter of lifted banners. So it is war, he thought. So we must fight again.

Again? He pulled his mind from the frightening dimness of that word. Had they ever fought before?

(The title and plot refer to the classic "Immortal Game" played between Anderssen and Kieseritzky in 1851, famous for Anderssen's win by audacious sacrifice of major pieces. The final moves of the same game are quoted in the game between Sebastian and Tyrell in Blade Runner).

The Greenwood encyclopedia of science fiction and fantasy: themes, works, and wonders has more examples of this theme.

Ongoing: I recommend A haphazard way to move through life and treasure... at The Growlery, which has further recommendations (that I second) for the works of Ian Watson. Felix mentions that he "personally liked the Go section, finding it the most evocative of the whole book", and I can see why: it is the most realistic depiction of the human condition, akin to the age-old situation of refugees, airdropped supplies haphazardly, being shuffled around between temporary encampments in furtherance of a war whose tactics are indiscernable. I just didn't think it a wise choice of game given - at the time - its relative obscurity (outside cognoscenti) to a Western readership. Now, Internet accessibility, through IGS Pandanet for instance, has greatly increased its player base.

Go itself does have a considerable role in literature and art. Although the absence of identifiable special pieces doesn't lend it to personification in the style of chess, it has attracted a large body of philosophy in relation to war, business, and life in general (the two stone colours map readily on to the yin and yang of Taoism). I'll leave that aside mostly - except to recommend Japanese Prints and the World of Go, by William Pinckard, for its nice overview of its omnipresence in Edo period depictions of legend and everyday life - and move to the narrower field of its manifestation in Western fiction. Go in Western literature, by Brian ‘Chiwito’ McDonald, is a slightly out-of-date but still pertinent commentary on the relatively few Western works to feature Go in a major role. Iain Banks is mentioned (I'd forgotten that his Walking on Glass contained a number of variants on board games) along with Ian Watson, as well as a number of other familiar faces: some members of the aforementioned Oulipo were into Go. McDonald also debunks the common belief that Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game is about - or even inspired by - Go, explaining how Hesse's game isn't physical, and even in its historical form within the book's mythos, used a wire-and-bead system unlike Go.

Oh, I've just recalled too that Katin in Nova knows about Go, but then he would.

And lights dimmed.

The captain hooked in. The grafitti, the scars on the walls, vanished. There were only the red lights chasing one another on the ceiling.

"A shook up go game," Katin said, "with iridescent stones."

Addendum, Friday 28th August The Guardian Books Blog has a piece by Stuart Evers, Why chess is a perfect game for fiction, which recommends the anthology of chess stories, The 64-Square Looking Glass: Great Games of Chess in World Literature (Burt Hochberg, Times Books, 1993, ISBN-10: 0812919297).
- Ray

1. Alice Through the Looking-Glass is a common misnomer.
2. Also worth looking at for Go and the 'Three Games', which explores the idea of three region-related philosophical subtexts to historically classic games: the Middle Eastern backgammon as Fate-dominated; chess playing out the "great myths of the West ... the overthrow of a hero and the crowning of a new hero ... a hierarchical and pyramidal society with powers strictly defined and limited", and the Eastern Go representing processes of pure mentation. Maybe - but this reeks of national stereotype, and ignores that chess - as shogi - is also highly traditional and highly popular in Japan, and that backgammon has been extremely popular in England and Europe: Chambers's Information for the People: A Popular Encyclopaedia, 1854, said of it:

the game has been long established in the country; and, as a fireside amusement of a decorous and exciting nature, is a favourite among clergymen, squires, farmers, and retired professional persons.

Bad luck with gazelles

At an Unreal Nature thread on Sod's Law (a.k.a Murphy's Law) - "the atheist’s reflex concession to magical thinking" - Dr C just mentioned the particular exposition

I never had a slice of bread,
Particularly large and wide,
That did not fall upon the floor,
And always on the buttered side.

The annoyance of dropping bread on the buttered side is timeless enough to be a truism. You can find it, for instance, in the 1807 precursor to Grumpy Old Men, The miseries of human life; or The groans of Samuel Sensitive, and Timothy Testy: or the groans of Samuel Sensitive and Timothy Testy : with a few supplementary sighs from Mrs. Testy : in twelve dialogues, by James Beresford, where it's listed as one of the miseries of the table. But the above four-line verse has a more specific history.

I first recall it from Arnold Silcock's Verse and Worse (a lovely collection of humorous verse, in print on and off since 1952) where it's credited to James Payn (e.g. Oxford Dictionary of Quotations says Chambers's Journal, February 1884). But the highly reliable The Yale Book of Quotations tracks it back to the Huron Reflector, 23rd November, 1841, and it can also be found uncredited in The Knickerbocker; Or, New York Monthly Magazine in 1835 as:

I never had a piece of toast,
Particularly good and wide,
But fell upon the sanded floor,
And always on the buttered side!

However, we start hitting source for this particular form with Thomas Hood the Younger:

I never nursed a dear gazelle,
To glad me with its dappled hide,
But when it came to know me well,
It fell upon the buttered side.

- from Muddled Metaphors, "By a Moore-ose Melodist", Thomas Hood Jr (date unknown), A Nonsense Anthology, Carolyn Wells, by BiblioBazaar, LLC, 2007

This identifies it as a parody of lines from Thomas Moore's The Fire-Worshippers, one of the four segments in his 1817 work Lalla Rookh, an Arabian Nights-style romance partially based on the story of Al-Muqanna (see The Poetic Works of Thomas Moore). In The Fire-Worshippers, a tragic sub-story, the heroine comes out with these deeply fatalistic lines:

Oh! Ever thus, from childhood's hour,
I've seen my fondest hopes decay;
I never loved a tree or flower,
But 'twas the first to fade away.
I never nurs'd a dear gazelle,
To glad me with its soft black eye,
But when it came to know me well,
And love me, it was sure to die!

These lines (which portray a life at the level of Unlucky Alf from The Fast Show) tickled the Victorian funny-bone, and there are many parodies, such as CS Calverley's Disaster, Henry Sambrooke Leigh's 'Twas ever thus, Lewis Carroll's Tèma con Variaziòni, a reference in Charles Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop (Chapter 56, where Mr Swiveller paraphrases it as "...and love me, it was sure to marry a market-gardener"), and Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Death of a Wombat 1.

I never reared a young Wombat
To glad me with his pin-hole eye,
But when he most was sweet & fat
And tail-less; he was sure to die!

One might wonder why such an obscure poem should attract such ridicule, but it wasn't obscure then; it was a bestseller from the start, and stayed in the public eye via reprints and stage adaptations: see Gill Stoker's Lalla Rookh page. Maybe the problem was the bizarre choice of animal (as Terry Caesar says in I Quite Forget What--Say a Daffodilly: Victorian Parody, "his rather unfortunate choice of an exotic gazelle to illustrate his trite presentation of life's fragility"). Maybe there was an undercurrent of hostility because some saw Lalla Rookh as Irish nationalist allegory, as argued in "The Standard of Revolt": Revolution and National Independence in Moore’s Lalla Rookh (Jeffery W. Vail, Romanticism on the Net, Numéro 40, November 2005).

Thomas Moore is overall another writer whose reputation has diminished (at least, outside his native Ireland). In his lifetime he was considered on a par with Lord Byron (for whom he was literary executor), but is now probably best known for his song lyrics, particularly The Minstrel Boy, The Last Rose of Summer and Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms.

"Dear gazelle" references, incidentally, also crop up in James Joyce's Ulysses and PG Wodehouse's Joy in the Morning (see Bully Says: Comics Oughta Be Fun!: A Wodehouse a Week #25).

"I shall miss you, Jeeves."

"Thank you, sir."

"Who was the chap who was always beefing about losing gazelles?"

"The poet Moore, sir. He complained that he had never nursed a dear gazelle, to glad him with its soft black eye, but when it came to know him well and love him, it was sure to die."

"It's the same with me. I am a gazelle short. You don't mind me alluding to you as a gazelle, Jeeves?"

"Not at all, sir."

1. It's little known that the Pre-Raphaelites were obsessed with wombats: see Rossetti's Wombat: A Pre-Raphaelite Obsession in Victorian England, National Library of Australia.
- Ray

Of academic interest

Current reading: The Annotated Alice, Martin Gardner's classic concordance to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass: a compilation of both books, with Gardner's detailed annotations on Carroll's contemporary references to mathematical, poetic and scientific topics.
      The Annotated Alice is a fascinating insight into the books. This excerpt at Norton Books gives a taster of the annotations. The book is 47 years on from its first publication, and has seen continuing updates. A recent development has been the discovery of a lost chapter, The Wasp in the Wig that appears to have been deleted because Tenniel, the illustrator, wasn't keen on it. The Alice Project quotes this chapter along with theories about what Tenniel disliked. I especially like the explanations of the parodies. Carroll's nonsense verse in funny in itself, but more so when compared to the pious improving poetry that it quite viciously satirises (see The poems in Alice in Wonderland for comparisons such as How doth the little crocodile vs. How doth the little busy bee).
      The Annotated Alice isn't to everyone's taste: Will Self's New Statesman review of the new Definitive Edition, Dirty old man, takes a hostile view of its avoidance of the always fraught question of Carroll's sexual orientation. This is by no means a clear issue. For instance, nowadays we are highly cautious, paranoid even, about the motives for child photography and tend to view Carroll's interest in this as automatically suspect; but it was a highly mainstream genre in Victorian times. Furthermore, the predominant view that Carroll was some flavour of repressed paedophile was heavily shaken in 1999 by Karoline Leach's book In the Shadow of the Dreamchild, which argued that much of the accepted view of Carroll is a stereotypical myth created in the vacuum left by his family's destruction and suppression of biographical material. Recently published letters and his diary (see "Lewis Carroll": A Myth in the Making) present a picture of a man who was neither shy nor reclusive, and whose female friends were mainly adult, these relationships in some cases skating on the edge of scandal. It's hard to assess whether this view will prevail, but the evidence coming from the increasing flow of primary sources looks at least likely to modify the traditional assessment. More on this evidence at Looking for Lewis Carroll and Contrariwise.

Not terribly related, except as an academic pursuit: this morning a customer asked - perhaps having seen the recent Times article, Nocturnal missions - about a book we didn't have, The Night Climbers of Cambridge, by the pseudonymous 'Whipplesnaith'. It's an underground classic in Cambridge, a book written in the 1930s about the illicit ascent of colleges and other buildings. I admit it rather takes me back. Many Cambridge undergraduates need to do at least some climbing due to the older colleges' archaic practice of locking the gates at night, and I remember those terrifying revolving spikes that topped some walls.

Night Climbers is online at InsectNation: interesting reading, akin to the accounts of present-day urban explorers. Andy Buckley, the site creator, admits that the copyright is a bit 'grey', but risked it given that all persons and companies related to the book are defunct.

Addendum: The Night Climbers of Cambridge was reprinted in 2007 by Oleander Press, Cambridge, to mark the 70th anniversary of the original edition.

- Ray