Borders

It could be any story about borders, but it serves to prompt musings on what it means to be in one country or another.

Egypt moves to seal Gaza border

The border in that case was marked out by a very physical barrier, but the boundaries of a country exist, surely, as information. If you stand here you are in Egypt. Walk a couple of yards and you are in the Gaza Strip (which, so wikipedia tells me, is "not recognized internationally as part of any sovereign country").

As a child, during the cold war, I lived for some time in West Germany and later in Berlin. You couldn't help but ponder what was going on when you looked at the East-West borders. In way, though the Berlin wall is more famous, the border in rural Germany was, for me, the most baffling. I remember walking in the Harz Mountains and coming to the border. From hill, you looked across at identical rolling woodland on either side of a couple of fences. What's different about standing on one side or the other? Well, somewhere there exist documents that say that if my coordinates are these I am under the jurisdiction (whatever that means) of the FRG, but if my coordinates are these I am under the GDR. Then what comes next depends on lots of other documents, things like passports and permits, international treaties - lots of information which determines where I am allowed to be and what can and will be done to me if I am somewhere I shouldn't be.

Ugliness in context

There are no absolutes. Meaning comes from context - and ugliness is no exception.

This idea that there is no meaning without context is my current framework. Or I could say there is no information without context. I hope to write more about this later, but for the moment, a word about ugliness and Margate, among other things.

Jenny Diski reviews Umberto Eco's book 'On Ugliness' in the current London Review of Books. Part of the thesis - I'm not sure whether this is Eco's or just Diski's - is that ugliness is a much more complex concept than beauty. I'm not convinced that beauty is as simple and uncontroversial as she makes out. I think it helps to remember that both only have any meaning within a context - a context that includes the physical setting, the time (which could mean morning or evening, spring or autumn, 19th or 20th century), state of mind of the beholder... any number of things.

So to Margate. In today's Independent we read that Bob Geldorf is in trouble for calling Margate ugly. As it happens, I visited Margate last year, and walking along the beach I looked back at the promenade with its backdrop of guesthouses and amusment arcades, and I thought it looked rather fine. (I hestitate to call it beautiful. Hmm, not sure what I would use the word beautiful for.) My reaction was that it was seriously marred by a single monstrous* block of flats near the station. What stupidity of the planning authority to allow that. Aside from the flats, there is no way I would call it ugly. But, I'm quite sure I bring to that judgement a whole raft of background issues. Like the fact that I spent a lot of my childhood at Blackpool, that I've always liked the seaside, that I have a fondness for the amateur, that there's a bit of the inverted snob within me... We all know that our opinions of what's ugly and what's beautiful can change. Both for us as individuals and the opinions of society. Who would have thought twenty years ago that there would be concerns over the need to preserve gasometers?

* 'Monstrous' is the perfect word of course, because of Prince Charles' famous 'monstrous carbuncle' quote. There you are, more context.

Selfish information replicators?

There is a 'spat' in the current edition of New Scientist between Richard Dawkins and Edward O Wilson. It is the ongoing argument as to whether there is such a thing as group selection, distinct from kin selection, as set out in this times article.

As I see it, Dawkins' line is an extreme reductionist stance, reducing all evolution to selection of the basic replicator, the gene. I heard Dawkins do his 'selfish gene' talk at Oxford, when I was there c.1978, and it is pretty convincing and certainly elegant. But, is there another stage in the reduction? Is it the information that 'wants' to replicate? This is what computer viruses do, of course. So if it is the information, is that information necessarily only residing in the gene? What if information resides in the group? Could there not be selection for that?

Things that are not there

If I had time, I would now say something about The Poet, the Warrior, the Prophet by Rubem Alves who has a lot to say about this sort of thing, though coming at it from a rather different direction.

OK, I'm never going to have time to write as much as I want, so I'll put something down anyway.

Alves talks a lot about words and silence, about things that are not there. He quotes a story, which he says he read in something written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez but he suspects is an ancient story, of a dead man washing up on the shore near a village. Arrival of the dead body brings life back to a suffocating community, as everyone tells there own story, transferred to the dead man. It could never have happened, had that man arrived at the village alive. It is his absence that releases their own stories.