We study Newton and Darwin - but not how they managed their student debt

The Times Online

November 5 2010 12:01AM

He is the very model of the kind of student the Government seems to have in mind: he graduates and goes on to make a pile of money - even though he had to struggle to fund his way through his studies. A reluctant farmer, he was fined 3s 4d at the age of 16 for allowing his swine to trespass and his fences to lie in disrepair. But just a few decades later he was Master of the Mint and (quite literally) coining it and paying himself a percentage of every pound coined. He was also, in effect, master of the universe.

Oddly enough, Isaac Newton didn’t study “science”. He barely knew the word. He concentrated on “natural philosophy” (and alchemy) at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was admitted in 1661 as one of the so-called “sizars”. In return for free tuition he had to run errands, feed and poke the fires of the well-off “fellow commoners” (gentry) or “pensioners” (studying for the ministry). It was the rough equivalent of getting a job at McDonald’s today. Then it was Super Sizar Me.

Fortunately it cost him nothing to contemplate apples falling from trees. But we know that he had enough money to afford a prism at Stourbridge Fair (leading to his theory of “differently refrangible rays”), so his mother, who had already provided him with a chamber pot, notebook, bottle of ink and some candles, must have slipped him a few shillings from time to time. His lot improved in 1667 when he was elected a Fellow (£2 a year). At the age of 27, he was appointed Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, when he received the magnificent stipend of £100 a year.

It is likely that the new, post-state future of universities is going to resemble the pre-state past. It may be a kind of bitter-sweet consolation to a new generation of undergraduates to know that some of our best-known students of old had their share of funding (and other) crises.

William Wordsworth was another sizar. He was admitted to St John’s, Cambridge in 1787, where he had a “nook obscure” but, as he wrote in The Prelude, his autobiographical poem, he was already worried about costs: “[I had] some fears/ About my future worldly maintenance.” He didn’t too well in his exams (classics and “geometrical science”), which is unsurprising since “I was the Dreamer, they the Dream”.

The poet relied on a couple of well-off uncles to cover expenses - which they did grudgingly. “He has had near £300 since he went to Cambridge,” wrote Uncle Christopher, “which I think is a very shameful sum for him to spend, considering his expectations.” Wordsworth was a firm advocate of postponing the repayment of debts. As late as 1803, long after he had left university and was wandering lonely as a cloud full-time, he still owed his tutor £10.

Charles Darwin failed as a physician at Edinburgh (he didn’t fancy dissecting corpses). So, as a kind of punishment, he was sent to Christ’s College, Cambridge in 1828 to study divinity instead. His father was paying, so Darwin reluctantly signed up to become an Anglican minister. “Considering how fiercely I have been attacked by the orthodox,” he wrote later on in life, “it seems ludicrous that I once intended to be a clergyman.”

He claims to have done his share of partying, but admits that the highlight of his university career was hunting beetles. He used to go around picking them up but once, spotting a handsome new specimen, he had his hands full so he popped it in his mouth for safekeeping (only spitting it out when the beetle “ejected an acrid fluid”). “I am surprised what an indelible impression many of the beetles which I caught at Cambridge left on my mind.”

Darwin paid a total of £636 0s 9½d over three years, including bills to the barber, grocer, tailor, and chimneysweep, and extra for vegetables with his meals. In our terms, that is around £48,000. In the middle of the 19th century, even a sizar had to shell out £14 9s 3d in tuition fees - but in total more like about £60 or £70 per annum in living costs (about £5,000), including £3 10s (£283) for coal. If you want to become a physicist, poet, or a coleopterist in the Big Society of the future, it will definitely help to have rich relatives, or patrons, or a network of well-disposed scholars and teachers to help you along the way. Or make a mint.

The humanities are a satnav system for exploring civilisations across time and space

The Independent

Monday, 18 October 2010

Everyone who has ever studied any “humanities” subject at university will have had the experience. I can remember it happening to me twice. I was writing a PhD thesis at the time called “The Knowledge of Ignorance” – a title plainly asking for trouble. “‘Ha!” said my American mining engineer friend, “what is the point of that?” Another time a computer engineer friend asked me what I was working on. “Well,” says I, “it’s about something rather important that happened in Tahiti in 1768 when Bougainville…” He cut me off. “Are you joking? That is so pointless!”

Seriously, I love engineers. I sometimes wonder if a world made up of nothing but engineers could be a mistake. But even they may have been taken aback by the apparent mathematical absurdity of a forecast 8 per cent surgical snip to military expenditure set against the proposed 80 per cent war on the humanities budget of universities.

I have never felt that the customary justification of the humanities degree, that it equips you to blag your way into a better job with a higher salary, is quite strong enough to answer the “Just remind me, what exactly is the point of what you are doing, anyway?”-type question. A decent how-to-give-a-good-interview course could be wrapped up in a lot less than three years, I reckon.

Which is why I want to bring in the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. And before the engineers throw up their hands in despair and start saying “Ha!”, can I quickly point out that he started off as an engineer and used to recommend to his students that, if they wanted to be good philosophers, they ought to go out and become car mechanics. In keeping with our austere times, he also had a habit of giving away nearly everything he owned or earned.

He came up with his “picture theory” of language in between battles in the First World War when he came across a forensic report of a car accident in Paris. Obviously, he thought, language works like this, by reconstructing a scene with the aid of lots of labels (words) and arrows (“ostensive definition”). His first work, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, is Wittgenstein and the art of car maintenance.

Somewhere down the road, however, he realised that things are not quite this simple (if only). Language is not a perfect “mirror” of “everything that is the case”. When I pray, or write a poem, or ask you to pass the salt, or declare war, or campaign for election, or sex-up a report about weapons of mass destruction, is that a mirror of anything? The car manual approach doesn’t really fit. So what we are doing? Is it art, truth, beauty? Whatever it is, this is the stuff that people over on the humanities side of the academy, philosophers, historians, literati, anthropologists, are mostly concerned with most of the time (to be fair, they read car manuals too but it’s not really their strong suit). Wittgenstein came up with three metaphors (in the Philosophical Investigations) to explain what is going on.

Language games. OK, engineers, you have language games too, don’t deny it. Everyone does (especially, for example, politicians). Games have rules. Classicists, historians, students of literature and language and speech acts generally: they are all analysing the rules according to which the games are played. And thus understanding the minds that play them.

Toolbox. You can do things with words (language is “performative”). And it is actually quite useful in improving the world (or, to be fair, the exact opposite). The humanists accumulate tools for intellectual DIY. The bigger the toolbox the better.

The city (or cities). We tend to get stuck in our own neighbourhood (or ghetto). The humanities are a satnav system for exploring civilisations across time and space.

I would add a fourth: the Crash. Wittgenstein crashed (he thought). Engineers crash. In the humanities we are always looking at crashes, with the idea it could help to avoid crashing in the future – or at least understand the art of the crash.

Andy Martin is a lecturer in French at the University of Cambridge. He is working on a book called ‘Hell Is Other People: Sartre vs Camus’.

Opinionator

Exclusive Online Commentary From The New York Times

By ANDY MARTIN

August 10th, 2010

This all started the day Luigi gave me a haircut. I was starting to look like a mad professor: specifically like Doc in “Back to the Future.” So Luigi took his scissors out and tried to fix me up. Except — and this is the point that occurred to me as I inspected the hair in the bathroom mirror the next morning — he didn’t really take quite enough off. He had enhanced the style, true, but there was a big floppy fringe that was starting to annoy me. And it was hot out. So I opened up the clipper attachment on the razor and hacked away at it for a while. When I finally emerged there was a general consensus that I looked like a particularly disreputable scarecrow. In the end I went to another barbershop (I didn’t dare show Luigi my handiwork) and had it all sheared off. Now I look like a cross between Britney Spears and Michel Foucault.

Sartre seems to be suggesting that thinking arises out of, or perhaps with, a consciousness of one’s own ugliness.

In short, it was a typical bad hair day. Everyone has them. I am going to hold back on my follicular study of the whole of Western philosophy (Nietzsche’s will-to-power-eternal-recurrence mustache; the workers-of-the-world-unite Marxian beard), but I think it has to be said that a haircut can have significant philosophical consequences. Jean-Paul Sartre, the French existentialist thinker, had a particularly traumatic tonsorial experience when he was only seven.  Up to that point he had had a glittering career as a crowd-pleaser. Everybody referred to young “Poulou” as “the angel.” His mother had carefully cultivated a luxuriant halo of golden locks. Then one fine day his grandfather takes it into his head that Poulou is starting to look like a girl, so he waits till his mother has gone out, then tells the boy they are going out for a special treat. Which turns out to be the barbershop. Poulou can hardly wait to show off his new look to his mother. But when she walks through the door, she takes one look at him before running up the stairs and flinging herself on the bed, sobbing hysterically. Her carefully constructed — one might say carefully combed — universe has just been torn down, like a Hollywood set being broken and reassembled for some quite different movie, rather harsher, darker, less romantic and devoid of semi-divine beings. For, as in an inverted fairy-tale, the young Sartre has morphed from an angel into a “toad”. It is now, for the first time, that Sartre realizes that he is — as his American lover, Sally Swing, will say of him — “ugly as sin.”

The New York TimesJean-Paul Sartre and two friends in France, no doubt discussing philosophy.

“The fact of my ugliness” becomes a barely suppressed leitmotif of his writing. He wears it like a badge of honor (Camus, watching Sartre in laborious seduction mode in a Paris bar: “Why are you going to so much trouble?” Sartre: “Have you had a proper look at this mug?”). The novelist Michel Houellebecq says somewhere that, when he met Sartre, he thought he was “practically disabled.” It is fair comment. He certainly has strabismus (with his distinctive lazy eye, so he appears to be looking in two directions at once), various parts of his body are dysfunctional and he considers his ugliness to count as a kind of disability. I can’t help wondering if ugliness is not indispensable to philosophy. Sartre seems to be suggesting that thinking — serious, sustained questioning — arises out of, or perhaps with, a consciousness of one’s own ugliness.

I don’t want to make any harsh personal remarks here but it is clear that a philosophers’ Mr. or Ms. Universe contest would be roughly on a par with the philosophers’ football match imagined by Monty Python. That is to say, it would have an ironic relationship to beauty. Philosophy as a satire on beauty.

It is no coincidence that one of our founding philosophers, Socrates, makes a big deal out of his own ugliness. It is the comic side of the great man. Socrates is (a) a thinker who asks profound and awkward questions (b) ugly. In Renaissance neo-Platonism (take, for example, Erasmus and his account of  “foolosophers” in “The Praise of Folly”) Socrates, still spectacularly ugly, acquires an explicitly Christian logic: philosophy is there — like Sartre’s angelic curls — to save us from our ugliness (perhaps more moral than physical).

I suspect that the day Britney Spears shaved her own hair off represented a kind of Sartrean or Socratic argument (rather than, say, a nervous breakdown).

But I can’t help thinking that ugliness infiltrated the original propositions of philosophy in precisely this redemptive way. The implication is there in works like Plato’s  “Phaedo.” If we need to die in order to attain the true, the good, and the beautiful (to kalon: neither masculine nor feminine but neutral, like Madame Sartre’s ephemeral angel, gender indeterminate), it must be because truth, goodness, and beauty elude us so comprehensively in life. You think you’re beautiful? Socrates seems to say. Well, think again! The idea of beauty, in this world, is like a mistake. An error of thought. Which should be re-thought.

Perhaps Socrates’s mission is to make the world safe for ugly people. Isn’t everyone a little ugly, one way or the other, at one time or another? Who is truly beautiful, all the time? Only the archetypes can be truly beautiful.

Fast-forwarding to Sartre and my bathroom-mirror crisis, I feel this gives us a relatively fresh way of thinking about neo-existentialism. Sartre (like Aristotle, like Socrates himself at certain odd moments) is trying to get away from the archetypes. From, in particular, a transcendent concept of beauty that continues to haunt — and sometimes cripple — us.

“It doesn’t matter if you are an ugly bastard. As an existentialist you can still score.” Sartre, so far as I know, never actually said it flat out (although he definitely described himself as a “salaud”). And yet it is nevertheless there in almost everything he ever wrote. In trying to be beautiful, we are trying to be like God (the “for-itself-in-itself” as Sartre rebarbatively put it). In other words, to become like a perfect thing, an icon of perfection, and this we can never fully attain. But it is good business for manufacturers of beauty creams, cosmetic surgeons and — yes! — even barbers.

Switching gender for a moment — going in the direction Madame Sartre would have preferred — I suspect that the day Britney Spears shaved her own hair off  represented a kind of Sartrean or Socratic argument (rather than, say, a nervous breakdown). She was, in effect, by the use of appearance, shrewdly de-mythifying beauty. The hair lies on the floor, “inexplicably faded” (Sartre), and the conventional notion of femininity likewise. I see Marilyn Monroe and Brigitte Bardot in a similar light: one by dying, the other by remaining alive, were trying to deviate from and deflate their iconic status. The beautiful, to kalon, is not some far-flung transcendent abstraction, in the neo-existentialist view. Beauty is a thing (social facts are things, Durkheim said). Whereas I am no-thing. Which explains why I can never be truly beautiful. Even if it doesn’t stop me wanting to be either. Perhaps this explains why Camus, Sartre’s more dashing sparring partner, jotted down in his notebooks, “Beauty is unbearable and drives us to despair.”

I always laugh when somebody says, “don’t be so judgmental.” Being judgmental is just what we do. Not being judgmental really would be like death. Normative behavior is normal. That original self-conscious, slightly despairing glance in the mirror (together with, “Is this it?” or “Is that all there is?”) is a great enabler because it compels us to seek improvement. The transcendent is right here right now. What we transcend is our selves. And we can (I am quoting Sartre here) transascend or transdescend. The inevitable dissatisfaction with one’s own appearance is the engine not only of philosophy but of civil society at large. Always providing you don’t end up pulling your hair out by the roots.

Review New York Times

By ANDY MARTIN

Published: June 9, 2010

A nomadic Californian surfer once took a wrong turn somewhere in Europe and ended up at the Berlin Wall. His faithful board still slung across his back like a guitar, he gazed up at one of the border guards, ensconced in a tower behind a machine gun and miles of barbed wire, and yelled out, “Man, you are bummed, because you will never know what true surfing really is!” That ringing indictment of totalitarianism — reported in a 1980s issue of Surfer magazine — turns out to be wrong. In Michael Scott Moore’s clued-in and far-flung “Sweetness and Blood,” the border guard, so to speak, exchanges his military uniform for baggy shorts and a rash vest. The surfer who came in from the cold. Trabants out, woodies in.

On Moore’s post-cold-war surfari, every one is now a beach bum, no one is bummed, anybody can surf anytime, anywhere, from Cuba to Morocco, from the Gaza Strip to Japan. Of course, the Siberian waves aren’t too hot. And personally, I still require palm trees and a sultry breeze before I paddle out. But Moore and a robust wet suit have boldly gone where only serious and often seriously unhinged dudes have gone before, mapping out a fresh, unexpected cartography of the waves.

The literature of surfing takes off in the late 18th century, with the voyages of Capt. James Cook. Cook couldn’t even swim, much less surf, which perhaps explains why the Hawaiian watermen eventually did to him exactly what his name seemed to be recommending. But not before one of his crew declared surfing “the most supreme pleasure.” It was the kind of utopianism that seeped even into the French Revolution, though it was tempered by the guillotine.

The tradition of the surf bard extolling the exploits of ace riders goes right back to the origins of surfing, a millennium or so ago, in the islands of Polynesia. It was never enough just to go surfing: you had to hype it up, too. Moore is a modern surf troubadour, singing the adventures of a cast of eccentric pioneers, not to mention Agatha Christie (whose surf writing had hitherto escaped me) and the Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who becomes a kind of honorary surfer by virtue of having been an individualist and dissident who spent time in jail.

The classic lexicon of “epic,” “insane” and “gnarly” is mostly set aside here. Highly imperfect waves abound. The closing line of the book, quoting a Japanese surfer, “Paddle, paddle — and sometimes, big wave come!,” sounds like “Waiting for Godot” with (or rather without) waves. Moore, an itinerant American who lives in Berlin and writes for Spiegel Online International, writes in a spirit closer to Bruce Chatwin’s “In Patagonia” than to the latest issue of Carve.

During the Persian Gulf war, surfers used to say, “If only Saddam surfed!” The “civilizing mission” of the American military has ended up planting surf boards on beaches around the globe just as the British left cricket bats behind. According to Robert Duvall in “Apocalypse Now,” “Charlie don’t surf.” Now Charlie definitely does surf, and maybe Al Qaeda too. “Osama? … Salem says don’t come out today. Nah, the surf’s flat.” That’s a joke phone call by an expat American surfer Moore meets in Morocco, but it’s almost plausible.

In his quest for the “first” surfer in various unlikely locations, Moore gives the palm to an Italian ice cream salesman who rode the waves off Cornwall before World War II. In Germany, Moore discovers that surfers first took to the icy North Sea in the 1950s, when “surfing on a German beach was a small expression of die neue Zeit, the shift from Hitler’s nightmare and the long shadow of the 19th century to an outlook that was more spontaneous, easygoing, modern and rich.” Hemingway played an indirect part in making France the West Coast of Europe, when the scriptwriter on the film of “The Sun Also Rises,” on location in Biarritz and eyeing the surf, wired back to Hollywood for a board.

Cornish surfers supposedly used to steal coffin lids to surf on, and there is a death-wish side to surfing. But there is also a yearning for rebirth, maybe even for the kind of harmony that seems unattainable on land. Moore tracks down Surfers Against Apartheid, founded in the 1980s by South African surfers to boycott contests at home, and an 86-year-old Jewish surfer from California who distributes surfboards toPalestinians in Gaza — despite the Israeli blockade and the criticisms of at least one surfing rabbi.

Surfing is less a counterculture than a cooler microcosm of the larger nonsurfing world, an ironic empire of anti- imperialists. In Cuba, Moore writes, where the first local surfers rode plywood desktops in the 1980s, Castro once feared that malcontents might steal a wave all the way to Miami (though now there’s a Havana Surf Club, supplied mainly with donations from across the Florida Strait). Surfing aspires to communion but is sucked into conflict. The Bali nightclub bombing of 2002 was, in part, an attack on surfing culture — “acts of unreason against another kind of unreason,” Moore writes — since Australian surfers paved the way for the expansion of tourism in the region.

I’m not sure there is such a thing as surf literature. But if there is, it has moved well beyond the self-mockery of Mark Twain (“None but the natives ever master the art of surf-bathing thoroughly”), the hyperbole of Jack London and the snazzy pop- anthropology of Tom Wolfe. Later this year, the surf writer Matt Warshaw is bringing out what promises to become the standard “History of Surfing.” Moore’s own history is a thing of shreds and patches, casually, almost randomly, assembled. But what he has done, subtly and beguilingly, is write a book about surfing that often is not really about surfing but about simply being alive (and, in some cases, dead).

I once came across a surf-and-brimstone article in a magazine on top of a wardrobe in a surf shack in Yallingup, Western Australia, next to a dozing snake. The headline was something like “Sex or Surfing — You Choose!” I think the only way sex gets into this book is when Moore pulls out his Mr. Zog’s Sex Wax and proceeds to hand it out to deprived surfers (along, finally, with his beloved board).

“Mad, bad and dangerous to know.” A lot of surfers would sign up for this description of that well-known wave aficionado, Byron (“And I have loved thee, ocean! … I wanton’d with thy breakers”), and Moore bathes his tribe in a warm, primal glow. But there is tragedy, maybe even absurdity, exemplified in the lament of Ken Bradshaw, after he rode what many rated as the biggest wave ever surfed (60 or 70 feet — or maybe it was 85): “How can I ever get that high again?” One surfer I know has posted this line from Camus’s notebooks on his Facebook page: “Beauty is unbearable and drives us to despair.” Take out “beauty” and put in “surfing,” and Camus’s next line still makes sense: “It offers us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we yearn to stretch out over the whole of time.”

Andy Martin is the author of “Stealingthe Wave: The Epic Struggle of KenBradshaw and Mark Foo.”

Here is the mini-article about Jean-Paul Sartre’s love letters published in The Times, February 13^th.

^{It was like discovering a lost Inca ruin. Buried in a cardboard box in Manhattan, at the Morgan Library. While researching a book, ‘What It Feels Like To Be Alive’, I recently came across a bundle of forgotten philosophical love letters from Jean-Paul Sartre to a young American woman, Sally Swing.}

^{Sartre’s most famous one-liner is ‘Hell is other people’. In Being and Nothingness, the great French existentialist argued that we have only two options: sadism or masochism. He was a self-confessed ‘bastard’, but to Sally Swing – ‘mon cher petit animal’ – he was capable of writing ‘some of the most beautiful love letters imaginable’.}

^{Swing (23) was a tyro journalist in post-war Paris, despatched to the Cannes film festival in 1947 to interview the philosopher. Sartre (42) was ‘ugly as sin, but utterly charming.’ So began an affair that was to last several years, kept aloft by air-mail.}

1. Why do we even need a lover?

Sartre sketched a chimerical being with two sets of eyes and two pairs of arms and hands. ‘Each of us can point out to the other what he or she sees. Otherwise we allow a whole host of unperceived things to pass us by.’ Where you go, ‘I have the impression that I have eyes there too.’

2. Why I don’t love you just for your body‘

God knows how much I love your body. But what is priceless for me is the human individual and it is your individuality I love. If I had to choose between your body and your friendship, I would prefer your friendship’.

3.Why you never have to feel alone‘

Gestalt theory explains how it is that one sees complicated patterns in the carpet interweaving despite the interruption of a chair leg. So it is with us: we continue underneath this absence…I remember everything about you: you are always close to me, I taste you in my mouth, I smell you in my nostrils, I hear the sound of your voice in my ears, you never leave me, I carry you around with me everywhere. And you are also the sense of time that flows and leads me back towards you.’

4. Why French women suffer from bad faith‘

Women are as free-willed in France as in America, but the rules of engagement require that they have to be seduced and find themselves in bed giving the impression that they have been carried away by an emotion stronger than they are.’

5. And what happened last night anyway?‘

It was only a dream, scarcely even a promise, virtually a denial.’ Swing missed Sartre when he was away, often with other women. ‘I would like to iron you out flat, fold you up and mail you back to Simone de Beauvoir’s grave,’ she wrote. But Sartre, the man of letters, suffered from a sense of the unreality of the flesh. He only fully loved her when they were apart. We’ll always have Paris.

Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/inherent-vice-by-thomas-pynchon-1764863.html 

and

Lee Child, 61 Hours

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/61-hours-by-lee-child-1923461.html 

The Times, January 2, 2010

My friend’s question was direct: “Have you found the Higgs boson yet?”

We were standing in the shade of a jacaranda on the campus of Caltech in Pasadena. An attractive blonde particle physicist had returned from CERN in Geneva. Naturally, my friend Alan Weinstein (I like to think of him as W. Einstein) would ask her about the so-called God particle. She laughed with the kind of laugh that suggested that physicists had been guilty of hyping the sub-atomic realm. “Nothing yet,” she replied. “We’re hoping we’ll come up with something nobody has thought of yet. We want to be surprised.”

Is physics really doomed if we don’t find the elusive Higgs boson

Now that normal service has been resumed and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is back on-line, our chances of being surprised in 2010 are greatly enhanced. The Higgs is still high on the watchlist, but there are other exotic particles that could steal the spotlight. Top is the neutralino, scion of a brief encounter between a fermion and a boson, which could in one fell swoop shore up supersymmetry and throw light on the great mystery of dark matter.

Over Christmas, Shahriar Afshar, formerly of Harvard, came out with a dramatic statement to the effect that physics is doomed if we fail to come up with the Higgs boson. He has a point.

The Higgs was slotted into the “Standard Model” to explain the vital, but otherwise inexplicable, presence of mass.

Consider this episode, taken at random from world history. When Geoff Hurst scores against Germany in the 1966 World Cup final, how does it come about that there can be a ball to kick, a foot, grass, and a planet to play on? One answer is mass. Without the Higgs all particles would be flying apart from one another at the speed of light and Wembley 1966 — along with the rest of the Universe as we know it — would cease to exist. But, even allowing that it is hard to prove a negative, would the non-appearance of Higgs cause the whole house of cards to tumble down?

Physicists have long had a habit of looking forward to the point — invariably seen to be imminent — at which they can all retire, mission accomplished.

The irony is that although cosmologists have thrown out the idea of the steady-state Universe and replaced it with a vision of perpetual expansion, they have held on to a harmonious steady-state conception of physics. In this way of thinking the end is always nigh.

Physics lives in a constant state of crisis. The “chaos and infighting” predicted by Afshar if CERN doesn’t produce the goods is the norm. Its greatest exponents — from Galileo on — create contradictions by subverting conventional wisdom. Maybe we need an expanding, multidimensional theory of knowledge, too.

Waimea Bay’s waves are legendary but yesterday brought the biggest swell in years and a dramatic surfing contest. Andy Martin reports from Hawaii

Wednesday, 9 December 2009

What’s happening?” yelled a woman leaning out of a gridlocked car. “Waves – huge and incredible waves!” replied one of the thousands of spectators lining Waimea Bay on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. “Awesome!” said the woman.

For once that adjective really was justified. The “Eddie” was finally happening. The “Quiksilver in Memory of Eddie Aikau” to give it its official title is a big-wave surfing phenomenon that takes place only when the waves at Waimea Bay remain at a sustained 20ft-plus (measured Hawaiian-style from the back of the wave, or 40ft from crest to trough). The last time it happened was in 2004. Until yesterday. It is less a sporting contest than a riotous celebration of a freak of nature.

The Hawaiian islands poke up out of the Pacific. Every winter, storm-generated swells spin down out of the north and collide with volcanic rock and reef to throw up giant waves. Every so often – 1969 was an instant classic as was 1998’s “Big Wednesday” – the North Shore of Oahu hits the jackpot.

This is one of those winters, combining an El Niño event with a typhoon that originated somewhere up near the Aleutian Islands. In Hawaii, where surfing was invented, big is beautiful. Waimea Bay used to have a monopoly on big waves. Now tow-in surfing, where the surfer is “towed” by jet ski to the wave, has opened up “outer reefs” and still bigger waves like “Jaws” in Maui. But the Bay, as they call it here, a natural arena, remains unsurpassed for drama, theatre and intensity.

There were police signs flashing along the Kamehameha Highway warning: DANGEROUS HIGH SURF. But news of the huge swell had flashed around the globe, attracting surfers from as far away as Brazil and Japan. In Hawaii schoolkids play hooky en masse when this happens. Grown-ups down tools and head towards the North Shore. Many were camping out on the beach or sleeping in cars for miles around.

On the beach as the contest finally got under way yesterday after days of anticipation and wave measuring, I ran into a bunch of soldiers from one of the local bases with their distinctive buzz cuts and way of sunning themselves and yet remaining at attention at the same time. “That is insanity!” exclaimed one of them as another gigantic wave exploded in the impact zone. “I wouldn’t go out there.” He was reluctant to give his name or serial number. “To be honest with you, I think I’ve gone AWOL,” he said. One of his comrades said: “You’re looking at a deserter right there!”

One way and another we were all deserting. But we were answering a higher call. A couple of Californians, both called Josh, had responded to the internet drums beating. “There was a lot of purple, man!” said one of the Joshes, who put his job at Facebook on hold to come over. He was referring to the colour of the satellite charts that indicate waves in excess of 30ft measuring the back of the wave.

“It’s been hyped,” said the other Josh, “but it’s still bigger than anything I’ve seen in California.”

Captain Cook first arrived in Hawaii in 1778 during the period of Makahiki, a season-long festival and holiday and religious ritual. This great tradition has carried right through to the present day in Hawaii. When the big waves hit Waimea Bay it’s like midsummer at Stonehenge. Here the myth of great foaming monsters rising up out of the sea becomes real. Not to mention young men – and occasionally women – going out to do battle with them.

The Eddie Aikau event was named after the native Hawaiian and iconic Waimea lifeguard who sacrificed his life, paddling away on his rescue board to find help when the Hokulea, a Hawaiian-style double-hulled canoe, went down in a storm on a voyage to Tahiti. The contest slogan, “Eddie Would Go” i.e. he would go out and surf regardless of how huge and gnarly the surf, has become a synonym for heroism and bravery. The Eddie contest has become a source of pride among Hawaiians. “This is the wildest thing I’ve ever seen,” said Amelia, who lives up in Pupukea Heights on the cliffs that hang over the Bay close to the ancient Hawaiian temple or heiau where people still go to pray for big waves.

Mark Foo, a famous Waimea surfer who drowned in 1994, is now an “honorary invitee” of the Eddie. His sister, SharLyn, runs the Backpackers Hostel and argues that the waves and the Eddie have helped to invigorate an economy in the doldrums. “In November Backpackers was virtually empty”, she said. “Now I’m full to bursting.”

Not everyone is quite so enthusiastic though. Surfers excluded from the 28 who are official “invitees” bitterly dismiss the event as a “circus”. Some locals object to the chaos and the crowds and the traffic snarled up half-way to Honolulu and the tourist coaches offering “Obama Presidential Tours”. One local resident says the very name Eddie Aikau fills him with “horror”. But he also paints portraits of surfers resembling gods. A British surfer, the late Ted Deerhurst, once said surfing at Waimea is like jumping off the top of a three-storey house – and then having the house chase you down the street.

The Bay has seen its share of death and disaster alongside all the epic exploits. Yesterday lifeguards, buzzing around on jet skis, and a search and rescue team with two helicopters, have been kept busy. Tom Carroll, an Australian surfing champion, was due to compete but he crashed out early with a shattered ankle.

“Sunset Suzy”, who was watching as another surfer was being dragged towards the rocks known as “Coffin Corner”, said, “This place is like a Coliseum”. And there is a certain undeniable excitement in the “wipeout” as the riders are thrown – sometimes brutally – from their chariots. The Mark Foo memorial at Waimea Bay carries this epitaph: “To get the ultimate thrill you have to be willing to pay the ultimate price.”

The writer is a fellow of the Cullman Centre at the New York Public Library and the author of Stealing the Wave

BBC Radio 3 is broadcasting my memoir of ‘Jacques Derrida, My Mentor’ on Tuesday March 23 at 11pm. Can be picked up on the web for a week afterwards or downloaded here when I get the CD…http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00rjymj 

I wanted to make a splash with my first article on Drift, so I thought I would have a chat about surfing and life with one of the most interesting men on the planet. As it happened, Stephen Hawking had other plans. But the man who did eventually give up his time for Drift is Andy Martin – a professor of French at Cambridge University; author of ‘Stealing the Wave’ and ‘Walking on Water’, as well as books on Napoleon and Brigitte Bardot; writer of diverse articles for major newspapers and contributor to various BBC productions. Most importantly, however, he’s a surfer like the rest of us. [photo by John Callahan.]

Andy, you once wrote that you were “born in East London, far from any beach, but umbilically connected via the Thames with the open sea”. By way of introduction, tell us how you eventually made it to the ocean, how often you get your feet wet and what kind of surfing you do?

This may not work for everyone, but I think marrying an Australian definitely helped. Having fantasised about surfing for many years, I think the turning point came when I witnessed the real thing for the first time at Ulu Watu. I wanted to paddle out straight off on the basis of zero actual experience. A passing Aussie probably saved me from bashing my brains out on the cliffs. How often: whenever the chance comes up, preferably somewhere with palm trees. What kind of surfing? Not high performance. Graceful if I’m lucky.

You must have taken more trips to Hawai’i than the average West Ham United fan, what with your many expeditions to the Eddie Would Go contest. But do you actually like the place? Can you envisage a ‘Martin’ household there?

I love Hawaii, but it is definitely not paradise. It probably induces a kind of madness. So naturally I feel I slot right in there. As for setting up house in Hawai’i – well, it’s a long commute.

West Ham aside, as a writer and professor you must have studied what most people would recognise as great works of art. Is surfing an art?

I get paid to read and write. But I have a sneaking regard for everything that is the opposite of a book. Surfing arose out an oral culture. Hawai’i has gone from pre-literate to what I think of as post-literate almost without missing a beat. Surfing – to me at any rate – like any great art is (a) ultimately futile but (b) despite itself somehow manages to contain a meditation on life and death.

Most Drift followers will know you from ‘Stealing the Wave’, your book on big-wave surfing and the epic battle between the notorious Ken Bradshaw and Mark Foo. I love your comparison of Bradshaw to an ‘existential’ hero. Not many surf writers would employ such a device, and it’s also one of the easiest to understand descriptions of an ‘existential’ principle that I’ve ever seen. What interests me, though, is your perspective on surfing… Is it largely ‘existential’ or ‘essential’?

I’d like to turn this one around. Rather than think of surfers as frustrated philosophers, I now tend to think of philosophers as would-be surfers. So for example I see Jean-Paul Sartre, author of ‘Being and Nothingness’ and ‘Roads to Freedom’ as a kind of Ken Bradshaw figure, a hardcore hellman locked into a tragic trajectory, and Albert Camus, ‘The Outsider’, as a more of a Mark Foo, a little more manoeuvrable and stylish. His “dying in a big wave is a beautiful way to go” thinking is comparable to Camus’ “suicide is the first of all philosophical problems.” I suppose if there is a line that captures the ‘essence’ of surfing it is again Camus: “beauty is unbearable. It drives us to despair, offering us eternity in a moment that we would like to unwind across the whole of time.”

But Sartre explicitly fantasises about surfing in a passage in ‘Being and Nothingness’, where he compares our passage through the water favourably to skiing because it “leaves no trace”, no tracks in the snow.

In your opinion, are there many ‘thinking’ surfers, or do most of us live up the stereotype of having too much salt stuck between our ears?

I think most of us – perhaps all of us – think too much, but we tend to think in straight lines most of the time. Surfing is a different way of thinking about our relationship with the world. It goes off at an oblique angle. I like that.

In ‘Stealing the Wave’ you also tell some memorable stories about your time spent at some of the world’s most famous breaks. Do you have any from outside the surfing world?

I can tell you one about New York. I recently competed in the Empire State Building Run-Up, where you get to run up all the stairs of the Empire State. I’m not making this up. I wasn’t sure I could really make it. And oddly enough as I approached the Empire State one fine morning in February, it reminded me a lot of a big day at Waimea Bay, which fills you with a mix of ecstasy and terror. 

Simon Barnes, the sports journalist and birdwatcher, once wrote something along the lines of: “Da Vinci never had to choose between one discipline or the other, so why should I?” I quite agree with him. But if you absolutely had to choose between words and waves, what would it be?

OK, this is hard and probably impossible. I’m just about to try a philosophical and psychological experiment by taking a vow of silence (for 24 hours only) when I give up words completely. I suspect language will find a way to creep back in. It’s a little bit like that with surfing. The less I surf the more I think about it: the more it exists as a metaphor. Waves are like dreams: if you don’t have them, you start hallucinating.

Is there any reason why your books generally have three words in the title?

Are you training to be a psychoanalyst? Clearly there’s some secret pattern here that I was completely unaware of. Something to with the three blind mice, I should think, or the three pigs. Or maybe Hegel’s dialectic.

Finally, any projects that we should know about in the pipeline?

I’m currently writing ‘What it Feels Like to Be Alive’. At least I managed to get the number of words up. Surfing gets in there somewhere.

If only King Kong had known about the Empire State Building Run-Up, where for one miraculous if masochistic morning each year people are allowed to climb the inside of the landmark building, he and Fay might have lived happily — if asymmetrically — ever after.

That’s what I was thinking as I stood on Fifth Avenue at 8 a.m. on Tuesday, staring up at the Empire State in all its glory, waiting for the 33rd annual running of New York’s famous vertical marathon. Panicking. Like a surfer about to paddle out on a big day at Waimea Bay, I was filled with a mix of ecstasy and terror. At least horizontal-marathon runners don’t have to look at the whole course from the starting line.

I would never have been there if I wasn’t too cheap to take out a decent gym membership. One freezing morning a few months ago, I was headed outside for a run but chickened out at the door. Rather than ride the elevator back up to my 16th-floor apartment, near Washington Square, I headed for the stairs. It nearly killed me. But I was hooked. Soon it was up and down twice, 32 floors, then 48. I could never get quite high enough.

Still, every morning, I would walk out the front door of my building and see the Empire State Building. If I looked out the windows of theNew York Public Library, there it was again. Like a beautiful woman I could not force from my mind — an extremely tall, rather dominant beautiful woman — the 102-story Empire State Building became an obsession. I was haunted by the vision of all those stairs.

I flirted with a 45-story building on the Upper East Side equipped with a pool and hot tub where my friend lives and where I would occasionally work out. His health club was like something out of Playboy. But from the window of his 40th-floor apartment, I could still see her — mocking me, a perpetual temptation. I realized that there was only one place in the city from which I could be sure not to have to gaze upon this accursed object of desire: inside the Empire State itself.

I once mentioned my secret yearning to a woman at a party. “I get it,” she said. “It’s a sort of hamster thing, isn’t it?” No, to us vertical runners stretching in the bowels of the Empire State last week, it was not a hamster thing. It was grand and epic and heroic. I wore a T-shirt inscribed with a variant of my father’s old motto from his days in the Royal Air Force: “Through Adversity to the Stairs.”

I had been warned about the firefighters in the race. There are times when you really want a firefighter, times when nothing is finer than the sight of a firefighter, or indeed several firefighters, in extremely tight shorts. When you are about to run up the stairs of the Empire State is not one of those times. Let them stick to their pinup calendars and keep out of my way.

With the cry “God be with you!” from a woman in an emerald-green running vest, 324 runners from 19 states and 17 countries were off, jockeying for position as we stormed through the lobby door to the stairs. It got pretty brutal; Ben Hur without the chariots.

I had two basic rules. Rule No. 1: keep running. Or at least jogging. I passed a few sluggards who were under the impression it was the Empire State Walk-Up. And then there were those who had ceased any semblance of locomotion altogether. Rule No. 2: don’t trample on the bodies. Go around (ruthlessly ignoring any cries of distress).

The surprising thing about the stairwell of the Empire State Building is that it looks like any other stairwell — only with more stairs. A lot more; 1,576 of them to the race’s finish line on the 86th floor. But it might as well be double or triple that. There is a sense of infinity to the stairwell, as if you were running around one of those Escher drawings for ever and ever amen.

In the first phase of the race, you forget all about death, taxes and unrequited love. You are totally focused. In the second phase, starting around the 60th floor, you begin to feel that perhaps death, taxes and unrequited love are not so bad, and definitely preferable to running up any more stairs.

When I hit the top, 21 minutes 20 seconds after I started (a bit under half the pace of Thomas Dold, the German who picked up his fifth straight title in 10 minutes 16 seconds), I was half expecting something like a King Kong statuette. Instead, an angelic blonde in a pink leotard — there to root on another runner — came over, as if in a dream, and leaned on me. It was a stairway to heaven. I was emperor of New York for the day and anything could happen. Turned out she had a fear of heights, but still.

It was in this empire state of mind, as I gazed out on the great city spinning a thousand feet below, that I finally figured it out. It isn’t because it feels so good when you stop. Or because it’s there. The thing about the Empire State Run-Up is that although it makes absolutely no sense in itself, it makes complete sense of everything else in the world, which divides up into lovely tall buildings with loads of stairs — and all the others.

One thing worries me. Is it all downstairs for me from now on? I wonder if they have run-ups in Kuala Lumpur or Dubai.

Andy Martin, a fellow of the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, lives in Greenwich Village, where he regularly runs up to his 16th-floor apartment as many as five times at a stretch, but takes the elevator down in between.