Just Imagine Our Civilization Reduced to Three Books...

Richard Feynman (1918 - 1988)

Richard Feynman was one of the greatest scientists of the 20th Century. He was a physicist whose prankish sense of humor and ability to see into things--and express them in his own unique ways--have made him the hero of millions of "geeks", scientists, intellectuals, and people who enjoy intelligent humor.

Here is a Youtube excerpt from a lecture he gave in which he was sidetracked by his outrage at the destruction of the Mayan civilization. "They had hundreds of thousands of books. And there's three left....Just imagine our civilization reduced to three books. The particular ones left by accident...."

Richard Feynman was an endlessly fascinating character. A number of popular books have been written about him, and you will find that the more you learn, the more he appeals, as an intellect, a prankster, and as a human being. A great place to start is the anecdotal biography, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, which is delightful. There is a BBC biography that is quite good, too, entitled Richard Feynman--No Ordinary Genius.

A wonderful biography of Feynman was done for Nova, called "The Quest for Tannu Tuva". The biography gives a feel for the delight that Feynman instills as we learn about him or watch videos of him. One of his preoccupations late in his life before his death from cancer was the wish to visit the Cental Asian republic of Tuva. It had become for him the embodiment of the unknown and exotic, an exciting place to explore and experience. Among the most exotic aspects of Tuvan culture is their extraordinary music, known as "Tuvan throat singing". Tuvan throat singing can be heard in some YouTube videos. This is one. And here is another. The technique known as "throat singing" is also referred to more accurately as "overtone singing", and is also practised by other Central Asian cultures (Mongolian, Tibetan) and in avant garde Western performance. (When I was in college, I had a music professor who was a wonderful composer. He used to arrange festivals of experimental music that at times showcased techniques such as overtone singing and circular breathing. This was thirty years ago, before Richard Feynman's interest in Tuvan culture became known and thereby greatly increased the notoriety of Tuvan throat singing, which I still find surprising and beautiful.)

The world has so much more to delight and enrich and teach us than the old superstitions and other forms of hate-filled prejudice allow. Those superstitions destroyed the Mayan civilization and nowadays are frothing to destroy the science and human advancement that people like Richard Feynman have given us in our time. Feynman found wonder and delight in the lost culture of the Maya, the little-known hidden culture and geography of Tuva, and in the workings of the Universe itself. So should we all. Tuva or bust!

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, French Artist

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891 - 1915), Self-Portrait

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska was a French painter and sculptor. He was killed in action in the First World War at the age of 24.

The U.S. poet, Ezra Pound (1885 - 1972) a genius himself, and a man who surrounded himself with geniuses, considered Gaudier-Brzeska the most authentic genius he had ever known. (A brief list of some of the artists Pound knew personally: Stravinsky, George Antheil, Henry James, Ford Maddox Ford, Yeats, Hemingway, William Carlos Williams, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Brancusi, e.e. cummings, Robert Frost, Wyndam Lewis, Basil Bunting, Louis Zukofsky, Noguchi, etc.)

In a very brief time, killed as young as he was, Gaudier-Brzeska created some of the most remarkable sculpture from the early 20th Century, and his drawings have a spareness and vitality that are extraordinary even among exceptional artists. He was a cubist sculptor and in his drawing very influenced by Chinese and Japanese art.

Most of Gaudier-Brzeska's sculptures are small, they can be held in the hand, because he could not afford blocks of marble. Even so, his few works show astounding talent, and it grieves one to think of what Gaudier-Brzeska might have accomplished. A vast, unprecedented wealth of talent disappeared into the mud and agony of the Great War, and Gaudier-Brzeska is one of the stand-outs of the geniuses lost.

Red Stone Dancer c. 1913

Here is a picture of one of Gaudier-Brzeska's sculptures, Red Stone Dancer from 1913.

Here is a reproduction of his most famous drawing, the magnificent portrait of the young Ezra Pound.

Ezra Pound wrote a memoir of his friend Henri Gaudier-Brzeska that was published in 1916, during the war. The title of Pound's book is  Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir by Ezra Pound. Please click on the link; it will take you to Amazon's page for the New Directions edition of the book. If you click on the image of the book, you can turn virtual pages and you'll see more reproductions of Gaudier-Brzeska's work.

The Tate has a little video of one of Gaudier-Brzeska's notebooks. Beautiful.

Charles Tomlinson, English Poet (b. 1927)

I was just reading some of the poetry of Charles Tomlinson, and the second section of his poem "A Garland for Thomas Eakins" struck me as particularly fine:

II

Anatomy, perspective
and reflection: a boat
in three inclinations:
to the wind, to the waves
and to the picture-frame.
Those are the problems. What
does a body propose
that a boat does not?