the proverbial fool

Nobody likes to be thought a fool, although this may be in part because the word has developed increasingly negative connotations over the past four centuries. I suspect a religious influence. In the Middle Ages, ‘fool’ was another name for the court jester, who was the mediæval equivalent of a professional comedian, a man whose job it was to make his employer laugh.

In fact, there were two types of fool: the natural fool really was an idiot, and his humour would have been of the unsubtle, slapstick variety, much like the general buffoonery of the modern circus clown; the licensed fool, on the other hand, was not merely permitted to criticize and poke fun at his employer and his or her guests, he was expected to do so, in the process providing a social commentary in a series of short, witty phrases.

This can be seen most clearly in a dramatic portrayal of the relationship. The fool in Shakespeare’s King Lear repeatedly reminds the king that he made a mistake in renouncing his throne:

Lear: Dost thou call me fool, boy?
Fool: All thy other titles thou hast given away; that
      thou wast born with. [Act I, Scene 4]

He is also a master of stating the obvious in a humorous way:

Fool: …The reason why the
      seven stars are no more than seven is a pretty reason.
Lear: Because they are not eight?
Fool: Yes, indeed: thou wouldst make a good fool. [Act I, Scene 5]

However, Shakespeare was not the only influence on the English language at the beginning of the seventeenth century. The first officially sanctioned translation of the Bible, the Authorized Version, was published in 1611. It was based largely on William Tyndale’s 1526 translation, which had been unauthorized and for which the unfortunate translator was burned at the stake for heresy. It quickly became apparent to the new audience that the biblical writers did not suffer fools gladly:

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge: but fools despise wisdom and instruction. [Proverbs 1:7]

How long…will…fools hate knowledge? [Proverbs 1:22]

It is as sport to a fool to do mischief…. [Proverbs 10:23]

…it is abomination to fools to depart from evil. [Proverbs 13:19]

A fool hath no delight in understanding…. [Proverbs 18:2]

Speak not in the ears of a fool: for he will despise the wisdom of thy words. [Proverbs 23:9]

He that trusteth in his own heart is a fool…. [Proverbs 28:26]

Note that some of these examples define rather than describe a fool. Clearly, the greatest of all follies was to reject the word of God. However, the early Stuart monarchs (James I and Charles I) continued to employ fools, and it was only with the ascent to power of the Puritans in 1649 that the practice was finally abandoned. One can surmise that these po-faced killjoys (they also forbade the celebration of Christmas) put an end to the role of official court jester because they disapproved of such frivolity, but it can be seen from the quotations above that there was substantial scriptural authority for such a move.

On the other hand, none of the many aphorisms in the Book of Proverbs can be regarded as widely used. The two best-known English proverbs about fools come from other sources:

…a foole and his money is soone parted.

Dr John Bridges, Defence of the Government of the Church of England, 1587.

Fools rush in where Angels fear to tread.

Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism, 1709.

These are statements that have attained the status of folk wisdom, but they are merely statements. Their Chinese equivalents tend to have a story attached. They also follow a set formula: four characters that summarize the story (they are often referred to as ‘four-character idioms’, or cheng yu).

One example that deals with apparent folly is yú gōng yí shān [‘foolish old man moves mountains’]. As with most chengyu, there is no standard text of the story, but the general thrust is as follows:

In ancient China, there was an old man who was annoyed that every visit to the provincial capital entailed a lengthy detour because the direct route was blocked by a substantial mountain range. He resolved to remove the mountains. He was aided in this endeavour by his sons and grandsons, but there were many scoffers. They asked the old man what he expected to achieve, given that he was already old and could not expect to succeed in his lifetime. He replied that after his death his sons and their sons, and their sons, and so on, would continue the work, while the mountains would grow no higher [he clearly hadn’t heard of plate tectonics], so in time the job would be done.

There is no agreement on how the story ends. In some versions, the old man’s neighbours, impressed by his diligence, join in and the mountains are eventually removed; in others, the immortals are moved by the old man’s perseverance, and they move the mountains for him. This chengyu would be used in the same way that an equivalent English proverb (such as ‘where there’s a will there’s a way’) would be used: to encourage someone who is daunted by a seemingly impossible task to persevere. It should not come as a surprise to learn that this was Mao Zedong’s favourite chengyu, used to exhort his fellow citizens to greater efforts, although if he used it during the Great Leap Forward his efforts must be judged a failure.

My own favourite cheng yu is yān ēr dào líng (‘cover ears steal bell’). The story goes like this:

One day, an itinerant beggar was passing through an isolated village when he spied a beautifully polished bronze bell hanging above the outer gate of one of the houses.

“A-ha!” he said. “That’s a fine bell. I shall steal it and sell it in the next village.”

“Wait a minute,” he thought. “When I take down the bell it will start ringing, and that will alert the villagers.”

He pondered this dilemma for a few minutes before coming up with a solution.

“If I cover my ears while carrying the bell, I will not hear it ringing,” he proclaimed confidently to himself. “And this means that I can make my escape in silence, because the bell will not be ringing.”

Needless to say, the beggar’s plan didn’t work. The conventional explanation of how this chengyu should be used (to describe someone who thinks they are clever but aren’t) is incorrect. I was taught to use it as a comment when someone does something that is unutterably foolish.

A similar cheng yu is kè zhōu qiú jiàn (‘drop sword mark boat’), which relates the story of a man who loses his sword while crossing a river in a boat. He cuts a notch in the side of the boat to indicate where he lost it. Again, it would normally be used to admonish someone who has just done something inconceivably stupid.

Cheng yu were routinely taught in Hong Kong’s schools in the 1960s and 1970s, but this no longer happens. I have only one comment for the nameless official who thought it would be a good idea to drop this important aspect of Chinese cultural tradition from the curriculum: yim yee doh ling, which is the local (Cantonese) version of ‘cover ears steal bell’.

atom heart mother

When I compiled some of my musical memories last month, I deliberately left out Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother, from the 1970 album of the same name, which has been my favourite music track since I first heard it in 1971 (having spent 1970 in the Australian outback, where the opportunities for keeping up to date with the contemporary music scene were severely limited). It was the longest continuous piece ever recorded by Pink Floyd, and it featured a brass ensemble, a choir and a wide range of sound effects to augment the band’s performance.

Actually, it is possible to argue that it was the band that augmented the brass and choir, and there is no doubt that the band was not particularly impressed with the result:

Atom Heart Mother is a good case, I think, for being thrown into the dustbin and never listened to by anyone ever again! It was pretty kind of pompous….

Bass guitarist Roger Waters, speaking in 1985.

Atom Heart Mother was a good idea, but it was dreadful. I listened to that album recently: God, it’s shit, possibly our lowest point artistically.

Lead guitarist David Gilmour, speaking in 2001.

The album was not well received by the critics at the time, which is a good reason for attempting to escape responsibility for its creation. Pink Floyd were never to attempt anything quite so grandiose again. However, although the tracks on the second side of the album cannot be ranked among the band’s finest work, the title track, which occupies the whole of side one, deserves a better reputation.

Unlike similar attempts at the time to fuse rock with more ‘serious’ elements, such as Deep Purple’s Concerto for Group and Orchestra, in which the orchestral contributions almost seemed irrelevant, Atom Heart Mother is a fully integrated suite of six ‘movements’. The way the band, the brass and the choir complement each other throughout the piece marks it out as much the more successful of the two.

The first movement opens with a long, droning chord on a Hammond organ that grows slowly in intensity. Then the brass section comes in with a series of short competing fanfares, rasping trumpets on the one side, blaring trombones on the other. Finally, the conflict is resolved: there is one last fanfare before the drums and bass join in for the first appearance of the anthemic main theme. This feel-good melody is suddenly interrupted by a return of the argumentative brass, and everything else falls silent, to be replaced by intermittent background sound effects: first, a whinnying horse, then several explosions, a rocket taking off, and a train rushing through a tunnel. But as a motorcycle roars off into the distance, discipline, and the main theme, is restored.

The main theme segues seamlessly into the second movement, which opens with a series of bass and organ arpeggios while a cello reprises the main theme. The accompaniment increases in tempo, and the drums come in; the cello is replaced by a slide guitar, and for the first time there is some limited embellishment and improvisation around the main theme. As the movement builds to a climax, the organ is replaced by a piano echoing the main theme, and the brass section lays down an understated backing.

The second movement ends suddenly, to be replaced by a slow, dramatic organ riff and the first entry of the choir. But there are no words, merely voices, soaring sopranos at first, then the contraltos provide a counterpoint, the organ reworking the main theme as the voices intermingle. Slowly, the tenors arrive, and the tone immediately becomes more menacing. Finally, the bass voices trigger a sense of urgency and, after a short crescendo, in come the drums, mostly tom-toms with the occasional cymbal, to bring whatever primitive ritual was being enacted to a resounding climax before petering out and leaving quietly.

The fourth movement is the most obviously rock-oriented of the six. It begins with a conventional guitar solo backed by staccato organ, bass and drums. Suddenly, the mood changes. The choir is back, and this time there are words. But it is a language that you cannot understand, although you feel that you should. An exotic ceremony is taking place. It builds to a climax that reintroduces the main theme, again played by the brass, which leads into a sequeway identical to that closing the first movement.

However, the following movement is a shock: relentlessly discordant, pulsating electronic noise that changes key erratically and builds remorselessly, through a background of yet more noise, although it could be voices, to the most stunning climax in the entire piece. This is scary stuff if you’ve recently ingested mescalin or LSD, which I did more than once in 1971 and 1972. Just before the end, a disembodied, distorted voice declares “Here is an important announcement”, a steam train rushes by, and the entire nightmare comes to a sudden, juddering, explosive halt.

Immediately, there are signs of a reawakening: optimistic tinkling notes, played by striking the strings of a piano with tiny hammers, a few tentative brass riffs. But they all appear to be out of phase. Sections of the brass try to establish the main theme amid competing riffs, and gradually the fragments come together. After a couple of false starts, the disembodied voice announces “Silence in the studio”, and the brass launches enthusiastically into the main theme, driven on by pounding drums. There are short repeats of the cello and slide guitar solos, this time with brass accompaniment. Finally, the choir provides ethereal background harmonies as the main theme builds towards its final crescendo.

And my personal memory? In 1971, I joined the staff of Eskdale Outward Bound School as a temporary instructor. The mainstay of Outward Bound in those days was the 26-day ‘standard’ course. The daily routine on such courses included an assembly at 9 o’clock each morning (unless everyone was out on expedition). The format of the assembly was simple: the warden made any announcements that were required, then an instructor gave an ‘inspirational’ reading and led a short prayer.

On my second course, I was asked to perform the second and third parts of the ceremony. I decided to interpret ‘reading’ in the widest possible sense. I rigged up my two large speakers to a recently acquired stereo cassette deck containing a tape that had already been cued to the start of the final movement beforehand. Before pressing the ‘start’ button, I explained to the capacity audience that the music symbolized the symbiosis between different levels of consciousness (I’d recently been reading Timothy Leary’s The Politics of Ecstasy). I sat down and started the music. The warden didn’t look too impressed, but he said nothing.

After what seemed like a lot more than the six minutes that the final movement actually takes to play, the music stopped and I stopped the tape. The reaction was so far beyond my expectations as to be halfway to the outer reaches of the solar system. All 108 students (all male, all between the ages of 16 and 20) stood and gave me a standing ovation. Even the warden admitted that he’d ‘appreciated’ it, and he appeared not to notice that I skipped the prayer. Several students sought me out during the day to tell me that I’d made them think.

This may have been the single most personally uplifting experience in my entire life. If you’ve heard Atom Heart Mother and still agree with Waters and Gilmour, all I can say is that it is your loss. If you haven’t heard it, then ignore Waters and Gilmour and give it a listen. I don’t think you will be disappointed.

photographic abstraction

One of the delights of digital photography is that you’re freed from the tyranny of having to decide whether something you see is worth using a frame of film, which means that you can take photographs of anything. I wonder how many people do. Take photos of anything, that is. For me, the only criterion is whether I like the image. It doesn’t have to be an intimate snapshot of friends or family; it doesn’t have to be of a ‘picturesque’ landscape; it certainly doesn’t have to be of a famous landmark. I like to take pictures that aren’t of anything.

In other words, I like to photograph images that were they painted and hanging in galleries would be considered ‘art’ by the cognoscenti. I make no such claims for the photographs that follow, although I could promote them as ‘found images’ in the tradition of Marcel Duchamp, who famously exhibited a porcelain urinal as a ‘found object’, claiming that because the world is full of interesting objects, it isn’t necessary to create new ones. The ‘art’ was claimed to be in the simple act of selection, but in fact the statement being made by Duchamp was that it’s art if he said it was. It was probably quite a profound statement when first made, but it sounds trite and banal now, and it opened the door to all manner of mountebanks and charlatans.

I could claim an affinity with abstract expressionism, but these photographs have neither Kandinsky’s vibrancy of colour nor Jackson Pollock’s fluidity of line. They are simply images that I find aesthetically pleasing. They were taken with a cheap six-year-old digital camera, and I have given them fanciful titles; you may feel that they remind you of something else. Let me know if they do.

tattered banners

the big bang, as seen from a nearby universe

the enchanted forest

light and darkness

the colour of money

How much reliance do you place on promises? Do you, for example, expect them to be kept? Before you answer, you might want to consider the following:

The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Limited promises to pay the bearer on demand at its office here ONE HUNDRED HONG KONG DOLLARS.

Inscription on HK$100 banknote.

This statement is meaningless. Assuming that the bank isn’t going to exchange your $100 note for another, I can’t help but wonder what it thinks the promise means. It’s obviously not going to exchange your $100 banknote for one $70 and two $15 notes, although it might as well given that this so-called promise is no more than a form of words. A piece of paper bearing such a promise is essentially worthless. Money is only as good as the confidence that people have in it, and paper money, it turns out, is no more than a gigantic fraud perpetrated against willing victims.

Until the First World War, it was possible to go into the head office of a note-issuing bank in most industrial countries and exchange such a promissory note for its equivalent value in gold. The war put paid to that practice. In even earlier times, silver (or gold), neatly fashioned into convenient units, was the only kind of money. Its value was real and instantly recognizable. Now all the ‘silver’ coins are cupronickel, which, if not intrinsically worthless, has a value that is a mere fraction of the amount engraved on the coin. Gold coins still exist, but they are not for everyday commercial transactions: they are simply bullion, a convenient way to amass and store wealth.

When humans first began to coalesce into settled agricultural communities, there was no money, and any inter-community trade would have been via the medium of barter. This would have worked well enough between small communities with broadly similar products to offer and similar needs, but as villages became towns and towns became cities, the need for a more efficient system would have become increasingly apparent. Hence the invention of coins, which resolved the obvious difficulty of finding someone who was willing to exchange their cattle directly for a wagon, or a sack of grain for a bolt of cloth.

Unfortunately, anyone receiving a gold or silver coin could not be sure what they were getting: coins might be of their proclaimed weight and therefore value, or they might be less. They might also contain an unknown amount of a base metal. Over time, a coin’s intrinsic value would be related to the perceived reliability of the issuing authority. In other words, money would either be reliable but scarce or unreliable but relatively plentiful. In both cases, uncertainty would be built in: uncertainty over opportunities for earning money, or uncertainty over what that money, once earned, would buy.

However, ingenuity didn’t stop with the invention of coins. The next innovation was the establishment of banks, which were used principally as repositories for accumulated wealth. They flourished first in the Roman Empire and reached a high level of development in the Italian city-states of the Renaissance. However, the first major innovation in banking practice took place in Amsterdam in the early seventeenth century. The majority of coins in circulation at that time were appallingly deficient in weight and/or purity, so the city’s merchants created a bank that was owned by the city—an embryonic central bank. The Bank of Amsterdam solved the problem of quality by going back to a system that had preceded the invention of coins: weighing. A merchant could bring all the coins that he had received in the course of business to the bank, and after they had been weighed their total value would be credited to his account.

This turned out to be a reliable form of money, because the merchant could then transfer some of that credit to a fellow merchant, and the recipient could be sure that he was getting honest weight. It wasn’t long before payments through the bank commanded a premium over conventional transactions. But then came an interesting discovery: the money deposited with the bank didn’t have to sit idly; the bank could lend that money. The borrower then had an amount that could be spent, but the original deposit could also be spent. There is an obvious difficulty here: the borrower and the depositor must not come for their money at the same time. They must trust the bank, trust it as far as believing that it isn’t doing what it does as a matter of routine.

One of the recurring themes in the history of money is that every system for its creation and management contains within itself the seeds of some unforeseen future abuse. It was thus with coins, clipped, ‘sweated’ with acid and otherwise debased until faith in their value had been eroded almost beyond repair. And so it was with the Bank of Amsterdam, which lent huge sums to the Dutch East India Company. The men who ran the bank were often the same men who ran the company, and over time the scrutiny given to loans grew increasingly lax. Times became harder for the company: there was war with Britain, and ships didn’t come back. One by one, loans went into default. As noted above, a bank can operate only if its depositors do not come for their money all at once. However, if they even suspect that they won’t be able to withdraw their money, they are sure to come. And they did. The Bank of Amsterdam was wound up in 1819.

However, long before the Bank of Amsterdam finally closed its doors, a far more spectacular example of banking malfeasance had occurred in France. Louis XIV had died in 1715, leaving the country bankrupt after a long and extravagant reign marked by a succession of largely pointless wars with much of the rest of Europe, and an heir only five years old. The country was therefore left in the hands of the regent, the Duc d’Orléans, a dissolute character with an expensive lifestyle and a big problem. The treasury was empty.

Apparently hopeless situations such as these offer opportunities for a scoundrel, and it wasn’t long before one appeared. John Law was the son of an Edinburgh goldsmith who, in 1716, obtained permission from the regent to open the Banque Générale. As part of the deal, Law’s bank took over the debts of the regent, and therefore of the country. In 1718, the bank became the Banque Royale, meaning that notes issued by the bank were guaranteed by the king; these notes were, in essence, promises to pay their holders their face value in silver or gold. It is not difficult to see why the regent was so easily persuaded.

In 1717, Law had acquired the Mississippi Company to support the French colony of Louisiana and to mine the ‘unlimited’ supplies of precious metals to be found there. However, as would soon become apparent to holders of the bank’s notes, the gold and silver backing the notes was in mines as yet undiscovered in the unexplored parts of the colony, which extended well beyond the boundaries of the modern American state, north to Minnesota, west to the Rockies and east to the Alleghenies.

By 1719, Law’s notes were being issued in the hundreds of millions. Government creditors who were paid off in the notes rushed to buy stock in the Mississippi Company and the Banque Royale. From the proceeds of these sales, more money could be lent to the government, more notes could be issued, and yet more stock could be sold. It was in effect a closed system for recycling worthless paper in which everyone involved was getting rich, on paper. The word ‘millionaire’ first appears during this episode.

Inevitably, doubts began to surface about the reality of the gold and silver, and people started to bring in their banknotes for redemption. By no stretch of the imagination was there enough gold and silver to pay off the notes, so payment was suspended. Law was lucky to get out of Paris alive.

However, there is another side to this story. In his role as comptroller general of France, Law had directed large sums into building canals and other useful public works. His mistake was not in issuing paper money but in issuing too much of it. Could the system be made to work if used in moderation?

The Bank of England had been set up in similar circumstances in 1694. The king, William of Orange, was also in debt, not as a result of succeeding Louis XIV but as a result of fighting him. He was persuaded that such a bank would solve his problems. Rich private subscribers put up the cash he needed, in return for which they were allowed to issue notes backed by the king’s promise to pay. This evolved into a system whereby these original subscribers, goldsmiths and the like, issued banknotes secured against the bullion in their vaults. When the Bank of England received such notes, it returned them for redemption, thus ensuring that these early bankers weren’t reckless in their issuing of banknotes.

As noted above, this remained the paradigm for the management of money until after the First World War, by which time the issuing of banknotes had become the prerogative of central banks. However, around this time the private banks discovered that they could make more money and therefore more profit not by lending money but by investing it. And therein lay the seeds of further abuse. Where investment had once been in stocks and shares, it metamorphosed into another system for recycling worthless paper: ‘structured investment vehicle’ sounds very impressive, until you realize that this was the label attached to an investment backed by American sub-prime mortgages. Which swindler thought that one up?