Last updated: 2/10/2000
Link back to course Welcome...

How Revolutionary Were the People in Creating Minds?

Section 2 has been changed from the original version dated 2/7. Sections that have been changed are in this shade of red.

Today we view the people in Creating Minds after a long time has passed. Their work has become part of our culture, and for us it may be part of normal thought. Under these circumstances, just from hearing about them, we may not understand how controversial and revolutionary their work was when it first came out. Here are some bits and pieces to illustrate this.

[First, just for fun, I call your attention to the section on the composer Igor Stravinsky in Creating Minds, and particularly to the section on page 190 in which the sound of cupping the right hand under the left armpit and squeezing the left arm produces a noise that "sounded (euphemistically) like wet resounding kisses." Does everybody understand exactly what is being described here? In how many textbooks will you read something like this?]

1. In the Stravinsky section, Gardner describes the opening night of Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring). It was chaos, pandemonium. I remember the record notes on the first recording of this that I bought (the fact (a) that I was a young male at the time, and the fact that (b) the record cover featured partial nudity were, I assure you, entirely unrelated). The record notes quoted from a newspaper review of the first performance. The reviewer said that towards the end of the piece he came to his senses and realized that he was keeping time to the music by pounding on the head of the person in front of him with his closed fists! And the poundee was likewise so absorbed in the music that he paid no attention! The ability of these major works of Creativity to astound the viewer, reader or listener  can scarcely be appreciated at this time, so long after their premier.
   
2. Regarding Einstein, I was an undergraduate Physics major during the late 1950's and early '60's, over 50 years after Einstein's publication of the theory of special relativity. At the time that I was a Physics major, the education practice was to follow the historical development of Physics, so we spent several years studying the earlier "classical" Physics of Newton, up to the end of the 1800's. Relative motion was well understood at the time. In contemporary terms, imagine a policeman standing at the corner of Woodward and 6 Mile, holding a radar gun and clocking two cars speeding North. One, a white police car, is traveling North at 80 miles an hour, and in the green second car, a criminal is driving North at 100 miles an hour. After an hour, the policeman in the white car has travelled 80 miles, and the criminal in the green car has travelled 100 miles, or 20 miles further than the policeman in the white car, as shown in the picture below. The 100 Mi that the green car has travelled, minus the 80 Mi that the white car has travelled gives 20 Mi, the distance that the green car is ahead of the white car; 100 Mi - 80 Mi = 20 Mi. That is, the criminal is 20 miles from the policeman in the white car, and 100 miles from the policeman on the ground. This is clearly what the picture below says, and is even the way arithmetic was defined historically, by figuring out distances on the ground.
   
   
   
   Well, starting in the late 1800's, there were many measurements of the speed of light, which is approximately 186,000 miles per second. This relative speed thing was tried with light beams, and the results were very confusing and contradictory. Nothing seemed to work the way it was expected to, like the two traveling cars above. At first, the experimenters were criticized for bad measurement techniques, but the best experimenters of the time got into this, and again there were criticisms of the techniques, but eventually all of these criticisms were answered, but still nothing seemed to work. The results had to be taken seriously.
   
   In the two-cars situation, suppose that the criminal was travelling at 100% of the speed of light, or 186,000 miles per second, while the policeman in the car is travelling at 80% of the speed of light, or 148,800 miles per second. After one second, the policeman in the car is 148,800 miles from the standing policeman, and the criminal is 186,000 miles from the policeman on the ground. But -- the criminal is also 186,000 miles from the policeman in the car (that's right, 186,000, not 186,000 - 148,800 = 37,200 Mi). Even after measuring as carefully as possible, the two policemen would measure exactly the same distance to the criminal, even after being as careful as they could and resolving all of the experimental problems. Many theoretical physicists tried to "bend" or adapt the classical relativity, that predicted different numerical values for the two policemen's measurements. But none of these attempts were successful. The new results extend to all measurments or values involving space, mass, energy and time, not just to the specific circumstance above. Einstein's word has many practical consequences, such as nuclear energy and x-rays.
   
   So, one day in our Physics classes, our teachers started explaining what Einstein proposed in the Special Theory of Relativity. Classically, speed was measured by taking a ruler and measuring the distance traveled between two times, and dividing the distance by the time to travel that distance. Einstein proposed that the measurements of distance and time were mixed up in a specific way. Classically, they way we had grown up, and been taught earlier, space and time were different things, and were independent. Space was measured with rulers and time was measured with clocks. They were different. But the Special Theory of Relativity said no, there was only space-time. All of Einstein's contemporaries tried to explain what was going on, but Einstein saw that there could be no "because" -- that was just the way things were. Space and time were not independent. The change was so fundamental that the nature of space-time could not be explained, just taken at face value. Space-time could not be fit into your previous experience, but was something new. The only comfort was that the mathematics showed that, in the case of the two policemen and the criminal, the space-time results were so close to the classical results that we would never be able to measure the difference. So our old results were not wrong in a practical sense. But if the criminal were traveling very close to the speed of light, then the classical results did not agree with the measurements at all, and only the results from the Special Theory of Relativity were correct. So, this did resolve the problem with the speed of light, but I still remember my own feeling of puzzlement and anger. It made no sense! What could Einstein have been thinking? It was just weird. It couldn't be right. But it was right. Again, the reaction was similar to that of the reviewer of Le Sacre du Printemps. And in my case, the outrage was fifty years after Einstein first made his proposal.
   
   Well, Einstein was right and I was wrong. And scarcely a year or two later, as a Physics graduate student, I was using Einstein's equations on a regular basis. They were no longer outrageous or weird to me. They were simply a tool that we used day in and day out to make further discoveries.

The changes that the creative individuals made, that are described in Creating Minds, were truly revolutionary. It is hard to grasp today how fundamentally they challenged the culture of the time. I hope that these anecdotes have helped.

T.S. Eliot

ELIOT AND HIS INFLUENCE, from Modern American Poetry, edited by Louis Untermeyer, published by Harcourt Brace and Co, Copyright 1950

"Two strongly opposed tendencies were noticeable for several years after 1915. The one was a use of the colloquial speech popularized by [Carl] Sandburg, [Vachel] Lindsay and [Edgar Lee] Masters and heightened by [Robert] Frost; the other was the striking departure from both the consistent conversational tone and the traditional "poetic" language to which such poets as E.A. Robinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay remained loyal. The abrupt break in idiom was brought about  by T.S. Eliot, who brought it from France. Eliot, borrowing the method from Laforgue, Valéry, and Rimbaud, used the technique of the Symbolist schools with such skill that he soon had a host of imitators on both sides of the Atlantic. Some were unable, some unwilling to follow Eliot's inner difficulties and despairs, but all were fascinated by his technical devices, and only a few were uninfluenced by them. The formula was, roughly, this: To reveal a man in his complex relation to the universe the poet must show him not only concerned with the immensities but with the trivialities of daily life, with a sense of the past continually interrupting the present, and with swiftly contradictory moods disputing dream and action. This was, obviously, a difficult if not impossible program to achieve in any one poem or even a set of poems. It was, however, attempted and suggested by a variety of effects: by a rapid leaping from image to image with a minimum of "explanatory" metaphors; by a liberal use of discords, juxtaposing tense images and prosy statements, followed by lyrical passages with deliberate banalities; by the continual flow of free association, in which one idea prompted a chain of others, accomplishing an emotional (or literary) progress, often gaining a new series of overtones, often sacrificing all continuity - Ezra Pound's Cantos, Crane's The Bridge, and Eliot's The Waste Land being the most famous examples of the mood "mixing memory and desire."

"The method had its distinct advantages; it enlarged the gamut of poetic devices and permitted a greater sensitivity of expression. But it was abused by many and even its champions were aware of its limitations. "The substitution of emotional for logical sequence, wrote C. Day Lewis in A Hope for Poetry, "may finally be classed as one of the manifestations of the general distrust of logic and dethroning of reason brought about by the Great War." Such a poem as The Waste Land, though it helped shaped a subtler poetic speech, made one aware of "the nervous exhaustion, the exaggerated self-consciousness, the pathetic gropings after the fragments of a shattered faith .... But in so doing it enlarged our conception of the field of poetic activity; as Eliot himself said, 'the essential advantage for a poet is not to have a beautiful world with which to deal; it is to be able to see beneath both beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, the horror, and the glory.'"

"The earlier Prufrock and Sweeney series accomplished the purpose in an acrid light verse; Eliot's later ironies emphasized, with new bitterness, the hollowness of a life without purpose and without faith. Far from celebrating the feeble, Eliot satirized the futilitarians:

From The Hollow Men

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dried grass
Or rat's feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without color,
Paralyzed force, gesture without motion -

"But most of those so strongly influenced by Eliot - and by Eliot's influences captured nothing except his (and Jules Laforgue's) idiom. His abrupt allusiveness, his style at once coarse and subtle, his emotional acuteness, could be imitated but not captured; his unacknowledged disciples merely parodied the trick of disassociation, the erudition without Eliot's wisdom, the gesture without (if I may misquote) emotion. The results were inevitable: sterile intellectualism at one extreme, infantile barbarism at the other.

However, to condemn an entire group because of the failures is unjust. The younger poets (1920-1930), sometimes condemned as "a lost generation," matured in a period which afforded them no security nor dignity nor any semblance of peace. Being sensitive, even over-sensitive recorders, the reflected the doubt, the very discontinuity of the times. Little wonder theirs was a "literature of nerves," little wonder their symbols were uncertain, their allusions private, and their work often obscure to the point of unintelligibility. The clearest of them maintained their individuality, though they demonstrated their limited heritage; even the more prominent acknowledged the influence of Eliot. As in England, where Stephen Spender, W.H. Auden, and C. Day Lewis were affected by Eliot's technique, though not by his philosophy, so Eliot's experiments may be traced to the work of Archibald MacLeish, Conrad Aiken, Horace Gregory, and the entire Nashville group."

QUOTATIONS FROM ELIOT'S POETRY

From The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
and sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question....
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

....

I grow old.... I grow old
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled                [very cool at the time / DB]

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to each a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

From The Waste Land

I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD
April is the cruelest month, breeding,
Lilacs out of the dead land, missing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.

...

Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair
Spread out in fiery points
Glowed into words, then would be savagely still.

"My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
"Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.
  "What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
"I never know what you are thinking. Think."

I think we are in a rat's alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.

More from The Hollow Men

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
                                         Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
                          For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

From Little Gidding, pt. 5, in Four Quartets [this is a very famous quotation]

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.