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A bounteous final frontier?

On January 22, 2013, an American company named Deep Space Industries (DSi) announced plans to launch two spacecrafts, in 2015 as a piggybacking payload named FireFly to prospect for near-Earth asteroids, and in 2016, to mine one and return a small sample to Earth.

This is just the first phase; in the second phase starting 2020, the ‘Harvestor’ class of vehicles are planned to mine, process, and then bring back samples weighing hundreds of tons as well as produce fuel to consume for itself.

(Clockwise from top) The Harvestor fuel-processor, the DragonFly miner, and the FireFly prospector (Images copyright: Bryan Versteeg / Deep Space Industries)

DSi’s plans parallel well with the mood at the WEF summit at Davos that took place last week: A bountiful final frontier! With access to technology increasing on many fronts, it’s becoming easier, rather smarter, to think and do bigger. It’s into this market that DSi, and SpaceX in a less grandiose way before it, and another organisation Planetary Resources (backed by Larry Page and Eric Schmidt among others) have stepped. They plan to redefine the “natural” in natural resources.

I mailed Mr. David Gump, the CEO of DSi, to ask a few questions when the news first broke. Here are his answers.

You’ve said that NASA has been forthcoming [in terms of investing in DSi]. Could you give us some details? Are there any other interested parties?

The top leadership of NASA has been briefed on our plans, so we are optimistic that we will get several contracts from the space agency for technology demonstrations (we carry NASA new tech on a mission so that NASA can evaluate how it works before including it in their own much more expensive missions) and for data about asteroids. We have submitted two proposals already and expect the winners to be announced in mid-March.

DSi plans to launch the DragonFly by 2016, and have it return a 25-65 kg sample from a small asteroid by 2020. In comparison, NASA’s Stardust and JAEA’s Hayabusa took about a decade to return with dust. What’s the difference?

The pace of asteroid detection is picking up. Now more than 900 new targets are identified every year and we’ll pass 10,000 identified near Earth asteroids by the end of 2013. There are many more possibilities to select from than before, so that Deep Space will have an easier time than earlier missions in selecting asteroids that pass closer to Earth at slow speeds.

Since you haven’t demonstrated your robotic 3D printer yet, don’t you think it’s likely to keep away prospective investors? Do you have any plans in the near future to demo it?

We will demo the 3D printer by the end of the year. Some investors like to come in early; others wait until there is less risk. The $3 million that we are raising in 2013 and the $10 million we will raise in 2014 are relatively small amounts, and we will connect with those investors who like the early entry.

Let’s say you find the platinum you’re looking for, and return it to Earth. Won’t the new supply channel drive down prices and remove from the economic purpose of your program?

There is a lot of confusion between what we’re actually saying, and what people are writing about us. As we worked very hard to make clear in our news conference, the primary market for asteroid resources is in space [emphasis mine], not terrestrially. Anything useful in high orbit costs $20,000 per kg to put there. What’s useful from asteroids includes propellant to refuel some of the 300 communications satellites in high orbit, and metals to fabricate expanded capabilities for them, from more power through more solar arrays, to more bandwidth per satellite through more spot beam antennas.

Our competitor, Planetary Resources, does emphasize mining PGMs [Platinum Group Metals] for export to Earth, but Deep Space does not. PGMs, gold, and silver will be profitable only as by-products of a robust asteroid processing industry creating fuel and building materials for the in space market[emphasis mine].

Including DSi, there have been two major entrants into the fledgling “asteroid-mining” sector in 2013. Have you long foreseen this? What do you think about the future of space exploration on the one hand and the expansion of natural resources to include the universe itself on the other?

Yes, I’ve foreseen that the resources of the solar system eventually will be opened to private-sector development. The reason is that every year, the cost of any high-technology project is getting less expensive. Each year brings lighter materials, electronics that are smaller, cheaper and more powerful, and rocket launchers that cost less. Each year, therefore, the amount of money required to start an ambitious space campaign is smaller and affordable by more and more companies.

-Ends-

(This blog post first appeared at The Copernican on February 1, 2013.)

Oct 25, 2013
‘No need to defend me.’

No need to defend me. Kudos to @monicabyrne13 and @hannahjwaters for having the courage to speak up. I was wrong. I am sorry. I am learning.

— Bora Zivkovic (@BoraZ) October 16, 2013

While studying at the Asian College of Journalism, I and some 11 other students were told about the awesome man named Bora Zivkovic and his work as a blogger with Scientific American. To learn about a man with such talents with writing and articulation as he possesses – talents that I have envied and aspired for for years – conduct himself so horribly is a shock, and the fall of a hero.

I understand that there is a greater problem at play here – about predators being everywhere and predation being ubiquitous – but I think I need to be able to personally confess that, while wincing against the stab of sexual harassment being prevalent, I also winced because it had to be Bora Zivkovic who had conducted himself thus.

What happened? Read this. And then this.

Oct 18, 2013
In the Valley of Drums…

For lack of a more sensational beginning: Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen fantasy fiction series is the best piece of writing I have ever encountered. Erikson’s experience as a archaeologist and an anthropologist is brought to bear in every line of the 10-book epic, producing a tale that is vigorously gripping yet mercilessly sophisticated. But once you are those requisite 30 to 40 pages in, you will come to understand why such sophistication is important, rather can be, because you will suddenly be aware of how much other works of fantasy fiction have chosen to leave out. Many readers of the series have criticized him for making his narrative so complex, so “unreasonably” intricate, but I find it tremendously gratifying that when I read his work, I feel as if I am drawn closer to the helplessness that Erikson himself feels… a kinship founded on knowing how much can go left unsaid for every plot concluded.

Right now, I’m re-reading the Malazan series for, I think, the third time. During each iteration, there has been room for profound discovery. In the seventh book, Reaper’s Gale, consider the example of a valley described by Erikson where two armies are due to meet. One army, that of the Letherii, employs sorcerers of considerable power, while the other, the tribal Awl, are reliant solely on the edges of iron. The valley, called Bast Fulmar – “Valley of Drums” – was chosen by the Awl warleader for the clash because it has been sapped of its ability to support magic. And how did it lose its magic? Here is how the Awl warleader, the enigmatic Redmask, describes it.

When the world was young, these plains surrounding us were higher, closer to the sky. The earth was a thin hide, covering thick flesh that was nothing but frozen wood and leaves.The rotted corpse of ancient forests. Beneath summer sun, unseen rivers flowed through that forest, between every twig, every crushed-down branch. And with each summer, the sun’s heat was greater, the season longer, and the rivers flowed, draining the vast buried forest. And so the plans descended, settled as the dried out forest crumbled to dust, and with the rains more water would sink down, sweeping away that dust, southward, northward, eastward, westward, following valleys rising to join streams. All directions, ever flowing away.

The land left the sky. The land settled onto stone, the very bone of the world. In this manner, the land changed to echo the cursed sorceries of the Shamans of the Antlers, the ones who kneel among boulders.

Such a piquant evocation of the living world we occupy I have not read elsewhere. Redmask, then, goes on to describe what went wrong with the world, with a valley in particular, to leave it so ghastly and raw (in context).

Bast Fulmar, the Valley of Drums. The Letherii believe we hold it in great awe. They believe this valley was the site of an ancient war between the Awl and the K’Chain Che’Malle – although the Letherii know not the true name of our ancient enemy. Perhaps indeed there were skirmishes, such that memory survives, only to twist and bind anew in false shapes. Many of you hold to those new shapes, believing them true. An ancient battle. One we won. One we lost – there are elders who are bold with the latter secret, as if defeat was a knife hidden in their heart-hand.

Bast Fulmar. Valley of Drums. Here, then, is its secret truth. The Shamans of the Antlers drummed the hide of this valley before us. Until all life was stolen, all waters fled. They drank deep, until nothing was left. For at this time, the shamans were not alone, not for that fell ritual. No, others of their kind had joined them – on distant continents, hundreds, thousands of leagues away, each and all on that one night. To sever their life from the earth, to sever this earth from its own life.

Bast Fulmar. We rise now to make war. In the Valley of Drums, my warriors, Letherii sorcery will fail. Edur sorcery will fail. In Bast Fulmar, there is no water of magic from which to steal. All used up, all taken to quench the fire that is life. Our enemy is not aware. They will find the truth this day. Too late. Today, my warriors, shall be iron against iron. That and nothing more.

Bast Fulmar sings this day. It sings: there is no magic. There is no magic!

There is of course an obvious reality mirroring this scene, an allusion to how we are draining this world, severing it from its own life.

Ah, Bast Fulmar…

Oct 16, 2013
The non-Nobel for Satyen Bose

Satyen Bose

Last week, as the Nobel Prizes were announced and Peter Higgs and Francois Englert won the highly coveted physics prize, dust was kicked up in India – just as it was in July and then in September 2012 – about how Satyendra Nath Bose had been ‘ignored’. S.N. Bose, in the 1920s, was responsible for formulating the Bose-Einstein statistics with Albert Einstein. These statistics described the physical laws that governed the class of particles that have come to be known, in honour of Bose’s work, as bosons.

The matter of ignoring S.N. Bose, on the other hand, was profoundly baseless, but a sensation realised only by a few in the country. Just because Bose had worked with bosons, many Indians, among them many academicians, felt he ought to have been remembered for his contribution. Only, they conveniently chose to forget, his contribution to the Nobel Prize for physics 2013 was tenuous and, at best, of historical value. I blogged about this for The Copernican science blog on The Hindu, and then wrote an OpEd along the same lines.

From the response I received, however, it seems as if the message is still lost on those who continue to believe Bose is now the poster-scientist for all Indian scientists whose contributions have been ignored by award-committees worldwide. Do we so strongly feel that post-colonial sting of entitlement?

Oct 15, 2013
Would you just calm down about the Bose in the boson?

July, 2012 – A Higgs boson-like entity is spotted at the Large Hadron Collider. Indians decry the lack of celebration of S.N. Bose, the Bengali physicist whom bosons are named for.

January, 2013 – The particle found at the LHC is confirmed to be a Higgs boson. Further outcry about S.N. Bose having been forgotten in favor of the “Western” intellects.

October, 2013 – Peter Higgs and Francois Englert win the 2013 Nobel Prize in physics for their work on the Higgs mechanism. Bose is also in the limelight but for the same wrong reasons.

The word ‘boson’ was named for S.N. Bose not because he discovered bosons. It was named so by Paul Dirac, a Nobel Prize winning physicist, to honour Bose’s contribution to the Bose-Einstein statistics, work he did with Albert Einstein on defining the general properties of all bosons.

There are two kinds of particles in nature. Matter particles are the proverbial building blocks. They are the quarks and leptons, together called fermions. Force particles guide the matter particles around and help them interact with each others. They are the photons, W and Z bosons, gluons and the Higgs bosons.

In 1924, Bose and Einstein developed a theory to explain how a group of identical but non-interacting particles may occupy different energy states. They drew up a set of statistical rules and the particles that followed these rules did not obey Pauli’s exclusion principle. All such particles came to be called bosons.

Similarly, in 1926, Enrico Fermi and Paul Dirac came up with a set of rules for particles that did obey Pauli’s exclusion principle. While they worked on this theory independently, Fermi’s results were published first, leading to Dirac calling these particles fermions in the Italian giant’s honour.

So there. S.N. Bose – good man, great contribution – but he has nothing to do with the Higgs boson in particular except that this particle is a boson. What’s being celebrated about the Higgs is not being done in denial of Bose’s contributions because there is nothing to deny. The physics behind what’s going on now has more to do with how the hunt for one particular boson is shaping modern particle physics. Face it, the world of science has moved on.

If anything, I liked this Outlook article (except the last line) published a day after the momentous CERN announcements on July 4 last year. It brought S.N. Bose back into the limelight at a time when few of us in the country had (or have) the scientific temperament to acknowledge such contributions from history and, simply, recognise and preserve it for what it is: homage.

Indeed, some Indians seem to harbour a maleficient sense of entitlement that extends to calls demanding the ‘B’ in ‘bosons’ be capitalised. Rolf Dieter-Heuer, Director General of CERN, responded to this while at a meeting in Kolkata in September 2012: “I was asked yesterday why the boson was not capped. In Bose’s own city today, we have capped the Boson. I, in fact, always cap the Boson. But today, we changed all our CERN slides to cap Bosons.”

Another example of misguided entitlement was some Indian physicists saying that ‘naming the Higgs particle after Bose is an honour bigger than the Nobel Prize itself’. If you’re looking for honour of Indian origin in the Nobel Prize for physics in 2013, look to Indian scientists who worked on the collider.

Look to contributions from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and the Institute of Mathematical Sciences. Look to the superconducting magnets technology that India provided. Look to people like Rohini Godbole, Kajari Mazumdar (see slide 4), and Ashoke Sen.

But if all you want to do is cling to the vestiges of a legacy you helped fade, then you’re also doomed, benumbed to the sting of being denied the Nobel Prizes only because you’re not producing and retaining Nobel-class thinkers anymore.

(This blog post first appeared at The Copernican on October 10, 2013.)

Oct 10, 2013
Water found in Martian soil

During its first 100 Martian days (sols), NASA’s Curiosity rover had studied the atmosphere and soil of the red planet in some detail. The initial results from these studies trickled in on September 26 and 27, 2013, in a special issue of Science. The most significant find appeared to be that finer Martian soil had up to two pints of water per cubic foot, which the author of one of the studies called an “excellent resource for future explorers”. The water molecules appeared to be ‘locked up’ in amorphous minerals of basaltic origins. Another sign of water was the presence of carbonates, picked out when the Sample Analysis at Mars instrument heated a sample and found carbon dioxide among the vapours. Carbonates are usually formed in the presence of water. With the presence of methane having been declared trivial on the planet earlier this week, finding water rekindled hopes of the red planet having once harboured life. However, direct signs of this, such as organic molecules, remained elusive in the studies.

Read my report for The Hindu on this.

The Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument, shown here at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, analysed the samples of material collected by the rover’s arm. Image: NASA-GSFC

Sep 27, 2013
Unusual third Van Allen belt explained

Remember that third Van Allen radiation belt that appeared in February and lasted for about a month? Scientists from the University of California, Los Angeles, have started to understand what it really was – a belt composed solely of electrons moving at almost light-speed – and why it occurred – because of a massive solar flare in September, 2012. Although these faster electrons aren’t unique, as they appear in the two original Van Allen belts as well, what scientists have to figure out now is what accelerates them to such high energies. My story on this development for The Hindu.

Sep 26, 2013
The numbers game

Cricket is a complex game – about as difficult to get a full hang of as a 21-year old trying to learn English from scratch. It takes a while, and a lot of practice. Even then, many people (I know) still have difficulty getting all the rules right. As a result, there are a lot of numbers that emerge after each game – so many runs scored in different directions, so many balls bowled at so-so speeds, at so-so lengths to so many batsmen, so many partnerships each lasting so many balls, so many successful and not-so-successful fielding positions, etc. In short, cricket is a statistics-heavy game, perhaps heavier than baseball itself. So if baseball had sabermetrics, what does cricket have?

Nothing official in place, for starters. Cricketing sabermetrics isn’t new, but it isn’t prevalent either – the reasons are too many to be dealt with here, but not the least of them is that cricket is also more complex than baseball. Building a statistical framework to encompass all of its nuances is difficult. So, a simplified version of cricketing sabermetrics – one making a lot of assumptions – assessing only the batsmen’s performance during Ashes 2013 caught my interest. Satyam Mukherjee, a post-doctoral fellow at the Kellogg School of Management, had used complex network analysis to figure out why Clarke, Trott and Bell were the better players during the tournament, and he establishes it with mathematical proof.

His work also raises a lot of questions on the relevance of such mechanisms in modern sport. Read my piece on this work for The Hindu.

Sep 12, 2013
After-math of the Ashes

In the recently concluded Ashes test series, England retained the urn by beating Australia 3-0 in five games. England always looked the more confident team, reinforced as well as evinced by the confidence each player had on every other. They batted well, they bowled well, they fielded well.

Australian players, on the other hand, looked out of place. Often, great performances by a batsman or a bowler didn’t translate into the rest of the team moving with that spirit, betraying high – if not unreasonable – dependence on some players, who were expected to bear the burden.

Now, a post-doctoral fellow from the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, has put these conclusions to the test. Satyam Mukherjee has used complex network analysis to determine how England and Australia differed in their strategies during the Ashes matches, to gauge the “quality” of wins and how much of a role each player played in it.

Satyam thinks that, to the best of his knowledge, “this work is the first of its kind in cricket”, and is hoped to motivate analysts to look at behind-the-scenes statistics of players whose best skills may not always be brought to the fore.

Specifically, Satyam uses concepts like the PageRank algorithm (which Google uses to determine the ‘influentiality’ of websites), betweenness and network centrality, and treats each team as a network of players who have to perform specific roles.

Math & matters of the heart

“Two football players are linked if one player passes the ball to another, a pitcher and batter is connected if they face each other, or Nadal and Federer get connected if they play against each other,” says Satyam, explaining how networks are built. “But in cricket, no such studies exist although there is no dearth of statistics.”

However, a network-analysis of a game of cricket is much less straightforward as the success of the game doesn’t depend solely on the ball being pass around or batsmen like Tendulkar and Lara facing each other off. Instead, they face off different bowlers, which means their performances can’t be compared directly, either.

What a self-organised social network looks like (nodes of the same colour are of the same group). Image: Wikimedia Commons

So he used publically available data from Cricinfo to compute the network performance of players and how well they’d performed different roles. “The network based approach gives us the hidden properties of the performance of players,” Satyam explains, adding that the advantage is that “it doesn’t suffer from any biases which exist in traditional schemes.”

In his network analysis, each player is thought of as a node (as shown above) in a network, with the lines connecting them being the runs scored by them together. This way, as the game progresses through different partnerships, nodes are added and connected, with the distance between nodes denoting the number of runs.

Then, Satyam brings his tools to reveal, when studied as a network of people trying to accomplish a common goal with different skills between them, how the team strategised and how it fell short.

According to his calculations, for example, Gautam Gambhir was the most successful player in terms of centrality scores during the 2011 ICC World Cup final for India. This means that he was involved in the most number of batting partnerships during the game (betweenness centrality). However, the man-of-the-match award went to skipper M.S. Dhoni.

“So there is a human bias coming into play,” exclaims Satyam. However, this doesn’t come across as a call to replace the more “spiritual” aspects of the game with a mathematical framework. Instead, Satyam is vouching for using such analytical methods to decrease the chances of missing out on important statistics that come into play during drafting, team-selection, etc.

Teams as competing networks

These and other network analysis concepts have been around for quite a while. They have been applied to sports for the last decade or so, quite famously to football using the Girvan-Newman algorithm and others. The parameters they use to “evaluate” teams are simple.

PageRank, a relatively newer measure developed by and named for Google co-founder Larry Page, measures the “quality” of outcomes (i.e. wins or losses).

In the context of a match, PageRank scores give a measure of the quality of wins. If a weak team wins against a relatively stronger team, it gains points. However, if the weak team loses to a strong team, it isn’t penalized that much. Each outcome’s PageRank is dependent on the performance of every player.

In the context of players’ performance, “it gives the importance of the player in the batting line up,” explains Satyam. In other words, it provides us with an idea of the importance of runs scored — such as Graeme Swann’s 34 in England’s first innings of the final test.

It is calculated as:

… where,

p_i = PageRank score

w_ij = weight of a link

s_j-out = out-strength of a link

i = whichever team it is

q = control parameter = 0.15 (default)

N = total number of players in the network

δ = a correcting term

In-strength is the sum of the fractions of runs a player has scored in partnership with others players.

Closeness measures the connectedness of a player in the team. The ‘closer’ he is, the more open he will be to his place in the playing order being changed. For example, the ‘closest’ batsmen will be comfortable opening the batting, playing in the middle order, or holding up the lower order. This can be decided based on the match situation, pitch conditions, availability of other players, etc. Thus, having ‘close’ players increases the adaptability of the team.

The results

Satyam put together a network of players in each of the five matches, and computed these scores for all of them in terms of their batting performances.

He found that, in the first and second games both of which England won, Ian Bell and Joe Root emerged as the best batsmen, respectively. Bell, especially, had the highest PageRank, in-strength, betweenness and closeness among all batsmen. In the second match, Root had the highest in-strength, betweenness and closeness, but Usman Khawaja and Michael Clarke beat him to the top on PageRank.

In the third test, Australia dominated the game. However, the domination arose through Clarke, the man of the match, while the rest of the players put up a less-than-dominating performance. In fact, this pattern was visible in Australia throughout the tournament. As opposed to it, England’s batsmen’s betweennesses were more evenly distributed. Everyone seems to have contributed, not just the top order.

For example, one batsman who regularly features in the top five players in terms of PageRank is Tim Bresnan, an all-rounder. Thus, his ability to build partnerships even when most specialist batsmen had departed was crucial for England to have stayed on top –such as in the fourth test at Riverside Ground. Looking at the overall scores: Bell – most betweenness centrality; Matt Prior – most closeness; Jonathan Trott – highest in-strength; Graeme Swann – highest PageRank.

A batsmen’s performance network as it transpired during the Ashes 2013. Notice how almost every player on the English side was capable of holding up partnerships while, for Australia, noticeable ‘hubs’ exist in the guise of Haddin, Hughes and Rogers. Image: Satyam Mukherjee

For Australia, on the other hand, Haddin, Hughes and Rogers have high betweenness centrality, which quickly drops off when other pairs are considered.

Accordingly, batsmen who received man-of-the-match awards during the series were Joe Root, Michael Clarke, and Shane Watson. This is an instance of simple mathematical concepts having encapsulated our practical considerations well enough to have reached almost the same conclusions (even though a lot of assumptions were made in the process). However, cricket is only new to this arena.

An informer

In 2003, Michael Lewis published a book titled Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. It brought to a wider audience the field of study called sabermetrics, which uses in-game statistics in baseball to separate objective judgments – “Who contributed the most…” – from subjective ones – “Was that a great…” – so that teams are aware of what their strongest and weakest resources are.

In 2011, this book was adapted into a successful movie, starring Brad Pitt. Although I’d heard of the book at the time, I hadn’t read it, and the movie helped me confront for the first time how managers unfamiliar with sabermetrics’ pros might react to the idea. In the movie, many of them quit (However, most of them were old, too, and just couldn’t cope with the power to pick or drop players leaving their hands and falling into those of some “new fangled, cold-and-calculated” sabermetrician).

For this, what network analysis in sports can bring to the fore has to be understood well before it is dismissed. In its simplest form, it makes correcting for regional biases in selections easy and helps spot ‘hidden’ talent in the domestic circuit. At its very nuanced, it could factor in bowlers and fielders, not just batsmen, and also include an “athletic index” for each batsman to denote how agile he is between the wickets, to see who has been the best performer (a suggestion included in Satyam Mukherjee’s paper).

Of course, for the game to stay competitive and entertaining, both subjective and objective methods are important. Even with cricket, I can’t imagine the BCCI resorting completely to sabermetrics’ version of cricket to choose the national cricket team – how would they be able to account for the reassuring presence of Captain Cool? Instead, they could use such tools to better inform their decision-making.

(For those interested, a more detailed presentation of Satyam’s methods is available in this paper.)

(This blog post first appeared at The Copernican on September 8, 2013.)

Sep 8, 2013
Clio’s passion

Dear Q,

This mail is not intended to be an apology as much as my own acknowledgment of my existence. Of late, I have become cognizant of what a significant role writing, and having my writing read, plays in the construction of my self-awareness – whether profound or mundane. Even as I live moments, I do not experience them with the same clarity and richness as I do when I write about those moments. Why, I don’t pause to think about something – anything – as much as when I do when I place commas and periods. I don’t recognize possession unless it comes with an apostrophe.

To some extent, this has slowed down the speed with which I can take on life in all its forms and guises; the exhilaration is more prodigious, and the conclusions and judgments more deliberated. To someone standing next to me, in a moment I would later discover to have been the host of an epiphany, I come across as detached and indifferent, as someone lacking empathy. But I have empathy, sometimes too much, at others even suffocating. However, I haven’t bothered explaining this to anyone… until now. And why do I choose to tell you? Because you will read me. You are reading me.

So much has kindled an awareness also of what each word brings with itself: a logbook of how memories have been created, recorded and recollected over centuries of the language’s existence. You read sentences from left to right, or right to left or top to bottom depending on the language, and you are attributing the purpose of the words you’re parsing to your interpretation of the text. Now, break the flow: go orthogonal and move your eyes in a direction perpendicular to the one that unlocks meaning. Suddenly, you are confronted with words – individual, nuclear words – silently staring at you. Isn’t it a scary sight to look at symbols that suddenly seem devoid of meaning or purpose?

Inky scratches on paper. Like what a prisoner in a high-security prison does with his nails on the walls after years of crippling solitude.

Count how many times each such word appears on the page, in the book, in all the books you own, in all the books that have ever existed. Each such word, whatever it is, has been invoked to evoke multiplets of emotions. Each such word has participated in all from the proclamation that burnt down Nero’s Rome to the one that ended slavery in Western civilization, from Anthony’s selfless lament to Nietzsche’s self-liberating one. Words have not been used but repeated to simply put together a finite number of intentions in seemingly infinite ways. Each such word gallantly harbors a legacy of the need for that word.

As Roland Barthes writes in Camera Lucida, look at a portrait photograph of Napoleon Bonaparte’s youngest brother, Jerome, taken in 1852. Imagine looking into the brother’s eyes – and tell yourself that you are now looking into the eyes that once looked into Napoleon’s. Don’t you feel a weight from the sensation that what you’re looking at may contain a scar from where a powerful man’s stare etched into? I feel a similar weight when I use words; I feel a constant reminder ringing in my head about using them in such a way that preserves their dignity, their heritage. I feel that there is wisdom in their shapes and strokes. It calms me deeply, just like a ritual and its processes might.

And when such legacies are brought to bear on every experience of mine – howsoever trivial – I can’t help but become addicted to their reassuring wisdom, their reassuring granular clarity. When writing with such words, I am more pushed to re-evaluate whatever it is that I am saying, more encouraged to plumb the murkier depths of my conscience that are closed to simpler wordless introspection. When I write, I feel like I finally have the tools I have long yearned for to build strong character, and find inner peace when I seek for it the most.

(Special thanks to The Hesitant Scribe for telling me it’s OK to live just to love words.)

Sep 7, 2013