New Compositions on My Music Site.

I titled these pieces "Dittie" because they are far simpler (and shorter) than most the music I compose. I like writing for string quartets and orchestras - large scale pieces that may take 6 months or even several years to finish. Here I'm trying to capture my brother's moods as a child. 




Paul, my younger brother by three years and two months, was enormously bright, but my parents, already concerned about my "bookish" tendencies, decided they wanted Paul to be "more a normal boy" than me.  I think they came to regret this later, when unequipped by the skills gained in study to understand himself or to cope with the loneliness that comes with difference, with brilliance, he became enormously self destructive. Rural America is a hellish environment, unaccepting of difference, of change, of any motivation wider than narrow self-interest. No wonder that it is a home today to both endemic racism and Trumpism. I escaped by leaving public school several years early, going off to Toronto to study at a conservatory. My brother remained.                 

He died just a few weeks after his 18th birthday, when his already long struggle with alcohol and drugs culminated in a single car accident on a lonely country road. His best friend was in the car, and walked away with minor injuries. Paul died five days later of internal injuries, spending those last days a total quadriplegic, unable to move a muscle from neck downward.

The images I hope are conveyed in the music are not of Paul's suffering, nor his troubles with booze, drugs or violence, but of Paul as he was going off to kindergarten - a proud march here, a silly song there. Listen and please enjoy.

Peter Kropotkin - History for the 99%

History for the 99%   

Seeing Neighbours Falling Into Poverty Pisses Me Off.

Peter Kropotkin 

Loving readers: If you read only a little of this, go to the end and read a few paragraphs from Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread.

Peter Alekseevich Kropotkin, the most unlikely of revolutionaries was born this day in 1842. Why so unlikely? Born to a Russian noble family, he bore the title ‘Prince.’ As a child he served as a page in the Court of Alexander II, Tsar of all Russia. He attended the most prestigious of schools until taking a commission with a Cossack Regiment serving in the East.  He had an encyclopaedic mind, publishing important papers in the fields of geography, geology, and biology. But above all, he was a man of finely attuned conscience, who saw Russian society as it was, violent, oppressive, wherein a tiny brutal minority held the vast majority as slaves. It was this clarity of vision and conscience that brought him to confront the horrors of his time, when, like now, avarice, and unbridled ambition lives vampirically on the vast sufferings of others.

While Kropotkin’s scientific endeavours continued throughout his life, his political interests began early in life. For all his immense privilege, he was aware almost instinctively of its source, the suffering of the slaves that the Russians called ‘раб’ or in English, serfs. But being a man of science and philosophy he did more than note this and react in repulsion. He tried to understand it. What were the roots of such a brutal state of affairs?apparently What sustains the fiction that a man may own a man, a woman, a child?

His older brother Alexander, who was later to kill himself while exiled to Siberia, was arrested as a university student by the Tsar’s secret police. His crime was reading Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self Reliance. Only when the professor who had lent him the book stepped forward was he released without apology. The penchant for subversive reading was apparently a family affair, for soon young Peter was reading Proudhon and Bakunin, along with other luminaries of the socialist movement, a movement that had frightened Europe’s hereditary rulers into savage suppression during the year of revolutions that sprang up city by city in 1848.

In 1862 Peter joined the military, one of the expected routes of advancement for a young man of his status. As a junior officer with a Cossack regiment, he explored portions of Siberia, and explored the state of penal settlement they came across..  In 1871, after writing several well  received scientific papers on the geology and geography of Siberia, he returned west where he rejected an offered scientific post in favour of political organising. In 1872 he joined the Chaikovskii Circle, a secret group of socialists that attempted to organise among the peasantry and illicitly published books and pamphlets by Marx,  John Stuart Mill, and Darwin. He began writing, too often perhaps under his own name, for he was arrested for the first of many times in 1874.  He was imprisoned in the imposing fortress of Peter and Paul in St. Petersburg. As is fitting of a prison built with the unpaid labour of slaves, the fortress erected by Peter styled ‘the Great,” could not hold Peter. By bribery or deceit he escaped and fled across Europe to Switzerland.  His brother Alexander was arrested the same year, and on charges of ‘political untrustworthiness’  was, accompanied with his wife and children, exiled to Siberia, where he would die.

Peter Kropotkin’s politics did naught to make his Swiss hosts comfortable, and at their suggestion in 1881, he moved to France. There he formally joined the First International as the International Working Men's Association came to be known known. The First International was an early federation of socialist leaning political parties, some radical and seeking an immediate overthrow of Capitalism - as for example Marx and Engels, but many more moderate. Peter Kropotkin was of the latter temperament, and not by temperament alone. He had earlier written back in 1869:

The Revolutionist is a doomed man. He has no private interests, no affairs, sentiments, ties, property nor even a name of his own. His entire being is devoured by one purpose, one thought, one passion - the revolution. Heart and soul, not merely by word but by deed, he has severed every link with the social order and with the entire civilized world; with the laws, good manners, conventions, and morality of that world. He is its merciless enemy and continues to inhabit it with only one purpose - to destroy it.
Peter Kropotkin was none of these things. Firm in his beliefs and thoughts, but gentle of disposition, he believed that humanity could be swayed towards a principled anarchism through persuasion and example. Others, especially those in power were not inclined to notice the distinction of revolutionist and gradualists.  He was arrested again, this time by the French Secret Police as a member of an illegal organisation. After the fall of the Paris Communion in 1848, membership in the First International was illegal. He was sentenced to five years.

Remarkably, his first writings on anarchism were smuggled from prison and published. After three years, Kropotkin was released and left France for the more tolerant Britain. Here he was received and became friends withWilliam Morris and George Bernard Shaw.  His political writing intensified, as did his organising, both locally and by letters to France and Russia. It was in Britain that he was to found the journal Freedom, still published today (and read by the author). It was also in England that he published a series of remarkable books, like the brilliant Conquest of Bread that Emile Zola called a true poem.

He visited both Canada and the United States, where his fame as an anarchist philosopher preceded him. In New York he spoke about the dangers of state capitalism (that underlies Marx ands Engels revolutionary program).

In New Jersey he was asked for a statement on his political beliefs. He said,

I am an anarchist and am trying to work out the ideal society, which I believe will be communistic in economics, but will leave full and free scope for the development of the individual. As to its organization, I believe in the formation of federated groups for production and consumption.... The social democrats are endeavouring to attain the same end, but the difference is that they start from the centre - the State and work toward the circumference, while we endeavour to work out the ideal society from the simple elements to the complex.

Back in Britain, books poured from the man: his autobiography, Memoirs of a Revolutionist (1899), Fields, Factories and Workshops (1901), Mutual Aid (1902) and The Great French Revolution (1909). To this add literally hundreds of journal articles, newspaper pieces and the immense work of editing not one, but several journals.

Peter Kropotkin returned to Russia during the revolution of 1918, hoping for anarchism to develop. Despite efforts in this direction, Lenin’s party seized power.  To Lenin he wrote: Russia was a Soviet Republic only in name and at present it is not the soviets which rule in Russia but party committees.

In Russia he completed his final book, Ethics, Origin and Development (1922).

Peter Kropotkin died of pneumonia in the small city of Dmitrov, 45 miles north of Moscow on
8 February, 1921. It had been a hard winter and there’d been food shortages.  In spite of obvious secret police presence, for Lenin was nothing if not nervous of anarchists, his funeral was attended by thousands. As word spread of his death, tens of thousands mourned. Peter Kropotkin loved humanity, and he loved people. Arrested, imprisoned, he had never betrayed a compatriot. He have his whole life to the belief that violence does not rule us, only enslave us. Slavery, said Kropotkin, will never endure.


Here’s a brief excerpt from Peter Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread:

“The shriek of the engine is heard in the wild gorges of the Alps, the Caucasus, and the Himalayas. The rivers have been made navigable; the coasts, carefully surveyed, are easy of access; artificial harbours, laboriously dug out and protected against the fury of the sea, afford shelter to the ships. Deep shafts have been sunk in the rocks; labyrinths of underground galleries have been dug out where coal may be raised or minerals extracted. At the crossings of the highways great cities have sprung up, and within their borders all the treasures of industry, science, and art have been accumulated.

Whole generations, that lived and died in misery, oppressed and ill-treated by their masters, and worn out by toil, have handed on this immense inheritance to our century. For thousands of years millions of men have laboured to clear the forests, to drain the marshes, and to open up highways by land and water. Every rood of soil we cultivate in Europe has been watered by the sweat of several races of men. Every acre has its story of enforced labour, of intolerable toil, of the people's sufferings. Every mile of railway, every yard of tunnel, has received its share of human blood.

The shafts of the mine still bear on their rocky walls the marks made by the pick of the workman who toiled to excavate them. The space between each prop in the underground galleries might be marked as a miner's grave; and who can tell what each of these graves has cost, in tears, in privations, in unspeakable wretchedness to the family who depended on the scanty wage of the worker cut off in his prime by fire-damp, rock-fall, or flood?

The cities, bound together by railroads and waterways, are organisms which have lived through centuries. Dig beneath them and you find, one above another, the foundations of streets, of houses, of theatres, of public buildings. Search into their history and you will see how the civilization of the town, its industry, its special characteristics, have slowly grown and ripened through the co-operation of generations of its inhabitants before it could become what it is to-day. And even to-day, the value of each dwelling, factory, and warehouse, which has been created by the accumulated labour of the millions of workers, now dead and buried, is only maintained by the very presence and labour of legions of the men who now inhabit that special corner of the globe. Each of the atoms composing what we call the Wealth of Nations owes its value to the fact that it is a part of the great whole.”


Great thanks to John Simkin whose research and writing supplied much of the above material.

Children of Light, But With Limits

We are literally all the children of light. The protons, neutrons and electrons that make up all matter in the universe came into existence a small fraction of  second into the Big Bang a bit more than 13.7 billion years ago. That’s right, the components of every atom in your body, and indeed the atoms themselves came into existence In the Big Bang.  In the first moments of this event, the Bang that produced our universe,  huge amounts of high energy photons, that is to say, light came into existence. The collision of these photons produced all the protons, neutrons and electrons that exist today, including the atomic particles that comprise you and me.

This isn’t theory, but a fact that has been reproduced at CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire), at their high energy particle accelerator on the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, and other high energy particle accelerators around the world.  Of course, it’s not all good news. The other name for the light composed of such high energy photons is gamma radiation, a form of light that is inimical to life. It’s just another of the wry gestures intrinsic to the universe after the Big Bang. Of course, people, especially those of a fundamentalist disposition, often ask “What was here before the Big Bang?” Expecting that the answer will be their notion of the author of the Bang, but such speculations are nonsensical, as time itself came into being in the Big Bang. There is no “before,” only after. But we are wired to seek causality, and as such, this answer is deeply dissatisfying, regardless of its truth.

Without knowing it, people asking that are posing a question that runs directly into Zeno’s paradox: Zeno, a Greek philosopher from 2500 years ago put it something like this.

Achilles [The great athlete mentioned by Homer in the Iliad as having been at the siege of Troy] races a tortoise, and as a generous hero type gives the tortoise a ten metre head start for their 100 metre race. As the race starts, the tortoise hurries along at 1/10th of a metre per second, while Achilles, not wanting the poor tortoise to be embarrassed, moves off at a stately 1 meter per second. Five seconds later Achilles reaches the halfway point to the tortoise’s starting position, but it is no longer halfway to the tortoise. As slow as he is, the tortoise has moved on. Achilles reaches the new halfway point, but again the tortoise has moved on, repeat ad nauseam. At some point poor Achilles must have realised that there are an infinite series of halfway points, thrown down his laurel ring sun shade and gone off for a nice bottle of Corcyraean Asyrtiko.

Mathematically, it actually makes sense that Achilles must reach each of an ever changing series of half way points. It’s a question whose logic is such as to have  an intrinsic appeal, even though we understand intuitively that this is not the way things work in the real world. So too, when we ask about events “before” the Big Bang we are asking a question that seems legitimate on its face, and by the standards of rhetorical logic can be asked, but which modern physics demonstrates is illegitimate.

We, as beings in time, cannot imagine timelessness, and thanks to the form of our evolved brain, and the limits of our sensory abilities can neither directly  perceive or understand. It’s not that we don’t try.  We speak of moments or events that are “timeless. The religious sometimes claim that their ecstatic experiences take them to an unmediated otherness “beyond time.” For all our poetic utterances of time flowing as a river,  when we make such  claims we speak metaphorically. Our perception of time may change, occasionally seeming to slow as our attention s either focussed or lost, but time exists whether we perceive it or not. It is an empirical phenomenon tied to the physical nature of space and the mass of stellar objects..

The difference between our perceptions and remembrances of time and time’s reality points to flaws in our ability to perceive and process the nature of the universe’s reality. We think and remember in moments, frozen images of events, or at best brief “film strip” like remembrances, while time is unforgivingly a continuum, whose expression is not tied to our interests, but to relations of the physics mass and distance we are incapable of directly perceiving or capturing as memories.

What is genuinely remarkable is that some of us can, through the language of mathematics understand the structure of time, in spite of the handicaps of the mammalian brain as evolved as Homo sapiens. But the physicist remembers the everyday experiences of time, not as it is or as she or he understands it, but just like the rest of us, as captured by memory and all the limitations that implies. Children of light we may well be, but we are neither gods nor, divorced from our animality, but creatures evolved to see and understand the universe as is needful. We evolved to see threat and opportunity in our environment, with a memory meant to capture patterns of threat and opportunity. We are built with the ability to form memories that represent time more as flash cards than films, and without the sensory capacity to directly perceive time in its physical reality.

D.H.H.


A Small Addendum on CERN.

The Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire is a European collaboration begun almost immediately after World War II ended. It was a response to the terrible bright nuclear flashes above Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where two bombs developed by the immense Anglo-American* Manhattan Project together killed or severely wounded more than 225,000 human lives, overwhelmingly civilians. CERN's avowed purpose was to increase the knowledge of physics for peace, a promise that has been kept in programs like the Large Hadron Collider, where immense energies are used to further humanity's understanding of the Cosmos.

A cutaway showing the packed magnets surrounding the slender red and clear tube where particles are accelerated.
Courtesy of CERN © 2014

The magnet structure in the photo -- the metal plates stacked horizontally in a U shape around the reddish central tube -- functions best at low superconductor temperatures of 455.8 degrees below zero (Fahrenheit), just under 4 degrees above absolute zero. At absolute zero the vibrations of atoms we understand as heat are at their theoretical minimum.

This incredibly cold temperature has to be maintained along the entire 17 mile length of the collider’s precisely circular track, enabling the magnets to carry up to a 12,000 ampere current. To put this in perspective, a typical home electrical circuit is rates at 10 or 15 amperes. At 10 amperes, it would take 1200 home circuits to feed the collider's magnetic field without "blowing the breakers." All this power produces a field capable of constraining and directing particles with a momentum of up to 14 TeV (trillion electronvolts), or 14,000,000,000,000 electronvolts. Including the energy required for cooling, instrumentation, computers, et alia, the CERN facility's power requirements are more than 200 megawatts, or roughly the same as that of the neighbouring city of Geneva.

A significant portion of this power bill is to supply CERN's computers. Every year for the last several, various projects at CERN have produced a combined total of more the 14 Petabytes of raw data. Even at a time when new personal computers often have a storage capacity of a terabyte or two, this is a remarkable volume of data. My somewhat complicated studio set up is still unusual for having 14 terabytes of internal and external storage, which at the moment is about 65% used. A Petabyte is 1015 bytes or 1000 terabytes, so this number looks like 14,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. Another way of thinking it is that they annually produce raw data 975 times that of accumulated works in the entire Library of Congress.  Now you know why CERN scientists (not a certain former Vice President) invented the internet. It was to share and shed data.


___________________

*British participation in the Manhattan Project is often forgotten or underestimated. British scientists, mathematicians  and engineers working both in the U.K. and the U.S. provided vital expertise to the project, though the U.S. provided virtually all the funding, and retained exclusive control over the weapons developed during the war. Fractious post-war politics initially undermined this cooperation, with the U.S. reneging on promises to share data and technology. Some information sharing was eventually restored, but only after it became clear that the U.K's native nuclear weapons endeavour was moving forward regardless of U.S. desires otherwise, and could be traded as part payment for American airforce basing rights on what American's sometimes referred to as the "aircraft carrier U.S.S. Britain."