Hugh Trenchard

In 1816, George Brabantjieff’s fragile genes allowed him only to be carted in a wheelbarrow, at the age of eleven, through London streets by Alexander Poole, a vegetable gardener who lived by the Thames among a grove of Mulberry Trees, which he brought from Armenia and cultivated with care.

No one troubled Poole where he made his home and grew carrots and potatoes and beans, ate them for himself and fed to Brabantjieff, and sold them in the markets. But Poole frequently resented Brabantjieff, who was left to his caretaking by a young Armenian woman when Poole travelled to Turkey and then to the Mountains of Ararat with Cortezza, Portuguese dancer, whose scar beneath her lip was the mark of an earlier lover’s overzealous passion, from whom she escaped one night in Lisbon with nothing but a shred of her life. It was during that visit in 1804 when Poole acquired his Mulberry seeds and finally returned to England, in the spring of 1805, with Brabantjieff.

On a winter afternoon when Poole longed for the orange dusk of Armenian nights; when, for the sixth day, the London sunset was obscured by obstinate rain and clouds; when the cold and his fever stretched thin the meninges of his brain and spinal chord, the wheelbarrow in which Brabantjieff sat, and the carrots beside him, struck an obstacle and propelled Brabantjieff onto the stony path. In the ubiquitous darkness, Brabantjieff’s head struck a stone, and he could not be saved. But before his quivering body ceased all motion, Brabantjieff said this to Poole, his voice clear and emanating from the darkness, for his mouth could not be seen: “Thank you, my dear Mr. Poole. That I have been half of you, half of all people, save for the little boy we saw yesterday with no arms; I have been one portion of all people. Like you are too, Mr. Poole, one part of all mankind. I can leave you now, for without my legs you cared for me like I was part of you. Thank you Mr. Poole, go now and take your part in mankind, and remember me, that I was part of you, and all of you.”

Poole was never certain whether the wheelbarrow pitched against that stone in the darkness entirely by accident, but when he eventually returned to Lisbon and found Cortezza, travelled again to Armenia to stand at the foot of the Mountains of Ararat, only then did he at last understand Brabantjieff. By happenstance he passed a grove of Mulberry Trees, and he was with Cortezza beneath the orange light of dusk; then he forgave himself and all mankind.

Assuming there is an odd handful of people who do come to take a peek at these ramblings, it is probably a reasonable assumption that most come to read about my latest running or cycling endeavors, which, for what they are worth, are of some interest to the running and cycling community. I don’t doubt there is truth to this, but to what degree, I am largely unaware.

In recent months, however, I surely disappoint those readers, few in number though they may be, since the reflections here are much less about describing such exercises of the body, than they are about engaging in the exercise of the literary, or academic, or purely speculative mind and, where-ever possible, exalting one of my favorite themes: self-referential paradox.

Having said that, I am willing to reach into the shifting sands of all the errant words heaped here that distract from the efforts of my body, and extract a kernel of reference to my latest bodily endeavor, that being the Pioneer 8km running race, before, during, and after which my legs felt like bricks, or lead, or cement and the effort like running in sand, or water, or snow, and the desire to cease the effort after 5km, intense, and the feeling of great fortune for having stayed the course to collect the top Master* award and one hundred dollars, bitter-sweet. Bitter, because the time was nigh 40 seconds slower than last year when I was sixth Master in a much deeper Masters field, and sweet because the reward was unexpected and, in a sense, at least some objective validation of the hard work, regardless of my own perception of the result. Bitter sweet too, because there are others, younger and much faster, who linger on the precipice of becoming Masters runners and who instantly will shift me down the ranks of that category.

But why the effort should not simply be satisfying in its own right and nothing less, I am amazed now even as I write these words that I still must ask myself this question after twenty two years of relatively serious athletic competition. But at least there is always the ever pervasive sense of hope, the sense that the body, if properly rested, or sharp, or peaked, has much more to offer me. But there is also acceptance and elation, muted though these emotions may be, for it is certain that I could not keep doing this if after every effort there was not, buried somewhere, a kernel of these too.

Having said all that, we, like the ouroboros, come around again: we may write about the exercises we engage in, or we may, by writing, engage in exercise and speak of our exercises, ones of the body and ones of the mind, analyze them, speculate upon their origins and their trajectories, and then stop here… because the last word written reflects the cycle within the cycle; it is the last one read by an odd handful of people who come to take a peek at these ramblings: this one, here.

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*Craig Odermatt won the 40-44 year age category, but is 39 at this time. He turns 40 this year, and so for the purpose of the race series, he is in the 40-44 category. To qualify for the top Master award, one had to be at least 40 on the day of the race.

Experimental writing, in the tradition of Borges.

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Anthony Cardoza, whose name, in combination with his activities, was perceived by some from an ancient secret order to be connected with certain elaborate configurations of a school of Herring fish, is not dead, contrary to the rumours, though he has been absent from the streets for three years.

I, who knew Cardoza well, am now a messenger, but was once Cardoza’s closest confidante and associate. I distanced myself from him in 1467 after fourteen years of integration when I was 28 and he 42. I have not seen Cardoza during his three-year absence, an absence that is like a wound through the hearts of thousands, and I have not heard from anyone that he is in fact alive.

But I have had time now to recount the fourteen year history of our integration, the days and the locations at which we met, the anecdotes and circumscriptions of those who were near at those times, the book he left me with; in particular I considered the words of the letter found by Alphonse of the secret order who indicated the motion of a school of Herring fish and how it altered the course of an ocean current and the location of the bottle of rum that contained his letter, the bottle Cardoza cast into the water in 1464; Alphonse said these events explained why he found the letter that Cardoza wrote, which explanation I dismissed.

There were some who claimed that, while unconditionally generous and compassionate, Cardoza was plagued by the secrets of a confrontation in 1450 with a tribe of Imazighen Berbers who claimed allegiance to the infamous Tariq ibn Ziyad, which secrets, it was said, left Cardoza’s eyes and frequent smile bereft of sincerity, though I knew Cardoza loved his followers with a passion that pierced every dark night that Cardoza had seen but never shared.

But I who once knew Cardoza, no longer know him, though I am certain that I am he. Yet there is no one since who has recognized me and told me so. For this I do not blame them, for I am glad finally to have found anonymity. Still I am uncertain why this has come to pass. And although I have excluded the ruminations of the secret order from my analysis of events past (for the problem of Cardoza’s absence cannot include the ocean currents or the Herring fish because I am here in the flesh and to state that this or that configuration of fish never happened is entirely invalid), that I am Cardoza validates indeed the circumscriptions of those who have provided me clues in addition to my own recollections; that I am Cardoza is proof that things do not change unless specified otherwise: the silence of the townspeople indicates no evidence to the contrary. And I, who am now a messenger, have evidence and no doubt, and now relay the words of the letter that Alphonse found: Cardoza lives!

While not entirely deliberate at the time of writing it, the short story entitled, “The Best Cure for Loneliness” (previous post), touches on interesting current issues regarding the evolutionary and psychological basis for altruism. For example, in Cialdini et al. (1997) “Reinterpreting Empathy – Altruism Relationship: When One Into One Equals Oneness”, the authors argue for a non-altruistic (or essentially self-interested) motive for kindness to others that involves the concept “self-other oneness”.

True altruism involves selfless assistance with costs to the helper but no benefit to him/her. Cialdini et al. note prominent researcher, Batson, who argues that “purely altruistic action can occur reliably, provided that it is preceded by a specific psychological state: empathic concern for another” (481).

Cialdini et al. challenge this by presenting the concept of “self-other oneness” which entails a largely self-interested motive, similar to other kinds of self interested motivations, or “egoistic” motivations such as social approval, guilt, or sadness (483).

Cialdini et al describe self-other oneness:

“The notion of a responsive and fluid sense of self offers the provocative possibility that when one takes the perspective of another (either through instructions or feelings of attachment) and vicariously experiences what the other is experiencing, one comes to incorporate the self within the boundaries of the other….What is merged is conceptual, not physical.”

Cialdini et al note that the self-oneness response intensifies on a continuum of increasing attachment: near stranger, acquaintance, a good friend, or a family member (483), saying, “The upshot of this analysis is that close attachments may elevate benevolence not because individuals feel more empathic concern for the close other, but because they feel more at one with the other – that is, because they perceive more of themselves in the other…If people locate more of themselves in the others to whom they are closely attached, then the helping that takes place among such individuals may not be selfless” (483).

The present discussion is not meant to be a scholarly analysis of the Cialdini et al “self-other oneness” category of egoistic kindness and it has only marginal value in illustrating some of the arguments relating to altruism and self-interested motivations for kindness. However, I do present it for the sake of a thought provoking paradox, one which arguably presents a problem in the logic of the Caldini argument.

Thus the story, “The Best Cure for Loneliness”, entails an interesting extension to the notion of “self-other oneness”, in that the characters of the story (who of course share my name!) are the purest (fictional) example of the concept: they are both Hugh Trenchard (note I have not written this story because of a great need to see my name in print (!); the story was modelled on one written by Jorge Luis Borges, in which the writer encounters himself on a park bench).

In the story, the first HT indicates that he cannot be altruistic to the other because he is only concerned about social approval (“no fine looking women or well-suited men nearby”), and only becomes concerned about his counterpart and prepared to engage in an arguably altruistic act when HT (the first) realizes his counterpart is *in fact* himself. In the end, both engage in apparently selfless acts for each other, and indicate they may oscillate between these selfless acts when periods of “impoverishment” befall them.

Along the continuum of self-other attachment, their relationship is at the farthest extreme: far more than family, they are the purest form of oneness: they are in fact each other! If the Cialdini et al analysis is applied, a paradox thus arises: their motivations to assist the other is primarily selfish, and yet they fundamentally assist themselves. Although a paradox of this story, it does present a rhetorical\logical problem for the Caldini argument: if the concept of self-otherness is taken to its farthest extreme, if you assist yourself, then you are simultaneously both fundamentally self-interested and purely altruistic!

In any event, my aim here is not to present a rigorous criticism of the Caldini et al argument. Rather, it is only that I have realized my story entails some interesting elements of the altruism/selfishness debate which I have thought to illustrate a little here.

I leave this for now, perhaps to be revisited another day.

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Cialdini, R., Brown, S. Lewis, B., Luce, C., Neuberg. S. (1997) “Reinterpreting Empathy – Altruism Relationship: When One Into One Equals Oneness”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 73, No. 3, 481-494

“Shall I tell you a story?” Asked the impoverished man, whose stated motivation to speak was a two-dollar coin, but whose obvious delusions revealed clearly to me his desperation for human contact on that hour of that day when hundreds had passed by and cast their eyes beyond his transparent, ragged sillouette. “It is the story of the compression of your happiness, Hugh Trenchard, to a single point and its implosion such that it encompasses the universe.”

For my selfishness, of charity I do not profess a single strand in my stony body, although, perhaps to impress company, I have been witnessed to press gently a token now and again into the hand or cap of those whose lives litter or adorn the streets, the description for which depends on the perspective I choose that day and the particular proportions of harmones and glucose coursing my veins, the relative concentrations of which may be determined by many things: the color of the sky, the intensity of the sun, the last minute office visit from the director who kept me late, the absence or overabundance of telephone or electronic messages that day.

Indeed it is well known that charity impresses others, and perhaps capably counting myself among the best and shrewdest of sociopaths, I have determined that a nod and smile and a coin in the hand of the needy appears to others as compassion, and such an appearance entails a vast panoply of potential benefits, of which it is not currently my intention to enumerate.

To be sure, this day was one when I perceived there to be no benefit derived from my stopping to engage the impoverished man: I was in no company, and there were no fine looking women or well-suited men nearby to witness the event and for whom I may have fantasized their thoughts to be, “my, how considerate and compassionate is that young man to engage that unfortunate destitute.” And the benefit to the man himself was negligible, if not enabling an entirely self-destructive trajectory, I long ago convinced myself.

But that he knew my name was more than startling. It is of course acceptable social engagement to acknowledge the greetings of others who know your name. But for those whose lives are not known publicly, it is rare for strangers to know your name, and so when such a stranger identifies you by your given names with clearest conviction, it is generally difficult to ignore, even for the least sanguine among us.

And so I stopped. “You know my name?” I asked the man.

“As surely as you know yourself.” He replied. “And I will, for a two-dollar coin, tell you that you also know me, and that when I begin to speak, you will be the one to tell me the story of my happiness, how it compresses to a point and implodes such that it encompasses the universe.”

“I will tell you the story?” I asked. “Why would I do such a thing? I do not know that story. It sounds utterly nonsensical. If you knew me so well, you would know that I am a skeptical man of science.” I said. “And this is a charade. There are ways for you to determine my name, who I am. I pass by this way frequently, it cannot be difficult for you to learn about me. And so I defy your story and leave you here to accost another victim of your fraud. But if you must, I will give you a five dollar bill if you promise to save your breath and let me on my way.”

“All right,” he replied. “But you know it will haunt you. My words will vibrate all the neural strands of your brain, and you will wonder about the story which you know well and that only you can tell me.”

“Oh please,” I said. “I have no more time for this game. I have no stories for you. I must go.” I turned my heals and began to stride away.

The impoverished man yelled after me. “I know the books on your shelf, Hugh Trenchard! I know that you have read Jorge Luis Borges this very afternoon, that you read The Book of Sand, and The Other; how Borges met himself and how they dreamed of each other! I know too that as you lay reading, you began to fashion a story in your mind that began this way: “Shall I tell you a story?” Asked the impoverished man”".

I stopped again, and turned. I was beyond surprise. If whom you thought was a stranger tells you so much, he who was a stranger can no longer properly be described that way, and there can be nothing less than infinite understanding. “Then how would you have me begin this story?” I asked.

“I do not need to tell you,” he said. “I am waiting for you to begin,” he said, returning the five-dollar bill to me. I nodded and thanked him. “Will you get coffee with that?” he asked.

“No.” I replied. “Today I am hungry, and there is a burger at McDonalds with my name on it. But I must wait for another stranger to come along to tell them this story, for I will need more money for supper tonight.”

“Then I will leave you here.” He said. “Take care of yourself and I will talk again with you another day.”

“Will you tell me the story, then?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “You will return the five-dollar bill to me, and every synapse will be a microcosm of the universe. There is no loneliness to be achieved when all the connections of the cosmos lies compressed within us. Go, Hugh Trenchard, engage the universe and return to me when you are impoverished again.”

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IF a self-proclaimed studious man of exacting diligence finds himself frequenting the local Starbucks on the somewhat delusional premise that he intends to study the rigours of supply and demand of currency, exchange markets, current account deficits and surpluses, J-curves and the nuances of the Marshall-Lerner condition; and if this man deludes himself as the background strains of Bing Crosby are, for once, insufficiently loud to drown the nasal resonances of another young man’s nearby Quebecois Francais that seems in strange way and barely tolerable fashion to vibrate arrythmically and dissonantly his ears tympanic tissues, then certainly this man would be true to foundations of integrity to question why he is in this particular location, that is, the local Starbucks, when his time is undoubtedly better spent in the quieter confines of home. Also would he wisely exalt the virtues of honest discourse to question why the temptation is now irresistable to dribble out blog blather, when the time taken to do so means correspondingly equal durations of time not taken to engage in his studies of exacting diligence.

Does this man soothe his present lack of patience to work through the rigours of the task at hand? Is he fatigued from his dose of treadmill intervals in which he proclaimed with egregious self-satisfaction that “his legs were on fire”? Does he feel the sluggish relaxation of cognitive clarity that results from three consecutive days of some quantity of liquor consumed, albeit not excessively, but to the concommitant detriment of sleep?

And why is this man suddenly aware of the sloping table at which he sits, the loose top of the adjacent table on which his elbow rests, and why so suddenly noticeable is the slight discomfort of his lower back that results from back lifts at the gym? All such inconsequential events in past similar contexts would go unnoticed, and so why the uncharacteristic sensitivity? Indeed, if one were to distill present blog profusions to their one essential point, one might be forgiven for observing that our man seems, er…shall we say…pissed off.

And if our man could self-proclaim some capacity to engage insight into the present state of his consciousness, what would he find? Could he reach into the well of foul and soupy water and the sharp pebbles of his thoughts, and stir his hand long enough to bring the water to equilibrium and begin, grain by grain, to smooth the rough edges of every stone there?

He concedes that he cannot until the water is flushed and the stones smoothed by the pure clear spring of another, who by her absence, even for a day or two, cuts and grinds every stone together in a dull grating roar that fills up and displaces every cell in his body and leaves him unmoving like a statue of one billion fossilized roughcut stones.

In his moment of paralysis he is glancing up; he has ceased to type, and his distractions at once hone to a point and disappear. He strains, and there is international finance. It grabs and rattles him. He has written. Yes, he has written of his fleeting insight, false or true, his delusions, of water and pebbles and statues and rattles. He can move again.

Given a couple of spare hours preceding sleep and a day off work tomorrow (as all my Fridays are), and a temporary relinquishment of the pains of a course in International Finance, for a few minutes preceding the setting down of these words I thought that I might upload a video file of a flock of Brant geese on the waters near Parksville, taken during a recent weekend getaway. But the sometimes intricate mechanics of electronic file conversion has, for now, usurped my attempts and caused me to re-direct the focus of my ramblings for the night.

However, before leaving the subject of Brant geese, a subject to which I will return, I must comment that these are remarkable birds from the perspective of collective phenomena generally. I had observed how closely clustered these birds were as they floated on the heaving cold waters near to the shoreline, and I watched how they would adjust their positions when relocating en masse by drifting in behind each other, much as cyclists do when speeds are driven to a certain output threshold at which riders self-organize into a synchronized paceline. Another example of the “drafting effect”, I thought, as I watched them. The drafting effect is of course the description I apply to any natural self-organized process whereby agents in a system save energy by following others.

So, I managed to capture a brief digital video of the flock on the water, albeit in fairly poor quality. But I will leave the vagaries of file uploads for another time, when the hour is not so near the stroke of midnight, and the lids less heavy.

That said, as the seconds wind on inexorably toward that moment when today becomes tomorrow, when evening becomes morning; that moment when I vow to cry for the night “I can no more” and send myself to bed – in the intervening time there is little left of detail to be expressed, but merely a mood, a cloud of sensations which emerge from a unique sequence of synaptic events that crystallize to a few phrases on a white, empty, digital space.

Ah there it is! I can no more.

This shall be continued soon.

I’ve gone with a new background theme. Seems like a good time to shake it up. And seeing as my bluebird theme is shared with the Twitter site folks – not deliberately of course – I have another reason to make the change. I’ve chosen this theme because there is an element of a chaotic process evident, and chaos theory is closely connected with complexity theory, one of my primary interests.

The Arlington Symposium and Other Activities

Across the Potomac River from Washington, DC, is Arlington, Virginia; located there is the United States National Cemetery and the Pentagon, among other things. Also there, for me, was the 2009 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) fall symposium “Complex Adaptive Systems and the Threshold Effect: Views from the Natural and Social Sciences.”

I was fortunate to have had the following paper accepted for a presentation at this symposium, entitled “Self-Organized Coupling Dynamics and Phase Transitions in Bicycle Pelotons”.

There were actually seven simultaneous symposia occurring, all sponsored by the AAAI, a well-funded organization based in the United States, whose sponsors include Microsoft, NASA, the National Science Foundation, and US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, among others. As a part time student I was fortunate to be one among several to receive a National Science Foundation grant to assist me in my costs to attend.

Distributed among these seven symposia were about 300 people, and about 80 in the complex adaptive systems symposium.

I enjoyed the opportunity to meet people who share some fundamental intellectual pursuits. There were others in attendance whose books and articles I have seen reference to or possess. For example, Peter Erdi, author of the book “Complexity Explained” was in attendance, while Mitchell Waldrop, author of “Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Chaos and Order” and an editor for the journal Nature, gave a keynote talk, and introduced me and my presentation.

I enjoyed taking some time to explore Washington, DC, including a number of Smithsonian institute museums and galleries, some running and cycling on a rented bike as well.

Ah, presently the hour is late, and I really must to bed. Perhaps pressing the “post” button now, when this contribution has not become too long, will inspire me to resume posts here with more regularity again. Well, we shall see.

The small muscle spasms of post Victoria Marathon soreness seem to signify a good time for a long-overdue blog update. Granted, on this morning after, I am not as sore as I could be, though I certainly felt green for two or three hours post-race while a nasty cocktail of sugary/ cola drinks, too much caffeine and ibuprofen filtered through my liver and kidneys.

Training for the Victoria marathon began mid-August, following an anti-climactic end to a cycling season in which a broken chain preceded an unceremonious withdrawal from my last important race of the season, the Provincial Road race in Abbotsford. A couple of relatively weak Tuesday night time-trials in Sidney was all the body could muster in two weeks that followed, though the placings there bolstered a minor upside to my season finale by preserving a 5th place overall in the Victoria Cycling League ‘A’ standings, a weekly series of local club races that begins in March and ends in September.

To linger for a moment on the summer’s cycling events, the highlight was probably the White Rock Criterium in July, in which fitness acquired from the Mt Hood 5-stage race in June began finally to emerge, and, by the criterium finish I began to believe I still belonged in an elite level bicycle race, though perhaps not the same could have been said about the road race the next day.

Overall my cycling season was not as long and generally weaker than 2008, but perhaps a commitment to a role in a Victoria Shakespeare Society production of Julias Caesar and twelve performances beginning early July, and ending mid-August, flattened slightly my peaking capacity on the bike. For this I am not complaining, as the acting experience was rich and wonderful, and I see more of that in the cards in years to come.

To be sure, while the motivation remains to train and be competitive as a cyclist (and as a runner), there is a marked, inexorable shift in motivations that greets the advent of my fifth decade and gently nudges the expenditure of my energies in alternative directions. I feel it stronger now than I did during the last decade of life, but still the call is also strong from every bodily cell to be invigorated by intense activity. But this beckoning is now more firmly pulled against a set of intellectual and artistic imperatives that drive my energies too, the agents of which at either end are not inconsistent in principle, but which heighten the tension that sends me on my way through the dynamical dancing landscape of my life, as it does all of us to varying degrees. Of course amid that tension is the greatest responsibility we bear to our fellow human beings, the constancy of which is sometimes the hardest work we bear, at least it so often seems to me.

I have vastly digressed! But what could a post that comes three months after the last one be but one that begins from the philosophical perspective, shifts to a general descriptive overview (perhaps vice-versa in this case), but ends finally on specificities. The marathon!

My training went well, having discovered double tempo workouts once a week that culminated in one day a couple of weeks ago when I did two 10 mile tempo runs within a few hours and about 40km on the day. With a longer lead up to the event, I can see how such sessions can result in yet greater fitness.

In the weeks leading up to the race I had in mind that 2:36 was reasonable, and initially I had thought it was possible for me to shoot for the top Master time, for which some prize money was on the line. But when I had heard that Danny Gonzalez, from Oregon, was here, whose PB is 2:13 (albeit set probably 20 years ago), it seemed my chances at that were slim.

On the cold but sunny and nearly windless morning, I found it a tough day out there. While my pace was about where I had hoped through ten miles, in 58 somthing, I found the energy gradually waning through to the half, at 1:17.58. While I have had greater mental struggles to pull myself to the finish, I was surprised at how hard I was breathing at points over the second half – glad that I was able to breathe that hard and not blow completely, but somewhat chagrinned that such an effort did not result in faster leg turnover.

In the end I was not far down on the second Master, from Tokyo, whose time was 2:36, and not as far back from Gonazalez as I might have thought, who was in at 2:33. I was happy with being the third Master and 12th overall among a very strong field, with non-Canadians taking 8 of the places ahead of me.