The Man Who Knew Infinity -- Film Review What the Robin Knows -- Book Review Janis Joplin: Little Girl Blue -- Film Review

The Man Who Knew Infinity

Directed by Matthew Brown

This is a beautifully made, touching film about the life of Srinivasa Ramanujan, one of the more naturally gifted mathematicians of the twentieth century.  He was untrained.  Worked by intuition.  He had an extraordinary ability to make mental calculations.  He simply wrote down the mathematical formulas as he visualized them in his mind, sure of their correctness.  Of course, other mathematicians were not so sure and demanded proofs, which he found tedious and a waste of time.  However, at Cambridge, among G.H. Hardy, J.E. Littlewood, Bertrand Russell, and others, he learned, and was able to produce some impressive proofs of thorny mathematical problems that had seemed intractable.  He died at an unfortunately young age (32) from tuberculosis.

The film takes a very personal look at him and his relationships with his family in India, his wife (played by the captivating Devika Bhise), and the British mathematicians at Cambridge.  From his early struggles to gain recognition for his work in India, his momentous venture moving to England, separating from his new wife and family, to join a powerhouse of British mathematicians at Cambridge, to the culture clash he felt upon arriving in England, he faced obstacles, opposition, and disappointments.  He encountered resistance, prejudice, and violence in England, jealousy from colleagues, as well as loneliness.  His road was one of struggle and ultimate triumph, albeit cut short by the onset of terminal tuberculosis.  In some respects it is a tragic story and deeply sad, but in others it is a monument to the strength and vitality and will to triumph within the human spirit.  It is very moving, visually very satisfying.  An outstanding achievement.  

What the Robin Knows:  How Birds Reveal the Secrets of the Natural World.  By Jon Young.  Boston & New York:  Mariner Books,  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.  2012. 

Jon Young's book, What the Robin Knows, is about more than birds.  It is about how to see, how to perceive, how to experience oneself in the natural world.  Civilized people, who do not grow up surrounded by nature, and who do not depend on their knowledge and understanding of the natural world for their day to day survival, have lost much awareness of this world.  Humans have succeeded in distancing themselves from this world of nature from which we arose, and with this disengagement has followed a loss of knowledge, understanding and awareness of its inner workings that was once commonplace and vital.  Jon Young is attempting to reawaken not only the knowledge, but the mode of perception, and very importantly, the way of relating, that has fallen into disuse.  The subtle alarm calls of the invisible junco simply have no relevance for most modern people.  Therefore they are not even perceived.  Yet in the wilderness they carry a powerful significance that can make the difference between life and death for some creatures, including ourselves. 

Birds do not know that they are living in civilization.  Their ways of life, survival and death are the same as they have been for millions of years.  Every day of a bird's life is lived under the constant threat of imminent death, and every day there are life and death dramas played out among all the birds and animals in the habitat.  He relates a striking incident where a male cardinal rescues his female companion from the pursuit of a hawk (pp. 32-33) and he points out the relationship between such an incident and the "companion calls" that birds are constantly making to one another.  This kind of eyewitness report is very apt and interesting, and these kinds of stories make this book a very informative, engaging read.  Young relates a number of hawk anecdotes that are quite dramatic, and several chapters of the book are spent describing different types of alarm calls and behaviors in response to different types of predatory threats.  

I think the most important lesson of this book is that all bird songs and all bird behavior is meaningful, and very much context dependent.  To observe birds well, you need to observe the entire environment, the entire ecosystem that they are living in.  Everything a bird does, every tweet a bird makes, tells you something about the immediate circumstances around that bird.  There is nothing idle or superfluous in nature.  And all the other birds and all the other animals know this and are paying attention.  The entire habitat is an intensely communicative network. 

The main idea is not to hear birds.  The main idea is to hear everything. (p. 59)

This book is written in the first person and has the character of a birdwatcher's journal rather than simply a dispassionate exposition on the behavior and language of birds.  For example, he opens Chapter 3 with a long anecdote about how he became acquainted with white throated sparrows and juncos walking back from a fishing excursion in New Jersey at the age of 11.  At first it annoyed me that he injected so much of himself into his account.  It is not so important to me how he acquired his knowledge.  I felt that he should focus on the birds and leave himself out of it.  I gradually came to realize that his approach is the right one after all, because his object is not so much to teach or expound on the behavior of birds, but rather to mentor and train people who have an interest in the natural world to hone their sensitivity to the subtleties and complexities of being in that world.  He wants to train you to become a participant observer in nature, and he must do this by example.  This book is not so much a field guide as it is a self-help manual.  Altering ones attention to the natural world means changing oneself from the inside.  Grasping the interconnectedness of the daily dramas in the natural world alters our perception of our own place in it.  This is the real object of What the Robin Knows.

If we learn to read the birds -- and their behaviors and vocalizations -- through them, we can read the world at large.  Anyone with a working understanding of this discipline can approach an unknown habitat and quickly draw all sorts of 'natural world' conclusions.  The types of birds seen or heard, their numbers and behaviors and vocalizations, will reveal the locations of running water or still water, dead trees, ripe fruit, a carcass, predators, fish runs, insect hatches, and so much more (p. 173).

Tecumseh was not only the greatest Indian warrior, he excelled at hunting far beyond his Indian peers.  In a hunting competition he once brought in nearly three times as many deer as his nearest competitors (Eckert, pp. 486-87).  During the winter of 1779-80, which was one of the coldest and severest on record, many Indians starved or died of exposure, but Tecumseh's hunting skill brought in hundreds of rabbits, turkeys, raccoons, grouse, squirrels, opossum, deer, buffalo, and bears that enabled his village to survive and earned him the highest praise (Eckert, p. 244-45, N220).  Young's book explains how he must have done it.  Tecumseh must have been a master reader of the signs and language of the birds and the forest. 

Another subtext running through this book is a critique of modern life.  Young describes how the San Bushmen of Africa create bonds of recognition between themselves and the birds and other creatures in their environment.  They distinguish between recognition, which is a bond, and merely seeing without recognizing, that does not create a bond. 

I want to point out that the San's concept of seeing without recognizing is practically the definition of the rushed, hectic modern experience.  I really don't believe that a daily schedule chopped into quarter-hour segments is who we are instinctively.  That is our acquired self, not our evolved self. (p. 180-81)

And I would like to add that this lack of recognition that characterizes our perception of the creatures of the natural world applies equally well to the lack of recognition that we accord each other.  The disconnectedness that the modern urban dweller experiences from our fellow human beings is on a continuum with our disengagement from the natural world. 

He notes along the way many interesting features of particular birds and their communicative peculiarities.  Being able to distinguish between the many varying alarm calls birds voice can provide much information about the type and immediacy of other predatory animals in the environs.  He notes that jays around the world can perfectly mimic the calls of hawks and then sound alarm calls for those illusory hawks.  If the ruse works, it scares other birds away from a food source the jay was eyeing (p. 55). Many songbirds have ventriloquial abilities, which are used to confuse attacking hawks (p. 128).  Chain link fences are a preferred refuge for songbirds because they provide good protection from hawks.  If a hawk approaches from one side, the small songbird can pass through an opening to the other side thwarting the hawk (p. 151f.).  The book is full of small observations and facts about birds that provide the reader with constant engaging interest.

The appendix gives detailed step by step instructions on how to begin learning bird language in earnest.  Like learning any language it requires a lot of time and it helps to live in the environment where the language is used for daily life.  What the Robin Knows is an excellent guide for the serious birdwatcher who wishes to go beyond simply cataloging the birds to understanding the entire ecosystem in which the birds live and how the subtle nuances in their calls and behavior reveal hidden aspects of the natural world. 

Notes

Eckert, Allen W.  (1992)  A Sorrow in Our Heart:  The Life of Tecumseh.  New York:  Bantam.

Janis Joplin: Little Girl Blue

Directed by Amy Berg

Janis Joplin is at the top of my list of female singers.  She sings with the most moving, powerful passion, energy, delicacy, and exquisite sensitivity of any female singer I have ever heard.  This film is an excellent portrayal of her character, music, background and career.  Janis Joplin's heart and voice is full of pain and passion.  Beginning with the rejection she felt in her family and community in Port Arthur, Texas, she took on the pain and rejection felt by others and gave powerful voice to it on stage.  There is a clip of her doing Ball and Chain at the Monterey Pop Festival that left the audience agog.  She seems to just tower over other singers by virtue of her total lack of buffers and inhibitions on her raw feelings that literally explode from her.  There are many interviews with family members, friends, band mates, and acquaintances that offer a rich array of perspectives on every aspect of her life, including the heroin use that eventually did her in.  It was a touching, full bodied, presentation of her life and career.  I strongly recommend it to everyone.  Seen on PBS, May 3, 2016.