The Vestigial Tail of the Déjà Vu-er

Not too long ago, Felix Grant had a post on his blog, Déjà vu, all over again, that was about repetition, redemption, and trial and improvement. Ray Girvan followed that with a post on his blog titled, Déjà view, that was about literary treatments of time loops  and various efforts of people to use such loops to learn from their mistakes. After reading both of these interesting posts, I was feeling a bit left out, but I couldn’t think of anything useful to add. However, now that Dr. C made his contribution to the subject, Deja Vu All Over, summed up by the central text in the post, CLICK PICS TO ENLARGE THEM,  (which I find to be deeply profound) I felt I had to do something or those three might ask me to turn in my secret decoder ring.

After deep cogitation, I realized that there is in fact one important part of my life that is an over-and-over-and-over kind of thing: toast. You may remember, from a previous post of mine, that I am the goddess of toast. (When we have a power outage, I have found myself standing in front of the toaster mournfully pushing the little lever up and down.)

It so happens, by perfect coincidence, that I found this essay (untitled as far as I can see) in Cultural Notebook in Prospect magazine (March 2009) by Sam Leith*. He is describing what it’s like to drop your freshly buttered toast on the floor:

… An inspection confirmed it. Butter side down. The laws of exchange had dictated that exactly what the toast lost to the floor in melted Anchor, it gained in cat hair. Meanwhile, on the Today programme in the background: tumbling interest rates, collapsing banks, cities in flames. Everything that could have gone wrong, it seems, just did.

This — the juxtaposition of toast and Today — was as close as I’m likely to get to a religious revelation. Very few of us ascribe our larger problems to the workings of metaphysical agencies, you see. Global warming is, our theology has it, our own fault. The collapse of the banking system, similarly, can be pinned on nothing more unearthly than a planet of variously greedy, misguided, imperfect people. And yet — if you are anything like me — you believe, sneakingly but firmly, that your small misfortunes are the result of a personal campaign of persecution by the Ineffable. You don’t believe in anything so grand as God or the Devil. You believe, rather, in the karmic equivalent of a parking warden hovering by a meter. It even has a name. You call it Sod’s law.

Sod’s law is what remains of our determinism. It is the atheist’s reflex concession to magical thinking — a vestigial tail of the vast eschatologies of our recent past.

I wish I could get away with quoting the whole essay, but I’ll have to make do with two further extracts:

… A novelist can have characters who are magical thinkers, or antinomian fatalists, or who believe they make their own destinies. But what the characters think is irrelevant: the novelist can’t create characters to whom something actually happens accidentally. Real, malevolent bad luck is confined to the outside world.

… Toast may give us some clarity. When I was ten, I remember being glued to an edition of Tomorrow’s World in which the presenter interviewed some scientists who were doing systematic work in this area. Hundreds and hundreds of times, these scientists, in white lab coats, were toasting bread, buttering it, and pushing toast from the edges of tables. Splat, another piece of toast would go. Butter side up, or butter side down. And the scientists would solemnly make a note on one side or another of their clipboards.

As it turns out, they weren’t the only ones. In the course of researching a book, I recently stumbled on an abstract of a 1995 article that appeared in the European Journal of Physics. And it argued that, yes, toast will tend to land butter side down. Or, to put it more precisely — modelling toast as “a thin, rigid, rough lamina” (which is how I make it, too) Robert AJ Matthews discovered that on falling from a plate or table of average height, “gravitation torque induced as the toast topples over the edge of the plate/table is insufficient to bring the toast butter-side up again by the time it hits the floor.”

But here’s the interesting bit. Only falling from a table more than three metres high will the toast manage a complete rotation and thus be more likely to land butter side up. Yet we will never eat from such tables because, Matthews explains, the formula giving the maximum height of human beings (to which the height of our tables is inexorably connected) contains no fewer than three of the “fundamental constants of the universe.” So, this Prometheus among men concluded, “toast falling off the breakfast table lands butter side down because the universe is made that way.” And there’s an end of it. We predestinarian pessimists were right all along. The facts of the universe are Sods. Which also means that if you have the misfortune, like most of us, to be non-fictional, your toast will always taste a little bit of cat hair.

I don’t see why “there’s an end of it.” Why can’t we make our tables three meters high? It would require a considerable use of step-ladders, but I think it would be worth it to get out of all this déjà vu-ing.

Read the whole essay. I’ve left out a little bit in the middle that is good. [ link ]

* Once again — in this case because of the style of the humor — I found myself wondering if this piece was pseudonomously written by someone I know, but if you look at the picture of Mr. Leith, you can see it’s probably not. Felix is wrinklier.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/