The Writing and Beauty Walk

Transcript of Helen Sword’s podcast episode The Writing and Beauty Walk

Hi, I'm Helen Sword from helensword.com and this is Sword Swings, my podcast series for writers in motion. Whether you're out walking or writing in a car or on a train or a bus or just pottering around in your kitchen, this recording will help you move yourself and your writing to someplace new. I've extracted today's podcast episode from a conversation that I held back in 2021 with esteemed special guest and genre-defying writer Professor Douglas Hofstadter.

Doug is a transdisciplinary thinker who teaches cognitive science and comparative literature, among other things, at Indiana University. His groundbreaking book, Gödel, Escher, Bach, An Eternal Golden Braid, won both the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction and the National Book Award in 1980. Doug's enduring passion for languages, music, and the sciences finds expression in his ongoing discursive explorations in poetry, translation, script-inspired whirly art, and wordplay, all of which keep him writing, in his own words, ‘perpetually in search of beauty.’ So let's dive into this extract in which we discuss what beauty is and how pushing boundaries can help you discover beauty in your own writing.

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Helen: So I usually start out by asking my guests. to talk about just kind of their intellectual autobiography as a writer, I guess, how they got to where they are now. I think if I asked Doug that question, it would take several hours to even begin to answer it. So I'm going to ask it through a particular lens, which is a kind of intellectual autobiography of your life as a writer who cares about beauty. So writing through the lens of beauty. But before we do that, I've got to ask the big question, which is, so, so what is beauty anyway?

Doug: Thank you, Helen. It's a pleasure to quote be here on quote. What is beauty? I don't know that I could define beauty. I feel that my whole life has been a quest for beauty in multiple domains, going way beyond language, music, obviously, mathematics, humor, sports. I mean, motion, moving one's body, dancing. Photography, language, the sounds of language, the sounds of different languages. But if you ask me to define beauty, I don't know how I would express it other than saying something that has a very powerful appeal, it depends on the kind of beauty. It can be, it can be to one's emotions. It can be to one's visual sense of the world in terms of pattern. It can be in terms of sound, just again, pattern, not music, but just language, linguistic sound, it can be pattern. I don't like to stress pattern as if that were the only thing because when I really think of beauty and music, it often involves pattern, but it's the emotional impact, it's not the actual pattern. It's some kind of unity of things that come together in a special way that one would not expect, and that complement each other or harmonize with each other in a very natural and powerful and unexpected way. I think there's something like that. You know, you've asked me a very difficult question, but it's an interesting thing for me to ponder. I will ponder it and, and, uh, and maybe I'll come up with some kind of an answer. But I don't, I don't usually think about how to define beauty since I assume almost everybody has a concept of beauty.

Helen: Well, you use it comfortably, as do I. I mean, I talk about the aesthetics of writing. Much as you do, you know, all these different elements from the musical to the intellectual to the visual, there's so much beauty, so much aesthetic pleasure that can come from all these objects people have written down, you know, everything from an earbud holder to golden and red fall leaves, right?

Lots of different ways we can, we can perceive beauty, but I have had people coming particularly out of kind of art and architecture backgrounds or, you know, certain backgrounds who say, Oh, we're not supposed to talk about beauty. That's a cultural construct. You know, it's not real and what you find beautiful, somebody else won't.

And, you know, a pile garbage can be beautiful or whatever. I just find myself strangely uninterested in that debate, personally, you know, I sort of want to be able to talk about beauty without having to sort of frame everything.

Doug: Well, I mean, I'll tell you, I remember I took a photograph in Berkeley in 19, probably 66 or 67. I was driving around somewhere. It was very, very late afternoon or sunset time. And the sun was very low. And I was, strangely enough, passing by a dump, and all of a sudden, maybe because my car drove by or I was standing there, I don't remember, a huge bunch of seagulls took off and flew into the air above the dump, which was very dark, but it was lit from, you know, that very late afternoon, early evening light, very low light.

And the seagulls were brilliant white against this dark dump. And I've never forgotten the extreme beauty. But of course it wasn't the dump itself. It was the dump combined with the seagulls. So it wasn't exactly the pile of garbage that was beautiful, but there was something about the pile of garbage against, or the seagulls against it. That was… it was wonderful.

Helen: And it was also your perception of it. Wasn't it? Somebody else driven by and not even noticed, you know, you were attuned to it.

Doug: Absolutely. Absolutely. Being attuned to it is certainly very, very, very central.

Helen: Well, can you take us back then? I know when I interviewed you a few years back for my book, you talked about growing up in a household where there was a lot of wordplay and a kind of joy and pleasure around language. Let's maybe go back there again and, and talk about beauty in language. When did beauty and writing become related terms for you?

Doug: Well, I think my mother tried to expose me to some good writing, but, uh, I'm not sure. I, of course, read charming things like the Winnie the Pooh series when I was smaller. She read them to me. I think that my first real awareness of beauty in language came when I was about 12, when I was first exposed to the French language. My mother, we were preparing for our year in Geneva, we were going to go to Geneva on a sabbatical year for my dad and she had a teacher who had her listen to French songs sung by various famous French singers.

I listened to the songs, and I found the sounds extraordinarily beautiful. It also happened that my mother was writing down the words because she couldn't understand them all. So her teacher would give them to her and my mother wrote them down. She had exquisite handwriting. My mother did. I always admired her handwriting. And that handwriting remains to me one of the peak examples of visual beauty in my life. My mother's handwriting. But the sounds of French I fell in love with. I took French then in school for a year before we went to Geneva. And when we went to Geneva, the love affair between me and French was so, so powerful and it never has ended. It's still extraordinarily intense. And after French, I went back to the United States and took more languages. I studied languages at college at Stanford, and I took several languages, but I also used to browse around the bookstore and pick up books, taught other languages. And I had friends from various countries. And so I picked up a book on Dutch, several books on Hindi, a book on Tamil, a book on Sinhalese. And then I studied German and, and Spanish and especially Italian. It was an obsession with me studying languages, a very profound obsession that has continued my entire life. And so, the sound of language that primarily, I would say, is what I would define as beauty.

But it goes beyond that, because let me mention that when I was about 15 years old, 14 or 15, my friend Peter Jones brought me a book called English Through Pictures, which was a book for people to learn English from the very very basics. It had prefaces in 41 languages and many different writing systems that I had never seen, including, as I mentioned earlier, Tamil, Sinhalese, Hindi, Bengali, and others. And those writing systems from India and Sri Lanka just thrilled me in a way that's almost impossible to describe. And the curvilinear shapes of those letters and the way they went together to form words and the words went together to form texts. It's very hard to explain that, but it was extremely intoxicating to me.

And I started imitating those shapes on paper and improvising shapes with pencil, pen, and then felt tip pen. And I did that for many, many years. Again, that's language. It's the visual aspect of language. And it wasn't that I was actually writing language. But what it was is that I was using the shapes of language to form abstract structures that I called whirly art. Actually my sister called it that, and so I picked it, I just imitated it. I just used her name for it. Whirly art was done on scrolls of paper, long, long scrolls, sometimes as long as 20 feet long. And it involved these shapes, borrowed from, um, not borrowed from, Inspired by, they were not literally borrowed from, you would very seldom see an actual letter of Tamil or Sinhalese or Malayalam or Hindi or Bengali or whatever, but you would see shapes that were very profoundly influenced by those languages.

So that was another aspect of language and its beauty, but then at about age 15, you know, I started reading some novels, my favorite was Catcher in the Rye. And I found it extremely touching and yet beauty is, it's a little bit, it's touching and more. It's not beautiful language in the sense of poetry. It's beautiful because it reaches my heart so profoundly. It's beautiful.

Helen: There's so much there in what you've just said, because I think it takes us right back to thinking about what is beauty anyway, and your story started with your mother's handwriting, which is presumably aesthetically beautiful, beautiful to look at, but there would have been the emotional connection to that as well.

And then the fact that it was in French, which was beautiful to hear, but then you segued from there into your fascination, intoxication by language. And then that becomes also a kind of intellectual fascination alongside the shape of the words, the sound of the words, the music of the words, just this idea that there are so many different meanings out there.

It sounds to me like that book, it was your Rosetta Stone, wasn't it? It's sort of, I imagine you went through because they all, all the introductions said the same thing. So you could get a little glimpse into the languages you didn't know as well. Or did you look at them?

Doug: You mean English through pictures?

Helen: Yeah. The ones in the different alphabet systems were then more just a kind of opaque system of, yeah, of worldly art, or were you also trying to identify the language structures in there as well?

Doug: No, I wasn't trying to do that. I did later study a bit of Sinhalese because I had a friend from Sri Lanka. So I studied it for a few months and I studied Hindi for about a year. I did not, um, study Tamil, but I at least learned how to pronounce it. That was many, many years ago. I mean, that was in the early sixties.

Helen: And then of course you went on to, um, well let's talk about wordplay for a moment because that's been a big part of your life and your writing as well and I specifically remember you telling anecdotes of playing word games with your family. Is that right?

Doug: But wordplay was something I think, this is again influenced by the songs that my mother used to play at the piano. She loved popular music and jazz and the musicians, the composers whose music she most often played were people like Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Richard Rogers, Kurt Weill, the list goes on. But let me just give an example. Cole Porter wrote this song called Let's Do It. And Let's Do It is an interesting title because it's not even clear. The next words are ‘let's do it. Let's fall in love.’ And the question is, are those synonyms or are those complimentary act? Namely let's do it. Meaning let's fall in love. That's a very romantic sentiment. Let's do it. Meaning let's have sex and let's fall in love. Uh, so it's like, it's very ambiguous. Let's do it. Let's fall in love. Are you, are you saying the same thing or are you saying different things? And he makes it, he plays with that all the way through, but it becomes pretty clear that probably let's do it is more like sex than it is like love because he says, He talks about all the different animals that do it and in Boston, even beans do it, he says, but Lithuanians and Lets do it, ‘Let’ being a name for Latvian, ‘let’s do it, Lithuanians and Lets do it.’

Wordplay is just rampant in that song. It's rampant in all the songs that I know by Cole Porter. Yeah. And in that year in Geneva, we used to listen all the time to Ella Fitzgerald singing the Cole Porter songbook. And I came to know the words of about 40 Cole Porter songs and adored them to pieces.

One of the songs that was at the same time funniest and most beautiful was, uh, You're the Top, where he lists things that are metaphors for being great, wonderful. At the time we're around 1930. So he'll talk about the Mona Lisa. The Tower of Pisa, but also cellophane and the the nose on the great Durante, which he rhymes with Inferno's Dante, instead of saying Dante's Inferno, he flips it and says Inferno's Dante. And wordplay, it's just so rife in the songs.

Helen: So you were kind of reverse engineering these and learning how language works.

Doug: I mean, to me, those were very influential. They profoundly affected what I thought was wonderful about language, the ambiguity, the patterns of sounds, all those kinds of things became very, very much…I became very aware of them and, and thought about them a lot.

Helen: Hmm. So can you carry us through now? You've got us up to about, oh, your teenage years or college, you know, of course your, your first big book, Gödel, Escher, Bach waas this strand weaving together the musical, the visual and the mathematical.

Doug: When I originally started writing the book, I was very, very, very interested in talking about Les's theorem, which is an amazing result discovered by the Austrian logician for Oodle in 1931. And it had implications to me for all sorts of things having to do with thinking and computers, the mind. And so forth. And I wanted to set forth all these things that I was on fire at that time. This is in 1972, three, four, roughly that period, I was on fire with these ideas about consciousness, the mind, the soul, the I, capital I, and Gödel's work.

And I started writing a book as a grad, I was a graduate student in physics and I was taking time off from my physics. I don't mean I stopped studying, but I mean I did things that I shouldn't be doing, which were writing. And I spent a couple of months writing a very quick first draft all in pen, by the way. And I called the book tentatively Gödel's theorem and the human brain. And it was going to be a fairly, I don't know, typical, I might say academic kind of book about philosophy and ideas. And I was very excited by it, but I had to put it aside because I had to finish my PhD. And so when I returned to it a couple of years later, I showed a version of it—an early version, I don't think it was a handwritten version, I think it was a typed version—to my dad. And he said that he made several criticisms and said I wasn't using enough pictures. That was one of his many criticisms. All of which were good. It reminded me of the fact that in the back of my mind, as I was writing all of these things, the pictures of M. C. Escher, the prints, the paradoxical prints of M. C. Escher were, were floating in my mind and helping me formulate my sentences, but I never referred to them. They were just in my mind. And so I thought, ‘wow, maybe I should include some Escher pictures.’ And, so that started adding richness to the book, a visual richness that I hadn't originally envisioned at all.

The other thing was that I read a dialogue by Lewis Carroll between the tortoise and Achilles. I don't want to go into it, but it was extremely funny. It was about logic, and it was pertinent to what I was talking about in the book, but I was a little bit frustrated by Lewis Carroll's dialogue because it seemed to me that he didn't make his point quite as directly as I would have liked to see him do.

So, I undertook the challenge of writing a similar dialogue myself. Again, between the same two characters, and I thought they were extremely funny. I loved the characters that Carroll had created for the Tortoise and Achilles, and so I borrowed them, and I wrote another dialogue, and that got me into the, I don't know, it got me into the joy of dialogue writing with these two humorous characters.

And I started writing dialogues. On one dialogue, I had some kind of intricate structure going on where it doesn't matter, but it was a certain kind of intricacy. And at the very end of the dialogue, I went back to the first page, which didn't have any title. I put in the first page into a typewriter and at the very top I wrote the word fugue, F U G U E, because it had a kind of an intricate, interesting, playful structure. But that act of writing that word on that page made me suddenly think, ‘wow, you could maybe try to write a dialogue that really was a fugue, that was a musical, that was imitating a musical fugue by Bach.’

And I thought, wow, that's a very interesting idea, but I think it's so challenging. Maybe I should try something easier. And so I thought, how about a cannon, a cannon being a round, but there are various forms of cannons and I knew them because I knew a lot of Bach at that time. And one of the pieces that inspired me was so the so-called crab cannon from Bach's musical offering where there are two instruments. One of them plays the theme forwards in time, while simultaneously the other one plays the theme backwards. In other words, it plays it from the last note to the first note. So the theme is harmonizing with itself, but played in contrary time directions.

And I thought, ‘wow, maybe I could do that. I could have the tortoise say some things and Achilles say some things and have them match.’ And I decided that I would do it. The tortoise's first speech would be Achilles last speech. Achilles' first speech would be the tortoise's last speech, and then I would just have them alternate, and they would cross in the middle.

And I didn't know quite how I was going to get the crossing point to happen, because they would just be saying the same things. And I decided, given that this is called a crab canon, I would put in an extra character called a crab. And I would put the crab's remark at the very center of the dialogue. And the structure was borrowing from a box structure, the crab cannon, and it was expressing ideas that to me were very interesting, and it was using wordplay all the time because I had to have each speech had to have a double meaning.

For example, ‘not at all.’ In one case was meant: No, definitely not. But when it was said the other time, it meant: you're welcome. So it was like every phrase had a sort of a double meaning. And that became another aspect of the book. The aspect of dialogue writing influenced by pieces by Bach.

Helen: And I have to go back to these two things you said at the very beginning. ‘My whole life has been a quest for beauty in multiple domains.’ And when I asked, ‘well, what is beauty?’ ‘Some kind of unity of things that come together in unexpected ways.’ So what a, what a beautiful demonstration.

Doug: Another thing about the title that I did not know, but I discovered after the book was published, was that the title itself is a multilingual pun, expressing a deep belief that I have, which is to take the umlaut on the top of the O in Gödel.

So it's G, O with two dots, and let it fall off. It falls off and it bounces and it goes beyond the D. So it says ‘G O D:’ All right. Then it's, then it says ‘E L’ for the finishing Gödel. Then we start Escher, which is ‘E S.’ Then we continue with ‘C H E R.’ And then we finish with ‘Bach’.

So if you read it out loud, it is God: El Es (in Spanish, meaning he is), Cher (In French, meaning Dear) Bach.

God: he is dear Bach.

And, to me, Bach comes closer to divinity in music, comes closer to the sacred than anything that I know of in the world. And so saying God is really expressed as a profound philosophy that I have. And I didn't realize that my book's title actually had that double meaning, another ambiguity.

Helen: We're back, I think, to seeing the seagulls over the dump, right? You know, it is about your perception of it as well. And of course, Bach was all about, he was always encoding his own B A C H into his music, wasn't he?

Doug: Not always, but he did it a couple of times. Yes, yes.

Helen: Yes, figure of speech by always.
Wow. So, so much going on there. Now I've asked you this question before when I interviewed you for my book Air and light and time and space, but I hear from academics, a lot when I'll point to examples of what I call stylish academic writing, which is out there in every possible discipline, in some really surprising places, physics, computer science, you name it, and I'll point to those and I say, you know what, We enjoy reading these things. Why don't we, as academic writers, write them more? And what I hear over and over again is this kind of conservatism and fear saying, ‘well, you're allowed to do that when you're, you know, the famous academic with tenure, but I couldn't possibly do this early in my career.’ But there you were writing this book way early in your career, like right at the beginning as an academic.

Doug: When I first started writing Gödel, I was a graduate student, and when I finished it, I hadn't yet gotten a job. I will tell you that I took an early version of the manuscript with me to Poland before it was published. And I showed it to a Polish man who was interested in artificial intelligence. That was his profession. He read it, he gobbled it up. And he gave it back to me and he said, you were extremely courageous or brave or some word like that to write a book like this, and I had no idea what he was talking about. I had no idea! Because to me it had just been ideas that were churning and bubbling inside of me and my heart of hearts was just telling me do this, do this, do this, you know, I was coming from my innermost self.

There was no sense of doing anything daring. There was a sense of doing something that I was compelled to do. I was more influenced by people like Cole Porter and Ira Gershwin! And I didn't think that they were doing anything daring or bold. I thought they were doing things that were beautiful and original and fantastic. So I was trying to do something in my own way.

Helen: Well, I think we can say that you were led by beauty, kind of writ large rather than by fear.

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That's the end of today's podcast episode, which has been extracted from a much longer conversation. I hope that your body and your mind have both moved to someplace new since we started and that you've had some new thoughts about what you personally find beautiful in writing. You can watch the full version of my conversation with Douglas Hofstadter in the videos section of the WriteSpace Library. That's my online membership community at helensword.com, where you can also find my full series of Swordswing podcasts and transcripts.
Thanks for listening, and I look forward to walking with you again soon.