Mirrors

            I read this book once. (This is when all of my friends resume to throw themselves back in upturned laughter at the ridiculousness of my statement. And by ridiculous I mean obviousness and expected aspect of it. I always read). So I was ready this book and the man, talking about a certain woman, said, “She doesn’t mind empty promises. She likes pretty words.” And I thought of some of the aphorisms of In Cold Blood that just pry themselves into my memory, my consciousness plagued with their existence. They are leeches draining me from logic, that’s how beautiful Capote’s words are. And I strife to suss out just what exactly he means to say, and sometimes I wonder if there is any point to them. But I don’t mind. They’re pretty.

            But God knows writers don’t just write meaningless rabble. This novel especially doesn’t seem like the type to state things that don’t make a difference to the plot of the story, that don’t have some type of purpose. The one that captured my attention the most was when Perry was walking outside of the café to meet up with Dick and he looked at his reflection and the narrator said:

             “His own face enthralled him. Each angle of it induced a different impression. It was a change-face, and mirror-guided experiments had taught him how to ring the changes, how to look now ominous, now impish, now soulful; a tilt of the head, a twist of the lips, and the corrupt gypsy became the gentle romantic.”

            Of course, what Capote means to say is that Perry is the ever-talented deceiver. But the phrasing, the pure music of the words, is just beautiful. At first the reader sees this bit of information as somewhat negative, Perry as a conceited male that can’t seem to loose thirst for his utterly refreshing countenance. But there’s more to that. It’s a “change-face”, a noun, as if it were an object you encounter everyday. Mirrors are not his way of basking in ego and aesthetics, mirrors are his path to accomplishing his goal of great fraud. They are his mentor. Unlike most human that occupies this earth, to Perry, mirrors don’t show him what he is, they show him what he can become. And, quite frankly, I’m scared of what it is exactly that he can become. Haunting and beautiful in its exposition, this quotation shows the pure wickedness that encompasses Perry as a character. Not only a character, but as a person.

            Every Bonnie has to have a Clyde. Perry’s Clyde is dick in all his logical and non-artistic glory because, “when you got right down toot, Dick's literalness, his pragmatic approach to every subject, was the primary reason Perry had been attracted to him, for it made Dick seem, compared to himself, so authentically tough, invulnerable, "totally masculine."” Here we see a type of FOIL in the, I guess you could call them antagonists, of the story. There’s a balance. Not only that, but therein lies a kind of lack in confidence, demure quality then that lies within Perry. The above quotation implies that Perry sees himself as not very tough, maybe even vulnerable, and not completely “masculine.” He, consciously or not, is with Dick because it fulfills the aspect of a man that he cannot fulfill himself.

            It is not a healthy relationship. It sounds irrelevant, but a romantic relationship in which one person feels that their partner completes them in a way and is ergo not free to feel fully independent and complete without said person, is unhealthy. This is not romantic, obviously. But it runs the same lines. And it says a lot about Perry and Dick and maybe helps understand their actions.

Guitars and Other Instruments: ie. Guns

            It’s surprising how knowledge can change your perspective. Now, dear friends, let’s proceed to learn how to differentiate functions and dispatch our myopic mindset by exposing ourselves to all the possibilities. Oh God. AP Calculus is quite obviously rendering me delusional. No. By knowledge I’m not referring to concrete facts and logarithms. By knowledge I mean my awareness of the fact that four members of the Clutter family are going to die. Spoiler, this is not. Before gnawing my eyes, please do read the very accessible summary on the back of In Cold Blood. I hadn’t read it before I delved into the text. I just thought that, well, duh, six people die, and the whole novel would be a mystery as to who it was. But it isn’t. The summary specifies who died and who exactly went to jail. I now think of the Clutter family and, quite frankly (and pathetically) I’m sad to know that Dick and Perry were the killers. I thought Mr. Clutter would pave a gradual road from sanity to inevitable madness.

            Maybe the former were unjustly convicted? One can only hope. (Yes, because everyone obviously hopes it’s the deranged father that ends up encasing his entire family in a bloodbath and not the two convicts.) I think that’s just my morbid side.

           

            Mr. Clutter is what appears to be an okay man, save for the fact that he is obsessively self-controlled and opposed to drinking and smoking. Any stimulant, really, and he proceeds to fire anyone he sees involved in any of the like. That just made me harbor some dislike for the man, probably because it seems like a pretty ludicrous thing to do unless the worker is a raging alcoholic who is the Hulk personified. And so it is so astounding and thought-invoking when his daughter, Nancy smells smoke everywhere and narrows down her options to her dad. She voices her concerns to her best friend: "Why do I smelling smoke? Honestly, I think I'm losing my mind. I get into the car, I walk into a room, and it's as though somebody had just been there, smoking a cigarette.” And I just can’t seem to fathom just why it is Mr. Clutter, hater of anything smoke and alcohol would resort to doing such a thing.

            Like Mr. Clutter whom never smokes or drinks (or so we think), Perry,  “the young man breakfasting in a cafe called the Little Jewel never drank coffee.”

           This seemed kind of ironic to me, given that he was in a café. From now on, I’ll go to ice crap shops even though the idea of frozen dairy makes me hyperventilate (Not really.) Either way, Perry was in the café and the narrator says that “now, thanks to a letter, an invitation to a "score," here he was with all his worldly belongings: one cardboard suitcase, a guitar, and two big boxes of books and maps and songs, poems and old letters, weighing a quarter of a ton,” and I fell in love. The man’s possessions rendered me speechless. A guitar happens to be my favorite instrument and one I play daily, books are my ever-present companions, songs are my transportation to peace, and poems and letters are just pure poetry that hypnotizes. And the guy travels. I can imagine his cardboard suitcase slathered in quotes and postcards, and drawings from all over the world, pure culture emanating from that sole entity. Too bad he turns out to be a killer.

           

            Or does he? Tun Tun Tun. Another thing that captured my interest, apart from his obvious great taste for the finer things in life, was when I read that “only four months ago he had sworn, first to the State Parole Board, then to himself, that he would never set foot within its [Olathe, Kansas] boundaries again.” Why? What is it about Olathe, or any place actually, that would significantly make a person swear never to come back to it? It irks me.

           

            But what irked me, or rather, astonished me, the most, was when the reader got an inside look into the other ‘instrument’ he and Dick had:

            “Another sort of instrument lay beside it - a twelve-gauge pump-action shotgun, brand-new, blue-barreled, and with a sportsman's scene of pheasants in flight etched along the stock. A flashlight, a fishing knife, a pair of leather gloves, and a hunting vest fully packed with shells contributed further atmosphere to this curious still life.”

            Curious, indeed.

Looking Like a Fool: Orwell

• “The young Buddhist priests were the worst of all. There were several thousands of them in the town and none of them seemed to have anything to do except stand on street corners and jeer at Europeans.” Hasty generalization: If one does it, it doesn’t mean all of them do it. There’s not enough evidence to conclude that none of them seemed to have anything to do except ‘stand on street corners and jeer at Europeans.’
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• “One day something happened which in a roundabout way was enlightening. It was a tiny incident in itself, but it gave me a better glimpse than I had had before of the real nature of imperialism — the real motives for which despotic governments act.” This is the beginning of Complex Cause, seeing as imperialism is an entity that can’t be narrowed down to one sole explanation. In this situation, Orwell is setting up the plot to later blame just one cause out of all the others.
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• “It is a serious matter to shoot a working elephant — it is comparable to destroying a huge and costly piece of machinery — and obviously one ought not to do it if it can possibly be avoided. “ False analogy: of course, seeing as this is purely fiction, it might be on part of the writer’s want to portray a specific image and thought. But in reality, comparing the death and dealing with an animal is not comparable to that of a costly piece of machinery.
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•  “They did not like me, but with the magical rifle in my hands I was momentarily worth watching. And suddenly I realized that I should have to shoot the elephant after all. The term for type of fallacy is beyond me, I don’t think it exists, or maybe I just haven’t heard of it. Either way, it should definitely be one. Reaching a conclusion based on an argument that is really not an argument at all, just an appeal to popularity or your image, should be a fallacy. Just saying.
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• “The people expected it of me and I had got to do it. This is just an example of bad conclusion.” People expect you to run naked in a presidential campaign the day before you’re about to be married to the First Daughter? Are you going to have to do it? I guess, in a way, this is also Appeal to Popularity.
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• “It seemed to me that it would be murder to shoot him.” Tautology: to shoot someone is basically to murder them. Unless he’s talking about friendly shooting of bullets of love and happiness, in which case I have no experience in the matter and take back what I said.
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•             “A white man mustn't be frightened in front of ‘natives’; and so, in general, he isn't frightened.” False analogy: I guess that is merely part of the culture and ergo being fearless in front of ‘natives’ is such a tough accomplishment that anything else would just be implied. But culture-less-wise, just the ‘if this, then this’ comparison just does not make sense and has no logic behind it.

           

He ends up shooting it and the elephant suffers. He feels like a pile of crap. He feels like crap. And yet, the ending line just stuck with me.

            “I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.”

            Whoah.

Tread With Dauntless Steps

            Winston Churchill speaks out in favor of keeping hold of India, with his speech, “Our Duty in India.” These are a few fallacies I happened to come across while reading his enlightening speech:

o   “One would have thought that if there was one cause in the world which the Conservative party would have hastened to defend, it would be the cause of the British Empire in India.” False Dilemma: In a way. He makes it out to be almost as if there’s almost rarely, if even, a cause which the Conservative party would hasten to defend, in the present, past, and in the future, which can’t at all be true.

o   “The princes, the Europeans, the Moslems, the Depressed classes, the Anglo-Indians - none of them know what to do nor where to turn in the face of their apparent desertion by Great Britain. Can you wonder that they try in desperation to make what terms are possible with the triumphant Brahmin oligarchy?” Fallacy of antecedent: Apparently, since it happened once, it must happen again. Just because most of their once-upon-a-time colonies treaded rough waters and were less than prepared when they reached independence doesn’t mean the same would necessarily happen  to India.

o   “But let me tell you this. If at the sacrifice of every British interest and of all the necessary safeguards and means of preserving peace and progress in India, you come to terms with Gandhi, Gandhi would at that self-same moment cease to count any more in the Indian situation.” What’s the argument behind this? It is just a presumption without proof. It’s Misinterpreting the evidence, because, with the very little evidence he has, if any, there is no correlation with his statement and it’s pure speculation and conjecture.

o   “In running after Gandhi and trying to build on Gandhi, in imagining that Mr. Ramsay MacDonald and Mr. Gandhi and Lord Irwin are going to bestow peace and progress upon India, we should be committing ourselves to a crazy dream, with a terrible awakening.” False Analogy: Agreeing with Gandhi is in no way an action that can be credibly and logically compared to the state of unconscious fantasies in your brain.

o   “Do not be deceived by these untruths.” Tautology: there’s no new information, just a conclusion. Deceived implies that something is misleading and not at all what it seems, and the word “untruths” basically repeats that same idea.

o   “Here you have nearly three hundred and fifty millions of people, lifted to a civilisation and to a level of peace, order, sanitation and progress far above anything they could possibly have achieved themselves or could maintain.” Aside from the obvious egotism and superciliousness that wraps his superior statement, he is also falling into the Chanticleer fallacy. After this, therefore because of this. Just because the India became more civilized after the Birtish made their presence known and paved in their affairs, does not mean that said deed is because of the British. The British probably urged the process and helped develop it, but they are not the reason for the progress in India. Churchill then goes more in depth by saying, “This wonderful fact is due to the guidance and authority of a few thousands of British officials responsible to Parliament who have for generations presided over the development of India.”  Here is where he straight-out falls into the post hoc ergo proper hoc fallacy.

o   “India will fall back quite rapidly through the centuries into the barbarism and privations of the Middle Ages.” This is a gross exaggeration. And so it is a perfect example of Reductio ad Absurdum. The premise is absurd.

o   “Were we to wash our hands of all responsibility and divest ourselves of all our powers, as our sentimentalists desire, ferocious civil wars would speedily break out between the Moslems and the Hindus. No one who knows India will dispute this.” Hasty generalization. Just like they preach to you in SAT tutoring: Always avoid extreme language. “All” would be extreme language, extreme meaning, it’s probably not the answer; it’s probably not correct (Ha. Tautology. AH! I just commited a logical fallacy! Get it? “Not the answer, it’s probably not correct?” Ok…) because it’s exaggerating. You go, Churchill.

o   “Their plight is worse than that of slaves, because they have been taught to consent not only to a physical but to a psychic servitude and prostration.”  I have no name for this. False analogy? The speaker is extremely not within his rights to make such a comparison seeing as he has never been, and will probably never be, a slave, let alone know enough of the experience to lessen it in comparison to other political events.

o   “There are also nearly five million Indian Christians in India, a large proportion of whom can read and write, and some of whom have shown themselves exceptionally gifted. It will be a sorry day when the arm of Britain can no longer offer them the protection of an equal law.” This isn’t so much a fallacy as it is a clear use of ethos in terms of appealing to Britain’s character. Churchill makes Britain appear as strong protective entity that truly cares for these people’s wellbeing.

            It is with these logical fallacies that Churchill planned to “ tread with dauntless steps the path of justice and of honour.” He said, not me.

            (JK, I’m actually a huge Winston Churchill fan, if only for the fact that he’s the wittiest politician I’ve ever come to know.)