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Just as with knives and umbrellas, there’s no endpoint in the arts. Classics are constantly renovated. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet has been turned into a ballet, an opera, a musical (West Side Story), and adapted more than forty times for film, including the animated movie Gnomeo and Juliet, in which the star-crossed lovers are garden gnomes.
Jazz great Bobby Short sang and played piano for thirty-five years at the Café Carlyle in New York City. Yet no matter how many times he played standards such as “I’m in Love Again” or “Too Marvelous for Words,” no two performances were alike. For a jazz artist, there is no definitive performance, no final outcome. Instead, the goal is continual renewal: the same song never the same way twice.5
Similarly, Sherlock Holmes has proven to be a popular favorite for reinvention. In Arthur Conan Doyle’s novella A Study in Scarlet, the police discover a dead body with a message written in blood on the wall: RACHE. Scotland Yard’s Inspector Lestrade enlists Holmes to help him solve the baffling case. Combing over the scene, Lestrade interprets the bloody scrawl:
Why, it means that the writer was going to put the female name Rachel, but was disturbed before he or she had time to finish. You mark my words, when this case comes to be cleared up, you will find that a woman named Rachel has something to do with it. It’s all very well for you to laugh, Mr. Sherlock Holmes. You may be very smart and clever, but the old hound is the best, when all is said and done.6
But Holmes continues to study the crime scene and, in a flourish, announces a dazzling series of deductions:
There has been murder done, and the murderer was a man. He was more than six feet high, was in the prime of life, had small feet for his height, wore coarse, square-toed boots and smoked a Trichinopoly cigar.
After asserting that the victim was poisoned, Holmes adds, “One more thing, Lestrade … Rache is the German for ‘revenge’; so don’t lose your time looking for Miss Rachel.”
The novella was a classic, but classics are constantly reinvented, and the writers of the BBC’s Sherlock came up with a twist to this tale. In the opening episode (now titled A Study in Pink), a woman’s body is discovered under similar circumstances. The victim has scratched a word into the wooden floorboards: RACHE.
Lestrade gives Holmes a few minutes to study the crime scene, then asks if he has any insights. A policeman standing in the hallway confidently chimes in, “She’s German. Rache. German for revenge.” Holmes replies, “Yes, thank you for your input. Of course she’s not …” and impatiently shuts the door on him. He continues, “She’s from out of town, though, and intended to stay in London for one night before going home to Cardiff. So far, so obvious.”
Lestrade asks, “What about the message?” Holmes announces that the woman was unhappily married, a serial adulteress and was travelling with a pink suitcase, which is missing. He finishes by saying, “She must have had a phone or organizer – let’s find out who Rachel is.”
“She was writing Rachel?” Lestrade asks, skeptically. Holmes responds sarcastically, “No, she was writing an angry note in German. Of course she was writing Rachel.”
It’s one of the many bends in the update of this classic story.
***
Because of the way that brains continuously bend their inputs, language evolves. Human communication has change built into its DNA: as a result, today’s dictionaries look very little like those of five hundred years ago. Language meets the needs for conversation and consciousness not just because it is referential, but also because it is mutable – and that’s what makes it such a powerful vehicle for transmitting new ideas. Thanks to the creative possibilities of language, what we can say keeps pace with what we need to say.7
Consider verlan, a French slang in which syllables are swapped around: bizarre becomes zarbi; cigarette is flipped into garettsi.8 Originally spoken by urban youth and criminals as a way of hiding from the authorities, many verlan words have become so commonplace that they have been absorbed into conversational French.
Dictionary definitions are constantly revised to keep up with our changing uses and knowledge. In Roman times, “addicts” were people who were unable to pay their debts and gave themselves as slaves to their creditors. The word eventually came to be associated with drug dependency: one becomes a slave to one’s addiction. The word “husband” originally referred to being a homeowner; it had nothing to do with being married. But because owning your own property made it more likely you’d find a mate, the word eventually came to mean a male who has been wed. On November 5, 1605, Guy Fawkes tried to blow up the British Parliament. He was captured and executed. Loyalists burned his effigy, which they nicknamed the “guy.” Centuries later, the word lost its negative connotation and a musical named Guys and Dolls ran on Broadway.9 In American slang, bad means good, hot means sexy, cool means great, and wicked means excellent. If you could transport yourself one hundred years into the future, you’d find yourself flummoxed by your great-grandchildren’s speech because language itself is an ever-changing reflection of human invention.
***
As we’ve seen, bending is a makeover of an existing prototype, opening up a wellspring of possibilities through alterations in size, shape, material, speed, chronology and more. As a result of our perpetual neural manipulations, human culture incorporates an ever-expanding series of variations on themes passed down from generation to generation.
But suppose you want to take a theme apart, fracture it into its component pieces. For that we turn to a second technique of the brain.
CHAPTER 4
BREAKING
In breaking, something whole – such as a human body – is taken apart, and something new assembled out of the fragments.
Sophie Cave’s Floating Heads
Auguste Rodin’s Shadow Torso
Magdalena Abakanowicz’s Unrecognized
To create his Broken Obelisk, Barnett Newman snapped the obelisk in half and flipped it upside down.
Similarly, artists Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso broke apart the visual plane into a jigsaw puzzle of angles and perspectives in Cubism. In his massive painting Guernica, Picasso used breaking to illustrate the horrors of war. Bits and pieces of civilians, animals and soldiers – a torso, a leg, a head, all disjointed with no figure complete – create a stark representation of brutality and suffering.
George Braque’s Still Life with Violin and Pitcher
Pablo Picasso’s Guernica
The cognitive strategy of breaking that enabled Newman, Braque, and Picasso to make their art also made airports safer. On July 30, 1971, a Pan Am 747 was redirected to a shorter runway as it prepared to depart from San Francisco airport. The new runway required a steeper angle of ascent but, unfortunately, the pilots failed to make the necessary adjustments: as the plane took off, its climb was too shallow and it struck a lighting tower. Airport towers and fences at the time were