I applauded at the conclusion to Dick’s “It’s elementary, my dear Watson.”  Here it is, slightly ammended: “At at time in history when students are told that the only purpose of an education is a means to an end, in other words, getting a diploma solely to make money, it is refreshing and important to go back to the year 1887, when Sir Conan Doyle created the character of Sherlock Holmes to serve as a model for what learning, knowledge and education are really about: the ability to think, to speak, to write, to cultivate one’s heart and soul with a viewd to becoming a moral force for the betterment of society.  So as to leave the world a little better off than it was before you arrived.  Elementary, my dear Watson!”

Can anyone not applaud?  Of course I’m thinking of my sister Sue, who may smile at this conclusion, and point out how far it seems from present-day urgent issues of funding and adult education and the crisis of authority.  This would no doubt devolve into a huge and fascinating conversation, because I can’t think of anything Sue might say that Dr. Elghammer would not find grist for his mill.  And vice versa.  Perhaps in another time frame, or in a parallel universe, or on the Champs Elyssées (not the one in Paris of course, but the real one!) we’ll get tidbits of that exchange.

I applauded.  I’d sign that conclusion with both hands, and I’d campaign to get my brother-in-law voted in as education minister, or, as I read in a children’s book to my grand-daughter, as “the minister, not of foregin affairs, but of strange affairs.”  (”Kamo” by Daniel Pennac)  But here I have the luxury of doing something else, which is to reread the piece, and to organise my thoughts as they occur and rearrange themselves, prompted and shifted about by the argument.  “Sharing our thoughts” as the title of the blog has it.

There are three characteristics of Sherlock Holmes.  First of all, his ability to think.  Then his love of knowledge.  And finally, his multidimensional skills.  His ability to think enables him to solve problems, and to find solutions to mysteries.  He can determine the motivation of the murderer by using logic, deductive reasoning, and the scientific method.  Secondly, he has a love of knowledge.  His mind is a treasure trove of data.  Dick capitalizes the folders or headings of this data.  Botany.  Geology.  Chemistry.  Anatomy.  Literature.  Law.  Weapons.  (in fact, “weapons” is not capitalized.)  And, the man has multidimensional skills: he can play the violin, box, fence; he’s a cryptologist and a black belt, and an expert in disguises and masks.

The word that I can’t get out of my mind is the word “multidimensional.”  Why is the third list of characteristics multi-dimensional?  I don’t want to push this too far, because I would like it to become a conversation.  If only an imaginary one, a written one, one based on hardly a trace.  Let me make an opening comment on the way to this endless conversation.  What comes as a shock with the word “multidimensional” is that the first two sets of characteristics are mono-dimensional: they are indeed characteristic of the problem of solipsism.  Read them again: they describe what it’s like to be penned up inside your brain, and to have serious problems not only dealing with, but even imagining other people’s existence.  The primary dimension in these lists is the mind: logic and knowledge.  To be used after the fact.  To determine the shape and meaning of traces.  Mutlidimensionality comes with intercourse and exchange, and those are the characteristics described in the third list.  Playing the violin, boxing and fencing, the martial arts, and disguises all require an intense engagement with someone else.  That’s why I would have put cryptology in the list of his treasure trove of knowledge.  Am I on to something here?  Does anybody else feel the shock, once the meaning of “multidimensional” is searched and captured like lint on its way down, by the presence of violin playing in this list?  Isn’t this the beginning of the end of the use of Sherlock Holmes in a military academy?  Is this hyper-stable list on the point of explosion the stuff of which the “Hound of the Baskervilles” was concocted? 

Here’s a quote from a strange novel by a well-educated Englishman named McCarthy.  Not Cormac McCarthy, who would say that this is probably not literature at all.  But TOM McCarthy.  I like his surname.  God knows why.  Here is what he has to say.  It’s my opening gambit in the balm of conversation with my brother-in-law:

“Forensic procedure is an art form, nothing less.  No I’ll go further, it’s higher, more refined, than any art form.  Why?  Because it’s real.  Take just one aspect of it — say the diagrams … They’re records of atrocities.  Each line, each figure, every angle — the ink itself vibrates with an almost intolerable violence, darkly screaming from the silence of the white paper: something has happened here, someone has died.  ‘It’s just like cricket,” I told Naz one day.  ‘In what sense?’ he asked.  ‘Each time the ball’s been past,’ I said, ‘and the white lines are still zinging where it hit, and the seam’s left a mark, and …’  ‘I don’t follow,’ he said.  ‘It … well, it just is,’ I told him.  ‘Each ball is like a crime, a murder.  And then they do it again, and again and again, and the comentator has to commentate, or he’ll die too.”  (Remainder by Tom McCarthy, 2006)