Labatut, Trickster
The opening of Benjamin Labatut’s When We Cease To Understand The World (2019) lays out the pessimistic paradigm which is the central theme of the book. In his discussion of cyanide and its proliferation amongst Nazi leaders at the fall of the Third Reich, he establishes a correlation which fascinates the author: that mathematics are responsible for begetting violence, that violence begets math, math begets art, art begets beauty, and then that same art begets violence. He tells the two-hundred-year story of Prussian Blue, a dye which required the crushing of millions of silkworms to create a hue which energized the continental art scene with its spiritual allure, its resemblance to the untouchable blue of the sky; the blue which appeared in Van Gogh’s Starry Night and the waters of Hokusai’s The Great Wave [19], as well as the uniforms of the Prussian army. He tells us how this dye was soon blended with sulphuric acid to create the pesticide which allowed California to produce previously unfathomable amounts of perfect oranges, the same mixture which was pumped into gas chambers at Auschwitz, staining the interior cinder blocks to this day. The blue responsible for so much beauty, the one which covered the walls of the trains which carried prisoners into camps, was Hitler’s favorite color and the same blue he tasted in his final moments as he crushed down on a pill inside his bunker. He speaks of the sweet scent of almond which cyanide gives off [10], the way it, quite literally, “takes your breath away” [21].
WWCTUTW is a continuous spiral through the ground-breaking discoveries of 20th century mathematics, their ability to manifest in both war and art without bias, the way they tend to eat at the minds of those who discover them. The book remains acutely aware of the trepidatious nature of knowledge, its capacity for horror and beauty, the peculiar way in which the weight of certain knowledge weighs upon those who discover it and the world at large. It is an insightful, inspiring book which befuddles the reader who relies too heavily on truth or narrative alone, which somehow steals complicated lessons from a mind-numbing century and presents Truths as difficult as the ones which these mathematicians uncovered. Whether by the first or fiftieth page (or in some cases only at the bitter end), the reader realizes that they have been lied to, that the literal history of the events enclosed, what we feel the urge to call the ‘truth,’ has been manipulated. This brazenness leaves the reader either scrambling for tangible matter or, in accepting the whirling dervish of his writing, enlightened to Labatut’s deeper message.
Pessimistic Paradigm
In Christopher Nolan’s 2023 Oppenheimer, based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s 2005 biography on the scientist, American Prometheus, the viewer is left to meditate on the role of scientists, their crucial parsing of the laws of the universe, and the duty they have to the way their discoveries are used in a world which is inevitably violent. There is a central correlation in the text between Oppenheimer’s roles as both Prometheus and Vishnu, the Hindu god of preservation who teaches Arjuna of the powerlessness of humanity, and the ways in which all is governed by the divine. Oppenheimer, a central character in Labatut’s book, has managed to ‘steal fire from the gods’ with his creation of the atomic bomb, and in doing so embodies Vishnu’s lesson as he convinces Arjuna to lead his troops into battle against his own people. Vishnu inspires the general to attack by transforming into a terrifying beast, and telling him that he has “become death, destroyer of worlds.”
How should we comprehend this dichotomy? How do we marry the gifts of the trickster, in this case, Prometheus, and the destruction they tend to cause? This is a major concern for Labatut, the question which he tangles with and simultaneously the method by which he tells the story. In WWCTUTW, Labatut presents us with a series of tricksters, their individual struggles and the ways in which their divine role eats at their humanity. He carefully studies the paths Discovery takes into both Beauty and Violence, an often blurry line, and rather than present a cohesive theory allows the contradiction to lie uninterrogated.
Tricksterism
In the opening line of Lewis Hyde’s 1998 Trickster Makes The World, Hyde admits that “the first story I have to tell is not exactly true, but it isn’t exactly false, either.” So what is it? As Hyde says himself, it is a story. An ancient thing; a strange medium distinct to humankind which predates the written word, predates all known knowledge. Narrative exists in the liminal space of human consciousness— its rhythms and rules are foundational to our chemistry; are so mysteriously central to our construction that modern theorizers suggest in vain that it is modeled off that other foundational medium, the orgasm. The greatest tomes written on stories— Aristotle’s, Joseph Campbell’s— can point towards their functionality, can make complicated assumptions on their roots in the family system, in the particular way humans emote and perceive reality. And yet the discovery of the gene which makes them work, the chemical origin of their utility, will forever remain beyond our understanding. In Labatut’s framework, the search for this scientific explanation might even be the death knell for the scientist who seeks them.
Hyde claims that the role of the trickster is to travel between worlds, to carry people and messages between heaven and earth and— in eras when that road is closed— become a thief, smuggling these messages and artifacts [7]. Among the most notable of tricksters is Prometheus, who carried the light of heaven on a torch and gifted humanity with fire. Prometheus was famously punished for this act, and I believe an age might be defined by the ways in which we treat our own tricksters. To shun them is to deny a gift— to act as the hangman of the gods, the gods who require no hangman. To exalt them is to mistreat them— the trickster cannot handle praise. The trickster defaults on attention. Some literary tricksters— Edward Teach, MD or Douglas Hofstadter— try to remain anonymous. Labatut pays his price in user reviews on Good Reads, accepts that perhaps for the rest of his career he will be tainted by the assertion of ‘falsehoods,’ accepts the possibility that those prestigious magazines which allow writers to make a career out of a vocation might reject his prominence for fear of an inflated fact-checking budget. “Where someone’s sense of honorable behavior has left him unable to act,” says Hyde, “trickster will appear to suggest an amoral action, something on the right/wrong precipice which will get life going again.” Trickster takes on the burden of Churn. Trickster is responsible for keeping the Wheel of Being in rotation; since even the iron core at the center of earth is liable to pausing, and perhaps it is only in the crossing of worlds that it might be re-started, whether with or against the rotation of the earth itself.
Madness
It is a common motif that the trickster is liable to madness, what Labatut calls “Grothendieck’s Curse” [65]. He tells the story of Alexander Grothendieck, one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century, a man whose work remains required reading for mathematicians around the world. Grothendieck churned out proofs at an unprecedented pace and moved theory into realms thought impossible as he sought his own Philosopher’s Stone, his own torch of the light of heaven— what he called motive, or, “the heart of the heart—” a ray of light capable of illuminating every conceivable incarnation of a mathematical object [66]. Labatut recounts the movement of his career from brilliant theories through this fool’s quest, and the growing suspicion that the work he was doing might be the source of great destruction. This suspicion became a defining fear in the “possible effects that his own ideas could have on the world,” aka what mankind might do if it had the power of the knowledge Grothendieck was seeking. Labatut details his descent, his abandonment of family and friends, his growing obsession with the corrupt nature of power wrapped up in the military-industrial complex. As Grothendieck becomes obsessed with the idea of the universe as a conscious entity, he begins to eschew the physical world, stops eating, wears tattered clothes and denies himself shoes and medicine. He becomes indifferent to pain, starts a commune which ends in a sordid love triangle and the burning of tens of thousands of pages of his work. For the last fifteen years of his life, Grothendieck disappears from the world, lives anonymously in a remote village in the shadows of the Pyrenees and denies all visitors.
The history of genius and its link to madness is a recurring theme in modern psychology. In his 2014 paper Here Be Dragons, psychologist Rex E. Jung posits that the complex stew of creativity and intelligence— the basis of Genius— may result in a paradoxical pull between two poles: abstraction and certainty. This tension has the capacity to infect the mind which experiences both to such extreme degrees, leading to a proliferation of psychological conditions— what we may refer to as madness. WWCTUTW is Labatut’s attempt at creatively spinning this concept into a narrative, and investigating the worth of such a descent, furtively posing the question of whether ‘descent’ is even the right word for such a journey. To do so, he uses the life of Karl Schwarzschild, a German Jew who discovered black holes while fighting voluntarily for the German army in World War I. Schwarzschild was horrified by his discovery that a black hole might suck the entire universe into its crushing density, and as he lay dying in a medic tent at the front lines, days after sending his proof to Einstein, he trembles at the idea of matter causing such destruction, and the possibility that it might do the same to the human mind. Labatut writes:
Could a sufficient concentration of human will— millions of people exploited for a single end with their minds compressed into the same psychic space— unleash something comparable to the singularity? Schwarzschild was convinced that such a thing was not only possible, but was actually taking place in his Fatherland….. Schwarzschild was inconsolable, babbling about a black sun dawning over the horizon, capable of engulfing the entire world, and he lamented that that there was nothing we could do about it [56].
In the relation of this story, Labatut is presenting the methodology by which the genius might succumb to madness. He presents how a glimpse of the unimaginable might spread like the Pemphigus which ate away at Schwarzschild’s body, covering him in scabs and abscesses and rendering his throat unusable for both swallowing and putting into words the theories he was dreadfully approaching. Schwarzschild’s work was originally dismissed by all who encountered it, including Einstein himself. And yet, history proved his theory of black holes to be mathematically accurate. If we are to trust Labatut, he may have been psychologically correct as well.
The Antagonist
There are foils to this pessimistic paradigm, certain thinkers who towered in the same field as Grothendieck and Schwarzschild yet who insisted on the saving power of the universe, who insisted on a universal balance and who remained “well-adjusted,” (i.e. psychologically healthy), while working on the same theories which drove others to destruction. The most prominent was Einstein, who served as a soothing mother-figure to the scientific community, diligently deconstructing the work of these mad-geniuses and insisting on the rationality of the universe. Einstein was the final word on all subjects mathematical, and as the Schwarzschilds of the world detailed the great potential for destruction which he believed to be inherent to mathematics, Einstein maintained an equivalent sense of order. He is one of the few thinkers in this book who managed to live a long life, and he appears in each story throughout as a sort of Pied Piper, unable to save the singular thinkers but struggling nonetheless to prevent their followers from running off cliffs. The Pied Piper, in this context, could be seen as the universal foil to the trickster, the trickster who without looking over his shoulder dives head first in order to prove gravity wrong.
As Einstein walked the streets of Prague alongside Franz Kafka, he foresaw these ideas and their implications, and in a crucial moment of his career turned, Rip Van Winkle-esque, away from Quantum Theory and its troubling implications. He instead buried himself deeper into the Theory of Relativity, thus forming the basis of the most consequential ideas in scientific history. And yet, over the next fifty years, the man was ultimately proved wrong. He denounced the Theory of Probability, what was later proved accurate, and in doing so turned his back on what he likely knew to be true, but which in its proving might destabilize all preconceived notions of reason and order. Labatut hints that Einstein was playing chess in the realm of human thought, attempting to prevent human hands from ever grasping these universal truths, throwing his weight against the tricksters on their road of return from the realm of the heavens.
Trans-Human Survival Gene
Labatut does not intend to raise these concerns— to hint at the potential de-stabilization of Reason— without addressing their validity. Without having the mathematical prowess to disprove them, he hints at alternative theories so as to not leave the reader alone to lament, like Schwarzschild, on the potential of mathematics to destroy humanity. On the question of the singularity, on our supposed fragility, on the myriad simple and terrifying ways in which our individual candles might be snuffed, Labatut hints at the strange, colony-wide survival humans have relied on for our two-hundred thousand years.
For a few decades now there have been several buttons which, if pressed, might end humanity. Consider this. Certain men at the head of aggressive body-politics caught in countless petty battles have a key which, when turned, might very simply lead to our complete annihilation. And yet, we remain. Why? Are humans not impulsive? Do we not occasionally act before thinking of consequences? Aren’t we blinded at times by anger, bitterness, regret, exhaustion, drug-use, philosophy or a thousand other factors emotional or otherwise? And yet, that button has never been pressed. Is there, perhaps, some colony-wide gene, some prohibiting factor, which prevents this? To raise this question to a cosmic level, let’s consider the way Oppenheimer theorized that the detonation of an atomic bomb might ignite our atmosphere, and in one brief moment reduce the entirety of Earth to a ball of fire; an analogous concern to Schwarzschild’s theory that a black hole might subsume all matter across the universe. These things were theoretically proven possible. And yet, to our knowledge, they have not happened. Why not? Bad theory? Or, worth considering, some protective force within our reality which prevents this. Some universal, fundamental yearning for survival. Perhaps this word is misleading. Perhaps survival is a human construct, which obfuscates the larger question. Perhaps the correct word is continuation.
To Tame or Protect?
This question is not directly raised, but it is the sort of fare a close reader of Labatut inevitably wonders. Throughout the book, queries like the above are pranced upon and discarded, giving immense density to the slim paperback. One such consideration comes from his section on the German chemist Fritz Haber. Haber was an instrumental player in biological warfare, who created the pesticide which would kill his half-sister, brother-in-law and nephews in Hitler’s gas chambers. According to Labatut, among his possessions when he died was a letter to his wife lamenting his role in humanity’s history, though not for the direct horror his inventions would enable, but for the process he created of capturing nitrogen from the air. He feared this practice would alter the chemical balance of the atmosphere, and allow plant life to overtake human civilization. A version of this idea, popularized by HBO’s series The Last Of Us, is that a slight alteration of the internal temperature maintained by humans could pave the way for an explosion of parasitic fungus, potentially beckoning the end of mankind.
The mastery of this book is that it does not take as a given the need to bolster human civilization. To eradicate this foundation, which nearly all artistic and scientific work presumes, allows the reader to re-frame how they approach information like the above. A question that comes in and out of style regards our relationship to nature. The current wave of discussion and legislation regarding climate change is only the latest in a thousands-of-years old discussion on the matter. We enter this discussion from the assumption that nature ought to be protected. If there are only a few male rhinos left, we should gather their sperm, and devote funding and labor to creating new ones. If we soil a river via excessive mining, we should regulate the mine to keep the waterway pure. If we are injecting massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, we should try to capture the carbon and protect the Ozone layer. This stance of protector is a new turn for humans. In the 1800’s, the romantic movement popularized an adoration of nature, and soon after the transcendental movement focused on nature as a means to intellectual and spiritual enlightenment.
Further back in western culture, while indigenous cultures were worshipping nature-based gods and implementing rituals to prove gratitude for natural abundance, nature was an enemy. Long, cold winters in Europe meant widespread death, and expansive oceans were hurdles for us to overcome. This shift over the last 600 years, where Nature went from being feared, to being fought, to being worshipped to being cradled, is one we take for granted. Is the concept of stewardship justified? Are we foolishly presuming that, since aspects of the natural world are now subjugated to human intervention, we are greater than and responsible for preserving it? It seems so obvious that we should try to repair what we’ve broken. But this imposed hierarchy, through Labatut’s lens, becomes distorted. Does nature not still regularly level us via disease and severe weather events? Are we really so alien from it, as our eradication of ants from our apartments presupposes?
What does this shift do to the human psyche? It places us in a false food-chain, where we are at the top. We neglect Nature’s power by assuming that it needs us to steward it. But Nature is just fine— it plays a long game, and all the carbon we pump into the air will be recycled and put to use in the millennia to come. Species have come and gone for billions of years, the only constant being the laws which govern them. We have this very human idea that since we’ve done damage, we ought to fix. But in reading this book, that idea seems ludicrous. What have we ever fixed? The very act of living involves the consuming and repurposing of matter. The rallying cry of environmentalists to restore purity to the natural world is really the sound of human-beings looking to extend human-kind— a noble wish, but not their explicit goal. What we have lost in this transition from fear to preservation is a respect for Nature’s omniscience and brutality. The prevailing sentiment from Labatut is that the best thing we could do for earth is, maybe, just chill.
Anti-Intellectual?
Labatut presents an idea antithetical to the contemporary faith in the Scientific arts. As a pandemic surged and bio-technicians around the world raced to develop a life-saving vaccine, chants billowed from the masses to “Trust the Science,” a sentiment familiar from years of rampant denial of climate warnings. Does Labatut stand in opposition to these sentiments? Is this a fundamentally conservative or anti-intellectual piece of writing? A careful reading of WWCTUTW begs one to consider the practice of Math, and the way Mathematics operates within lived reality. Take scientific concepts such as Bernoulli’s Principle or the rate of gravity. Sure, standing on a train platform as a vessel flies by should suck one into its wake and onto the tracks. Sure, an object should fall at the constant rate of 9.8 meters-per-second-squared. But they do not. These things, while theoretically and experimentally verified, do not occur in our lived reality. These truths suggest a correlation between hard science and a supposedly distinct thing: Religion. The tenets of both can be vehemently attested to, can be suggested as ‘true.’ But they may only be proven in a vacuum. And when one is trying to conceptualize the complexity of life, these vacuum-truths are helpful only symbolically, as one approaches a livable philosophy. Science, in this framework, is a religion. Labatut is not anti-intellectual, he is not anti-progressive. He is wary of mankind’s ability weighed against our fragility. The sciences are subject to the same follies that all human constructions are, and Labatut suggests that they ought to be deliberated with the same scrutiny.
Fact v Fiction
There is a worthwhile discussion to be had on the concept of fiction. One simple definition might be a made-up story. But this delegitimizes the artist’s license, which must be capable of asserting that what they are saying is true, even while it may not have happened. In responding to an artist’s work, aren’t we complicit in this assertion? Doesn’t any discussion of reality end up devolving into the flimsiness of a fact? In lived experience, don’t we find, again and again, that truth might be beholden to more factors than we care to admit? Have you ever tried to tell a story to someone who was also present, and realized that there may be two truths, perhaps even more? In studies following the attacks on the World Trade Center, subjects were asked, once a year, to relate their experiences in the days following the event. Without fail, these memories evolved, changing each year so dramatically that when participants were shown their responses from a mere few years before, they balk, actually going as far as to say, “no, I was wrong then,” or even, “I was lying then, now I’m telling the truth.” Reality is flimsy. Our perception of it is beholden to so many conflicting influences that to pin it down is a classically rational folly.
So, then, what is fiction? Does the definition include its literary value, or the quality of its construction? As a literary artist, this factor is dear to me. I love writing for what I may say with it, sure, but what keeps me in complete devotion is the quality of how it is being said. Both for the way it might serve the thesis and as an end itself. It is thrilling to push the artistic construction of words further, and Labatut’s work passes this test fabulously, pulling the reader through with language that never falls too heavily into the technical or the flowery, but somehow engages both the practical and artistic mind with each paragraph. It strikes an incredible balance by engaging the whole of the imagination, informing one of the advances made in Mathematics and reminding one that we live in a esthetic world, playing to both the child and the student in all of us. He never misses an opportunity to place an emotional beat in the physical world, such as when the frantic Heisenberg is lost in a dense fog, and “the few things he could make out— a seagull’s skeleton, the wrinkled wrapper of a cough drop, seemed strangely hostile” [99]. When he informs us of complicated theory that we may not have the background to understand, he does so by relying on the theories mystical qualities and its context in the history of thought. He conveys the significance of Shinichi Mochizuki’s proof that a+ b = c by writing, “if proven, it will become a formidable tool capable of dispelling, as if by magic, a vast quantity of long-standing enigmas,” explaining that Mochizuki created a “vast universe, of which he is the sole inhabitant” [64]. This manner of presenting such ideas allows their significance to fit where the technical explanation would not.
But studying fiction on these grounds is analogous to studying a painting’s brush strokes and not its subject. The question remains: what is true? Labatut himself says that there is rampant fictionalization, and that while only one paragraph in chapter one is made-up, “the quantity of fiction grows throughout the book” [189]. Note the word “fiction,” and not “falsehoods.” When we consume art we are trusting the artist’s asserted Truth. We are complicit in their story-telling to the value of their message, whether that be Science, as a human construct, has the potential to reap violence, or There are lines to human knowledge, the crossing of which may be analogous to drinking poison and accepting infection. It may also be, The hearing of a good story is an ultimate Value, worthy as an end unto itself. It may be Time spent listening to a good yarn, idly considering some higher thoughts, is time spent well. WWCTUTW is a worthy exercise by any of these metrics. It is packed full of scientific history, of accessible introductions to recent developments in quantum theory, of biographical data about the scientists who made these discoveries. It is also a valuable resource of these higher thoughts, these Truths, and one who reads it closely is rewarded with a rich meal of Things To Consider, things to Keep In Mind as one traverses life. In service to these themes it does not hold ‘what actually happened’ to a high standard. ‘What actually happened’ is a waste of time when the goal is to inspire, to interrogate, to get one thinking about their own ethics, their own epoch, and our universal duties. ‘What actually happened’ is a blindfold, in this context. Labatut boldly removes it, takes the consequences of this to the chin.
He speaks in a cadence very familiar to modern readers, with origins in the work of Joan Didion or Hunter S. Thompson which refined itself into the modern, formulaic voice which can be found all throughout creative non-fiction. It’s the voice that appears in both David Sedaris and wedding toasts. It opens with a story, mixes in a couple jokes, does a bit of theorizing and gets awfully close to sentimental until just at the end, when it returns to the original anecdote, cracks it open in a fresh way, and leaves the reader thinking they’ve been touched. It’s popular because it works, and its ubiquity speaks to something happening in the modern world. There is access to such a plethora of ‘truths,’ to so much information, that one might reasonably be terrified to sift through it. We require writers to do some research, figure out what is worth knowing, and distill it for us into something digestible, something with some narrative, something with some heart. This tone of truthiness is one thing in personal narrative, but it becomes muddled when a piece claims, explicitly or implicitly, to be factual. One assumes that the tone, and the testimonial of a publisher, implies a level of verification akin to research papers, with their peer reviewing, sources cited and blind studies, etc. But there is a reason the New Yorker doesn’t casually publish research papers, relevant as they may be. Information on its own is brutal; it sits like lead and calls no attention to itself. The qualities that make art entertaining— pity, fear, musicality— each come at the sacrifice of rigorousness. What happens when the presence of this tone supplants our inner bullshit radar? Stories weaved from facts fly at us un-sifted, and we take each Truth and give it a companion emotion until it becomes core theory, sample-size and legitimacy-rating notwithstanding. Labatut was forged in this wave, knows this voice and these weaknesses all too well and employs them to get us wrapped up in a story too good to be true, because of the simple fact that it isn’t. But behind this decoy, the reader ought to contend with them anyways. Ought to consider the possibility that here be Truths, whether or not they are built on facts. The original experience of this text is one of awe. Awe with the research conducted, with the journals we imagine Labatut pouring over, with the implication of the message. But beneath all of that is the awe that the world we live in is so precarious; that the closer one gets to the central facts of the universe the less rational they are, the closer they edge towards madness. By the time one gets a whiff of the improbability of what is being told, the hook of the underlying thesis is in the fish’s mouth, and the reader remains enthralled so as to hear some sort of resolution to the woeful, universally relevant narrative.
Leo Strauss’ theory of Great Books says that one should approach any thoughtful work with great attention to the writer themselves. We should try to parse where they were, what world they were living in, what they were and were not allowed to say and how their work is a product of their limitations. We should assume that any brilliant writer has some awareness of how their book will be perceived, how it will move in its own particular way into the mind and beliefs of the readers. The brilliant writer, who has something important to say, will craft their art in the specific way it needs to be crafted for that message to have the greatest and most robust lifespan possible. With this level of consideration, it is viable to think Labatut was very intentional in his approach, that he was trying to play on our perceptions of literature and its rigid counterpart, research. He must have been speaking to something very sensitive in the nature of truth, something taken for granted, or perhaps something dangerous. If Labatut is as brilliant as this work supposes, there may be an intention to the work that is beyond designation, some thesis beneath the layered theses which one has access to, some Truth which might take time and attention to reveal itself.
The Lemon Tree
Labatut in his acknowledgements says point blank that “this is a work of fiction based on real events” [189]. In reviews online it is categorized as ‘historical fiction,’ something that didn’t happen, but could have. This simplification reduces the particular magic Labatut is able to construct in these pages— the sense of imminency he curates via characters we sort of know, stories we’ve sort of heard, and places them into reality with knowledge and theories that only some of us have access to, but which in time will be worked into the fold of our understanding of the world as all new theories do.
He closes the text with a parable, in a section which breaks from the tone and uses the first-person. In a six-part series of vignettes Labatut tells the story of a plague eating the trees of his neighborhood, and a mysterious man, who in the context of the book might be any one of the enigmatic thinkers mentioned earlier who fled public life and abandoned their research out of fear of that research’s implications. The former mathematician speaks of his horror at “the sudden realization that it was mathematics— not nuclear weapons, computers, biological warfare or our climate Armageddon— which was changing our world to the point where, in a couple of decades at most, we would simply not be able to grasp what being human really meant” [187]. The narrator considers a prized lemon tree on his property, considers its beauty, the enigmatic splendor of its produce, and wonders how long it has to live. When he learns that the only method to answer this question would be by chopping it down to dissect it, he balks. “Who would want to do that?” [188]. Perhaps the beauty of brilliant madness, the beauty of the last century of heavenly strides in our understanding of existence, oughtn’t have been dissected. But it was, by Labatut, and in dissecting it he destroyed it, revealed its putrid core and the funereal soil from which it grew. He destroyed it to show us just how much we have to lose.