tag: quotes
Alexander Pope
The First Epistle
Awake, my St. John! leave all meaner things
To low ambition, and the pride of Kings.
Let us (since Life can little more supply
Than just to look about us and to die)
Expatiate free o’er all this scene of Man;
A mighty maze! but not without a plan;
A Wild, where weeds and flow’rs promiscuous shoot,
Or Garden, tempting with forbidden fruit.
Together let us beat this ample field,
Try what the open, what the covert yield;
The latent tracts, the giddy heights explore
Of all who blindly creep, or sightless soar;
Eye Nature’s walks, shoot Folly as it flies,
And catch the Manners living as they rise;
Laugh where we must, be candid where we can;
But vindicate the ways of God to Man.
Say first, of God above, or Man below,
What can we reason, but from what we know?
Of Man what see we, but his station here,
From which to reason, or to which refer?
Thro’ worlds unnumber’d tho’ the God be known,
‘Tis ours to trace him only in our own.
He, who thro’ vast immensity can pierce,
See worlds on worlds compose one universe,
Observe how system into system runs,
What other planets circle other suns,
What vary’d being peoples ev’ry star,
May tell why Heav’n has made us as we are.
But of this frame the bearings, and the ties,
The strong connections, nice dependencies,
Gradations just, has thy pervading soul
Look’d thro’? or can a part contain the whole?
Is the great chain, that draws all to agree,
And drawn supports, upheld by God, or thee?
→ cats:: texts, third party texts, travelog
→ tags:: cosmology, cosmos, poetry, quotes, system, third-party
instagram, yadda yadda yadda
Insipid: this posting over @ the New Yorker is just too friggin kind to the whole concept. Retro is so … empty …
Susan Sontag is not empty and to use her full words to do anything but obliterate the whole inane concept of instagram is a travesty.
It is a nostalgic time right now, and photographs actively promote nostalgia. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos. An ugly or grotesque subject may be moving because it has been dignified by the attention of the photographer. A beautiful subject can be the object of rueful feelings, because it has aged or decayed or no longer exists. All photographs are momento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt. — Susan Sontag
→ cats:: now reading, thesis
→ tags:: attention, photography, quotes, time
In Memory of W. B. Yeats
I
He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.
Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.
But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
just the first of three stanzas, the latter two seemingly thinner than this first one. gloomy a bit, but the evident strength is marvelous.
→ comment→ cats:: texts, third party texts
→ tags:: poetry, quotes
source of power
For most of the time that humans have inhabited the earth, their prime source of power has been their own muscle power. . . . Early additional sources of power included human slaves and domesticated animals. The hunting/gathering societies were helped when an extra food gatherer or hunter could join in the task of securing food. Likewise, the labor intensiveness of primitive agriculture increased both the need for and the usefulness of slave and animal labor. . . . A slave or extra hunter, of course, would have to be fed. However, two hunters could kill more than twice as much game as a single hunter could kill alone. In this way, additional labor provided a greater return in energy than the energy input required for its maintenance. (Pimentel & Pimentel, 2008, p.68)
→ cats:: thesis
→ tags:: energy, food, power, quotes
The Kingdom of God
O world invisible, we view thee,
O world intangible, we touch thee,
O world unknowable, we know thee,
Inapprehensible, we clutch thee!
Does the fish soar to find the ocean,
The eagle plunge to find the air—
That we ask of the stars in motion
If they have rumour of thee there?
Not where the wheeling systems darken,
And our benumbed conceiving soars!—
The drift of pinions, would we hearken,
Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.
The angels keep their ancient places;—
Turn but a stone, and start a wing!
‘Tis ye, ‘tis your estrangèd faces,
That miss the many-splendoured thing.
But (when so sad thou canst not sadder)
Cry;—and upon thy so sore loss
Shall shine the traffic of Jacob’s ladder
Pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross.
Yea, in the night, my Soul, my daughter.
Cry,—clinging Heaven by the hems;
And lo, Christ walking on the water
Not of Gennesareth, but Thames!
– Francis Thompson (1859–1907)
Nicholson & Lee, eds. The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse. 1917.
→ cats:: texts, third party texts
→ tags:: poetry, quotes
organum sensus communis
Every efficient cause acts through its own power, which it exercises on the adjacent matter, as the Light (lux) of the sun exercises its power on the air (which power is Light [lumen] diffused through the whole world from the solar Light [lux]). And this power is called ‘likeness,’ ‘image,’ and ‘species,’ and is designed by many other names, and it is produced both by substance and by accident, spiritual and corporeal . . . This species produces every action in the world, for it acts on sense, on the intellect, and on all matter of the world for the generation of things. — Roger Bacon, Opus maius
→ cats:: thesis
→ tags:: air, Light, quotes, spirit
Bey reminds again!
One fundamental key to success in Travel is of course attentiveness. We call it «paying attention» in English & «prêter attention» in French (in Arabic, however, one gives attention) suggesting that we’re as stingy with our attentiveness as we are with our money. Quite often it seems that no one is «paying attention», that everyone is hoarding their consciousness—what? saving it for a rainy day?—and damping down the fires of awareness lest all available fuel be consumed in a single holocaust of unbearable knowing.
This model of consciousness seems suspiciously «Capitalist» however—as if indeed our attention were a limited resource, once spent forever irrecoverable. A usury of perception now appears: we demand interest on our payment-of-attention, as if it were a loan rather than an expense. Or as if our consciousness were threatened by an entropic «heat death», against which the best defense must consist of a dull mediocre trancestate of grudging half attention—a miserliness of psychic resources—a refusal to notice the unexpected or to savor the miraculousness of the ordinary: a lack of generosity.
But what if we treated our perceptions as gifts rather than payments? What if we gave our attention instead of paying it? According to the law of reciprocity, the gift is returned with a gift – there is no expenditure, no scarcity, no debt against Capital, no penury, no punishment for giving our attention away, and no end to the potentiality of attentiveness.
Our consciousness is not a commodity, nor is it a contractual agreement between the Cartesian ego and the abyss of Nothingness, nor is it simply a function of some meat machine with a limited warranty. True, eventually we wear out and break. In a certain sense the hoarding of our energies makes sense-we «save» ourselves for the truly important moments, the breakthroughs, the «peak experiences».
But if we picture ourselves as shallow coin purses—if we barricade the «doors of perception» like fearful peasants at the howling of Boreal wolves—if we never «pay attention»—how will we recognize the approach and advent of those precious moments, those openings?
Bey, H., Overcoming Tourism. Available at: http://hermetic.com/bey/tourism.html [Accessed February 15, 2012].
→ cats:: thesis
→ tags:: attention, quotes, travel
Lewis’ Megamachine
From our present vantage point, we can see that the inventors and controllers of the Megamachine, from the Pyramid Age onward, have in fact been haunted by delusions of omniscience and omnipotence — immediate or prospective. Those original delusions have not become less irrational, now that they have at their disposal the formidable resources of exact science and a high-energy technology. The Nuclear Age conceptions of absolute power, infallible computerized intelligence, limitless expanding productivity, all culminating in a system of total control exercised by a military-scientific-industrial elite, correspond to the Bronze Age conception of Divine Kingship. Such power, to succeed on its own terms, must destroy the symbiotic cooperations between all species and communities essential to man’s survival and development. Both ideologies belong to the same infantile magico-religious scheme as ritual human sacrifice. As with Captain Ahab’s pursuit of Moby Dick, the scientific and technical means are entirely rational, but the ultimate ends are mad.
Mumford, L., 1973. Technics and the Nature of Man. In C. Mitcham & R. Mackey, eds. Philosophy and Technology: Readings in the philosophical problems. New York, NY: The Free Press.
→ cats:: thesis
→ tags:: military-industrial complex, quotes
how many?
How many days have I been doing this? gah. Not sure it’s sustainable much longer. Although I am scheduled to finish well before the 3.5-year study limit (actually just approaching the 2.5-year marker since it all started in Sydney in ’09), it seems like a friggin’ eternity of sitting in front of the screen. and I think I’m goin’ to hell, thoughtlessly: righteous thanks George, for pointing this out. you are spot-on again!
A petty bureaucrat writes to his superior: “The lighting must be better protected than now. Lights could be eliminated, since they apparently are never used. However, it has been observed that when the doors are shut, the load always presses hard against them as soon as darkness sets in, which makes closing the door difficult. Also, because of the alarming nature of darkness, screaming always occurs when the doors are closed. It would therefore be useful to light the lamp before and during the first moments of the operation.” The bureaucrat was the ironically named “Mr. Just,” his organization the SS, the year 1942.
What Mr. Just did not write–what he would have written, had he been taking full responsibility for his own prose–is: “To more easily kill the Jews, leave the lights on.” But writing this would have forced him to admit what he was up to. To avoid writing this, what did he have to do? Disown his prose. Pretend his prose was not him. He may have written a more honest version, and tore it up. He may have intuitively, self-protectively, skipped directly to this dishonest, passive-voice version. Either way, he accepted an inauthentic relation to his own prose, and thereby doomed himself to hell.
Working with language is a means by which we can identify the bullshit within ourselves (and others). If we learn what a truthful sentence looks like, a little flag goes up at a false one. False prose can mark an attempt to evade responsibility, or something more diabolical; the process of improving our prose disciplines the mind, hones the logic, and most importantly, tells us what we really think.
Saunders, G., 2007. The Braindead Megaphone: essays, New York, NY: Riverhead Books.
→ cats:: thesis
→ tags:: language, quotes, writing
it is the boots
Before I left Sangin, I attended a memorial service for two marines who were killed a week earlier by an I.E.D. The centerpiece of any memorial for a marine is the formal construction of his battle cross. The rifle stuck bayonet down, the helmet set atop the butt stock, the dog tags draped on the pistol grip, the boots placed on the ground. The end result is a movingly personlike assemblage of the dead man’s essential gear. What holds it all together is the rifle. Clearly, the rifle is meant to symbolize a kind of linchpin — the singularly vital thing. Yet somehow, it is the boots, their laces neatly looped and tied, that are most affecting. It is the boots, not the rifle, that most evoke an absence. It is the boots that young marines reach out to touch when they kneel before it all.
Mogelson, L., 2012. The Hard Way Out of Afghanistan. New York Times. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/05/magazine/afghanistan.html
→ cats:: thesis
→ tags:: death, military-industrial complex, quotes
your vitality is beguiling
to watch the movements of any body, while in mind is the recollection of an other one dying, and while snow falls heavy on the greenhouse glass outside, and the pipes rush with water somewhere in the house. it’s all too much.
→ commentLet there be spaces in your togetherness, And let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each others cup but drink not from one cup. Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone, Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music. Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together, yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow. ― Kahlil Gibran
→ cats:: thesis
→ tags:: body, quotes
I just saw you
Vision is a remarkable process by which we are able to interpret an image from light the eyes receive from the objects around us. Although this process depends on the interplay of many different factors (including the optics of the eye, the isomerization of retinal, nerve impulses, and the brain’s ability to reconstruct the image), vision is fundamentally based on the change in the molecular orbitals of retinal that occurs when the molecule absorbs energy in the form of light reflected off of the objects that we see. When visible light hits the chromophore (retinal), a p electron is promoted to a higher-energy orbital, allowing free rotation about the bond between carbon atom 11 and carbon atom 12 of the retinal molecule. About half the time, this rotation leads to the isomerization of retinal when the p electron returns to the lower-energy orbital. When retinal isomerizes, a conformational change in the protein opsin occurs. This conformational change initiates a cascade of biochemical reactions that result in the closing of Na+ channels in the cell membrane. When the Na+ channels are closed, a large potential difference builds up across the plasma membrane, and the potential difference is passed along to an adjoining nerve cell as an electrical impulse. The nerve cell carries this impulse to the brain, where the visual information is interpreted.
or
The retina is lined with many millions of photoreceptor cells that consist of two types: 7 million cones provide color information and sharpness of images, and 120 million rods are extremely sensitive detectors of white light to provide night vision. (The names of these cells come from their respective shapes.) The outer segments (tops) of the rods and cones contain a region filled with membrane-bound discs, which contain proteins bound to the chromophore 11-cis-retinal. (A chromophore is a molecule that can absorb light at a specific wavelength, and thus typically displays a characteristic color.) When visible light hits the chromophore, the chromophore undergoes an isomerization, or change in molecular arrangement, to all-trans-retinal. The new form of retinal does not fit as well into the protein, and so a series of conformational changes in the protein begins. As the protein changes its conformation, it initiates a cascade of biochemical reactions that result in the closing of Na+ channels in the cell membrane. Prior to this event, Na+ ions flow freely into the cell to compensate for the lower potential (more negative charge) which exists inside the cell. When the Na+ channels are closed, however, a large potential difference builds up across the plasma membrane (inside the cell becomes more negative and outside the cell becomes more positive). This potential difference is passed along to an adjoining nerve cell as an electrical impulse at the synaptic terminal, the place where these two cells meet. The nerve cell carries this impulse to the brain, where the visual information is interpreted.
→ cats:: thesis
→ tags:: Light, quotes, seeing, vision
recalling Varela
→ comment…[T]he last 15 years have witnessed the ascent of an alternative view, that of embodied or enactive cognition. This new wave arose because the computationalist doctrine failed to account even for the most elementary coping with the world: walking, perceiving object in a natural setting, imagination. Slowly the cards turned into considering that the basis of mind is the body in coupled action, that is, the sensory-motor circuits establish the organism as viable in situated contexts. From this perspective the brain appears as a dynamical process (and not a syntactic one) of real time variables with a rich self-organizing capacity (and not a representational machinery). So in this sense the mind is not in the head since it['s] roots [are] in the body as a whole and also in the extended environment where the organism finds itself.
- Francisco Varela, Cosmos Web Forum letter 12e (1998?)
→ cats:: thesis
→ tags:: mind, quotes
pleroma
→ commentThe pleroma is both beginning and end of the created beings. It pervadeth them, as the light of the sun everywhere pervadeth the air. Although the pleroma prevadeth altogether, yet hath created being no share thereof, just as wholly transparent body becometh neither light nor dark through the light nor dark through the light which pervadeth it. We are, however, the pleroma itself, for we are a part of the eternal and the infinite. — C.G. Jung
Jung, C.G. & Jaffé, A., 1965. The Seven Sermons to the Dead. In Memories, Dreams, Reflections. New York, NY: Vintage Books.
→ cats:: thesis
→ tags:: esoteric, quotes
no title…
→ commentThe deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life. The fight with nature which primitive man has to wage for his bodily existence attains in this modern form its latest transformation. The eighteenth century called upon man to free himself of all the historical bonds in the state and in religion, in morals and in economics. Man’s nature, originally good and common to all, should develop unhampered. In addition to more liberty, the nineteenth century demanded the functional specialization of man and his work; this specialization makes one individual incomparable to another, and each of them indispensable to the highest possible extent. However, this specialization makes each man the more directly dependent upon the supplementary activities of all others. Nietzsche sees the full development of the individual conditioned by the most ruthless struggle of individuals; socialism believes in the suppression of all competition for the same reason. Be that as it may, in all these positions the same basic motive is at work: the person resists to being leveled down and worn out by a social-technological mechanism. An inquiry into the inner meaning of specifically modern life and its products, into the soul of the cultural body, so to speak, must seek to solve the equation which structures like the metropolis set up between the individual and the super-individual contents of life. Such an inquiry must answer the question of how the personality accommodates itself in the adjustments to external forces. — Georg Simmel
Simmel, G., 1950. The Metropolis & Mental Life. In The Sociology of Georg Simmel. New York, NY: Free Press.
→ cats:: thesis
→ tags:: quotes
whilst on the road
→ commentHeal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils: freely ye have received, freely give. Provide neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in your purses, Nor scrip for your journey, neither two coats, neither shoes, nor yet staves: for the workman is worthy of his meat. And into whatsoever city or town ye shall enter, enquire who in it is worthy; and there abide till ye go thence. And when ye come into an house, salute it. And if the house be worthy, let your peace come upon it: but if it be not worthy, let your peace return to you. And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words, when ye depart out of that house or city, shake off the dust of your feet. — Matthew 10:8-14
→ cats:: travelog
→ tags:: en route, quotes
yup.
→ commentWhat people are contemplating on their word-processor screens is the operation of their own brains. It is not entrails that we try to interpret these days, nor even hearts or facial expressions; it is, quite simply, the brain. We want to expose to view its billions of connections and watch it operating like a video-game. All this cerebral, electronic snobbery is hugely affected – far from being the sign of a superior knowledge of humanity, it is merely the mark of a simplified theory, since the human being is here reduced to the terminal excrescence of his or her spinal chord. But we should not worry too much about this: it is all much less scientific, less functional than is ordinarily thought. All that fascinates us is the spectacle of the brain and its workings. What we are wanting here is to see our thoughts unfolding before us – and this itself is a superstition.
Hence, the academic grappling with his computer, ceaselessly correcting, reworking, and complexifying, turning the exercise into a kind of interminable psychoanalysis, memorizing everything in an effort to escape the final outcome, to delay the day of reckoning of death, and that other—fatal—moment of reckoning that is writing, by forming an endless feed-back loop with the machine. This is a marvelous instrument of exoteric magic. In fact all these interactions come down in the end to endless exchanges with a machine. Just look at the child sitting in front of his computer at school; do you think he has been made interactive, opened up to the world? Child and machine have merely been joined together in an integrated circuit. As for the intellectual, he has at last found the equivalent of what the teenager gets from his stereo and his walkman: a spectacular desublimation of thought, his concepts as images on a screen. — Jean Baudrillard
Baudrillard, J., 2000. America, London, England: Verso.
→ cats:: thesis
→ tags:: quotes, spectacle, technology, writing
not to be overlooked . . .
→ commentFollowing on to examine the trend in cosmology and unified field theories, Chalmers speculates that conscious experience may be a fundamental feature cosmologically:
“If the existence of consciousness cannot be derived from physical laws, a theory of physics is not a true theory of everything. So a final theory must contain an additional fundamental component. Toward this end, I propose that conscious experience be considered a fundamental feature, irreducible to anything more basic.”
This perception of the central nature of consciousness to the cosmological description is more acute than an academic or philosophical matter. Although the scientific description is based exclusively on the objective physical universe, our contact with reality is entirely sine qua non through our subjective conscious experience. From birth to death, we experience only a stream of consciousness through which all our experience of the physical world is gained. All scientific experiments performed on the physical world ultimately become validated by the subjective conscious experience of the experimenters, and the subsequent witnesses to the phenomena and conclusions. — Chris King
King, C., 2006. Quantum Cosmology and the Hard Problem of the Conscious Brain. In J. Tuszynski, ed. The Emerging Physics of Consciousness. New York, NY: Springer.
→ cats:: thesis
→ tags:: consciousness, cosmology, quantum, quotes
more on struggle
→ commentPower may be defined, for every society, as resulting from the need to struggle against the entropy that threatens it with disorder. — Georges Balandier
→ cats:: thesis
→ tags:: entropy, power, quotes, society
you can’t be outside of it!
→ commentWe are thus facing the following strange situation. While all building stones for the [modern scientific] world-picture are furnished by the senses qua organs of the mind, while the world-picture itself is and remains for everyone a construct of his mind and apart from it has no demonstrable existence, the mind itself remains a stranger in this picture, it has no place in it, it can nowhere be found in it. — Schrödinger
Schrodinger, E., 1956. What is Life: & other Scientific Essays, Garden City, NJ: Doubleday Anchor Book. p.216. (pdf copy)
→ cats:: thesis
→ tags:: quotes, science, worldview
solving this?
But we are up against a curious paradox. Something of immense importance to all of us does not find expression in the literary arts. The rational side of man, with its scientific and technological expressions, gets little literary space. It is curious that science and technology have always occupied so small a place in literature. What important literary figure, except Diderot, seriously occupied himself with the problems of technology? This is all the more extraordinary when one considers that literature is supposed to hold the mirror up to life. In life people spend a great deal of time involved in the technology of the period in which they live. They work, and their jobs are connected with technology and the organizations technology engenders. Yet one sees little evidence of this in literature. — Aldous Huxley
I have a little hope to somehow tap into a solution, or, an attack on this issue. The issue did come into my awareness this past spring, in Melbourne, following some conversations with different ‘humanists’ where I realized how poorly they understand the operational paradigms of technology. And, how they look at the world through a literal or metaphoric lens which effects an almost-complete disjunction between the ‘realities’ of the (techno-)social system that they are fully embedded within, and how they imagine that social system operates.
So, today I have to forge a short footnote on the ideas behind “systems theory” for a general and likely unwitting audience. Not easy.
But did turn in a final draft a couple days ago. One hurdle, now 120 days of writerly hell ahead.
→ comment→ cats:: thesis
→ tags:: life, quotes, system, technology, writing
delectably so
→ commentIn the philosophy of Democritus the atoms are eternal and indestructible units of matter, they can never be transformed into each other. With regard to this question modern physics takes a definite stand against the materialism of Democritus and for Plato and the Pythagoreans. The elementary particles are certainly not eternal and indestructible units of matter, they can actually be transformed into each other. As a matter of fact, if two such particles, moving through space with a very high kinetic energy, collide, then many new elementary particles may be created from the available energy and the old particles may have disappeared in the collision. Such events have been frequently observed and offer the best proof that all particles are made of the same substance: energy. But the resemblance of the modern views to those of Plato and the Pythagoreans can be carried somewhat further. The elementary particles in Plato’s Timaeus are finally not substance but mathematical forms. “All things are numbers” is a sentence attributed to Pythagoras. The only mathematical forms available at that time were such geometric forms as the regular solids or the triangles which form their surface. In modern quantum theory there can be no doubt that the elementary particles will finally also be mathematical forms but of a much more complicated nature. The Greek philosophers thought of static forms and found them in the regular solids. Modern science, however, has from its beginning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries started from the dynamic problem. The constant element in physics since Newton is not a configuration or a geometrical form, but a dynamic law. The equation of motion holds at all times, it is in this sense eternal, whereas the geometrical forms, like the orbits, are changing. Therefore, the mathematical forms that represent the elementary particles will be solutions of some eternal law of motion for matter. This is a problem which has not yet been solved. — Excerpt from the chapter “Quantum Theory and the Roots of Atomic Science,” pp. 71-72. Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science (New York: Harper and Row, 1958). Lectures delivered at University of St. Andrews, Scotland, Winter 1955-56.
→ cats:: thesis
→ tags:: energy, history, matter, physics, quotes
revolution?
For revolutionary educators, knowledge exceeds its semiotic end products; it travels intertextually within demarcated systems of intelligibility. Critical knowledge is understood as persistently open, disclosive, incomplete, and open-ended. In this way it remains cautious in the presence of reified social relations and epistemological distortions that occlude the social ontology of knowledge and its processual journey from fact to value. In other words, critical epistemological practice examines not only the content of knowledge, but also its method of production. It seeks to understand how ideological constructions are encoded and administered, how metonymic and synecdochical gestures are performed so as to obscure relations of domination and oppression, how the interpretive and interpellative frameworks by which we organize our sentiments construct ruling stereotypes, and how the governing categories of our everyday discourse render invisible and obscure real social relations of exploitation. — (McLaren, P., 2001. Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Politics of Hope: Reclaiming Critical Pedagogy. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies.)
Aside from the monumental use of academic blah-blah-blah here, the idea behind the obscurity is valid. That is, a radical approach to the facilitation of transformative learning requires a deep awareness of more than just a subject. It demands an awareness of how an embodied knowledge of that subject is founded or generated or discovered. This “how” is in many cases far more important than the “what” of knowledge. I describe this “how” as the meta-structures under which the learning is undertaken. It can be a material issue — bricks-and-mortar, the architectural setting — but also, consequent to an energy-based worldview, it is also a critical question of the entire set of flows within which the encounter is taking place. This is far, far more than opening a classroom window for fresh air, or sitting under a tree with a group of students, although the change in the energy ‘content’ of the situation can be quite profoundly altered by small actions on or reactions to the locale. An energy perception drives much deeper into the meta-structures than that, although any awareness is a good starting point. Because the energy content of the situation is most profoundly affected by the presence of the Self and the Others, the entire energy dynamic among participants must also receive this attention and care. This dynamic is more fundamental than ‘merely’ the social — it is expressed in my concept of continuum-of-relation, defined as the total accumulated network of relations, expressed as activated exchanges of energy, as Dialogues, that have occurred, are occurring, and will occur between members of the species. A holistic awareness of this continuum is necessary to optimize the facilitation.
No revolution is possible among people using language as per McLaren!
→ comment→ cats:: teaching, thesis
→ tags:: continuum-of-relation, dialogue, encounter, energy, quotes, teaching, worldview
the force of taut stomachs
[F]orce is always experienced through interaction. We become aware of force as it affects us or some object in our perceptual field. When you enter an unfamiliar dark room and bump into the edge of the table, you are experiencing the interactional character of force. When you eat too much the ingested food presses outwards on your taughtly stretched stomach. There is no schema for force that does not involve interaction or potential interaction. (Johnson, Mark. (1987) The Body in the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.).
Interaction then, of course, needs energy, for the ‘approach’ to transition in space, or time. It requires one to be ‘at the effect of’ either an internal energy source, or at least sliding down a potential field (gravitational, for example).
→ comment→ cats:: thesis
→ tags:: quotes
cranking up the heat…
more nettime volleys, feels a bit easier to be pointed and precise, but the problem of establishing a set of base assumptions about reality still dogs the process — with the dominant Cartesian separation needing to be convincingly rejected for a more sane continuous and implicate cosmos…
Mark Stahlman writes in this thread:
So, give up your plans for “radical change of the system we live under” and *just* STOP living under that system (at least for the better half of your life)!
I respond sotto voce, etc:
(more …)
→ cats:: mailing lists, texts
→ tags:: mailing-list post, nettime, protocol, quotes, system
finance sector
→ comment52 Finance and Insurance
521 Monetary Authorities – Central Bank
5211 Monetary Authorities – Central Bank
52111 Monetary Authorities – Central Bank
521110 Monetary Authorities – Central Bank
522 Credit Intermediation and Related Activities
5221 Depository Credit Intermediation
52211 Commercial Banking
522110 Commercial Banking
52212 Savings Institutions
522120 Savings Institutions
52213 Credit Unions
522130 Credit Unions
52219 Other Depository Credit Intermediation
522190 Other Depository Credit Intermediation
5222 Nondepository Credit Intermediation
52221 Credit Card Issuing
522210 Credit Card Issuing
52222 Sales Financing
522220 Sales Financing
52229 Other Nondepository Credit Intermediation
522291 Consumer Lending
522292 Real Estate Credit
522293 International Trade Financing
522294 Secondary Market Financing
522298 All Other Nondepository Credit Intermediation
5223 Activities Related to Credit Intermediation
52231 Mortgage and Nonmortgage Loan Brokers
522310 Mortgage and Nonmortgage Loan Brokers
52232 Financial Transactions Processing, Reserve, and Clearinghouse Activities
522320 Financial Transactions Processing, Reserve, and Clearinghouse Activities
52239 Other Activities Related to Credit Intermediation
522390 Other Activities Related to Credit Intermediation
523 Securities, Commodity Contracts, and Other Financial Investments and Related Activities
5231 Securities and Commodity Contracts Intermediation and Brokerage
52311 Investment Banking and Securities Dealing
523110 Investment Banking and Securities Dealing
52312 Securities Brokerage
523120 Securities Brokerage
52313 Commodity Contracts Dealing
523130 Commodity Contracts Dealing
52314 Commodity Contracts Brokerage
523140 Commodity Contracts Brokerage
5232 Securities and Commodity Exchanges
52321 Securities and Commodity Exchanges
523210 Securities and Commodity Exchanges
5239 Other Financial Investment Activities
52391 Miscellaneous Intermediation
523910 Miscellaneous Intermediation
52392 Portfolio Management
523920 Portfolio Management
52393 Investment Advice
523930 Investment Advice
52399 All Other Financial Investment Activities
523991 Trust, Fiduciary, and Custody Activities
523999 Miscellaneous Financial Investment Activities
524 Insurance Carriers and Related Activities
5241 Insurance Carriers
52411 Direct Life, Health, and Medical Insurance Carriers
524113 Direct Life Insurance Carriers
524114 Direct Health and Medical Insurance Carriers
52412 Direct Insurance (except Life, Health, and Medical) Carriers
524126 Direct Property and Casualty Insurance Carriers
524127 Direct Title Insurance Carriers
524128 Other Direct Insurance (except Life, Health, and Medical) Carriers
52413 Reinsurance Carriers
524130 Reinsurance Carriers
5242 Agencies, Brokerages, and Other Insurance Related Activities
52421 Insurance Agencies and Brokerages
524210 Insurance Agencies and Brokerages
52429 Other Insurance Related Activities
524291 Claims Adjusting
524292 Third Party Administration of Insurance and Pension Funds
524298 All Other Insurance Related Activities
525 Funds, Trusts, and Other Financial Vehicles
5251 Insurance and Employee Benefit Funds
52511 Pension Funds
525110 Pension Funds
52512 Health and Welfare Funds
525120 Health and Welfare Funds
52519 Other Insurance Funds
525190 Other Insurance Funds
5259 Other Investment Pools and Funds
52591 Open-End Investment Funds
525910 Open-End Investment Funds
52592 Trusts, Estates, and Agency Accounts
525920 Trusts, Estates, and Agency Accounts
52593 Real Estate Investment Trusts
525930 Real Estate Investment Trusts
52599 Other Financial Vehicles
525990 Other Financial Vehicles
→ cats:: third party texts
→ tags:: economic, money, politics, quotes
Noli turbare circulos meos!
The human individual lives usually far within his limits; he possesses powers of various sorts which he habitually fails to use. He energizes below his maximum, and he behaves below his optimum. In elementary faculty, in coordination, in power of inhibition and control, in every conceivable way, his life is contracted like the field of vision of an hysteric subject — but with less excuse, for the poor hysteric is diseased, while in the rest of us it is only an inveterate habit — the habit of inferiority to our full self — that is bad. — William James
Is this a condition merely of imperfect incarnate be-ing? The insensibility towards full experience and peripheral awareness? We are not what we could be? How does this fit with the image that Life is in a constant evolutionary optimizing process. Is our potential only an artifact of our too-rapid increase in intelligence — where apparent possibility far outpaces the actual possibilities — we count more than we think, we think more than we know, and know more than we can find any wisdom within. To accede to our potential, we need to test the limits of our viability, but more than that, we must change our energy state. (or simply let our ordered existence sink to a less complex state!)
→ comment→ cats:: 50 years on
→ tags:: awareness, control, life, quotes
Divorce or Corrasable Bond
→ commentYour skin is translucent in the still air of this room.
Clay is prerogative; eyes are derivative.
We live in the shadows of immense hands
like death that will take our sex away.Bridal days and wedding nights of grace and youth
and doors opening in women.Music is a child of the grass
and teaches us the cost of frostbite.
We can’t separate the misunderstandings
or wash dishes in the music-box.We talk too much and spend the word on our burning hands.
A cinder of a joke catches in our throat
and you laugh to hold onto the hurrying waters.A fern is a fan that resembles a rainbow
and the last ghosts of Indians are asking for food
in the amber waves of dying grain.– Daniela Gioseffi
→ cats:: texts, third party texts
→ tags:: poetry, quotes
Huxley’s education
In a world where education is predominantly verbal, highly educated people find it all but impossible to pay serious attention to anything but words and notions. There is always money for, there are always doctorates in, the learned foolery of research into what, for scholars, is the all-important problem: Who influenced whom to say what when? Even in this age of technology the verbal humanities are honored. The non-verbal humanities, the arts of being directly aware of the given facts of our existence, ale almost completely ignored. A catalogue, a bibliography, a definitive edition of a third-rate versier’s ipsissima verba, a stupendous index to end all indexes – any genuinely Alexandrian project is sure of approval and financial support: But when it comes to finding out how you and I, our children and grandchildren, may become more perceptive, more intensely aware of inward and outward reality, more open to the Spirit, less apt, by psychological malpractices, to make ourselves physically ill, and more capable of controlling our own autonomic nervous system – when it comes to any form of non-verbal education more fundamental (and more likely to be of some practical use) than Swedish drill, no really respectable person in any really respectable university or church will do anything about it. Verbalists are suspicious of the non-verbal; rationalists fear the given, non-rational fact; intellectuals feel that “what we perceive by the eye (or in any other way) is foreign to us as such and need not impress us deeply.”
Besides, this matter of education in the non-verbal humanities will not fit into any of the established pigeonholes. It is not religion, not neurology, not gymnastics, not morality or civics, not even experimental psychology. This being so the subject is, for academic and ecclesiastical purposes, non-existent and may safely be ignored altogether or left, with a Patronizing smile, to those whom the Pharisees of verbal orthodoxy call cranks, quacks, charlatans and unqualified amateurs. “I have always found,” Blake wrote rather bitterly, “that Angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise. This they do with a confident insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning.” Systematic reasoning is something we could not, as a species or as individuals, possibly do without. But neither, if we are to remain sane, can we possibly do without direct perception, the more unsystematic the better, of the inner and outer worlds into which we have been born. This given reality is an infinite which passes all understanding and yet admits of being directly and in some sort totally apprehended. It is a transcendence belonging to another order than the human, and yet it may be present to us as a felt immanence, an experienced participation. To be enlightened is to be aware, always, of total reality in its immanent otherness – to be aware of it and yet to remain in a condition to survive as an animal, to think and feel as a human being, to resort whenever expedient to systematic reasoning. Our goal is to discover that we have always been where we ought to be.
Huxley, A., 1954. The Doors of Perception. Available at: http://www.mescaline.com/huxley.htm [Accessed July 27, 2011].
→ cats:: bibliography, thesis, third party
→ tags:: bibliography, education, learning, perception, quotes, reality
snippet
The sensual world is a phenomena apprehended imperfectly through our senses, as it suffuses through our entire being. Or is it received perfectly? As energy is characterized by radiant movement (from a source, from a concentration, to a sink), we are suffused with the radiant energy of the world that we are immersed in. We receive, and as a localized system of concentrated energy, we also radiate. In this two-way circulation of energy, we are constantly re-connecting with the larger world around us: inhaling energized particles that arrive in our immediate vicinity; drinking a certain fundamental energy source that we have named water; consuming other quantities of energy from the wider system around us. Reaching with hand, striving with foot to promote necessary and sufficient consumption for the maintenance of body and more than simple survival. We expend our life-energies in organizing the world around us, and for that, we eventually die. Before that instance of transformation, time is spent in seeking to realize procreative potentials so that life will continue in its unbroken line from primordial past to questionable future. And when that time is done, body implodes, trading order for disorder, until we become the radiant heat of interstellar plasma.
→ commentIf the doors of perception were cleansed,
everything would appear to man as it is — infinite.
For man has closed himself up ’til he sees things
through narrow chinks of his cavern.
– William Blake
→ cats:: thesis
→ tags:: energy, life-energy, life-time, order, quotes, time, water
on visibility
To look:
at everything which overflows the outline, the contour, the category, the name of what it is.
All appearances are continually changing one another: visually everything is interdependent. Looking is submitting the sense of sight to the experience of that interdependence. To looker something (a pin that has dropped) is the opposite of this looking. Visibility is a quality of light. Colours are the faces of light. This is why looking is to recognize, enter a whole. Identity of an object or colour or form is what visibility reveals: it is a conclusion of visibility; but it has nothing to do with the process of visibility which is as uncontainable, which is as much a form of energy as light itself. Light which is the source of all life. The visible is a feature of that life; it cannot exist without it. In a dead universe nothing is visible.
Visibility is a form of growth.
Aim: to see the appearance of a thing (even an inanimate thing) as a stage in its growth – or as a stage in a growth of which it is part. To see its visibility as a kind of flowering.
Clouds gather visibility, and then disperse into invisibility. All appearances are of the nature of clouds.
The hyacinth grows into visibility. But so does the garnet or sapphire.
Not to say that behind appearances is the truth, the Platonic way. It is very possible that visibility is the truth and that what lies outside visibility are only the ‘traces’ of what has been or will become visible.
To look at light.
To recognize that outlines are an invention.
To transcend scale: a few blades of grass as large as the sky looks: the ant visibly coexistent with the mountain: in its visibility comparable with the mountain. Perhaps that’s the point. The fact is visibility (inseparable from light) is greater than its categories of measurement (small, big, distant, near, dark, light, blue, yellow, etc.).
To look is to rediscover, over and beyond these measurements, the primacy of visibility itself.
The eye receiving.
But also the eye intercepting. The eye intercepts the continual intercourse between light and the surfaces which reflect and absorb it. Separate objects are like isolated words. Meaning is only to be found in the relation between them. What is the meaning to be found in the visible? A form of energy, continually transforming itself.
Exercise.
Look:
White transparent curtains across the window.
Light coming from the right.
Shadows of folds, hanging folds, darker than clouds.
Suddenly sunlight.
The window frames now cast shadows across the curtains.
The shadows are convoluted following the folds: the window frames are straight and rectangular.
Between the curtains and the window: a space like the lines on which music is written: but three-dimensional, and the notes of light, rather than sound. The space between the rectangular window frames and their shadows convoluted because the curtains hang in folds half-transparently.
Looking through the curtain, a cloud crossing the sky, its upper edge yellowy silver and undulating – with almost exactly the same rhythm as the convolutions of the shadows (now disappeared because the sun has gone in). The cloud is moving fast. Almost at gale speed. On the houses opposite the wrought-iron balconies are absolutely still. For an instant the sun comes out again.
Snake shadow – gone.
Clouds moving.
Sea swelling.
Charlie’s van comes back.
A heavy swell at sea.
A memory. Visual.
Tall cliffs. White. With straight horizontal lines of dark flashing grey flint. Between the lines centuries of chalk deposit.
The fringe of the cliffs against the sky, grass hanging over.
The thickness of the turf in relation to the height of the cliffs like the thickness of an animal’s fur. At the height of the grass gulls wheeling. Figures of eight cut off by the cliff. The shadows of the cliffs on the sea (the tide is in, almost up to the cliffs.)
The shadow of the cliffs on the sea, lying on the sea, from the water’s edge to eighty meters out: the length of the coast. In the shadow of the cliff the sea is almost brown.
Further out, just beyond the shadow of the grass fringe, the sea is a green mixed with a little white. The green that oxidized copper goes, but with sun. As I write this very sentence, the sun comes out above Noel Road, casts the shadow of the window frame on the curtains, the curtains stir in the window, my pen casts a shadow on this paper and the sun goes in.
To look:
at everything which overflows the outline, the contour, the category, the name of what it is.
Berger, J., 1986. The Sense of Sight, New York, NY: Pantheon.
→ cats:: bibliography, teaching
→ tags:: bibliography, life, Light, photography, quotes, seeing, sky
freedom from mastery
→ commentThe greatest joy, and the greatest triumph, in art, comes at the moment when, realizing to the fullest your grip over the medium, you deliberately sacrifice it in the hope of discovering a vital hidden truth within you. It comes like a reward for patience — this freedom of mastery which is born of the hardest discipline. Then no matter what you do or say, you are absolutely right and nobody dare criticize you. I sense this very often in looking at Picasso’s work. The great freedom and spontaneity he reveals is born, one feels, because of the impact, the pressure, the support of the whole being which, for an endless period, has been subservient to the discipline of the spirit. The most careless gesture is as right, as true, as valid, as the most carefully planned strokes. This I know, and nobody could convince me to the contrary. Picasso here is only demonstrating a wisdom of life which the sage practices on another, higher level.
This morning, awake at five o’clock, the room almost dark still, I lay awake quietly meditating about the essay I would get up to write, and at the same time, as though playing a duet, watching the gradual change of colors in my paintings beside the bed, as the light slowly increased. I had the strange sensation then of imagining what might happen to those colors should the light continue to increase in strength beyond full daylight. And from thinking about the unknown color gamut to the forms themselves and then to their significance — what a world of conjecture I explored. In that moment I was able, so to speak, to place myself in a future which may one day be realized. I saw not only what I might one day be able to do, but also I saw this — that the anticipation of the event was an augur of the deed itself. Suddenly I realized how it had been with the struggle to express myself in writing. I saw back to the period when I had the most intense, exalted visions of words written and spoken, but in fact could only mutter brokenly. Today I see that my steadfast desire was alone responsible for whatever progress or mastery I have made. The reality is always there, and it is preceded by vision. And if one keeps looking steadily the vision crystallizes into fact or deed. There is no escaping it. It doesn’t matter what route one travels — every route brings you eventually to the goal. “All roads lead to Heaven,” is the Chinese proverb. If one accepted that fully, one would get there so much more quickly. One should not be worrying about the degree of “success” obtained by each and every effort, but only concentrate on maintaining the vision, keeping it pure and steady. The rest is sleight-of-hand work in the dark, a genuine automatic process, no less somnambulistic because accompanied by pains and aches. — Henry Miller
→ cats:: texts, third party texts
→ tags:: quotes, seeing, writing
post and trans or nada
To continue with our survey of disciplinary evolution: The term “post-disciplinarity” evokes an intellectual universe in which we inhabit the ruins of outmoded disciplinary structures, mediating between our nostalgia for this lost unity and our excitement at the intellectual freedom its demise can offer us. Is the era of post-disciplinarity upon us now? Finally, “trans-disciplinarity” refers to the highest level of integrated study, that which proposes the unity of intellectual frameworks beyond the disciplinary perspectives and points toward our potential to think in terms of frameworks, concepts, techniques, and vocabulary that we have not yet imagined. It must be acknowledged, however, that the very notion of “trans-disciplinarity” may strike many of us as chimerical, sinisterly monolithic, or as a ruse for smuggling back in old dreams of objectivity and universal knowledge. Are we then right back where we started, or does our investigation of disciplines and the nature of knowledge maintain our historical perspective? – Julie A. Buckler
Well, so what term to use? A completely new fabrication? A remix, a mash-up. Or just ignore and forget the whole thing about (public) discipline, instead, focusing on internal and self-discipline. That’s all that is important these days. Waning lives, crumbling Empire, who cares what labels people tattoo on each other’s brow. (keep away from m’fucking head, dude!)
→ comment→ cats:: thesis
→ tags:: quotes, trans-disciplinary
so that’s how it goes
→ commentAcquire new knowledge whilst thinking over the old, and you may become a teacher of others. — Confucius
→ cats:: teaching
→ tags:: quotes, teaching
this covers it!
→ commentI must create a system,
Or be enslaved by another Man’s;
I will not Reason and Compare,
My business is to Create.
- William Blake
→ cats:: thesis
→ tags:: creativity, quotes, reason, system
honestly,
→ commentTo design systems that work correctly we often need to understand and correct how they can go wrong — Dan Goldin, NASA Administrator, 2000
→ cats:: thesis
→ tags:: military-industrial complex, quotes, system
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
→ commentFrom my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
– Randall Jarrell
→ cats:: texts, third party texts
→ tags:: death, military-industrial complex, poetry, quotes
a bit from Rainer
→ commentBe patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. — R.M. Rilke
→ cats:: travelog
→ tags:: life-time, quotes, writing
gift:servant
→ commentThe intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant but has forgotten the gift. — Albert Einstein
→ cats:: texts
→ tags:: mind, quotes, society
analysis
Etymology: < post-classical Latin analysis act of resolving (something) into its elements (13th cent. in British and continental sources) < ancient Greek ἀνάλυσις action of loosing or releasing, fact of dissolving, resolution of a problem, in Hellenistic Greek also solution of a problem < ἀναλύειν to unloose, undo ( < ἀνά- ana- prefix + λύειν to loose: see lysis* n.) + -σις -sis suffix. Compare French analyse critical study of a work (a1630), method of resolution and demonstration in mathematics (1637), method of reflection and exposition in philosophy (1637), method which employs deductive reasoning to establish the nature, structure, and essential features of something, starting from its constituent parts (1690), summary (end of the 17th cent.), chemical analysis (1726), grammatical analysis (1775), Italian analisi (1598 in Florio; subsequently from 1669), Spanish análisis (a1621), German Analysis (probably 15th cent.), Analyse (18th cent.).
* ‘A plinth or step above the cornice of the podium of ancient temples, which surrounded or embraced the stylobate**’ (Gwilt Archit. 1842).
** A continuous basement upon which a row of columns is supported.
hmmm, wow! The “systems analyst” takes on an entirely different appearance and role! To loosen, release the solidity of social construct.
→ comment→ cats:: thesis
→ tags:: language, quotes
so it goes
→ commentIf used in numbers, atomic bombs not only can nullify any nation’s military effort, but can demolish its social and economic structure and prevent their re-establishment for long periods of time. With such weapons, especially if employed in conjunction with other weapons of mass destruction such as pathogenic bacteria, it is quite possible to depopulate vast areas of the earth’s surface, leaving only vestigal remnants of man’s material works. — Report of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Operations Crossroads, 30 June 1947
→ cats:: thesis
→ tags:: military-industrial complex, quotes, time, war, weapons
other thoughts via John McPhee
“If the profession of an engineer were not based upon exact science,” he said, “I might tremble for the result, in view of the immensely of the interests dependent on my success. But every atom that moves onward in the river, from the moment it leaves its home among the crystal springs or mountain snows, throughout the fifteen hundred leagues of its devious pathway, until it is finally lost in the vast waters of the Gulf, is controlled by laws as fixed and certain as those which direct the majestic march of the heavenly spheres. Every phenomenon and apparent eccentricity of the river — its scouring and depositing action, its caving banks, the formation of the bars at its mouth, the effect of the waves and tides of the sea upon its currents and deposits — is controlled by law as immutable as the Creator, and the engineer need only to be insured that he does not ignore the existence of any of these laws, to feel positively certain of the results he aims at.” James B. Eads, engineer, quoted in “Atchafalaya” by John McPhee
versus
“One who knows the Mississippi will promptly aver — not aloud but to himself — that ten thousand River Commissions, with the mines of the world at their back, cannot tame that lawless stream, cannot curb it or confine it, cannot say to it, ‘Go here,’ or ‘Go there,’ and make it obey; cannot save a shore which it has sentenced; cannot bar its path with an obstruction which it will not tear down, dance over, and laugh at. But a discreet man will not put these things into spoken words; for the West Point engineers have not their superiors anywhere; they know all that can be known of their abstruse science; and so, since they conceive that they can fetter and handcuff that river and boss him, it is but wisdom for the unscientific man to keep still, lie low, and wait till they do it. Captain Eads, with his jetties, has done a work at the mouth of the Mississippi which seemed clearly impossible; so we do not feel full confidence now to prophesy against like impossibilities. Otherwise one would pipe out and say the Commission might as well bully the comets in their courses and undertake to make them behave, as try to bully the Mississippi into right and reasonable conduct.” — Mark Twain in “Life on the Mississippi” quoted in “Atchafalaya” by John McPhee
from The Control of Nature: Atchafalaya — John McPhee, 23 February 1987 in The New Yorker.
and this from Bill Gammage in a precursor of his recent book “The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia” (Allen & Unwin, 2011)
→ commentI suggest that people turned to crops, herds and stores to protect them from other people. The reason farmers stepped onto the road to civilisation was military.
Aborigines ensured that usually they had plenty of food by controlling their population and by maximizing their resources. But their truly great achievement lay in how they protected their resources — not by military force, but by religious sanction. Even under extreme duress Aborigines rarely took food that was not theirs. That may have been so in early Europe and elsewhere too — most societies attempt to sanctify property. If so, it broke down. Farmers were led to protect their food, thus lost the predictability and security that widely dispersed resources gave hunter-gatherers, and thus had to work hard and make hard work a virtue. Work, sedentism and storing generate individual and collective strivings for surplus, for wealth. That is the road Europeans took, and Aborigines avoided. In August 1770 James Cook could not have known whether Aborigines were ‘far more happier’ than Europeans, but he was right to see that they were content in ‘all the necessarys of Life’, which we Europeans, ever restless for more, can never be. — Bill Gammage, 2005
→ cats:: thesis
→ tags:: engineering, life, pathway, quotes, resources, techno-social, technology, water
a life of excess
→ commentThe World is a Sacred Vessel …
As for those who would take the whole world
To tinker as they see fit,
I observe that they never succeed:
For the world is a sacred vessel
Not made to be altered by man.
The tinker will spoil it;
Usurpers will lose it.For indeed there are things
That must move ahead,
While others must lag;
And some that feel hot,
While others feel cold;
And some that are strong,
While others are weak;
And vigorous ones,
While others worn out.So the Wise Man discards
Extreme inclinations
To make sweeping judgments,
Or to a life of excess.
– Lao Tzo, Tao te Ching, Chapter 26
→ cats:: travelog
→ tags:: change, consumption, quotes, techno-social
grim Shaw
→ commentTHE DEVIL: And is Man any the less destroying himself for all this boasted brain of his? Have you walked up and down upon the earth lately? I have; and I have examined Man’s wonderful inventions. And I tell you that in the arts of life man invents nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence and famine. The peasant I tempt to-day eats and drinks what was eaten and drunk by the peasants of ten thousand years ago; and the house he lives in has not altered as much in a thousand centuries as the fashion of a lady’s bonnet in a score of weeks. But when he goes out to slay, he carries a marvel of mechanism that lets loose at the touch of his finger all the hidden molecular energies, and leaves the javelin, the arrow, the blowpipe of his fathers far behind. In the arts of peace Man is a bungler. I have seen his cotton factories and the like, with machinery that a greedy dog could have invented if it had wanted money instead of food. I know his clumsy typewriters and bungling locomotives and tedious bicycles: they are toys compared to the Maxim gun, the submarine torpedo boat. There is nothing in Man’s industrial machinery but his greed and sloth: his heart is in his weapons. This marvelous force of Life of which you boast is a force of Death: Man measures his strength by his destructiveness. What is his religion? An excuse for hating ME. What is his law? An excuse for hanging YOU. What is his morality? Gentility! an excuse for consuming without producing. What is his art? An excuse for gloating over pictures of slaughter. What are his politics? Either the worship of a despot because a despot can kill, or parliamentary cockfighting. I spent an evening lately in a certain celebrated legislature, and heard the pot lecturing the kettle for its blackness, and ministers answering questions. When I left I chalked up on the door the old nursery saying –”Ask no questions and you will be told no lies.” — George Bernard Shaw, The Devil speaking in “Don Juan in Hell,” Act III of “Man and Superman,” 1902
→ cats:: thesis
→ tags:: death, life, money, politics, quotes, weapons
natural selection
→ commentIt has been pointed out by Boltzmann that the fundamental object of contention in the life-struggle, in the evolution of the organic world, is available energy. In accord with this observation is the principle that, in the struggle for existence, the advantage must go to those organisms whose energy-capturing devices are most efficient in directing available energy into channels favorable to the preservation of the species. — Alfred Lotka in “Contribution to the Energetics of Evolution“
→ cats:: bibliography, thesis
→ tags:: energy, evolution, quotes
dreams and desires
→ commentWhat am I supposed to do in a group of militants who expect me to leave in the cloakroom, I won’t say a few ideas — for my ideas would have led me to join the group — but the dreams and desires which never leave me, the wish to live authentically and without restraint? What’s the use of exchanging one isolation, one monotony, one lie for another? When the illusion of real change has been exposed, a mere change of illusion becomes intolerable. But present conditions are precisely these: the economy cannot stop making us consume more and more, and to consume without respite is to change illusions at an accelerating pace which gradually dissolves the illusion of change. We find ourselves alone, unchanged, frozen in the empty space behind the waterfall of gadgets, family cars and paperbacks.
People without imagination are beginning to tire of the importance attached to comfort, to culture, to leisure, to all that destroys imagination. This means that people are not really tired of comfort, culture and leisure but of the use to which they are put, which is precisely what stops us enjoying them. — Raoul Vaneigem (The Revolution of Everyday Life)
→ cats:: thesis, travelog
→ tags:: change, dreams, quotes
basic:
→ commentJust as the constant increase of entropy is the basic law of the universe, so it is the basic law of life to be ever more highly structured and to struggle against entropy. — Vaclav Havel
→ cats:: thesis
→ tags:: entropy, life, quotes
post-post
the day after the ascent of a 14,000+ footer (Grays Peak, near Silverplume), no sore-ness. remarkable, considering the intensity of the cardio work that such an effort entails. heart-throb rising from chest to throat to head as altitude is gained.
heading back into deep work on the thesis after a string of field research expeditions and dislocations. the gathering of material is continuous, as is the (plodding) process of getting archive material up (see new (old) stuff)
then, back to work.
So human social organizations constantly reconstitute themselves through a flow of members and other adjunct materials, information, and energy. Many of these are selectively favored through a continuing expansion or effort to expand above their original size. Such organizations may reach a point at which further expansion is blocked, and budding off is the only alternative to continue. The blockage may be due to internal structural problems, such as a Marxian internal contradiction, or the appearance of revolutions, and so on; or, to external constraints–such as furious neighboring states, or a strongly competitive market enterprise. — Richard Adams
I would suggest that the enumerated items — members, materials, information, and energy — may be re-categorized into energy, and the embodied and surrounding protocols (flow pathways accumulated through shared (social) information). Materials should be ignored in the sense that they are ultimately manifestations of energy: traditionalists are be encouraged to consider that the concept of ‘things’ and of static ‘materials’ are merely convenient constructs to be transcended or shed in the stead of energy and flow…
Let us transfix this momentary eternity which encloses everything, past and future, but without losing in the immobility of language any of its gigantic erotic whirling. — Nikos Kazantzakis
Ta… impossible, when writing, to accede, to yield tradition to this, eh?
→ comment→ cats:: thesis, travelog
→ tags:: archive, energy, flow, quotes, research, walking
Day of Affirmation
It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance. — Robert Kennedy
From his University of Cape Town, South Africa N.U.S.A.S. “Day of Affirmation” speech. Looks to be an interesting film.
→ comment→ cats:: travelog
→ tags:: energy, quotes, water
attention deficit?
I find that I am able to attend voluntarily, now to one and now to the other system of lines; and that then this system remains visible alone for a certain time, whilst the other completely vanishes. This happens, for example, whenever I try to count the lines first of one and then of the other system. … But it is extremely hard to chain the attention down to one of the systems for long, unless we associate with our looking some distinct purpose which keeps the activity of the attention perpetually renewed. Such a one is counting the lines, comparing their intervals, or the like. An equilibrium of the attention, persistent for any length of time, is under no circumstances attainable. The natural tendency of attention when left to itself is to wander to ever new things; and so soon as the interest of its object is over, so soon as nothing new is to be noticed there, it passes, in spite of our will, to something else. If we wish to keep it upon one and the same object, we most seek constantly to find out something new about the latter, especially if other powerful impressions are attracting us away.
This is only restrictedly true. We move our eyes by our will; but one without training cannot so easily execute the intention of making them converge. At any moment, however, he can execute that of looking at a near object, in which act convergence is involved. Now just as little can we carry out our purpose to keep our attention steadily fixed on a certain object, when our interest in the object is exhausted and the purpose is inwardly formulated in this abstract way. But we can set ourselves new questions about the object, so that a new interest in it arises, and then the attention will remain riveted. The relation of attention to will is, then, less one of immediate than of mediate control. — Hermann von Helmholtz, “Psychologische Optiks,” as quoted in William James, “The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1″
What bugs me is that stupid little black dot in the picture …
→ comment→ cats:: thesis
→ tags:: attention, intention, quotes, seeing, thesis
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