miranda (w.h. auden)
My dear one is mine as mirrors are lonely, As the poor and sad are real to the good king, And the high green hill sits always by the sea. Up jumped the Black Man behind the elder tree, Turned a somersault and ran away waving; My Dear One is mine as mirrors are lonely. The Witch gave a squawk; her venomous body Melted into light as water leaves a spring, And the high green hill sits always by the sea. At his crossroads, too, the Ancient prayed for me, Down his wasted cheeks tears of joy were running: My dear one is mine as mirrors are lonely. He kissed me awake, and no one was sorry; The sun shone on sails, eyes, pebbles, anything, And the high green hill sits always by the sea. So to remember our changing garden, we Are linked as children in a circle dancing: My dear one is mine as mirrors are lonely, And the high, green hill sits always by the sea. -- W. H. Auden
norman borlaug.
the father of the ‘green revolution’ in agriculture died last sunday.
reflections on his legacy here.
solaris.
wow. just emerged from solaris. that just ate me whole and it was amazing.
any more adventures of this kind? mind and matter issues and love and identity ones too? recommendations here.
wow.
abstraction.
rippled from here. i am not sure how ‘conceptuality’ is different from ‘abstraction’. in all fairness, i am trying to do something else here.
[from the OED]
1. The act of withdrawing; withdrawal, separation or removal; in modern usage euphem. secret or dishonest removal; pilfering, purloining.
an abstraction I never greatly cared about. 1848 MILL Pol. Econ. 5 (1876) A wrongful abstraction of wealth from certain members of the community.
2. ‘Abstraction, in chemistry, denotes the drawing off, or exhaling away, a menstruum from the subject it had been put to dissolve. Some also use the word as synonymous with distillation or even cohobation.’ Chambers Cyc. Suppl. 1753.
3. The act or process of separating in thought, of considering a thing independently of its associations; or a substance independently of its attributes; or an attribute or quality independently of the substance to which it belongs.
it is merely a negation to one or more objects, in consequence of its concentration on another.4. The result of abstracting: the idea of something which has no independent existence; a thing which exists only in idea; something visionary.
5. A state of withdrawal or seclusion from worldly things or things of sense.
6. The state of mental withdrawal; inattention to things present; absence of mind.
7. In the fine arts, the practice or state of freedom from representational qualities; a work of art with these characteristics.
8. Comb. abstraction-monger, one who deals with visionary ideas.
weaving rainbows?
just finished reading richard dawkins’s ‘unweaving the rainbow’ (1998) and have had very strong reactions to it of which i am still trying to make sense. All that follows is not meant as a discouragement from reading the book.
the first feeling that comes from it is that it can tell me things about biological processes (co-evolution, the idea that organisms are made up of other organisms, and feedback mechanisms in human consciousness and perception to mention but a few) that are quite fascinating and rich material of how animals live in their environments. I have to say that I was more impressed the more I read of it, and the last chapter truly resonated with resonate with some of the ideas that i’ve encountered in anthropology interested in biological processes and how the metaphors used to describe them might go some way towards describing social phenomena. he is also somewhat keen on reacting to what i suppose then was a long string of reactions and polarisations of ‘the selfish gene’, his earlier book that he kind of revisits in a chapter called the ’selfish cooperator’. the last chapter in particular goes some way towards dealing with the idea of subjective consciousness and mind-brain patterning understanding.
while the whole book goes some way towards dissolving strict oppositions of science versus poetry, it does not stand away from its pedestal of authority and trashes anything that is remotely ‘religious’ (my use of this term being closer to an anthro use of it, as describing phenomena of social efficacy and meaning? — his examples often deriding the patterning processes that people resort to in explanatory frameworks such as astrology or other ‘nonsense’ acc to him).
i am guessing from the tack of this book that he is taking issue with ‘creationists’ (also much more dogmatically in ‘god delusion’ – a more recent work which has not been received well by reviewers). he also takes issue with ‘relativist’ frameworks, and quotes some, to be honest, quite unfortunate instances of anthropology-in-destructive-mode, aka po-mo utterances that, taken out of context, are pretty easy to be misread and twisted. these type of attacks happen mostly at the beginning of the book, as a ‘positioning’ device of sorts. they are like this one, that quotes an anthropologist matt cartmill who writes in Discover magazine in 1998 in an article that whistleblows a book by gross and levitt on ‘higher superstition: the academic left and its quarrel with science’ (1994) to illustrate the general jist of those Dawkins attacks here:
‘anybody who claims to have objective knowledge about anything is trying to control and dominate the rest of us… There are no objective facts. all supposed ‘facts’ are contaminated with theories, and all theories are infested with moral and political doctrines… Therefore, when some guy in a lab coat tells you that such and such is an objective fact… he must have a political agenda up his starched white sleeve.’
cartmill is a respectable biological anthropologist in ‘evolutionary anthropology’ at duke. he then goes and follows the quote by
There are even a few vocal fifth columnists within science itself who hold exactly these views, and use them to waste the time of the rest of us. Carmill’s thesis is that there is an unexpected an pernicious alliance between the know-nothing fundamentalist religious right and the sophisticated academic left. A bizarre manifestation of the alliance is their joint opposition to the theory of evolution. The opposition of the fundamentalists is obvious. That of the left is a compound of hostility to science in general, of ‘respect’ (weasel word of our time) for tribal creation myths, and of various political agendas. Both these strange bedfellows share a concern for ‘human dignity’ and take offence at treating humans as ‘animals’. … Purveyors of cultural relativism and the ‘higher superstition’ are apt to pour scorn on the search for truth. This partly stems from the conviction that truths are different in different cultures… and partly from the inability of philosophers of science to agree about truth anyway. There are, of course, genuine philosophical difficulties. Is a truth just a so-far-unfalsified hypothesis? What status does truth have in the strange, uncertain world of quantum theory? Is anything ultimately true? On the other hand, no philosopher has any trouble when suspecting his wife of adultery. ‘Is it true?’ feels like a fair question, and few who ask it in their private lives would be satisfied with logic-chopping sophistry in response.
I am not too sure how to respond to this bunch of statements, which, to me muddle certain (interweaving) things:
1. relativism does not equal relativity, relativity does not mean anything goes, it means awareness of positioning
2. epistemological truth-claims are themselves embedded in systems of validation and power, i.e. asking ‘what is truth’ is not the right question in this context
However, the bunching of left-wing academics (including social anthros) with fundamentalist right-wing religious arguments is a cause for alarm. I believe that a lot of anthro that attempts to be radical in its treatment of subjects gets misunderstood, and labelled ‘po-mo’ in the process.
Anthros are really bad at PR, and sometimes we get caught up in so much complicated social life that we cannot think about them properly and our accounts are incredibly rich, but incredibly un-appealing to larger audiences. We tend to excuse this as ‘complexity’.
photo: slain’s castle
consequences.
“When one puts objectivity in parenthesis, all views, all verses in the multiverse are equally valid. Understanding this, you lose the passion for changing the other. One of the results is that you look apathetic to people. Now, those who do not live with objectivity in parentheses have a passion for changing the other. So they have this passion and you do not. For example, at the university where I work, people may say, ‘Humberto is not really interested in anything,’ because I don’t have the passion in the same sense that the person that has objectivity without parentheses. And I think that this is the main difficulty. To other people you may seem too tolerant. However, if the others also put objectivity in parentheses , you discover that disagreements can only be solved by entering a domain of co-inspiration, in which things are done together because the participants want to do them. With objectivity in parentheses, it is easy to do things together because one is not denying the other in the process of doing them.”
Humberto Maturana – Interview 1985.
autonomy.
Such oscillating systems [as ecological systems] are operated by thresholds – not by states, but by differences and changes and even differences between changes. There is information not only in our words but also in the processes we describe. It’s nice to have the explanation in step with the system of ideas within the process you are trying to explain… Now if you are going to face oscillating systems, you meet a very curious circumstance – that a certain degree of reality is imported to the ‘system’, the chunk of living matter. There is a justification of some sort in drawing a line around it, perhaps in giving it a name. That justification is based on the fact of autonomy, of literal ‘autonomy’ in that the [topology of the] system names itself. The injunctions which govern the [topology of the] system necessarily are message which stand for the name of the system. The system is auto-self-nomic, self-naming, or self-ruling. And that is the only autonomy there is, as far as I know. It’s recursivenss, and recursiveness is crucial to any system containing if-then links, where the ‘then’ is not logical but temporal ‘then’ (Bateson, A Sacred Unity, 1991: 181-2)
he’s the (dead) man of the week, definitely.
i wish i had more time to read fiction.
when i’m grown up, i would love to be a literary critic, reading the works of my choice and writing about them. but i suppose that train is more or less gone.
so, if you feel inclined that way, read mircea cartarescu, a romanian writer i adore. the most recent book translated into french is ‘pourquoi nous aimons les femmes’.
else, i really like albanian literature of all kinds. i am not sure whether it is the translation that makes the language appear rich or what it is about this language, but it works! more here.
want an awesome story told?
i know, i hardly get away with using american adjectives, but hey!
the garden of forking paths – by JL Borges…
hypertext version here.
and this stuff is directly quoted in the paper i am writing at the moment, not that you get to thinking i would be procrastinating. i couldn’t even spell that word if i tried.
Knowledge is In the Air.
I am still amazed sometimes at how much we are sponges when it comes to appropriating knowledge.
I mean, how exactly does it come about in writing?
I wrote this outline late at night, and went to sleep. When I revisited it in the morning, I found it to be bursting with vectors that I had not consciously considered. But I suppose they have been around me, in the cakes I make, in the conferences I fall asleep in, in the dreams that make me. So somehow osmosis is not just interaction between single cells.
I will not even go into the question of ‘where’ exactly this is supposed to happen, but I will keep it at the back of my mind [as they say, even though mind may not be the right word, and it is not a bounded, closed-off space, but a dynamic contact-based interface - I wish I was a neuroscientist just for a day...].
Of course, this knowledge may only be valid only until something else comes around and hangs over our heads. And that thought can be a little bit destabilizing…
