Tuesday, December 31, 2002

 
ALMOST AN AMPHIBIAN

"The Invention of Printing, though ingenious, compared with the invention of Letters, is no great matter." Thomas Hobbes

Bewilderness

"The original and natural idea of knowledge is that of "cunning" or the possession of wits." Odysseus

"Every letter is a godsend" - James Joyce

"We are like early amphibians, so to speak, struggling out of the waters that have hitherto covered our kind, into the air, seeking to breathe in a new fashion and emancipate ouselves from long accepted and long unquestioned necessities. At last it becomes for us a case of air or nothing. But the new land has not definitely emerged from the waters and we swim distressfully in an element we wish to abandon."
H.G.Wells

To be or not to begs the question

To be and not to be arise mutually Lao Tzu - Tao Te Ching

To swing or not to swing?
That is the hanger!
Is it hipper for the wig to dig
The flips and drags of the wheel of fortune
Or to come on like Kinsey
Against this mass mess
And by this stance cover the action
Lord Buckley

Marshall McLuhan uttered these next few words back in 1954: before we read them let's pause & delve, let's dwell together, to collect our phantom limbs and witness the dancing ground beyond the mutter of all belief, for the clearing of at least one Adam & Eve attention span.
"In ordinary perception men perform the miracle of recreating within themselves - in their interior faculties - the external world. This miracle is the work of the nous poietikos or of the agent intellect - that is, the poetic or creative process. The exterior world in every instant of perception is interiorized and recreated in a new matter. Ourselves. And in this creative work that is perception and cognition, we experience immediately that dance of Being ..."

Happy New Year & Happy New Ears!

Let auld Aquinas be woven into roles of wisdom
Loving Hildegard of Bingen bringing birthsong into being
Many becoming One are scatterling to gather

Access All Eras
A wake, so eyes may open in the stars ...


posted by Andrew 12/31/2002 05:12:00 PM

Thursday, December 12, 2002

 
AN OAR TO CARVE SUCH A HUGE HAM

"But of all other stupendous inventions, what sublimity of mind must have been his who conceived how to communicate his most secret thoughts to any other person, though very far distant either in time or place, speaking with those who are in the Indies, speaking to those who are not yet born, nor shall be this thousand or ten thousand years? And with no greater difficulty than the various arrangement of two dozen little signs upon paper? Let this be the seal of all the admirable inventions of man."
Galileo

Understanding Media : The Extensions of Man

WHO GAVE YOU THAT NUMB?
The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he may never recover bliss-being-awareness

Society derives from sex, from mammalian pair bonds and pack bonds
From Neuroeconomics by Hagbard Celine
"Society derives from sex, from reproductive relationships. Mammalian pair bonds and pack bonds (imprinted emotions of affection and trust) held the first human bands and tribes together as working units. At the center, the hub, stood the orgasmic tenderness - the shared love of the genital embrace in the mating act - and out of this radiated the "sublimated" tenderness of parent-infant, brother-sister, uncles and aunts and grandparents, the whole "extended family" or hunting/food-gathering band."

Anne Husted Burleigh - Wendell Berry's Community
Berry's themes are marriage, community, land, and the fidelity that binds us to all three. Trust, fidelity, standing by one's word, are the cement of all human relations and therefore of marriage and community.
Marriage, in Berry's view, is the cornerstone of the community, the engine that energizes human life. For most of us, marriage is the form of our lives, of which, once again, fidelity is the cement. To break our word would be to break the form. Without faithfully keeping our word, there can be no marriage and therefore no community. Berry points out in his essay, "Poetry and Marriage," that fidelity, standing by our word, "is a double fidelity: to the community and to oneself." Only within the community can we achieve our end to know and love others; within the community one is "at once free and a member."

Interview with Terence McKenna
G: You've said quite often that the world is made of language, and this seems to have caused quite a bit of confusion, myself included. Could you clarify what you mean by the word 'world' and what you mean by the word 'language' in that context?

TM: Well, for example (the example I always use), the child lying in a crib with an open window - a pre-verbal or nearly pre-verbal child - and a hummingbird flies through the room. It's a psychedelic miracle, it's absolutely stunning. The boundaries of that experience are completely undefined. But then the mother or the nanny walks into the room and says, "Oh! It's a bird, baby. Bird." The miracle immediately collapses down into a hard little tile, and by the time a person is six years old, reality has been entirely replaced by a mosaic of defined and very non-numinous meaning. And so people are then imprisoned in this language. And they will remain so imprisoned until the yawning grave, unless they are put in touch with the transhistorical wisdom of the body. And that means psychedelics. By the way, this idea that reality is made of language is actually the standard position in structural linguistics. This is not a radical position, this is dull-as-dog-shit orthodoxy for those people.

Sleeping and Awakening

Do not say, 'It is morning,' and dismiss it with a name of yesterday.
See it for the first-time as a new-born child that has no name.
Rabindranath Tagore - "Stray Birds"


posted by Andrew 12/12/2002 03:43:00 PM

Tuesday, December 10, 2002

 
EQUATIONS - MADE OF DHARMAS

On the Chemistry of Plato's Timaeus by John Visintainer

"At the beginning of Greek philosophy there was the dilemma of the one and the many. We know: there is an ever changing variety of phenomena appearing to our senses; still somehow we believe that ultimately it should be possible to reduce everything to one principle. We try to understand the phenomena and, in doing so, we realize that all understanding begins with recognising similarities or regularities in the phenomena.
... It was a characteristic feature of the way of thinking in ancient Greece that the first philosophers looked for a material cause of all things."
Werner Heisenberg - Natural Law And The Structure of Matter (1964)

Is the Universe Alive?

"In place of clod-like particles of matter in a lumbering Newtonian machine we have an interlocking network of information exchange - a holistic, indeterministic and open system - vibrant with potentialities and bestowed with infinite richness. The human mind is a by-product of this vast informational process, a by-product with the curious capability of being able to understand, at least in part, the principles on which the process runs.
Descartes founded the image of the human mind as a sort of nebulous substance that exists independently of the body. Much later, in the 1930s, Gilbert Ryle derided this dualism in a pithy reference to the mind part as 'the ghost in the machine'. Ryle articulated his criticism during the triumphal phase of materialism and mechanism. The 'machine' he referred to was the human body and the human brain, themselves just parts of the larger cosmic machine. But already, when he coined that pithy expression, the new physics was at work, undermining the world view on which Ryle's philosophy was based. Today ... we can see that Ryle was right to dismiss the notion of the ghost in the machine - not because there is no ghost, but because there is no machine."
Paul Davies & John Gribbin - The Matter Myth (Viking, 1991, pages 302-303)

Thrashing it down to little gibs by Jart

Three things are required for beauty:
wholeness, harmony, radiance.
Thomas Aquinas

The Octave of Energy

RIGHT WHERE YOU ARE SITTING NOW

"Value is the Schr�dinger's Cat in every equation."

What is Language?

"Within the Hindu tradition dharma is relative and dependent on the conditions of society. It always has a social implication. It is the bond which holds society together. This is fitting to the ancient origins of the term. But within modern Buddhist thought dharma becomes the phenomenal world - the object of perception, thought or understanding. A chair, for example, is not composed of atoms of substance, it is composed of dharmas."
Robert M Pirsig - Lila : An Enquiry into Morals (Black Swan, 1997, page 446)

We May Be Evolving Faster Than We Think

Keith Windschuttle - Absolutely Relative

"I don't believe that the world is made of quarks or electromagnetic waves, or stars or planets, or any of these things. I believe that the world is made of language."
Terence McKenna - The Archaic Revival


posted by Andrew 12/10/2002 04:02:00 PM

Wednesday, December 04, 2002

 
THE PARTNERSHIP ENTERPRISE

"The first thing Parmenides is told when he arrives in the underworld is 'Welcome young man, partnered by immortal charioteers.' But people don't care too much what he's told, so they translate it as 'Welcome young man, accompanied by immortal charioteers.'
That sounds a much simpler statement for the goddess to make. And yet it's also to misunderstand the meaning of a word that in Greek always has the sense of partnership - of inseparability, intimacy, of an enduring bond that sustains and never ends. In human terms it can be the bond between brothers and sisters, but above all the intimacy of the partnership between a husband and wife."
In The Dark Places of Wisdom - Peter Kingsley (Element, 1999, pages 83 - 84)

WHAT IF HUMAN NATURE IS HISTORICAL? by Robert M Young

"When Freud, like other men, asks in bitterness "What do women want?" he is reacting to the depth and the force - the irrepressible yet never clearly mobilized force - of this bitterest human protest of all: What women want is to stop serving as scapegoats (their own scapegoats as well as men's and children's scapegoats) for human resentment of the human condition. They want this so painfully and so pervasively, and until quite recently it was such a hopeless thing to want, that they have not yet been able to say out loud that they want it.
What hinges on our continued consent to carry this onus is nothing more or less than the pathological equilibrium of our species life itself. This is part of why we still hesitate to mobilize the force that is latent in our diffuse protest, hesitate to withdraw our chronically grudging consent. And it is also part of the uneasiness - tinged, I suspect, with some shadowy, fearful hope - behind Freud's testy question. Men, too, both fear and long for what will happen when women can really say what they want. What will happen is a self-revision of our collective life that has to have been incubating as long as live-bearing mammalian bodies have been animated by human sentience."
The Mermaid and the Minotaur - Dorothy Dinnerstein (Other Press, 1999 - Originally published 1976)

Humanity Dreams Itself into Existence - Lewis Mumford - Reflections (1975)

The Ninth Key of Basil Valentine

ACKNOWLEDGING THE WHOLE OF POETRY AS EVOLVING COMPOSITION

"No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism. the necessity that he shall he conform, that he shall he cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing ... is modified by the introduction of the new ...
The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of ... the form of ... literature will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past."
T.S.Eliot - Tradition And The Individual Talent (1919)

"The many become one, and are increased by one."

The Gesture of Balance

"As Dorothy Dinnerstein notes {Norman O} Brown fell into the error of regarding all enterprise - the attempt to comprehend the world, or even involve oneself in it - as the attempt of the infant to console itself for the loss of the Primary Unity, or kinesthetic wholeness. All of culture is thus seen as a form of substitute satisfaction. What Dinnerstein argues is that we have to distinguish between enterprise and driven behaviour. Enterprise, says Dinnerstein, is actually a healthy thing, a primary satisfaction rather than a secondary one. The problem she says, lies not in enterprise per se but in the situation in which the kinesthetic is renounced to the point that the visual is needed to fulfill compensatory functions. Brown, Roheim, Balint, Merleau-Ponty, Wallon, and Lacan were guilty of what might be called "universalization" - they zeroed in so completely on this one tendency that they mistakenly turned it into the whole of the human condition, and thereby skewed the meaning of human effort. All of these writers, Dinnerstein essentially says, were correct insofar as they recognized that we ruin enterprise by trying to get it to replace a Primary Unity we originally lost, but incorrect insofar as they argued that this is embedded in the structure of the human psyche (or body) itself and that one cannot relate to the world, and to our loss, in a different way.
... there is a way of going about enterprise, particularly as it applies to creativity, in which the activity is preceded by wholeness, rather than being a frantic attempt to achieve it. This frantic approach to life is not inevitable; we really don't have to spend our lives chasing ecstasy in an effort to shut down the nemo {a feeling of hollowness, an anti-ego, a state of being nobody}. It is in fact possible to embrace enterprise, the cosmological urge, Attali's "composition," and the like in terms of a living out of the ebb and flow of union and separation."
Coming To Our Senses : Body and Spirit in the Hidden History of the West -
Morris Berman (Unwin Hyman, 1990, page 316)

"Passion and reason have been separated traditionally, but minds without emotions are not actually minds at all.
Although a cognitive neuroscience is now popular, there are relatively few neuroscientists engaged in the field of affective neuroscience (studying emotions and brain)."
Hiroaki Niki

"The very possibility of emotional development that is genuinely on a par with - as high as, level with - the development of reason is only seldom entertained."
Margaret Donaldson - Human Minds : An Exploration (Penguin , 1993, page 264)


posted by Andrew 12/04/2002 03:15:00 AM

Monday, December 02, 2002

 
METANOIA - A CHANGE OF HEART

When Robert Oppenheimer was asked in 1947 about what the atomic bomb meant for physics, he responded, "In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humour, and no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose."

"To repent of an action is to modify the past."
Oscar Wilde

January 1999 - Dr. Karen Hodges speaks of "The Repentance of Faust"

Enlarging Human Personality : Lloyd Ross and Workplace Democracy
"Oscar Wilde is ... remembered for his cutting wit ... he is rarely recalled as the author of The Soul of Man Under Socialism. In the Chifley lecture, Lloyd Ross did not refer to Wilde's essay, published in 1891. Yet Lloyd Ross and Oscar Wilde had in common a belief that while socialism had to be expressed as collective action, ultimately socialism had to create fulfilled individuals, free to realise their potential. Oscar Wilde wrote that if socialism resulted in industrial tyranny, then the last stage of man would be worse than the first."

"To make men Socialists is nothing, but to make Socialism human is a great thing."
Oscar Wilde

"The theology of society severed every tie, renounced all dependence, and flaunted its distinguishing feature: the tautological, the self-advertising. The power and impact of totalitarian regimes cannot be explained unless we accept that the very notion of society has appropriated an unprecedented power, one previously the preserve of religion. The results were not long in coming: the liturgies in the stadiums, the positive heroes, the fecund women, the massacres. Being antisocial would become the equivalent of sinning against the Holy Ghost. Whether the pretexts speak of race or class, the one sufficient reason for killing your enemies was always the same: these people were harmful to society. Society becomes the subject above all subjects, for whose sake everything is justified."
Roberto Calasso - Literature and the Gods (Vintage 2001, pages 173 -4)


posted by Andrew 12/02/2002 05:23:00 PM