Saturday, April 24, 2004

 
You crawl us and we'll crawl you

Dream of a true mythology (Part 2)

Steve Dietz: Ten Dreams of Technology
The collection of dreams includes: Symbiosis, Emergence, Immersion, World Peace, Transparency, Flows, Open Work, Other, New Art, and Hacking. The author notes that these dreams of technology have a future, even if it is not yet determined.

Topologies in Networks
"What I want to suggest is to think about a topology not only of objects, of materials and of behaviour, but a topology of networks, a topology of agency, of events and of subjectivity. Questions that can then come into view are: what is the 'place' of a translocal encounter, what are the social dimensions of a networked event, and what forms of distributed subjectivity can emerge from it?" Andreas Broeckmann

In Quest of the Tristero
What are the signifiers, signs and symptoms of these times in America?

Doctor Faustus and the Universal Machine
"Language become opaque. It becomes the world."

Thomas Pynchon - The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)
"For it was now like walking among matrices of a great digital computer, the zeroes and ones twinned above, hanging like balanced mobiles right and left, ahead, thick, maybe endless. Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth."

Ekphrasis, Escape, and Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49

"By process of elimination, one is no longer anything more than an abstract line, or a piece [....] It is by conjugating, by continuing with other lines, other pieces, that one makes a world that can overlay the first one, like a transparency. Animal elegance, the camouflage fish, the clandestine: this fish is crisscrossed by abstract lines that resemble nothing, that do not even follow its organic divisions; but thus disorganized, disarticulated, it worlds with the lines of a rock, sand, and plants, becoming imperceptible."
Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari - A Thousand Plateaus (Translated by Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, page 280)

Three-Toed Sloth: The Secret life of Plants - Cosma Shalizi
"The idea of using particles to do computation goes back at least to the Game of Life in the 1970s, and it's a pretty standard trick in studying CAs. (Here is a non-EvCA paper which does it, for instance.) Probably the most mathematically elaborate use of particle computation is Matthew Cook's proof that one of the most basic cellular automata rules (called "rule 110") is as powerful as a universal Turing machine. Universal Turing machines are equivalent to a kind of string-manipulation system called a Post tag system (named after the logician Emil Post, who invented them in the 1920s). Cook devised a variation on Post tag systems he called cyclic tag systems, and showed that they, too, are computationally universal."

Words to plants by Fatima Cvrckova
"What is the principle of L-system-based plant models? A summary of a hypothetical example (by and for a mathematically naive biologist) would go as follows: Assume that a plant body can be divided into a finite number of modules, structural subunits of a few well-defined types (such as terminal buds, internodes with leaves and axillar buds, flowers, fruit). Imagine that the plant develops in discrete time-steps, corresponding e.g. to the plastochron. Define what happens to each type of module in each time-step: e.g. terminal buds produce internodes and new terminal buds or flowers, depending on the context, flowers produce fruit, some axillar buds give rise to internodes and terminal buds, others remain dormant - again in a context-dependent manner. Describe the starting structure of the plant and the rules for module transformation in a formal language, first developed by Aristid Lindenmeyer in the sixties (hence L-systems). The module structure translates into "parametric words", with more-less empirical parameters, and the rules determining module fate take on the form of "productions" or "rewriting rules" for defining the context and replacing ancestor modules with their descendants according to this context. Let the model "develop", i.e. compute the module structure for many discrete time steps, and, last but not least, feed the formal descriptions of the results from each step into a program that produces a graphical representation. As soon as the mathematical description is formulated, the parameters (and numerical constants contained in the rewriting rules) are by no means restricted to empirically derived values. Exploration of the space of available parameter values reveals that the same model with different sets of constants can lead to structures reminiscent of a cherry tree, a plum tree or a fern leaf."

Do plants act like computers? Leaves appear to regulate their 'breathing' by conducting simple calculations (Nature - 21 January 2004)
Philip Ball: "Plants appear to 'think', according to US researchers, who say that green plants engage in a form of problem-solving computation. David Peak and co-workers at Utah State University in Logan say that plants may regulate their uptake and loss of gases by 'distributed computation' - a kind of information processing that involves communication between many interacting units. It's the same form of maths that is widely thought to regulate how ants forage."

Science News Online - Blood vessels (sans blood) shape organs
John Travis: It's obvious that organs maturing in a developing embryo need new blood vessels that will supply oxygen and other vital molecules. These fledgling blood vessels may do more, however. Even before blood begins to flow, the vessels provide signals that help give birth to organs, according to two studies of the development of the liver and pancreas.
[...] Blood vessels and many organs "develop hand in hand," concludes [Douglas] Melton. "That guarantees that when you have the final organ, the blood vessels are already there."

ABC Science News - The getting of plant wisdom
Cathy Johnson: "Human tribal communities are not the only ones who pass wisdom onto their juniors. Plants, it seems, do the same and this newly-discovered aspect of their behaviour may affect models of global climate change. British researchers have shown for the first time that mature leaves of a plant can pass on information about the level of light and carbon dioxide in their environment to developing leaves in the same plant. The youngsters respond by adjusting the number of stomata, or pores in the leaves."

Segmented spiral waves in a reaction-diffusion system by Vladimir K. Vanag and Irving R. Epstein
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 100 (2003): 14635--14638
Abstract: "Pattern formation in reaction-diffusion systems is often invoked as a mechanism for biological morphogenesis. Patterns in chemical systems typically occur either as propagating waves or as stationary, spatially periodic, Turing structures. The spiral and concentric (target) waves found to date in spatially extended chemical or physical systems are smooth and continuous; only living systems, such as seashells, lichens, pine cones, or flowers, have been shown to demonstrate segmentation of these patterns. Here, we report observations of segmented spiral and target waves in the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction dispersed in water nanodroplets of a water-in-oil microemulsion. These highly ordered chemical patterns, consisting of short wave segments regularly separated by gaps, form a link between Turing and trigger wave patterns and narrow the disparity between chemistry and biology. They exhibit aspects of such fundamental biological behavior as self-replication of structural elements and preservation of morphology during evolutionary development from a simpler precursor to a more complex structure."

Susan Stepney reviews The Garden in the Machine
"Life is certainly a game, but it is not played according to fixed rules. The rules themselves can evolve, and during evolution old rules can ..."
Claus Emmeche

Sunday Painting: Art, the Web and the Global Information Society
"In 1968 Fluxus artist Robert Filiou, along with his friend George Brecht, introduced the idea of the Fête Permanente, or Eternal Network.
[...] In his novel Idoru, William Gibson describes the Cyberspace of DatAmerica, a repository for all data, all traces of our electronic patterns no matter how mundane, and thinks that there might be a larger perspective. He wonders if in this information there might be a way of getting to "some other kind of truth, another mode of knowing, deep within grey shoals of information." As artists we need to explore the notion of what we can know from the information we connect with. What can the information we generate tell us about ourselves? Is there 'some other kind of truth'? Can we track people in a way that helps us bring to bear new ways of understanding, from their electronic traces? What kind of field craft do we need to learn to track these footprints? What kind of Art can we generate from making new links, new relationships and new ways of knowing?"
David Topping

Dropping Science Like Galileo Dropped the Orange: Arcana, Alchemy, & Cognitive Marrow
"Laney was not, he was careful to point out, a voyeur. He had a peculiar knack with data-collection architectures, and a medically documented concentration-deficit that he could toggle, under certain conditions, into a state of pathological hyperfocus. This made him, he continued over lattes in a Roppongi branch of Amos 'n' Andes, an extremely good researcher. (He made no mention of the Federal Orphanage in Gainesville, nor of any attempts that might have been made there to cure his concentration-deficit. The 5-SB trials or any of that.)
The relevant data, in terms of his current employability, was that he was an intuitive fisher of patterns of information: of the sort of signature a particular individual inadvertently created in the net as he or she went about the mundane yet endlessly multiplex business of life in a digital society. Laney's concentration-deficit, too slight to register on some scales, made him a natural channel-zapper, shifting from program to program, from database to database, from platform to platform, in a way that was, well, intuitive.
And that was the catch, really, when it came to finding employment: Laney was the equivalent of a dowser, a cybernetic water-witch. He couldn't explain how he did what he did. He just didn't know.
He'd come to Slitscan from DatAmerica, where he'd been a research assistant on a project code-named TIDAL. It said something about the corporate culture of DatAmerica that Laney had never been able to discover whether or not TIDAL was an acronym, or (even remotely) what TIDAL was about. He'd spent his time skimming vast floes of undifferentiated data, looking for "nodal points" he'd been trained to recogize by a team of French scientists who were all keen tennis players, and none of whom had had any interest in explaining these nodal points to Laney, who came to feel that he served as a kind of native guide."
William Gibson - Idoru (Penguin, 1997, page 25)

The Biological Notion of Self and Non-self

"Like all rich interconnected networks, the immune system generates internal levels through distributed processes. More precisely, a dynamic level of antibody/cell encounters regulates cell numbers and circulating levels of molecular profiles. This idea is strictly parallel to the species network giving an ecosystem an identity within its environment. The interesting consequence, of course, is that such an ecology of lymphocytes exists within the body which it affects and changes, and is affected and changed by.
The mutual dance between immune system and body is the key to the alternative view proposed here, since it is this mutual dance that allows the body to have a changing and plastic identity throughout its life and its multiple encounters. Now the establishment of the system's identity is a positive task, and not a reaction against antigens. The task of specifying the identity is seen here as both logically and biologically primary; the ontogenic antigenic history modulates that process.
This requires that the immune network -- like an ecosystem -- have a specific learning mechanism. And this mechanism is precisely based on the constant changing of the components of the network by recruitment of new lymphocytes from a resting pool in an active process that reaches up to 20 percent of all lymphocytes in a mouse, for example. It is this ongoing replacement that provides the mechanism for learning and memory, instead of the better-known learning algorithms for neural networks. In fact, from the theoretical standpoint, the flexibility of the immune system resembles the flexibility sought by current research in artificial intelligence known as genetic algorithms or classifier systems ..."
Francisco J. Varela and Mark Anspach - Immu-knowledge: The Process of Somatic Individuation; in Gaia 2: Emergence: The New Science of Becoming (Lindisfarne Press, 1991, page 79)

Ben Goertzel: The Evolving Mind - Chapter 6: The Ecosystem of Ideas

"The famous biologist August Weismann, at the end of the nineteenth century, developed the view that the organism is created by the growth and development of specialized cells, the "germ line," which contains microscopic molecular structures, a central directing agency, determining growth and development. In turn, Weismann's molecular structures became the chromosomes, became the genetic code, became the "developmental program" controlling ontogeny. In no small measure, the intellectual lineage is straight from Weismann to today. In this trajectory, we have lost an earlier image of cells and organisms as self-creating wholes."
Stuart Kauffman - At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity (Penguin, 1996, page 274)

The Dance of Understanding
"[...] A particular type of physiological correlation which could be useful in explaining the connection of bodyhood with behaviour is the sensory-effector correlation. The body surface, which is the interface between organism and environment, can be said to have a dual participation in the outer as well as the inner world. It has long been a feature of physiological explanation that surfaces are distinguished as sensory or effector according to their function, i.e. whether they detect external stimuli or implement some action. This is arbitrary, like all distinctions, and only a part of the story. The "double look" shows that sensing and effecting are one operation in an organisational sense. The simplest explanation of the process which we call cognition is a sequence of sensory-effector correlations at the organism's surface.
The autonomous operation of the nervous system - the changing relations of activity according to its own structural dynamics - at any moment in time, has the potential for a certain configuration of sensory-effector correlations at its surface. The organism's behaviour - its relations with the medium - also consists of potential sensory-effector correlations at the interface. Where these two sets of possibilities meet, we say a structural coupling occurs in that moment. The flow continues according to its own history of recursive interaction. Each coupling triggers the change which brings about the next possibilities, so the flow of behaviour and the flow of physiology are mutually modulating. The dynamic matching of internal and external sensory-effector correlations constitutes the course or history of structural coupling.
This is by no means a complete or adequate account of the behaviour/physiology interaction. Most of this still remains to be worked out. Our remarks provide a few elements of a particular way of looking at it (based on Maturana's explanations) which we think could be useful in our conversation. As observers we see certain things which we explain in our languaging - which then constitute our reality and also a sufficiently satisfying reality for those who wish to be in conversation with us. The utilitarian value of our particular explanation is the extent to which it provides a satisfying answer to the question: what is it that we would need to have observed so that we could agree that understanding had occurred?
It may look as if the nervous system is making computations to accommodate behaviour to the circumstances - as implied by the idea of "learning" - but we prefer the explanation that it is not part of the operation of the nervous system to have a representational "knowledge" of the medium. Therefore, we say the nervous system does not constitute behaviour, but it shapes the organism's participation with the medium by its pattern of possible sensory-effector correlations. The nervous system can generate adequate sensory-effector correlations as long as its flow remains congruent to that of the medium. We observe that the organism and its circumstances change together as long as they remain coupled. It is a dynamic congruence through recursive interaction along a path which is "laid down in walking." [3]
We see the flow of structural coupling in the image of a tightrope walker maintaining her balance by means of the exquisite structural dynamics of her bodywork intertwining with the precise behavioural dynamics of her footwork on the rope. She and the rope change together as long as their coupling lasts. There are times when the relationship is shaky and times when it is slick and smooth. Similarly the path ..."
Lloyd Fell and David Russell

Stuart Kauffman: Understanding Genetic Regulatory Networks
"Past work has focused on random Boolean networks, introduced by myself, and piecewise-linear models introduced by Glass. This work has shown that such systems behave in three broad regimes, ordered, critical, and chaotic. It is a fundamental question whether cells are in the ordered, critical or, implausibly, the chaotic regime. I will discuss classical random Boolean networks, and new work on scale free networks, and proposed work on "medusa networks". The scant data available support scale free or medusa networks. A large number of dynamical properties are open to study in these three ensembles, and companion experiments to assess whether real cells and organisms have properties close to one or another of these ensembles. Thereafter, additional predicted features should lead to iterative improvement of the ensembles that best match cells. In my view, the ensemble approach affords the most rapid pathway to initial understanding of complex genetic regulatory networks."

Geri Wittig - Landscape data and complex adaptive system Earth
"Kauffman's argument that fitness landscapes are non-random comes out of his work on Boolean networks. Fitness landscapes of an individual or network develop in parallel with other fitness landscapes. These landscapes can be thought of as nodes in a web of landscapes that determine the parameters for each other: enabling the network to establish the conditions for development. The ecology of the whole network is transformed by a change in one niche or landscape. Kauffman argues that coadapting networks evolve to the verge of a self-organized threshold where minor changes in one landscape trigger a rush of changes that move out through the entire network. Because of the complexity of the web of landscapes, possibilities are limited within a given network. Networks of fitness landscapes are inclined to settle into rhythms with cyclic patterns, functioning like attractors in dynamical systems. Functioning along a perimeter of divergence that is in constant flux, networks self-organize in somewhat stable patterns until another phase transition occurs. A bifurcation occurs resulting in the emergence of a new morphological type that remains relatively stable for a time, and then suddenly mutates or vanishes. Because this process is unpredictable by nature, it doesn't necessarily mean it is directionless. Instead of thinking of this process as teleological, self-organizing systems can be understood as following a teleonomic progression; a line of development that moves toward increasing complexity."

Tim O'Reilly: The Fuss About Gmail and Privacy: Nine Reasons Why It's Bogus
"Gmail is fascinating to me as a watershed event in the evolution of the internet. In a brilliant Copernican stroke, gmail turns everything on its head, rejecting the personal computer as the center of the computing universe, instead recognizing that applications revolve around the network as the planets revolve around the Sun. But Google and gmail go even further, making the network itself disappear into the universal virtual computer, the internet as operating system.
I've been dreaming this dream for years. At my conference on peer-to-peer networking, web services, and distributed computation back in 2001, Clay Shirky, reflecting on "Lessons from Napster", retold the old story about Thomas J. Watson, founder of the modern IBM. "I see no reason for more than five of these machines in the world," Watson is reputed to have said. "We now know that he was wrong," Clay went on. The audience laughed knowingly, thinking of the hundreds of millions, if not billions, of computers deployed worldwide. But then Clay delivered his punch line: "We now know that he overstated the number by four."
Pioneers like Google are remaking the computing industry before our eyes. Google of course isn't one computer -- it's a hundred thousand computers, by report -- but to the user, it appears as one. Our personal computers, our phones, and even our cars, increasingly need to be thought of as access and local storage devices. The services that matter are all going to run on the global virtual computer that the internet is becoming."

Wladawksy-Berger Unplugged: 'The Net will transform everything' May 15, 2002
Wladawksy-Berger: "Grid computing is extending the Internet to be able to become a computing platform. Let me explain. The Internet is a great network with TCP/IP supporting all kinds of network accesses. It's a great communications mechanism with e-mail and instant messaging, and of course with the Worldwide Web, it's a fantastic repository of content.
We now want to take it to the next level in which applications can be distributed all over the Internet, and they can access all the resources that they need, and of course are allowed to access with the proper security even though they are distributed over the Internet. To have such distributed applications you need a set of protocols that everybody can use. That's what the grid community has been building, and that is what the grid computing is about."

Gridwars: parallel programming for survival
Grid computing and cellular automata are a potent combination

Do Plants Practice Grid Computing?
"Researchers are now exploring the possibility of using distributed computing with swarms of simple robots to carry out tasks, such as searching a landscape, more efficiently than a single, more sophisticated robot could manage."
Philip Ball

Computing on a Cellular Scale by Ivars Peterson
"The frenetic scurrying of ants around a nest may seem like much ado about nothing. There's method in the madness, however. All this activity adds up to ingenious strategies for collectively working out the shortest path to a food source, combining forces to move a large, unwieldy object, and performing other functions crucial to an ant colony's well-being.
In effect, astonishing feats of teamwork emerge from a large number of unsupervised individuals following a few simple rules. It's an example of self-organizing cooperative behavior, and it's found among ants, bees, and other social insects.
A similar type of teamwork appears to occur in plants."

Erica Klarreich: Computation's New Leaf
"[...] Plants may use computation to figure out how wide to open pores in their leaves, researchers propose in the January 27 [2004] Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The leaf pores, also called stomata, open to allow in carbon dioxide, which plants need for photosynthesis. However, open pores also let out water and so may dehydrate the plant. To balance these competing factors as environmental factors change, plants constantly adjust how many and how widely their pores are open.
The way that plants achieve this balance has been a mystery. There's no brain to coordinate the tens of thousands of pores, and individual pores seem to have no way of knowing what distant pores are doing.
At first, biologists thought that each pore simply decided independently what action to take. About 10 years ago, however, researchers noticed that large patches of pores frequently open and close in concert. More recently, Keith Mott, a biologist at Utah State University in Logan, discovered that over minutes, these patches of synchronization move about the leaf, often displaying complex dynamics.
He described these observations to physicist David Peak, a colleague at Utah State. They reminded Peak of patterns that turn up in cellular automata, a kind of distributed emergent computer."

Complexity and Stomatal Behavior
"Our research investigates the dynamics of stomatal networks in leaves as a possible example of computation in a multicellular, non-neuronal biological system. Stomata are tiny pores on the surfaces of leaves that regulate the exchange of gases between the plant and the atmosphere. By continually adjusting stomatal aperture a plant solves the problem of maximizing CO2 uptake while minimizing H2O loss. Stomatal systems are formally similar to networks of distributed computational elements that process and share information only locally. Simulations of such networks show that computation involving the entire network can emerge from local processing when the elements are correctly "wired" together. Stomata have been shown to exhibit complex collective behavior, and we hypothesize that this behavior implies that the plant solves its CO2/H2O constrained optimization problem by distributed, emergent computation."

From cellular mitosis to cellular automata by Michael D. Bayne
"A common characteristic of many biological systems is that of decentralized control. There are no ring masters in nature, no command central. The complex behavior that is observed must be explainable by some other mechanism. CAs give us the perfect environment for exploring systems with no central control."

Brian P. Hoke: Cellular Automata and Art
"Cellular automata (CA) manifest one of the most intriguing ideas in mathematics: from simple rules and algorithms, complex patterns and behavior can result. Underlying this is the notion of scale. The rule for state-change of cells in Von Neumann's computer is local; each cell 'sees' only its immediate neighbors. Yet the combination of the right initial conditions and the right local rule produces a global pattern which, when interpreted correctly, can instruct the arm to construct a replica of the computer. Cellular automata, of which Von Neumann's self-replicating automaton is just one example, also transmit information in an interesting manner. There is no moving piece that carries data from one portion of the automaton to another. Cells convey information by referencing their neighbors; without movement, data is transmitted across the automaton."

The Myth of Arbitrariness
"In recent years thanks to minute research in molecular biology it is becoming increasingly clear that the various workings of an organism can be understood as the self-organization of a system of information." Tateki Sugeno

The Self-Made Tapestry: Pattern Formation in Nature by Philip Ball
"Why do similar patterns and forms appear in settings that seem to bear no relation to one another? The windblown ripples of desert sand follow a sinuous course that resembles the stripes of a zebra or a marine fish. We see the same architectural angles in the trellis-like shells of microscopic sea creatures as in the bubble walls of a foam. The forks of lightning mirror the branches of a river or a tree. This book explains why there is more than coincidence in this conjunction of forms and structures. Nature commonly weaves its tapestry by self-organization, employing no master plan or blueprint but instead simple, local interactions between its component parts - whether they be grains of sand, diffusing molecules or living cells. And the products of self-organization are typically universal patterns: spirals, spots, stripes, branches, honeycombs."

Fibonacci Numbers and Golden sections in Nature
Ron Knott explores: "... the family trees of cows and bees, the golden ratio and the Fibonacci series, the Fibonacci Spiral and sea shell shapes, branching plants, flower petal and seeds, leaves and petal arrangements, on pineapples and in apples, pine cones and leaf arrangements."

Creativity and self-organization: contributions from cognitive science and semiotics

"Thought is not necessarily connected with a brain. It appears in the work of bees, crystals and throughout the purely physical world ..." Charles Sanders Peirce

The Self Is A Semiotic Process
Journal of Consciousness Studies, 1999, Vol. 6, No. 4, pages 31 - 47
"[...] Peirce treats the tendency of nature to follow patterns which, although they may seem deterministic, as more like interpretative habits. These habits are so highly prescribed at the physical level, that we refer to them as 'laws'. But as we pass from physical through biological towards psychological levels of organisation, habits move away from ineluctable physical laws and towards organic flexibility, eventually arriving at human self-awareness and freedom to choose. In this sense, evolution from physical through biological to cultural levels of organisation can be seen as a process of semiotic enrichment, the concentration of a primordial sentience in proportion to the degree of evolved order.
This enrichment enhances the transactions between organisms and their surroundings. When animals perceive patterns in their surrounding and use them to guide what they do, they are not only responding to stimuli but also interpreting signs. This semiotic coupling of perception and action is the product of both phylogenetic and ontogenetic learning. Both species and an individual animal learn to notice what their surroundings offer and to use what they learn in the service of action. This is what James Gibson called 'affordance' in his theory of direct perception (Gibson, 1979), a term for which he proposed an interesting ontological status:
"I mean by it something that refers to both the environment and the animal in a way that no other term does. It implies the complementarity of animal and environment." (page 173)
"An affordance is neither an objective nor a subjective property; or it is both if you like. An affordance cuts across the dichotomy of subjective-objective and helps us understand its inadequacy. It is both physical and psychical, yet neither. An affordance points both ways, to the environment and to the observer." (page 129).
Affordance, the directly perceivable meaning of the environment, is in these terms inherently attached to action. It implies a mutualist ontology in which stable relations between co-evolved things is taken as being as real as the things themselves (Still and Good, 1998). In Peirce's terms, affordance is a sign for which the organism acts as interpretant to produce action in a given situation as the object. Thus organisms do not merely respond to stimuli, but act on the basis of meaning."
John Pickering

The Fuller Map
"The only complete reading is that which transforms the book into a simultaneous network of reciprocal relations." J. Rousset

Daisaku Ikeda: Peace Proposals and Addresses
"Decades ago Rachel Carson warned us that the real challenge is not to master nature, but to master ourselves. One mission of Buddhism is to bring about realization of our individual potential, the "intrinsic nature" in each of us, while respecting all others. The term engi describes the eternal network of reciprocal relations between all things existing in mutual respect and mutual dependence. Each is unique, and all coexist peacefully, based on the direct apprehension of cosmic life inherent in all phenomena."

Utopia Theory
Philip Ball: As economics Nobel laureate Herbert Simon puts it: "We know that going to the Moon was a simple task indeed, compared with some others we have set for ourselves, such as creating a humane society or a peaceful world."

CNN.com - Author: Mars mission to inspire humanity - 16 April 2004

"It is easier to go to Mars than it is to penetrate one's own being." Carl Jung

Azim Nanji: Beyond the Clash of Civilizations
"We have the opportunity to investigate not only the human genome but the map of the human self. That is a difficult journey."

Review: Musca Domestica, Assembling the Shepherd

Descent and Return: The Orphic Theme in Modern Literature by Walter A. Strauss
Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1971

Bertolt Brecht: The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication
July 1932: "Quite apart from the dubiousness of its functions, radio is one-sided when it should be two. It is purely an apparatus for distribution, for mere sharing out. So here is a positive suggestion: change this apparatus over from distribution to communication. The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes. That is to say, it would be if it knew how to receive as well as transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into relationship instead of isolating him. On this principle the radio should step out of the supply business and organize its listeners as suppliers."

Radiocasting: Musings on Radio and Art by Dan Lander
"If we take an inquisitive look at the aesthetical conceptions during the last two centuries, it is striking that they are based on the ontology of the image, upon a static world-picture, that inadvertently ignores, makes impossible, the essence of media art; its dynamics, immateriality and time related form."
Peter Weibel (1991)

Ear benders
Pernille Rudlin: "I couldn't remember in a previous posting where I had seen a study on why overheard conversations on mobile phones are more annoying and intrusive than overhead conversations between two people nearby. The survey I was thinking of isn't this one - picked up by Jakob Nielsen - "Why are Mobile Phones Annoying?" Behaviour and Information Technology, vol. 23, no. 1, 2004, pp. 33-41, by Andrew Monk, Jenni Carroll, Sarah Parker, and Mark Blythe from York University. But it proves that mobile phones are more annoying than overheard face to face conversations (although not much more annoying than loud overheard face to face conversations) and suggests that this might be due to the fact that we cannot help paying more attention to a conversation when we can only hear half of it."

Art / Science: The Work of Jack Butler and a Perspective on Psychology
"[Jack] Butler graphically envisions the ego as composed of two layers of skin. The inner layer is represented by the physical body, a container which makes introjection possible. The second layer is an imaginary, or psychical body surface, capable of expansion and contraction. It is this psychical layer which allows for the inscription of meanings. It is an idea skin which is permeable, allowing exchanges. Butler utilizes the tense space between the containing and permeable aspects of the body-self as a site for the synthesis of opposites. Scientific research practice is representative of an intrusive practice, penetrating the self. Art acts as a unifying, integrating process which reconstructs the skin-ego or surface. The space between bodily and psychical egos is a space between art and science, between subjective and cultural meaning, between male and female. The extremes of these polarities become transparent, making one visible through the other, allowing a collapse of singularities into a more complex, layered view of the world."
Emily Butler

Adam Misbah'ul Haqq: What Is "Progressive Islam" Anyway?
"In ancient times, most religious traditions agreed on a cyclical articulation of time -- time was more or less a series of patterns which expanded and contracted regularly creating a sort of breathing cosmos, hence the rise and fall of civilizations and the birth and death of all living things. Since Darwinism first swept through the industrialized world, people have viewed time from the perspective of evolution -- humans began as abominable creatures (possibly an animal or other organism) and then evolved. This view of time sees humans as "progressing" into God. Such an ideology has fueled the ambition to world dominance.
Because the term "progressive" signifies that the goal of the approach is "progress," we must not only define "progress," but also identify the goal this "progress" hopes to attain.

Edward O. Wilson: Back From Chaos - The Atlantic 98.03

"It has now been put forward, by a scientist, that science with its distinctive form of logical thought depends on an act of affirmation by the scientist, personally, in what he is doing, and that this basic assertion of personal commitment can never be verified by any logical means. This is the theme of Polanyi's Personal Knowledge, and to this the reader is referred. It is the restoration of science once more to the company of the arts, giving science for its foundation the mythic or metaphoric or poetic situation where figure and agent become one and the same. Analysis, then -- logic, dialectic -- rest on a fundamental act of confidence and synthesis (or call it faith and love)."
Elizabeth Sewell - The Orphic Voice: Poetry and Natural History
(Harper & Row, 1971, Page 32)

Telegraph : Arts : The brains behind the brain
Blair Worden: "In what conditions does science advance? Scientists will tell you that its progress depends on the institutional security, and on the ample funding, of specialised research. Yet 17th-century England tells a different story. The scientific revolution throve on institutional anarchy, financial hardship, and the versatility of thinkers to whom boundaries of specialisation were unimaginable.
[...] The rise in the brain's status which Willis effected is revealed by the drawings, attractively reproduced in Zimmer's pages, with which Wren illustrated his findings. They portray the brain as a delicate, complex organ with the beauty of an orchid."

Integrating Knowledge With Needs

"I remember just before the First World War, I began to say that I didn't think nature had separate departments of Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and Mathematics requiring meetings of department heads in order to decide how to make bubbles and roses! I had a suspicion that nature had just one department!"
R. Buckminster Fuller - Prevailing Conditions in the Arts (1964)

Doc Searls: Release early, release often [via urlgreyhot]
"Blogs are somewhere between conversation and Writing (with a capital W). They're printed blurts that lithify into word balloons that float in cyberspace for the duration, making them searchable transcripts of thinking-out-loud."

Note 31
For the Orpheus myth as "myth thinking about myth," see Elizabeth Sewell, The Orphic Voice: Poetry and Natural History (New Haven: Yale UP, 1960).

McLuhan and Holeopathic Quadrophrenia - Phase 1
"At electric speeds the hieroglyphs of the page of Nature become readily intelligible and the Book of the World becomes a kind of Orphic hymn of revelation."
Marshall McLuhan - Libraries: Past, Present, Future

Conceptual Integration Networks
Cognitive Science, 22(2) 1998, 133-187
"An organizing frame provides a topology for the space it organizes -- that is, it provides a set of organizing relations among the elements in the space. When two spaces share the same organizing frame, they share the corresponding topology and so can easily be put into correspondence. Establishing a cross-space mapping between inputs is straightforward when they share the same organizing frame."
Gilles Fauconnier & Mark Turner

Cognitive Blending and the Two Cultures
Examples by Steven H. Cullinane, March 5, 2004

Testo di riferimento

"In an important sense there are no subjects at all; there is only knowledge, since the cross-connections among the myriad topics of this world simply cannot be divided up neatly."
Ted Nelson - Computer Lib/Dream Machines

Chaos in the Virtual Library .......strange attractors in the design studio....... by John Wood
"A surprising fact, C, is observed. But if a proposition, A, were true, C would be a matter of course. Hence, there is a reason to suspect that A is true."
C.S. Peirce

The Glass Bead Game Archive : Game Four
"Elizabeth Sewell in The Orphic Voice (Yale, 1960) has made a profound argument for viewing poetry and biology as complementary aspects of a single (taxonomic) discipline (as some people, Hesse I think among them, view music and math as complementary)..."

Love Letters by the Score: Uncovering the Messages Hidden in Berg's Violin Concerto
The Independent [London] - 5 April 2004
"One of the questions that would-be code-breakers were asked by the War Office in 1940 was: "Can you read an orchestral score?" That is a perfect illustration of music's linguistic power both to reveal and to conceal. Ever since Pythagoras discovered that the sweetest harmonies were governed by the simplest mathematics, number has been regarded as this language's foundation. And gradually, musical numerology acquired religious significance.
In Bach's day, pieces of music governed by the number three, 12 or 33 were assumed to reflect, respectively, the Trinity, the Disciples and the years of Christ's life. Viennese Masons could read their own numerical messages in Mozart's Magic Flute. In some hands the game got terribly complicated, but it was often as simple as ABC."
Michael Church

posted by Andrew 4/24/2004 08:01:00 PM

Friday, April 16, 2004

 
Complicity Theory

We Are All Bruce Lee
"When the Urban Movement group from Mostar brought up the idea of building a statue of Bruce Lee in the center of the city, the nationalists were disturbed. [...] "Out of all the ethnic heroes and those who have a material interest in acting as victims, we have chosen Bruce Lee. Now they can rack their brains trying to decide whether he is Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim), Croat, or Serb," said Veselin Gatalo, one of the initiators of the idea."

On the dark side of history: Carlo Ginzburg talks to Trygve Riiser Gundersen
Carlo Ginzburg: "Every literary device - be it in a fictional or historical text - makes reality visible in its own way, conveys its vision of reality. Specific linguistic forms are related to specific forms of truth, one might say. There is a kind of formal constraint at work here -- every literary form forces us to discover one thing and ignore something else. The traditional narrative, for example, has its own innate limitations, it imposes a kind of sequential constraint: something has to come first, something else later. When I wrote The Cheese and the Worms I dreamed of writing the whole book on one gigantic page, so that I could escape this straitjacket. It was, of course, a ridiculous idea.
[...] There is something problematical about the unequivocal linking of our concept of history with the idea of remembrance, of memory. We tend to talk of history as being mankind's collective memory - but collective memory has more often than not functioned on premises of forgetfulness. In the creation of the modern nationalism or the twentieth century's major ideological movements, collective memory has mainly been effective in virtue of all it has left out: history has been transformed into a succession of symbolical and abstract quantities all harking back to our Glorious Past: revolution, war, class struggle, Germania, Marianne, the Unknown Warrior and so on and so forth. Even personal memory is by its very nature selective: we remember only what we have not forgotten. Remembrance is, so to speak, interwoven with forgetfulness. That is why the Jewish historian Yosef Yerushalmi has pointed out that the opposite of "forgetfulness" is not really "remembrance" but "justice". It was the concept of final historical justice that was at the root of the ancient idea of judgement, and I find it hard not to think that that is a more satisfactory model for genuine historical awareness than those we employ today.
But the idea of judgement must not be confused with that of retribution."

The dry eyes of deep grief
"In 1990 the sociologist Gillian Rose became a consultant for the Polish Commission for the Future of Auschwitz. From then until her death in 1995, she argued that the Holocaust was being narrated in such a way as to protect the present generation from the thought that they too might have something in common with the perpetrators. For Rose, the story of the Holocaust is typically told so as to place the audience alongside the victim. The crisis of glimpsing our own reflection in the face of the Nazi camp guard is a horror too far."
Giles Fraser

Richard Jackson - Poetry and answerability
"The bullet that I shot
at the time of the great war
made a circle around the globe
and struck me in the back."
Zbigniew Herbert

Geoffrey Owen reviews In Defence of Globalization by Jagdish Bhagwati
"Whereas Stiglitz argued in his book that something had gone "horribly wrong" with globalisation (an outcome which he attributed to the extreme free-market ideology of successive US administrations), Bhagwati believes that the world is broadly on the right track, that capitalism is a system which can undermine privilege and open up opportunity for the many, and that the best way for poor countries to lift themselves out of poverty is to develop institutions and policies which facilitate their integration into the world economy."

The Battles of Richard Wolin
Richard Wolin: "When I was a student in Berkeley in 1980, Habermas, as a visiting professor, gave a series of lectures that were published as Theory of Communicative Action. He re-read the classics of modern social theory - Weber, Durkheim, and Parsons - to show dynamic potentials for social change within the lifeworld of late capitalism. These concrete analyses, in my opinion, far outstrip the capacity of the Messianic Marxists, like Benjamin and Bloch, to diagnose avenues of contemporary political intervention (i.e, new social movements). I still have a soft spot for the Situationists, but it has little to do with Debord's political theory, which merely recycles (a la detournement) ideas from Lukacs and council communism."

Cage's artless art by Michael Eldred
Morton Feldman: "Boulez wrote a letter to John Cage in 1951. There was a line in that letter I will never forget. "I must know everything in order to step off the carpet." And for what purpose did he want to step off the carpet? Only to realize the perennial Frenchman's dream ... to crown himself Emperor. Was it love of knowledge, love of music, that obsesses our distinguished young provincial in 1951? It was love of analysis - an analysis he will pursue and use as an instrument of power."

Fighting Words: Camus, Sartre, and the rift that helped define them
"In the unpublished essay "In Defense of The Rebel," Camus writes, "The primary task of our public life is to preserve the fragile chance for peace and, to that end, not to serve any of the forces of war in any way whatsoever. I confess that without peace I can see nothing but agony. With it, everything is possible, and the historical contradiction in which we live will be transcended -- with each adversary enriching the other, whereas today each reinforces the other."
Perhaps declining "to serve any of the forces of war in any way whatsoever" is an effort to get out of history. But if so, we should all get out more often."
Scott McLemee

Mark Lilla - The Lure of Syracuse

"We might as well accept the fact that there is no conventional military force that can successfully challenge the American war machine. Terrorist strikes only give the US Government an opportunity that it is eagerly awaiting to further tighten its stranglehold. Within days of an attack you can bet that Patriot II would be passed. To argue against US military aggression by saying that it will increase the possibilities of terrorist strikes is futile. It's like threatening Brer Rabbit that you'll throw him into the bramble bush. Anybody who has read the document called 'The Project for the New American Century' can attest to that. The government's suppression of the Congressional Committee Report on September 11th, which found that there was intelligence warning of the strikes that was ignored, also attests to the fact that, for all their posturing, the terrorists and the Bush regime might as well be working as a team. They both hold people responsible for the actions of their governments. They both believe in the doctrine of collective guilt and collective punishment. Their actions benefit each other greatly."
Arundhati Roy - The Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire
(Flamingo, 2004, page 129)

Socialism in an Age of Waiting : Defining socialism

"Whatever shame we must still feel about their manipulation and betrayal by the agents of Stalinism, and whatever misgivings we may also have about their comparative neglect of China or Ethiopia at that time, we can still feel proud of the International Brigades and of the solidarity campaigns that helped to create them. In Republican Spain and then in occupied Europe, socialists knew that their first duty was, as C. Day Lewis famously wrote, to "defend the bad against the worse".
Sixty years on, another democratic republic in Europe came under sustained attack from a "fifth column" covertly aided -- indeed, armed, funded and directed -- by an ultranationalist dictatorship. Yet when the democratically elected secular and multiethnic government of Bosnia-Herzegovina called for support, and the western powers once again imposed unevenly enforced and lethal sanctions, the overwhelming majority of the western left either stayed silent or, worse, offered sympathy and understanding to the Serbian regime ..."

Where are the War Poets?
It is the logic of our times,
No subject for immortal verse --
That we who lived by honest dreams
Defend the bad against the worse.

The Jihadi Who Kept Asking Why by Elizabeth Rubin
[...] Alone again in his prison cell, Mansour began to retrace the genesis of his religious odyssey. When his sister came to visit, he asked her to bring books on Sufism (a strain of Islamic mysticism considered heretical by the Wahhabis) and by authors of Western philosophy and history, like Will Durant and Thomas Carlyle. Mansour passed through an intellectual paradigm shift, reading books that based their arguments on historical research. ''Before, everything we learned was by ideology,'' he told me. Wahhabism does not believe in history except insofar as it illuminates God's plan. Like a pathologist, he conducted a dissection of his own thinking. He questioned two of the defining tenets of Wahhabism: ''loyalty and dissociation,'' or loving Muslims just like you and holding hatred in your heart for Jews, Christians and Muslims not like you; and takfir, the practice of accusing fellow Sunnis of apostasy, which is a crime punishable by death.
Once the doubt crept in, it took on a logic of its own, spiraling through every stage of his life: if Salafism was flawed, then Wahhabism was flawed, and then so, too, were Islamic history and all the assumptions he had made about the universe. He couldn't stop.
As Adel al-Toraifi, Mansour's close friend explained, Mansour didn't change because he wanted music and wine and women. ''There is no politics in Mansour,'' he said. ''He didn't change because he found a new ideology. He changed from thinking deep inside Islam.''

The Public Life of Private Struggles by Mariane Pearl

I do not for a moment imagine that Danny has been in a car accident, or been robbed and left by the side of the road. I know he has been captured by Islamic militants. I know this. I know in my heart that he has been kidnapped by men who have kidnapped their own god, by which I mean men who have twisted the concept of jihad, of holy war, into something warped and wrong.
Numerous Muslims have described jihad to Danny and me as the most courageous process a person can undertake. A jihadi fights with himself to overcome his own limitations in order to contribute to society at large. This slow and difficult battle, the true jihad, is what Buddhists call "the human revolution."
Mariane Pearl - A Mighty Heart (Virago Press, 2003, page 51)

A scruffy fighting place by Richard Covington
[...] In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize, Heaney evoked the image of a bombed bus with a dying Protestant man reaching out to shake the hand of a Catholic. "It is a fragile gesture, far from having the same impact as a shot, but it symbolizes the power of art," he observed. "The mission of art, of poetry, is not to make peace. Art is peace."

What They Said....
"We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric; but out of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry."
WB Yeats

John F. Callahan on F. Scott Fitzgerald's evolving American Dream
"Fitzgerald embodied in his tissues and nervous system the fluid polarities of American experience: success and failure, illusion and disillusion, dream and nightmare."

Tina Rosenberg: What the World Needs Now Is DDT [vide MassiveEffort.org]
"DDT killed bald eagles because of its persistence in the environment. ''Silent Spring'' is now killing African children because of its persistence in the public mind."

Wired 3.05: The Age of Paine (May 1995)
"Paine's life and the birth of the American press prove that information media, taken together, were never meant, collectively, to be just another industry. Information wants to be free. That was the familiar and inspiring moral imperative behind the medium imagined by Paine and Thomas Jefferson. Media existed to spread ideas, to allow fearless argument, to challenge and question authority, to set a common social agenda.
Asked about the reasons for new media, Paine would have answered in a flash: to advance human rights, spread democracy, ease suffering, pester government. Modern journalists would have a much rougher time with the question. There is no longer widespread consensus, among practitioners or consumers, about journalism's practices and its goals.
Of course, the ferociously spirited press of the late 1700s that Paine helped invent differed from the institution we know today. It was dominated by individuals expressing their opinions. The idea that ordinary citizens with no special resources, expertise, or political power - like Paine himself - could sound off, reach wide audiences, even spark revolutions, was brand-new to the world. In Paine's wake, writes Gordon Wood in The Radicalism of the American Revolution, "every conceivable form of printed matter - books, pamphlets, handbills, posters, broadsides, and especially newspapers - multiplied and were now written and read by many more ordinary people than ever before in history."
Never skilled in business, Paine failed to foresee how fragile and easily overwhelmed these values and forms of expression would be when they collided with free-market economics. The rotary press and other printing technologies that later made it possible to mass-market newspapers also led publishers to make newspapers tamer and more moderate so their many new customers wouldn't be offended. Big, expensive printing presses churning out thousands of copies meant opinionated private citizens like Paine could no longer afford to own or have direct access to media, and journalism couldn't afford to give voice to opinionated private citizens.
Paine once warned a Philadelphia newspaper editor about the distinction between editorial power and the freedom of the press. It was a caution neither the editor nor his increasingly wealthy and powerful successors took to heart: "If the freedom of the press is to be determined by the judgment of the printer of a Newspaper in preference to that of the people, who when they read will judge for themselves, then freedom is on a very sandy foundation."
So it is. Paine's worst fear was echoed more than 150 years later by critic A.J. Liebling, who wryly observed: "In America, freedom of the press is largely reserved for those who own one." Almost everyone else has been shut out. But media history is being reversed. With computers and modems, individuals are pouring back in."
Jon Katz

James Joyce - 46.12
Harry Levin: "From two Italian philosophers, from Giambattista Vico's cyclical theory of history and Giordano Bruno's dialectical concept of nature, Joyce learned how to reconcile the principles of unity and diversity: "the same anew."
A phrase from his notebooks, "centripetal writing," seems to indicate his direction."

HERMENAUT: The Club Havana Secret History of Cinema: 1939

"Our choice is not between struggle and rest. It is one between struggle and struggle. And is the struggle of trust and love and hope not better than the struggle of fear and hatred and despair?"
Ronald Segal - The Struggle Against History (Pelican, 1974, page 206)

Ousted possibilities: critical histories in James Joyce's Ulysses
"[...] Joyce's struggle against history (which is, more precisely, a struggle against the master narratives of history which determine social conventions of all kinds) is not a rejection of history per se but rather an agonistic relation with history whenever it functions as a monological, authoritarian legitimation of social power."
Gregory Castle

A Missile is a Missile is a Missile: A Semiological Analysis of Some Aspects of the Cuban Missile Crisis by Servando Gonzalez (2000)
As Umberto Eco rightly points out, "Man is an animal who tells lies."

The Contract of (Un)Truth - Documentary and Fiction by Kees Bakker
Wolfgang Iser: "The wandering viewpoint is a means of describing the way in which the reader is present in the text."

The write way to read by Janadas Devan (The Straits Times 7 March 2004)
"When medieval scribes copied texts on sheets, they would place marks at various points on the sheet to guide its folding and binding. Each gathering of the folded paper was thus called a signature. The scribes read the text; copied them out; made each copy individual, special; and called the gathering of each folding a signature. The entire process seemed directed at making what wasn't one's own, one's own."

The Pinocchio Theory: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
"So the narrative is scrambled; and it changes before our eyes, since truth is always a function of -- always subject to -- the vagaries of memory and desire. It's not that it's hard to follow: Kaufman isn't interested in luring us into trying to solve a puzzle, the way Christopher Nolan does in Memento. Much more interestingly, the non-linearity of Eternal Sunshine allows Kaufman to link memories (plot events) associatively, like music, developing themes, repeating with variations, changing the feel of a scene by undermining and altering its context. This, together with Gondry's quicksilver direction (continually varying mood through subtle visual and musical cues, plays of color and sound) is what makes the film so engaging and enthralling. Gondry uses a lot of technical tricks from his music videos, especially various sorts of visual composting ..."

Memory bottleneck limits intelligence [via Slashdot]
Single spot in brain determines size of visual scratch pad

Forget Me Not - The genius of Charlie Kaufman's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
David Edelstein: "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is like a topsy-turvy Orpheus and Eurydice, in which the hero must look back -- and back and back -- or his beloved will be lost forever.
The legendary music-video director Michel Gondry and his cinematographer, Ellen Kuras, get to strut their stuff in these sequences: Their style is glancing and (literally) vaporous. In farce, the hero runs in and out of doors; here, he runs in and out of doors of perception -- in and out of blurs. Joel flees with his mental Clementine to places in his life that he hasn't supplied to his memory erasers -- places where she couldn't have been, like his kitchen when he was 4 years old and curled up under a kitchen table staring at a baby sitter in a short dress and white boots (now impersonated by Clementine), or the time when some bullies made him smash a dead bird with a hammer. These are wildly funny scenes -- but they're scary, too, and surreal, like little body-snatcher movies. The technicians are flabbergasted. They say he's "off the map," and they hunt around his brain for his new whereabouts. And as they erase Joel's synaptic hiding places, the house of his childhood ages and crumbles before our eyes, fences blow away, faces dissolve into rubbery blanks, passersby disappear."

Charlie Kaufman's Critique of Pure Comedy

posted by Andrew 4/16/2004 06:54:00 PM

Tuesday, April 06, 2004

 
Dream of a true mythology

Opera by Ralph Abraham
"Opera was born as a conscious imitation of Greek tragedy, and the beginning of opera is synonymous with Orpheus. The earliest recorded opera, by Peri in 1600, is Orpheus and Euridice. The second opera, by Caccini in 1602, is Orpheus and Euridice. The third opera, by Monteverdi in 1607, is Orpheus and Euridice. There are at least 26 operas in the 1600s about Orpheus, and 29 in the 1700s, including classics by Telemann, Gluck, Handel, and Haydn. And not only operas but operettas. Perhaps the first operetta is Orpheus in the Underworld by Offenbach in 1858. Similarly, with musical theater and film, Orpheus is a traditional theme to this day. The morphogenesis goes on."

Orpheus Today
"And the word Chaos was not just another word in Hesiod's Theogony, but one of three basic principles, three abstract principles - Chaos, Gaia, and Eros - out of which everything else was created ..."
Ralph H. Abraham

Galveston
"Orpheus, son of Apollo. His father descends to take Orpheus up to heaven. "It will help you to forget Eurydice and concentrate on higher things."
But Orpheus can't forget, or won't. He transports himself, whoosh, to Galveston, which he's heard is hell. [ Maybe he'll find her there? ] He sleeps on a steel bed in a skid row hotel. He drinks in a bowling alley bar. He's a garrulous drunk. The hookers don't mind as long as he's buying. Besides there's something about his voice... They listen to the music, even if the words don't make sense. He's leaning towards one of these ladies now, in full flow:
"Here's what I'm going to tell you. When you come into this world you find pockets in your pants, handlebars on your bike, put there by those who preceded you. You walk in their footsteps. But, as regards the entry into and possession of yourself, you're a solitary pioneer."
The hooker looks up at the clock and yawns. Orpheus doesn't notice. In his mind he strums a lyre and what he's saying is song and under its influence wild beasts are tamed and stones deliquesce. Trees uproot themselves to be closer to the source of this music... He passes out."
Orpheus - The Lowdown by Peter Blegvad & Andy Partridge

"Today, when you hit a bit of hypertext in a text, you are invited to spread your cybernetic wings, to leave the page you are reading, to lift yourself beyond the limits of the room in which you are seated, to sail across the seas, to enter an old library or to explore some distant "site" which is but a point and click away. We can, without moving our gross and heavy bodies an inch, sail swiftly across space and enter the Louvre, summon up old Latin manuscripts in distant libraries, or hear [...]
If Heidegger liked to quote the line from the German Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin, "poetically does man dwell upon the earth," we today get a bigger surge out of sailing cybernetically around the earth."
John D. Caputo - On Religion (Routledge, 2001, pages 73-74)

You believe in coincidence? Amazing. So do I
"Charles Coghlan, a leading actor in Victorian times, was born on Prince Edward Island, off eastern Canada. After a distinguished career, he died, following a brief illness, in Galveston, Texas, in 1899. Too far from Canada to be sent home, Coghlan was interred in a lead-lined coffin and placed in a local burial vault.
A year later, Galveston was struck by a hurricane that hurled massive waves over the cemetery and washed Coghlan's coffin out to sea. In stately solitude, the weatherbeaten box floated into the Gulf of Mexico, rounded Florida and sailed up the American coast until it reached Prince Edward Island. It was then picked up by local fishermen. He had made it home and was buried in the church of his baptism.
The tale is distinctly appealing. For a start, it is touching to know some of us still display a homing instinct even when we have snuffed it. In addition, the story has a decidedly spooky resonance: the dead adrift on the high seas, like Dracula's boat carried by the tides towards Whitby."
Robin McKie

Dreaming of Electric Sheep
"There's a now-familiar riff about extra-terrestrial life that maintains that the "little green men" of 1950s lore -- or the coneheaded oversized infants of recent fare -- are the ultimate in Homo sapiens provincialism: When intelligent life arrives from outer space, it won't look like bipedal primates -- it'll look like a cloud or a cluster of bacteria or something so different from our earthbound life forms that we won't even perceive it. (Marlon Brando was on a parallel wavelength when he famously proposed playing Superman's father as a green suitcase.)"
Steven Johnson

MSN Encarta - Opera
"The first true opera, a little of whose music survives, was Dafne (1598) by Jacopo Peri. Another composer, Marco da Gagliano, subsequently reset its text in 1608. Gagliano's version survives, but a contemporaneous German version by Heinrich Schütz -- the first German opera -- does not. In 1600 Peri turned to the Orpheus myth for his opera Euridice, a modest entertainment composed for a royal wedding. Peri was a member of the Camerata, a society of scholars, poets, and amateur musicians in Florence. For 20 years, the Camerata had researched the manner in which classical Greek drama had been performed, with a view toward reviving it. They concluded that the Greek actors had delivered their lines in a declamatory style halfway between speaking and true singing. In their efforts to recover this lost Greek art, the Camerata essentially invented a new type of solo singing, called monody, that was performed in free rhythm to simple accompaniment. Thus, Peri and his librettist, Ottavio Rinuccini, told the mythological story of Orpheus and Euridice using recitative sustained by chords from a small orchestra of seven instruments. In the end, opera was not a re-creation of Greek drama, as the Camerata had intended, but the creation of a powerful new type of drama instead.
It fell to another man, however, to realize the full potential of this dramma per musica (drama through music) that the Camerata had invented. Claudio Monteverdi, like Peri, was an educated gentleman; unlike Peri, he was a professional musician, not an enthusiastic amateur. Born in Cremona, Italy, Monteverdi flourished at the court of the Gonzaga family and ultimately directed the choir of Saint Mark's Cathedral in Venice. In 1607 he composed his own operatic version of the Orpheus and Euridice myth, Orfeo. The difference between Peri's Euridice and Monteverdi's Orfeo is the difference between an experiment and a masterpiece. Monteverdi expanded the orchestra, which included bowed and plucked strings, harpsichord and organ, trumpets and drums for ceremonial passages, recorders, and various novel instruments. He gave each character a distinctive accompaniment and wrote a heraldic overture. Monteverdi's recitative, more than a mere vehicle for the text, has a life of its own."

And the Octave Formed a Circle
"According to Greek Mythology the lyre was invented by Hermes, the god of tricksters, thieves, and merchants. On his first day of life Hermes had stolen the cattle of his brother Apollo, the god of music. Hermes knew that his brother would be furious when he figured out who had stolen the cattle, so he decided to make his brother a present so his punishment would not be so severe. Finding a tortoise shell and 7 pieces of sheep gut, Hermes fashioned an instrument. When Apollo came looking for him Hermes offered him the instrument as a peace offering. Enchanted by the sound it made, Apollo forgave his baby brother and took the instrument as his own, naming it the lyre."

Lyre [via LoveToKnow Free Online Encyclopedia]
"Notwithstanding the Hermes tradition of the invention of the lyre in Egypt, the Egyptians seem to have adopted it from Assyria or Babylonia.
To define the lyre, it is necessary clearly to separate it from the allied harp and guitar. In its primal form the lyre differs from the harp, of which the earliest, simplest notion is found in the bow and bowstring."

Gary Garritan - The History of Harps
"Many believe that the earliest harps came from the hunter's bow. Perhaps while hunting, prehistoric man liked the sound of the vibrating bowstring. Then a second string was added to the bow, then a third. In the course of time, more and more strings were added. Eventually, a gourd or a hollow area at one end of the bow was added which became a sound box."

Harps and lyres from Mesopotamia

"The brain consists mainly of two types of living cells, the long stringy neurons (Greek for "bowstring") and the compact glial ("glue") cells."
Nick Herbert - Elemental Mind (Plume, 1994, page 95)

Designing freedom
"The first thing we have to face up to is quite a tough proposition for people reared in our culture. It is that whatever we humans can do is mediated by our brains, and those brains are finite. We have in the cranium a slightly alkaline three-pound electrochemical computer running on glucose at about 25 watts. This computer contains some ten thousand million (that's ten to the ten) logical elements called neurons, operating on a basic scanning rhythm of ten cycles per second. Then this is a high-variety dynamic system all right; but it really is finite. It follows from Ashby's Law that we can recognize patterns up to a certain limit, and not beyond. Thus if something is going on that involves a higher variety than the brain commands, we shall not recognize what it is. This is the old constraint of requisite variety again.
There are practical consequences to this. For instance, I am sure that the reason we are making such a hash of the problems of global ecology is that we cannot understand them. I don't just mean that they are awfully difficult, so that understanding will take a lot of research. I mean that we can not understand at all, ever. Very likely this goes for many problems of government too, especially world government. It may even be true at the level of recursion where a corporation is managed."
Stafford Beer - Designing Freedom (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 1974, page 58)

Attention
"The brain is an electrochemical engine, and as it operates it generates electrical fields."

BBC NEWS : World getting 'literally greener'
Alex Kirby reports: "The world seems to have begun to turn greener, in the strictly literal sense, according to the United Nations Environment Programme (Unep). Satellite data show plant growth has been measurably more vigorous over the last 25 years. The news comes in Unep's first Global Environment Outlook Year Book 2003, which highlights trends and problems. [...]
Satellite and climate data between 1982 and 1999 show an "apparent greening of the biosphere", Unep says. "The amount of energy produced by plants through photosynthesis, minus what they use in respiration, increased globally by about 6% during the last two decades of the 20th century," it adds.
Advances in farming and successful conservation programmes around the world may have contributed to the greening trend, according to the organisation. Unep says areas in tropical zones and in the high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere accounted for 80% of the increased growth.
Nearly 40% came from the Amazon rainforests, probably because of a decline in cloud cover and the resulting increase in solar energy reaching the surface. Changes in monsoon dynamics meant more rainfall in the 1990s and increased vegetation over India, Pakistan and Bangladesh and the Sahel belt of sub-Saharan Africa."

BBC NEWS : World population growth 'falling'
"The growth rate of the world population has slowed down, according to the US Census Bureau. Its report says there were 74 million more people in 2002 - well below the 87 million added in 1989-90.
The rate of growth peaked 40 years ago, when it stood at about 2.2% a year."

Stone age traveller - Sunday, 22 April, 2001
"While working as a visual artist in London, [Tim] Robinson had approached his relationship with landscape in a highly abstract way, by creating large, movable installations. Then his art works began to shrink in size until they were gradually reduced to tiny dots on the walls of his studio. Feeling that words, not painting or sculpture, should be his new medium, he sought a solitary place where he could concentrate on writing.
He found that refuge on the Aran Islands, off Galway's coast, which was being battered by the full lash of November gales when he and his partner, Mairead, arrived. Robinson spent the next few years learning about the islands' flowers and birds, grappling with the Irish language and collecting local place names that were in danger of being lost.
"Then a local person asked me to make a map, something I'd never considered before. It was a wonderful way of taking everything I'd learnt about the island and giving it structure -- not simply putting facts down on a map, but using cartography as an expressive medium."
He developed intimate links with literally every stone on the Aran Islands -- a task that no islander would ever dream of undertaking -- and went on to produce two lengthy works. Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage and Stones of Aran: Labyrinth defy classification, encompassing history, pre-history, botany, geology, sociology, folklore, archaeology and mythology."
Emer Hughes

A Distant Mirror for the Brain
"By the 1650s, young natural philosophers were emulating Harvey, not Aristotle, in their studies of the liver, lungs, and other organs. And in the early 1660s, a group of Harvey's disciples applied his methods to the brain.
The group was led by the Oxford physician Thomas Willis (1621-1675). A royalist soldier during the Civil War, Willis had been rewarded at the Restoration with an appointment as professor of natural philosophy at Oxford. He used the new position to embark on a bold project: to map the brain and nerves and to work out their function.
[...] In recent decades, neuroscientists have looked back at Willis' work with growing admiration. He has even been called the Harvey of the nervous system. [...] By the late 17th century, the work of Willis and continental anatomists such as Nicolaus Steno and Franciscus Sylvius had led most physicians to accept the basic tenets of neurology. Philosophers such as John Locke (a student of Willis') even incorporated the reconceived brain into their epistemology."
Carl Zimmer

Adam Zeman reviews 'Soul Made Flesh'
"Carl Zimmer's illuminating book charts a fascinating chapter in the soul's journey; it is distilled from the writings of Oxford's 17th-century "virtuosi," depicted against the turbulent, sometimes tormented, background of the English Civil War, the plague and the Great Fire of London. The principal characters are a formidable group who transformed the understanding of our bodies and minds: William Harvey, who established the circulation of the blood; Robert Hooke, who coined the term "cell" for the smallest functional unit of biology; Robert Boyle, who dared "speak positively of very few things" yet fathered a great brood of profound experiments; Christopher Wren, astronomer, illustrator, architect; and, at the center, the physician Thomas Willis, whose studies of the brain and its functions created a "neurologie," a "doctrine of the nerves," which, Zimmer argues, has come to its fruition in our present "neurocentric age."
Willis grew up outside Oxford in a Royalist family, became a student at the university in 1638 at 17, and volunteered as a soldier in King Charles I's army in 1644. Despite his affiliation with the defeated Royalist cause, Willis managed to establish a successful medical practice. He, Wren and others formed the "Oxford Experimental Philosophy Club," whose activities included the creation of a universal language, the microscopic description of insects and the telescopic interrogation of the moon. In 1660, with the Royalists back in the kingdom's saddle after the restoration of King Charles II, Willis was appointed professor of natural philosophy at Oxford. He turned from the contemporary preoccupation with the work of the heart and lungs to a more obscure project: "to unlock the secret places of man's mind." To do so, he wrote, "I addicted myself to the opening of heads."
Willis dissected human brains in his Oxford house, Beam Hall, exploiting techniques of preservation, injection and microscopy developed by his colleagues. His theories were guided by his experience with patients and tested in animal experiments. He was intrigued by the network of blood vessels covering the brain, giving it the appearance of a "curious quilted ball"; he described the arterial circle at its base that still bears his name; concluded that the fluid-filled ventricles at its center, considered crucial by previous theories, were a mere "complication of the brain infoldings"; and traced the intricate network of nerves that emanates from the brain to coordinate the workings of our organs. In a series of books -- "Anatomy of the Brain," "Cerebral Pathology" and "Two Discourses Concerning the Soul of Brutes" -- he developed ideas that Zimmer reasonably describes as the foundation stones of contemporary neuroscience: that the nervous system is a network designed to transmit signals (regarded by Willis, well prior to the science of electricity, as "animal spirits"); its parts are specialized for particular functions; it shares much of its anatomy and function with the brains of animals, and its afflictions, both neurological and psychological, can be cured by "manipulating the atoms which compose it."
But although Willis believed that most brain functions could be explicated "according to the Rules, Canons and Laws of a Mechanick," he could not bring himself to identify the soul with its bodily home. The brain might be the "mind's presence room," in the words of his student John Locke, but Willis proposed that man, alone, was "a double-soul'd animal." An immaterial, rational soul cohabited with its material counterpart in the brain. Robert Boyle described this ethereal being as "a kind of imprisoned angel."

Lisa Jardine reviews 'Soul Made Flesh'
"The modernity of Willis's ground-breaking work with the brain, and his account of the role of the nerves in bodily functions, including the emotions, will astonish ..."

First Chapter: 'Soul Made Flesh' by Carl Zimmer
"At the beginning of the twenty-first century, thousands of neuroscientists follow Willis's trail. [...]
To some extent, we have become comfortable with this new brain. Few will deny that the workings of our minds are the product of billions of neurons organized into clusters and networks, trading trillions of signals with one another every second. We demonstrate our comfort by buying billions of dollars of drugs in the hope of lifting our mood, calming our jitters, or otherwise modifying who we are, simply by boosting or squelching the right neurochemical signals.
This comfort may have come too easily. The big business of brain drugs belies science's enormous ignorance about the organ. The maps that neuroscientists make today are like the early charts of the New World with grotesque coastlines and blank interiors. And what little we do know about how the brain works raises disturbing questions about the nature of our selves."

A robot to DIY for - The Guardian 27 March 2004
"Take Lucy's motors, for example. Grand spends a few pages explaining how he took perfectly good servomotors and made them harder for Lucy to control by adding some springs. It makes perfect sense, because the springs make Lucy's arms behave in a much more biological fashion. This forces Lucy's artificial brain to learn to control her arms in a way that is likely to be closer to the way mammal brains control muscles than to the way computers usually control servomotors. Her body thus provides the right sort of home for her mammalian-style brain, which is what Grand is most interested in. In the third section of the book, Grand sets out some of the novel hypotheses he has come up with to explain mammalian intelligence. I am not a neuroscientist, but I did find his suggestion that mammals are more intelligent than insects because their brains are in an important sense simpler both original and daring."
Dylan Evans

Simon Garfield meets AI inventor Steve Grand
"Grand, Lucy and Grand's wife, Ann, work in a converted garage by their house in Shipham, Somerset, and together they try to figure out what it is that makes the mind work. Lucy, who has the face of an orang-utan bought in Toys 'R' Us and a torso and arms of batteries, circuit boards, wires, motors and lots of solder, was never designed to perform marketable human functions that one might see in science fiction or Woody Allen films.
She is a vessel into which Grand throws some of his theories on how humans see the world and act in it. He is trying to make an artificial life that will learn the way babies learn, by seeing and touching, and by accumulating knowledge and experience. To do this, he must build muscles and connect them to a homemade central nervous system."

Growing Up with Lucy : How to Build an Android in Twenty Easy Steps
Page 47: "The human brain is amazingly subtle and complex, but it is not necessarily complicated. If all the parts were different then the overall machine would indeed be complicated - this is how the human brain appears when people assume it is made from specialised ad hoc neural modules. But that is because they are using the wrong paradigm. In reality, many of the parts are identical, or at least essentially similar, like Lego bricks."
Steve Grand

A Culture of the 'Inter' : Japanese Notions ma and basho
"In Japanese the word for 'person' is ningen. The first character (nin) means 'man', the second (gen) space or in-between (aida). Ningen does not refer to a substantial core of an actual person (hito) - cogito - but to a dynamic sphere wherein people are interconnected."
Henk Oosterling

Joi Ito's Web: Talking to Danny Hillis about Time and Comments from Takemura Sensei about "Ma"
"[...] The concept of the medium, the in-between, signifies the interval between time and space, and is similar to the concept of the web.
The function of the web, which weaves the internal world and unconsciousness of man, is the most important concept in trying to understand media. Until now, the massive, one-way media network has reflected, as the very word net implies, the ideology of capture, of rounding up the masses into a net. Hakim Bey, an advocate of the web and anti-copyright who had a decisive influence on cypher-punk, expresses with the word web not this type of net, but rather a web as a function of communication, actively weaving together the mutual intercourse of the scattered reference points of information. It could be compared to Sufi philosophy or the ambient "journey" woven together from nomads and nature.
In previous mass society, if you were excluded from the circulation system consisting of mass-produced advertisements and media devices it was difficult, even with superior content, to gain attention. The internet society, or the digital society, dismantles the circulation system that previously required a long duration of time and geographical expansion and infiltration. And as content and context instantaneously form a web of time and space, it produces a knot called "cyber-space/Ma" tying together time and space. In contrast to previous media circulation systems, which closed the gap between time and space, the web has already bestowed the flexible grid of "Ma" and a tribal response onto time and space. In this sense, freeware and web are truly new media systems in the context of cyberculture. [...]
Currently, the media of the inter-world called the web is weaving a new articulation with the traditional aesthetics that constitute the resources of Japanese experience and sensibility. The digital web, spreading across the earth like a nervous system, is evoking great changes in the physical world, in communication and the formation of communities in cyberspace, as well as in the industrial, economic systems which will be revolutionized by the digital network. We are facing the question not of how to design the completely new electronic world of cyberspace, but rather how to embody it. The historical experience and knowledge that human beings and the natural world have woven together will become an important factor in the design of this new ecosystem of information, the new world that has appeared on the earth, unaffected by gravity and whose concepts of time and space cannot be evoked by the old media. The emergence in the real world of an imaginary real society, in which unrealizable worlds are produced without end, conceals the complicit relationship of desire between human beings and the media. What we must consider seriously is the fact that media is the reflection of man's limitless desire. In the next generation of desire-designing media, we will need to discern an exquisite interval that reflects life-sized bodies and cultures."
Mitsuhiro Takemura

Intervals-Ideas-Initiatives

"The Eastern and Western experience of both time and space are essentially different. In flower arrangement, for example, the European arranges the flowers in space, whereas the Japanese harmonizes the space between flowers."
Barrington Nevitt - The Communication Ecology (Butterworth & Co, 1982, page 61)

Barry Boyce - What Time is Now?
"The Japanese concept of ma refers to the ability to stretch and bend time according to the movements of a human body dancing. If we watch dancers adept at ma, they create time for us as we witness their movements through space."

The Extensions of Humans

"Today man has developed extensions for practically everything he used to do with his body. The evolution of weapons begins with the teeth and the fist and ends with the atom bomb. Clothes and houses are extensions of man's biological temperature-control mechanisms. Furniture takes the place of squatting and sitting on the ground. Power tools, glasses, TV, telephones, and books which carry the voice across both time and space are examples of material extensions. Money is a way of extending and storing labor. Our transportation networks now do what we used to do with our feet and backs. In fact, all man-made material things can be treated as extensions of what man once did with his body or some specialized part of his body."
Edward T. Hall - The Silent Language (Fawcett, 1959, page 60)

The Speculist: Speaking of the Future Archives

"Language is metaphor in the sense that it not only stores but translates experience from one mode into another. Money is metaphor in the sense that it stores skill and labour and also translates one skill into another. But the principle of exchange and translation, or metaphor, is in our rational power to translate all of our senses into one another. This we do every instant of our lives. But the price we pay for special technological tools, whether the wheel or the alphabet or radio, is that these massive extensions of sense constitute closed systems. Our private senses are not closed systems but are endlessly translated into each other in that experience which we call con-sciousness. Our extended senses, tools, technologies, through the ages, have been closed systems incapable of interplay or collective awareness. Now, in the electric age, the very instantaneous nature of co-existence among our technological instruments has created a crisis quite new in human history. Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demand that they become collectively conscious. Our technologies, like our private senses, now demand an interplay and ratio that makes rational co-existence possible. As long as our technologies were as slow as the wheel or the alphabet or money, the fact that they were separate, closed systems was socially and psychically supportable. This is not true now when sight and sound and movement are simultaneous and global in extent. A ratio of interplay among these extensions of our human functions is now as necessary collectively as it has always been for our private and personal rationality in terms of our private senses or "wits," as they were once called.
Hitherto historians of culture have tended to isolate technological events much in the same way that classical physics dealt with physical events."
Marshall McLuhan - The Gutenberg Galaxy (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962, page 5)

Steven Connor - Seeing Sound: The Displaying of Marsysas
"It is neither accident nor surprise that in our world of recombinant media and conjugated forms, there should be such active and energetic concern with the ways in which different media and art forms converge. Convergence, which is to say, interconvertibility is all. [...] Mediation, a singular and general condition of translatability, is the medium within which we live.
I want here to look at a much earlier period in the history of intermedial translation, by considering the rendering of the flaying of Marsyas, in myth, text and image. I shall consider how the story of the antagonism of the lyre and the pipe and the defeat of the latter has been played out, from Herodotus and Ovid through Raphael, Titian, Nietzsche and Frazer to contemporary rereadings of the Marsyas myth in the work of the French psychoanalyst of the skin, Didier Anzieu. Along the way, I will be considering the argument and agreement between sound and image, music and skin, cry and gesture, playing, flaying ..."

Advanced Knowledge Technologies: Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration

"We may note ... that the psychosocial extension of man throughout the biosphere has been characterized as adding a "noosphere" layer. This idea of organized human thought now covering the globe as a functional part of the overall ecological system is, to an extent, physically demonstrable in our present global communications networks, and in the enormously accelerated growth of human knowledge with its parallel increase in the numbers of messages, meetings, journals, etc., ceaselessly circulating around the earth.
Our basic critical impasse in global terms is still, however, our inability to use our collective knowledge. The block is to be found most often in the persistence of obsolete social forms and attitudes. This brings us back to ... the role of social invention as a prime need."
John McHale - The Future of the Future (Ballantine, 1971, page 103)

machinewatch - a wary eye on the convergence

"[We] feed upon each other's mouths and minds like ants with social stomachs."
Weston La Barre - The Human Animal (Phoenix, 1955, page 207)

Autopoiesis and Coevolution
"Autopoiesis is based on the way living systems address and engage with the domains in which they operate." Chris Lucas

Poiesis of Spaces
Herbert Marshall McLuhan: "In the electric age we wear all mankind as our skin."

Nick Herbert - Elemental Mind
"I think that mind is as fundamental to nature as light or electricity."

Spacetime networks from multiway systems
Finite Relativity Theory
Causality and Multiply Connected Space-Time

"Although his theory of mind was inspired by Einsteinean relativity, Culbertson uses none of Einstein's other relativity postulates, only his four-dimensional spacetime framework for all material events.
In spacetime, the motion of a body -- a Democritean atom, for example -- is represented by a series of events winding their way through the block universe, the body's so-called world line. When bodies meet, their world lines entangle, forming networks in spacetime. It is the detailed topography of these spacetime networks that is, according to Culbertson, uniquely correlated with conscious experience. Hence the material basis of Culbertsonian mind is not isolated particles, but the world lines these particles trace out as they move through time. These world lines resemble threads in a fabric, and the patterns in this four-dimensional fabric are all "alive" -- elements of sentient life, [...] Culbertson breaks the Democritean isolation of lonely atoms by picturing these particles' spacetime paths as threads in an elaborate tapestry -- a tapestry in which the universe's entire history ..."
Nick Herbert - Elemental Mind (Plume, 1994, pages 122-123)

The "Life" of a Carpet: An Application of the Alexander Rules
"The life of a carpet originates in its details, and is established through connections. [...] The coupling of balanced opposites brings a carpet to life. In some parts of a design, space must be differentiated at the smallest perceivable scale -- the smallest size the eye can see -- to define nodes of interest. For a carpet, that will be a line with a one-knot width, and elements the size of a few knots."
Nikos A. Salingaros

Time is discrete
Planck-scale physics
Powells.com Interviews - Brian Greene

It was in China, late one moonless night,
The Simorgh first appeared to mortal sight -
He let a feather float down through the air,
And rumours of its fame spread everywhere;
Throughout the world men separately conceived
An image of its shape, and all believed
Their private fantasies uniquely true!
(In China still this feather is on view,
Whence comes the saying you have heard, no doubt,
"Seek knowledge, unto China seek it out.")
Farid ud-Din Attar - The Conference of the Birds
Translated by Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis
(Penguin, 1984, pages 34-35)

Conference of the Birds -- The Birds Assemble

posted by Andrew 4/06/2004 02:33:00 PM