Widows Talk

There is an architectural feature called a widows walk and it is a
balcony on an upper story of a coastal house where the mariners' wives
could watch the sea for signs of a returning ship. That the phrase is
"widows" walk got me thinking how much like words this feature is,
because no matter what you say, you are killing something when you
speak, you are losing. Like a woman up there looking out to sea has
already lost---if her husband were home, she would not be up there
scanning the horizon. How different the gull is, swooping over the
waves.

Buford Highway

This is a twist on Ken Kesey's 'you are either on the bus or off the
bus.' (I think that's what he said.) Anyway here in this southern city
we have buses and they almost all now have elaborate advertising
wrapped on them, photoreal stuff in many colors. If you match up the
scenes around the bus with the interior there is an interesting
contrast. You have people traveling to Doraville on a bus painted
with pictures of the Savannah beach. You have people slouched on
cracked plastic seats in a bus advertising BMW convertibles This
hardly counts as paradoxical since the advertising is emphatically NOT
for bus riders.

Yet the scene is a unit, combining truth and falsity, all
philosophical variants pushed together, all opinions folded into one
phrase, all colors in one blaze. The guy zipping past the public
transportation may think, can I manage a new Jaguar this summer, while
the person inside the bus wonders if he is getting any later. A unity
which laughs at any philosophical distance, which knows to specify any
school is to miss the point. A unity which exists to declare
multiplicity.

At the level of the person all are surrounded by ignorance and
(thankfully) ignorant of it. Yet the bus provides a sense of
destination to convertible driver
and bus passenger both, to distract them from the adjacent abyss.
Buses are like words. The bus points beyond itself, hints of things it
cannot deliver on. The bus will not be making any surprising stops.
The bus suggests travel but prevents any meaningful journey. Like
words.

If you accept ANY label whatsoever, you are at a bus stop. But how do
you express that you have to be both on and off the bus AT THE SAME
TIME, to get any discount on gravity?

Putting science into a test tube

Following is a quote describing a 17th century experiment by some
alchemists, especially one named Kenelm Digby who died around 1625.
The first thing that jumps out from this quote is how different
science was almost 400 years ago.
The results described we would not regard as credible. Of course it is not surprising that the quote sounds archaic -- the language is
poetic sounding. This can be fun to savor. But see what you think of this description of something the writer is calling "palingenesis." And my comments after the quote. Quote:

Never was a philosophical imagination more beautiful than that exquisite
Palingenesis, as it has been termed from the Greek, or a regeneration;
or rather, the apparitions of animals and plants. ...
Digby, and the whole of that admirable school, discovered in the ashes
of plants their primitive forms, which were again raised up by the
force of heat. Nothing, they say, perishes in nature; all is but a
continuation, or a revival. The semina of resurrection are concealed in
extinct bodies, as in the blood of man; the ashes of roses will again
revive into roses, though smaller and paler than if they had been
planted: unsubstantial and unodoriferous, they are not roses which grew
on rose-trees, but their delicate apparitions; and, like apparitions,
they are seen but for a moment! The process of the Palingenesis,
this picture of immortality, is described. These philosophers having
burnt a flower, by calcination disengaged the salts from its ashes, and
deposited them in a glass phial; a chemical mixture acted on it, till
in the fermentation they assumed a bluish and spectral hue. This dust,
thus excited by heat, shoots upwards into its primitive forms; by
sympathy the parts unite, and while each is returning to its destined
place, we see distinctly the stalk, the leaves, and the flower, arise:
it is the pale spectre of a flower coming slowly forth from its ashes.
The heat passes away, the magical scene declines, till the whole matter
again precipitates itself into the chaos at the bottom. This vegetable
phœnix lies thus concealed in its cold ashes, till the presence of heat
produced this resurrection—as in its absence it returns to its death.

End of quote.

This is empiricism, the spirit of scientific inquiry asking questions, sincerely concerned to get the outcome, though, it seems doubtful these investigators processing some
vegetable matter in a test tube could have seen what they said they
saw, Yet, a spirit of investigation and curiosity and the thrill of knowledge is apparent in the quote. Although they describe something that I doubt they saw, I am calling this empiricism.

And
what of the questions behind this investigation, what were the
experimenters looking for? These "apparitions of animals and plants"
prove the truth that "all is but a continuation."
The subject of their studies was DNA. They were using the only ideas
they possessed to investigate a recurring reality. We assume that our
20th century science is superior, and so no doubt it is, unless we pause and struggle to comprehend a larger picture.

We cannot know, what they did not know, 400 years ago, and THAT is the edge
between what we know and what we are ignorant of. To touch that
boundary is to change it. We cannot confidently assert that we, 400 years later, know more than our forebears, to a relevant extent. We manifestly cannot know what we do not know, So perhaps we are not really in a different situation that those gentlemen 400 years ago. Perhaps both our and the 17th century science, are, compared to the extent of what we do NOT know, tiny sandspits.

The scenery of a dog walk

To say you learned from your mistakes is a sure sign you did not.

To skip the obvious meaning: if you learned something you would not
verbalize it.

A definite meaning of my first sentence is that anyone who says, I
learned from my mistake, obviously did NOT learn from their mistakes
because this statement assumes ignorance is a matter of isolated
pools, little bits that can be captured and swept up, even hoovered
up, by a stately intellect.

What if the intellect is not stately?

What if ignorance is not just a few lost pieces from a jigsaw puzzle.

How would we really KNOW what ignorance is? What if the shore is small, and the ocean of ignorance huge???

Spit Torrent

Here is a recent development in digital rights management. There is a product called MediaDefenders which keeps software from being downloaded for free by peer-to-peer networks by planting a huge number of phony versions of the desirable files on networks--what happens then when someone downloads a copy is that they find they just have mush. The account I read (by Michael Wolff) called this carpet-bombing a peer-to-peer network, like bit-torrent.

Life has a similar trick--someone actually realizes a fact, but when they try to share this information, the listener cannot really grasp what the original seer saw. You read a good bit in mystical literature how "words cannot convey what happened to me." Of course unless you are Ludwig Wittgenstein that does not stop folks from discussing what they believe they saw. The readers (or hearers) of these accounts however, do not themselves then HAVE a mystical experience, themselves. Without something like that however, what is it that the lecturer conveys? Without the recipient of these accounts seeing what the speaker is discussing, we conclude they did not grasp the speakers content. Had they grasped the speakers point, they would have had an experience similar to the one the speaker is pointing to.

A Real Teacher grasps that there is this dilemma and must take this into account. It is perhaps this understanding, rather than any mystical experience , that sets apart certain historical figures of this endeavor. Mystical experiences after all are very common in the general population. (Soon perhaps we can look more closely at this commonness and why it is so little appreciated or accounted for. That is something to talk about in the near future.)

Look at Wittgenstein again--his major insight was if you cannot talk about it, don't try. So along came the positivists---(a philosophical school that says only externally verifiable information is valid,) and they loved Wittgenstein. He, however, would conclude that the positivists just did not understand his ideas.

Now Wittgenstein had a mystical experience (there must be a better way to put this.). And saying that if you cannot talk about something, then you should not do so, is a brutal truth that needed to be stressed. But when Wittgenstein was misunderstood to be saying that the mystical realm did not exist, when what he was really saying was that you could not talk about this level of experience -- what did he do? Or let me ask, what did he not do----he did not take this misunderstanding as data for him to expand his thoughts, he did not wonder why these mystical experiences were fleeting and beyond his control. Either of these plausible responses would have helped Wittgenstein on to a wider understanding. Such was not however Ludwig Wittgenstein's fate. He would wind up regarded as one of the most intelligent philosophers in the western world, and I guarantee that he did know he missed something, but he did not have the verve, the integrity, the energy to pursue the questions.

From the example of Wittgenstein perhaps we can see that intelligence is not what is missing in the difficulties facing a teacher determined to convey something.

So here are a couple of responses to the situation a teacher faces when he has an experience and feels a responsibility to -- somehow share. He can discuss the experience and in doing so lose it for himself and find that others never comprehended what he was saying, or he can formulate a philosophy of language which is highly regarded and utterly misinterpreted.

What other alternatives are there? The example of Jan Cox is one, and no doubt we will be saying more soon about this.

How the mind keeps busy avoiding reality

Below is a quote from the free email newsletter that New Scientist magazine makes available to the interested.The quote illustrates a particular strategy of ordinary human mentation; this strategy must have some value though as yet what value that could be is not clear to me. Perhaps it is the repeat a silly argument if that argument was ever believed in the past ploy. The parting line politicians use that they want to spend more time with their family falls in this camp. Never mind the guy/gal was just indicted for bribes, never mind their kids have already left for college. Never mind that the wife is furious their summer vacation will not be spent in Greece now. For some reason they can trot out the old argument that they have to leave their office to spend more time with their family and their audience does not break out in laughter.

Along these lines is this blurb for an article that does not need to be read for anyone to know the conclusions. Yet an academic magazine is publishing this article. The topic is about the effectiveness of makeup. It is my assertion that everyone knows that make up only makes young people look younger. The blurb ends that we deserve some evidence make up works. Oh sure, and we will learn from our mistakes.(That's what those stock brokers say.) Something else is going on, not what is being said. Yet this kind of blurb is repeated ad hilariousnessness, and it is all part of a dream. Part of a dream. And the proof that this research is silly, is that---if the makeup worked, you would need NO article investigating the claim. Everybody would use the product and look younger. Maybe research about HOW, it works, but not IF makeup works. So here is the blurb.

What lies beneath the makeup?
We spend a fortune on cosmetics that promise to keep our skin youthful, so surely we deserve some evidence that they work, says Richard Welle

Southeast Asia

It seems unlikely that no one else has noticed this but there seems to be some kind of engine of creativity, planetary creativity, apparently located in South East Asia.
The reasons I bring this up---recently the science news that flu viruses originate in southeast
Asia, brought back these things I had noticed before. The incredible biological diversity in for instance Malaysia. The origin of many species in this area (southeast China.) The fact that the oldest religion, Hinduism, is not only in this area, but is still vigorous after all these millenia (I base this judgment of vigor on the fact animal life is still protected in a way it is not in the west, animals protected in temples for instance.) You could make a case that the Chinese civilization is the greatest in terms of art and philosophy, that we have ever had on the planet. Religions that originated in southest Asia --Taosim and Buddhism --are able to continue while not loosing track of basic truths that the West has trouble even grasping---truths regarding change and nothingness). And a major language group appears to have originated in India, that to which English belongs.

One is tempted to assume the fact that some of this area is so volcanically active, is relevant,though exactly HOW increased volanic activity would be relevant is not clear. (See my mention of mind and matter in the first paragraph. (no reason to conclude creativity means human life is safer though, in such an area.) That a line through the Malayasian archipelago and the area including the Phillipines, seems to divide species, though the details are not right to hand (mind.)also may be relevant.

Against this idea that there is something special and generative about south east Asia,is the fact that civilization itself arose in the fertile crescent, which I cannot include in South east Asia, without extending the boundaries so much they are silly. And Jasper's axis time of history is a different kind of mapping which points to the fact that philosophy and major religions all arose within a narrow time frame. Whatever---though I am not sure we can say where civilization first arose, all we know is what is beneath where we choose to, or can, dig.

So when I say there seems to be something going on in South East Asia, am I referring to something geological?, to something spiritual, some magnetic lines of force, some energy derived from plate tectonics? I am clueless....