A Golden Turn

After I heard a discussion of the selection of the recordings to go on
the gold record sent along on Voyager I, it struck me as perhaps a
model for the origins of human speech itself.

There was a genuine effort to reflect on what would be understood by
someone or some being more intelligent than human beings---this sort
of task is not the talent of ordinary mentation. Some real effort
went into the selection of music, and various languages, recorded on
the gold record. Beethoven,Rock 'n Roll greetings in a large number of
languages, like Urdu, and others. The real message sent by earth on
Voyager I seems to be variety, though that is not how Carl Sagan's
crew saw their selection process. But the stretching necessary for
the selection task to compose the gold record resulted in --
inclusiveness and variety. The opposite really of the job of ordinary
mentation which is to divide. Some part of man's mind though
understood the job was NOT to define, divide, but to portray a rainbow
of mankind's variety and genius.

Back to the origins of speech though----surely this involved a similar
but incredibly more massive effort to----transcend the ordinary. The
first speech if I am correct in seeing a hint in the gold record
project, may have been guided by an attempt to comprehend something
above one's grasp. No doubt the ordinary would label that god, but
let us not be so inclined to labelling ourselves, because as soon as
you label something thusly, in fact what happens is you forget the
reality of what you were trying to define.

And another direction for the example of the gold record is the
recollection that, for the persevering mystical tracker, the job is
trying to produce a gold record every minute. One way to approach
this is by rotating the ordinary intellect through as much variety as
you can. Jan Cox used the picture of a rotating lighthouse lamp to
convey this, occasionally. The simple inclusion of variety to counter
the intellect's staring fixation on a single thing could be sufficient
to keep ordinary intellect open to the edge of discovery.

Bumper Music

Bumper music is those bland random bits of melody that fill in the
between chatter on the radio--they function to prevent dead air, and
cushion transitions on the air.
Maybe---

Thought is the bumper music for reality...

Touring the Turing Test

As you may recall the Turing Test was devised by the great computer
pioneer, Alan Turing, to elucidate when a computer might become human.
He devised this test in the 1940s, while he was working on breaking
the German codes during the war. The Turing test is this: if a person
communicating with a machine cannot tell if the machine is human or
not, then the machine can be considered sentient.

Actually there is a problem with this test----MOST PEOPLE would fail
the Turing test. A person in communication with a another person, and
trying to determine based on the communication if they were dealing
with a machine or a person could legitimately conclude the person in
question was a machine.

Mystical muskrats

Think of it this way. What if people confused the water with the
earthen dikes which exist to control the course of the water. What if
this analogy is a picture of the thought of people all over the globe. They
could be confusing the dirt with the water and assuming that the means
by which boats traverse water is by floating on the mud. We may
all be clay eaters.

Persons have complained that mystical texts are hard to read. Why
doesn't the author just say what he means? The writer with some
knowledge and the compassion to attempt conveying what he has seen,
has to counter not the ignorance of his listeners, but their knowledge.
His job includes clarifying the difference between clay (words) and
water (what words point to.) Since folks do not even glimpse the
nature of their inner confusion, the words of the mystic seek to
overflood the nature of words themselves -- a task destined perhaps to
ultimate, but not perhaps individual, failure. The splash of wild
water is prophesy and proof.

The flooding the mystic wants to share can change geography.

All of which does not mean that the muskrat making holes in the dam
knows what it is doing. Or that the muskrat does not.

--

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.