The Grendel We Cling To

What is going on with those monsters in Anglo-Saxon poetry, the Grendels, the dragons? Beowulf is a good example.

Surely most people wonder this when exposed to the literature or music, of anonymous bards, and very nonomous musicians like Wagner?  Don't we all  find monsters enthralling, but---- why? 

Here might be one reason: the dragons and monsters thrill us because their historic function was crucial for humanity and that function was----they represented the real.

Huh, you ask, dragons don't exist, and there is no way some Anglo Saxon story-teller ever saw a dinosaur.  How could dragons function as the reality note in a story? 

Monsters demonstrably mark the spot on maps where there is an unknown.  The Indians (American) in the 17th century spoke of monsters on the river (Mississppi), monsters who had a huge roar and would not let travelers pass.  This might be the way a plains people would describe a waterfall. 

Our conceptions are always static, a word is not a word if it cannot be defined, but a definition is a confinement.  There is no real motion if your reality was exactly as your words portray it. And yet it –the world --moves.  To comprehend this movement is one function of monsters.  At best all the human mind can do, at best---is take still snapshots of the rapid rush we are contained in.

Dragons move the story, the people, the world, along, they provide motion, in a world which is now, and has always, been, at the heart, incomprehensible.  Dragons are the plot points, that incite and demand human activity, they slay the heroes, they give a purpose to the quest, the dragons draw in big black lines the irreducible dimensions of the human world.

You ask why the young and  good are killed.  At the level of words it makes no sense.  Yet the flow of reality is experienced even if we cannot capture, convey, our world in words.  This gap between words and reality, is where monsters come in. They provide the differential over which the water of reality can flow, in a closer approximation to the world we experience, than can words alone. 

Yet now, over a thousand years after Beowulf, slew and was slain, we still love dragons, and even sing about their disappearance.  Does that mean the epistemological issues raised in this essay are resolved. I wonder is there  not some modern substitute for monsters?  I wonder and intend to continue this essay soon...

Kawkawkaw

Words are like bird feet.  And if you picture thousands and thousands of bird feet, you get a glimpse of the boring and mechanical quality of ordinary thought.  Back up though,-- words are like bird feet. The point is that birds fly, that is their glorious advantage. But they have feet and feet allow them to land and peck around, get their nourishment, and to secure themselves in trees at night. Feet connect birds to, in the words of Jan Cox, "the bosom of the mother." (He was talking about plants that cling, to earth, maybe I have stretched things too far with that picture.) Anyway feet are critically an aspect of avian reality, but they are not the motor of the species. And words are like bird feet, but most people assume that man's cerebral dimension is typified by words.  Most people never glimpse that man's ability to perceive reality involve words at the most mundane level. Words are critically important, but not the limit, not the glorious dimension that is a human potential, albeit a potential that cannot be gained, mechanically.

If you don't know what concentration is,

If you don't know what concentration is, how are you going to evaluate any possible fluctuations and analyze any possible significance?

The media of late (well since 2007) has raised the question of the effect of surfing the web on people's ability to concentrate.  However, the lack of an effective definition of concentration, one that focuses on it as an aspect of the human mind, and a potential power of the human mind, means that any investigation suffers from a confusion of terminology. Also the authors of these queries are focusing their speculation on too small a target, and so are doomed to fail.  They are looking at an individual mind, when such does not objectively exist. The rational binary, mechanical mind in the human species, does not exist to investigate questions of inner reality, and functions to rearrange the external world, to quote Jan Cox, loosely, and majorly, this binary mind serves to link the millions of people on the planet into a organism whose significant changes occur on a scale beyond that of an individual species, and at a level characterized by the epiphenomenal nature of verbiage. This is difficult to study since the survival of the organism needs every individual part to consider it's own cellular survival as crucial to the health of the larger organism.  A standard aspect of biological life.  

Have I gotten off the subject of concentration?  People do not know what concentration is, so again, their efforts to analyze the significance of the web, will not yield satisfactory results.  The average person has no clue about the nature of concentration, or the powers it can attain.  

Now spelling, that is a topic which needs to be analyzed in terms of the cyber changes we are participants of. It is not that texting and instant messaging has altered orthography. The interesting and perhaps minor thing is spell checkers. I used to be a marvelous speller. So vain was I of this ability that people did not hesitate to point out the lack of connection between spelling and intelligence.  I never used a computer spell checking program in document creation. Now though, with the built in spell checkers in email programs, I am so used to using it to find typos, that I never question my spelling and just accept whatever group of letters that make that red underlining disappear.  My native abilities in this field are fadding. 

No atheists in a black hole

The species of man apparently is designed to anticipate a deity. Although this does have an evolutionary advantage, saying this in no way explains the phenomenon, finding a point in the brain where such may be localized, in no way limits a cognitive significance to this fact about our species. Such are the views of reductionists and they cannot grasp how describing a closet from the inside does not effect an escape from the closet.  But the need for an escape is interesting, and built into the genome.  Now we are not going into the greater significance of this, merely pointing out what could be obvious from a rare perspective: that the simpler and hardest working of our species share with those widely considered at the high intelligence end of the spectrum -- they share an unexamined belief in a deity.  For the fisherman on a pier in rural Mississippi, and the laptop hunching scientist both believe, without any evidence, in a power superior to their own, a  stronger, faster, smarter --- power which -- still -- takes an interest in them.  Whether their idea is of a forgiving humanoid deity, or a cranky, humanoid with extra eyeballs, extra-terrestrial, the basic format is identical.  Only someone, with a perseverance in objective study of psychology and cosmology (to use the terms of Jan Cox), (who also pointed out that the idea of aliens is the idea of deity) might ask, and what does this tell us about people, about ourselves.  Let those clinging to their binary mind, talk of things of which they know nothing.

Artificial mind

The New York Times today has an article about why the recent scientific feat of planting articial DNA into a living cell. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/01/science/01angi.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=print

In it they quote Richard Feynman to the effect that if you don't build something, you don't understand it.  Which caught my attention, (in a very attention getting article) because Jan Cox mentioned this is his off hand way. I say Jan's words were offhand because everything he said had another non verbalizable purpose, as he spoke to students he hoped to point in a certain direction. Feynman's use, and most certainly the quote, (the quote both by the article and by the DNA artificer) is different, it is a throw away line, what Gurdjieff called smart aleck intellectualizing. The first time Feynman thought that phrase: If you don't build it, you don't understand it, he had a glimpse.  Then he said it again, he wrote it,and he did not have the real glimpse again and everybody reading it, thought yeah that's right, and totally missed the import of the phrase. Now it is said to sound cool, with it -- in the way scientists participate in that kind of verbal energy -- a pat on a paddle of a ping pong ball. Not fresh, not creative, not really seeing anything. 

The Times article talks about how we cannot create cells, yet, and how without the already extant cell, the implanting of artificial DNA would not have succeeded.  The DNA, with over a million steps, was copied from existing natural DNA.  So talk about creating life, so the article says, is not accurate. The article points out that the scientist involved did not design the million plus bases, merely copied them.  That scientist pointed out that he was not creating life, but his humility is phony, it is the way you are supposed to act, when you accept congratulations. He knows how to behave in public. 

This I point out to sketch the scientific mind.  With all the incredible progress made during the last five hundred years, the humility that characterizes the real giants of human progress, such as Isaac Newton, is uncommon even among that niche of the intelligentsia.

As an example, it is my guess that most scientists would say we are closer to understanding the major mysteries of the universe than we were during the European renaissance. It is possible however,  that compared to  the amount we do not understand, the amount of knowledge of the renaissance scientist, who thought the earth could not move because if it did move, people would fall off, and today's quark jugglers--the difference between what these folks, separated by centuries,  really know, is so small as to be, statistically insignificant.

...

Not all people who are happy, know.

All people who know, are happy

A scholarly look at the word scholar

Jan Cox said once that you cannot use a word correctly if you do not know its etymology. The example he used was the word "cakewalk." Learning about the Indo-European root of words like scholar, and hectic, gave me a glance of the connection between---scholar and hectic. The root of both 'scholar' and 'hectic' is the same indo-european word : "segh",  translated as "to hold." 

What I am today calling the monkey mind, which may be a eastern phrase itself, is the verbalizing aspect of the mechanical mind, generally assumed by modern scholars to be the most important function of the mind of man. What this monkey mind does, is hold--hang on to-- words, --- if it did not "hold" words, the monkey mind would glimpse something beyond itself.  If the monkey mind did not hold words, the words could become, transparent. So, for self preservation, and other reasons, this grasping of words is necessary and because of its necessity, is also hectic. 

The scholar must verbalize, (hold words) and must, doing so, at the very best, ignore other aspects of mind. This multiplicity of functions is one reason the scholar's monkey mind, is also---a hectic mind. The scholars mind must stay  full of words, while juggling various functions. Easy to see why scholars need words (as long as you don't immediately associate scholar with knowing something). The hectic comes too from the nature of words; words are pushy, loud, bumptious, with garish ties, --a fair description of words qua words. And this is all before you notice any connotative features. Hectic is a good word for ---words. 

This exposition acts like the the functioning of the monkey mind is difficult---that would be a misleading effect.  Our monkey mind is the default on the planet, the default for grown ups.