Some few will

• “No one ever got lynched and thought, Well, at least this will lead inexorably to the civil-rights movement.” New short fiction by Zadie Smith. | The New Yorker

Origin Story

Did the stability of stone buildings:

The smoothness of the stones,
The enduring aspect of stone
The eruptions from below of stone

Against the repetitive grasses built on immeasurable crumbs of black, all different, all the same,

And all within cornerless globes --

Did these comprehensions give men the idea for ideas, the word for words?

If so it certainly has been a persistent mistake.

Put Down the Gun

Put Down the Gun.

Those weeds were already withering

and

Your blindfold is slipping.

On what planet?

On what planet are superheroes born? Perhaps the answer is a lot closer than the fabulists would have us assume.  The function of heroes flying around, doing nice stuff, or not so, their function, in an economy of human energy consumption and output is a real question. Our answer is not meant to be definitive, but an arrow for further cerebral revolutions. And it is this:

As mankind, men and women, have become more engrossed in their imagination, (an aspect of modernity) the place of physical activity has decreased, in human life; it has literally become smaller, as you can estimate from the shift from a farmer's life to the profile of an office worker.

What does such a shift mean for the world people create, in their heads. Interestingtly, that world is now not consumed with stories of Paul Bunyan like heroism, with feats like chopping down lots of trees. That may be implausible, but now, such heroes are even less tethered to any likely scenario. Now the hero in our imaginings of the physical world have wings, or capes, and the whole alarerial dimension, as opposed to a dirt filled real outdoors, is the setting for human heroism.

And notice the place of sex, or lack of it, in such narratives.

Just interesting.

This displacement of energy from the physical to the mental, that may be getting larger, has one outcome: for a tiny minority, it results in greater mental capacity-- as in Stephen Hawking. For most, the numerically disabled, it still results in changes, apparrent in the figments we mention above. For, the mind, less connectedd to the body, still has to have pictures of some sort. And these pictures tell their own story.

For some reason the tune to this is "I'm getting married in the morning"

For the article titled

Cross Species Transfer of Genes Has Driven Evolution

click this link

http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/697075/?sc=swhn

although I cannot resist excerpting
......

“Jumping genes, properly called retrotransposons, copy and paste themselves around genomes, and in genomes of other species. How they do this is not yet known although insects like ticks or mosquitoes or possibly viruses may be involved – it’s still a big puzzle,” says project leader Professor David Adelson, Director of the University of Adelaide’s Bioinformatics Hub. 

“This process is called horizontal transfer, differing from the normal parent-offspring transfer, and it’s had an enormous impact on mammalian evolution.”

....

Ding dong the bells are going to ring

Way, way.. Waay...

This passage reminded me of something I have wondered about:

'.... T. rex and kin dominated the Earth for over 150 million years. They endured extreme temperature changes, rising and falling oceans, and super-volcano eruptions, and they diversified as their home—the supercontinent of Pangaea—literally broke apart. Dinosaurs were prehistory’s ultimate survivors ...'

No one doubts that dinosaurs (except their relatives--birds) did not co-exist with human beings.  But why, then, do all cultures (most anyway) have stories about--- dragons.  Dragons look and act like dinosaurs. What is the difference, besides one being agreed on as fictional?

Surely the stories about dragons point to the reality of an ancestral memory, the existence of which is something Plato and Jan Cox agree on. Then though, this memory must go way way, WAY, back.

Beating a read philoopopher

...that "whereof one may not speak, about that one must be silent",

Wittgenstein missed one salient (silient) dimension, you can talk 'around' the invisible----- as long as the maps are fresh---- as long as the fingers of the cerebral are eerily airy

Of course this approach is enough to clatter the teacups of analytic philosophers, were any left. They yearn for nothing more than to be able to put their cup in a saucer on a desk on a floor on a cement foundation on a nameable terrestrial layer-- on a --- on a -- but NO, never on a turtle's back.