Saturday XXXVIII: Sour and the Tower · 12 January 2008

So. Speaking of dead brilliant women whose not-unbrilliant husbands got in their names. Dead brilliant women who will be remembered because of—and yet also so forgotten because of—those husbands. Last week, Laura Huxley. This week, Alice Coltrane. She died a year ago today. Brilliant Alice.

I’m noting for the record that vocab around here has been getting ahead of itself. Tapas—Grenadine appetizers? Siddhis—the plural of Sith? Nadis—bad people? Oops. I forget how much of my idiolect is dead languages—Sanksrit for the yoga and Latin for the (ivory) tower.

Ridiculing the latter has become too easy for me, I realized on new years. A professor whose mind I love is stateside again and I’m remembering that, for what they’re worth, intellects can be machine sof beauty. His is light and tough, hungry and fast. Refined like an Oxford don, and decorated with poetry and anime and about a dozen fluent languages.

Apropo of the tower, maybe my drawing it two weeks ago out of the tarot deck is worth more than I know. Since then everything is noisy mismatch between my visceral expectations for 2008 (great great things) and my lived experience of it (strange inner bullshit). I feel like an ingrate for even noticing the bullshit, here in world-historical paradise. There is incomparable abundance in Santa Monica, California, 2008, as I sit around studying far-flung sweatshops and global pollution, with colleagues mired in the political violence and disease of one century or continent or the other. And here: lack of resistance, lack of real difficulty, lack of outer conflict. It’s weird that sometimes the ease it makes me feel lost and dark.

Trust your feelings? That’s a call to intuition, not to the reification of emotions! I will sort it out. Not that I’m all happy and shit about it just now. Not at all. Salty Saturday links:

● Supply chains in which slavery is happening now.

● So many books arriving in the mail. I strongly dislike owning them, but what do you do? There was a grant to finish off with the year, so now all this printed tonnage is arriving. Not a single volume of it fiction. So would someone please read this so I can live through you? I don’t know why I like Coetzee so much. He is something between a sick old man and a great human soul.

● Do we have a natural bias toward superstitions? Here are some evolutionary biogists arguing irrationality is evolutionarily efficient. Their philosophy reeks. And yet, the argument itself is almost good.

● You know about what goes on at Fort Benning, right? Today is the first large peace vigil to close the School of the Americas, the training camp for Latin American Paramilitaries. The annual peace gathering in Georgia is in two weeks.

Posted by (0v0)        
Categories: esoteric shit , evolution , markets-networks-society , morality , science , self-deception , social theory , sound , spirituality

Comment

1. Hi Owl, since we’re, according to Milne, the only two Hundred Acre Wood dwellers here, what is going on with our forest? I’ve felt it, too. I’m sorry to have been such a lousy friend this week+. Not the most fun ever for Pooh Corner? Am still constantly thinking of the black penie, and not surprised it is your pick, too, most mysterious, difficult, genealogically apart from the rest of vinifera. “I can’t remember the place, I can’t remember the girl, but the wine was Chambertin”. Black Penie strikes again.

   Posted by: eor · Jan 12, 08:48 AM · #

2. God, Eeyore is the most charming man ever.
   I mean donkey, never a jack ass.

   Posted by: Susan · Jan 12, 10:55 AM · #

3. I love Coetzee!!! I’ll read it, per your request, then probably suggest that you read it yourself. I’m terrible at synopsizing.

   Posted by: Carl · Jan 12, 01:59 PM · #

4. The black grape must be native to our woods. It really is terrible weather indoors here this week+, it’s true. But I know you are in the same zone as me and can’t imagine you’d ever in a hundred acres be a bad friend.

   Maybe some day you can teach me a little bit about the other, less difficult, vinifera.

   Posted by: (0v0) · Jan 12, 03:12 PM · #

5. I have no idea what you guys are talking about but I’m saying hello anyway.

   xoxo!

   Posted by: Anna · Jan 12, 03:30 PM · #

6. I liked the second to last link you gave. The last paragraph in that article sums up nicely a phenomenon that has profound implications for our relationship to ideas. I run up against this a lot in my role of educating people about their bodily injuries. They have extensive, “non-scientific” theories about how their bodies work. There is not a chance in hell that 5 minutes of biochem or physiology can change those sticky ideas. I learned to stop fighting that a long time ago and simply nod “yes”.

   The last paragraph: “Children make up their own theories about how things work, and they are hard to shift, he said. “We are hard-wired to make sense of the world, and that includes both rational and irrational assumptions. If you’ve got a theory, it’s very difficult to modify, and no amount of counter evidence will change it. We tend to have a bias to pay attention to those instances which confirm our intuitions.””

   I have a theory that this man is stuck with his theory about theories and that, in theory, it will be quite challenging for me to change my theory.

   Posted by: e&sj · Jan 12, 11:47 PM · #

7. Another thought about the penultimate link:

   No two blankets in the world are identical.

   I know, from difficult personal experience ;)

   Posted by: Tim · Jan 13, 05:14 AM · #

8. A wise teacher once advised me to let go of the need to tell a story for every sensation. To invent a whole little mythology of my body. To recognize the grasping for an explanatory story for what it is: grasping. :)

   I have, with some (perhaps intelligent?) exceptions, taken that advice and put it into practice the best that I can.

   I can only imagine that it has saved me a lot of bullshit. I thank that teacher every morning.

   Posted by: (0v0) · Jan 14, 06:46 PM · #

9. Hi (0v0)
   Oh, thanks for that link. I wrote to you offblog regarding that Franciscan priest because I heard of it when I went to mass at the Franciscan friary in San Francisco.

   Also, the Badva Ghitta (spelling mixed up) post is inspiring too. I have a children’s illustrated book that describes the principles of hinduism that is not intellectual, but great visual fun.

   Namaste
   Arturo

   Posted by: arturo · Jan 14, 08:08 PM · #

10. after reading my post above, i had to ask myself, “what do i know?”. The immediate answer: “not much”. OK. OK, I can live with that.

    Rational and irrational. Look at the words themselves and so much insight can be gleened. Ratio. Interger ratios in music are harmonious. 2:1 is our fair octave. 3:2 the perfect fifth. We note the steady foot tapping beat of music because the notes are held in relation to each other in simple interger ratios: whole notes, half notes and quarter notes. Too many “thirteenth notes” and it becomes noise and without simple ratio or irrational.

    So…. OK, I can live with irrational and rational seeing as they are constructs. And if I can live with that I can live without judgements – even heavily conditioned and perhaps hard-wired judgements. And then from that perhaps just a moment of freedom, of just listening, of just seeing. And then it falls back to this mind/brain, this order and simple ratio seeking mechanism that searches for regular patterns and if it doesn’t find them offers me fits in return.

    In a Ram Dass talk, I came across this poem he quoted:
    The freer I am, the higher I get,
    The higher I get, the more I see,
    The more I see, the less I know,
    The less I know, the freer I am…

    So my “scientific” theories give me a living, put food on my table etc. I am not certain that they are more real or more right even if they might have more inherent “integer” ratios within them. And look at integer and one definition: a thing complete in itself. From there we can go to Wilber’s integral and what we all seem to desire: integrity – a state of being whole or undivided…

    which brings us back to our favorite word: yoga

    Posted by: e&sj · Jan 15, 01:54 AM · #

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