The Rock Star told me that he feels like he's "standing in the middle of a storm" as he's helped people moving out and moving in for the past ten days.
Does he look like he's bothered by much to you? ;-)
August 2007 Archives
One of the New York Times lead stories, Shiite’s Tale: How Gulf With Sunnis Widened, opens with a microsocial version of the macrosocial dynamics which has overtaken Iraqi politics. The cycle is vicious...previous macrostructures inspire (infect?) microsocial interactions which, in their turn, lead to widespread social (cultural, political, religious) patterns. Effective interventions have to occur at both (all) levels - and be integrated with each other: those individuals who can do the emotional and intellectual labor of disengaging themselves from the dialectic-in-effect must also manage to maintain positions of political influence and become rhetorically effective at using language to exert voice.
As The Captain steered and navigated us along the Atlantic seacoast and up the Connecticut River, I marveled at our isolation.
No, we were not the only people on the water (although many times, especially in the early morning, it felt this way). We were the only people sailing. Cigarette boats, smaller fishing boats and larger cruisers pounded by, sometimes slowing considerately so as not to pummel us with their wake, but not always. How is it, I wondered, that people seek to escape the frenzy of daily life by transferring the same frenetic energy to their recreation? Everyone we met commented on the "speed" (as in lack thereof) or our humble craft. There we were, two women (egads!) on a tiny boat (one kayaker who stopped to chat boasted his boat was longer than ours by two whole feet!), rejecting modernity's rapidity and its characteristic exertion of control over the environment.
Sailing is a wonder. I was blessed with spectacular weather during my stint as crew for Shemaya's Serenity Sail - a bit of rain the first night (for which we were totally prepared), otherwise sun and the vagaries of wind and current. The second night boasted a spectacular sunset, a full moon and an eclipse! We had nice long downwind sails on Day Two and Three. By Day Three I was doing pretty well with steering - having worked out how to work the rudder to keep the bow pointed where we wanted to go. In the little bit of down time just before bed, we read Over the Edge of the World. "By sailing west until they reached the East, and then sailing on in the same direction..." (p. 2), Magellan and his crew changed humanity's conception of the world. While discussing this as we tacked back and forth up the mouth of the Connecticut River (the first time!), I had a flatearther moment. I don't know how else to explain it; I was sitting in Serenity, with water stretching quite a distance in all directions around me, land rising up on two sides and the Long Island Sound behind...I tried to imagine the magnitude of the shift in consciousness required to reject the obvious evidence provided through the perception of my own eyes: the world seemed flat. I comprehended the world as flat (for all of a second or two, just long enough to register).
An email from a colleague came with this quotation by Frantz Fanon:
I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.
Eat your heart out!
(Not that I know many details, except I am going to be on a sailboat, in the Atlantic, off the Connecticut seacoast for up to six days.)
He did it.
He really left.
shit. I'm sure that is not right. I had it in mind until I sat down to write this. Will someone correct me?
This is like when I thought you all were talking about female genital mutilation in India: how hard are you laughing now? ;-) Yes, I am just a phat redneck. (sigh)
Ethel the Philosopher is writing on non-propositional knowledge, which is almost phenomenological but not quite. Cassiopia the Easily Wounded is working on something else (I'm not sure what).
Then we saw my classmate from years ago, who I've now seen three times in the last two weeks: "In Panama we say, 'Now I see you in my soup!'" she exclaimed while passing me on the street. :-)
Wittgenstein was a misogynist who believed genius has a price. Did Nietzsche believe this too? I don't know, but we had an impassioned discussion tonight about the possibility that systemic change begins with us. (Maybe it was just me who was passionate?!)
I think there were a hundred other things I was supposed to remember for the blog, but come on! I can't do it all by myself! ;-)
Science, Vol 317 (24 August 2007) reports "evidence that the brain’s representation of the physical body is malleable and can be modified by information from the senses." The Experimental Induction of Out-of-Body Experiences by H. Henrik Ehrsson and Video Ergo Sum: Manipulating Bodily Self-Consciousness by Bigna Lenggenhager, Tej Tadi, Thomas Metzinger, and Olaf Blanke seem likely candidates for support of a related argument about linguistic relativity.
The question is, if we feel our bodies are where our eyes are, as further explained in this summary by the BBC, how does such a perception alter the way we imagine ourselves in the world, particularly in relation to others? Does this show up in the ways we communicate? In the ways we use language? Do such perceptions actually alter our consciousness by eliciting particular neural pathways to be broken, reconfigured, reinforced, or newly created?
"How was your year?"
Deborah's first question was too big for me to answer right away. It was, in fact, almost exactly a year ago that I returned from Istanbul and spent a day with Lee, meeting her friends Deb and June on Long Beach. As usual, Lee outdid herself with hospitality on both ends of this year's quick trip to Albuquerque, not only taking care of me but spontaneously entertaining three of my friends.
On the return flight, I'd done as much work as I could, continuing to read and write on my proposal. Underneath the intellectual activity however, a crevass yawed open so sharply I could hardly find means of articulation:
I would like to believe that the pain will fade. I know its pang will mellow, becoming more manageable if still poignant. Smaller triggers will elicit edges, twinges persist in their acuteness. The overwhelming character will ease, etching itself into identity such that intangible nuances of care and compassion will be enhanced. Unless one turns bitter, or chooses to ignore pain’s presence, these simple if tragic events will not be repeated. Indeed, exactly the same “mistake” will not occur again, rather conditions will call out disguised in a new form, sneakily enticing enactment of another version of the sad same ol’ same old thing. A quick wit and sharp intelligence will recognize the pattern – at least momentarily – before defenses once again seek to avert disaster (bringing it on? We must learn new ways.)
Arriving late to life, my mind opens so slowly to intersubjectivity. Communal relationality at the core of all myths that inspire me, even those of heroic deeds (which must be done on someone’s behalf). Sleep seeks me, the computer’s battery fades, this flight home extended, a delay. I am such a product of my time, yearning yet hemmed in, alive against the crushing numbness of institutional regimes demanding my labor, my subsistence ecked out against rules and policies and expectations not to rock the fragile boat. There are no life rafts here.
Lee's generosity is always a surprise - not that she offers, but that she so means it. Sam's progeny. :-) The connection between Deb and I continues. Her new work is fascinating, pursuing the theme of gestation shaping her (and my) work and life. I am compelled even more by Deb's words about her art. Perhaps next time I will bring an audio recorder? She could be podcast. :-) The new watercolors continue exploring bodily and root systems but invert the positive and negative ground. Her guiding principle, "everything contains its opposite," allows her to generate abstract images which haunt with familiarity. A chord of recognition is struck, then followed by a question: this speaks to me, eliciting a sense of ease, but I do not know exactly what or why: in her words, what is evoked is "a comfortable mystery." Lured by mystery yet safe enough in the zone of the familiar, perhaps we can look more closely?
Our reunion has that feel - none of us realized the timing until hours of interaction had passed. Yet the bonds that tied us last year are as strong and sudden now as they were then. An anniversary marked with all the important things: fellowship, food, fun. I must follow up on June's suggestion to read Christopher Moore (Practical Demon Keeping seems exactly right, and The Stupidest Angel definitely appeals).
Meanwhile, as we compared notes of the last year, Deb dropped some gems about acquiring "a knowledge of how you do things," and that what matters are not your circumstances "because everybody has circumstances" but "how you accommodate the circumstances."
So, whether you can't convince a dog to accept a hardboiled egg from your hand, or your jeans get wet in the surf, the point is (as an email from Ruth asserts) to learn to dance in the rain.
Having moved from place to place so many times in my life means there is no particular geography that grounds me, no physical location where my people are.
Returning to Albuquerque for a visit evokes memories specific to this place, tightly associated with the short time I lived here and the other times I've visited. The quality of the air, the dry heat, the spectacular Sandia mountain range and mellow (by comparison) but distinctive volcano range known as the Three Sisters outline this region of high desert. The lush vein of greenery lining the path of the Rio Grande through the city evokes a surge of joy: so much life!
I moved here for work (installing cable television), mom moved with me. Less than half-a year later my company lost its contract and I began my years on the road. While here I did some organizing for the National Lesbian Conference (which had its fair share of controversy!), was initiated into the ranks of hot air balloonists (one spectacular ride), and basked in the arid, rough landscape. None of the connections I made with local people have persisted, but I recall them fondly. Laurene and I gave a keynote presentation here at a NAME conference, which is a definite highlight of my academic/activist life.
The specificity of event, time, and location (a convergence of spacetime) strikes me in contrast to that of many of my friends who return to the same place where they and their families have always lived. What memories are elicited, by which selection processes when so much has happened within a circumscribed area? While I often bemoan the lack of such a home, it occurs to me that the ability to disperse my own memories over a temporality linked with movement might be a benefit.
I told mom that Tommy is a keeper. (Not that my opinion really matters, but it is nice to meet him and discover that I like his sense of humor and appreciate his integrity.)
He's got an amazing mental focus, evident in his stories and daily interactions. He credits his mom (who "never thought no harm of no one") and Jesus Christ. Tommy is blessed with great health and has had incredible good luck (as well as plenty of horrible experiences that might have more deeply wounded a lesser person). He loves his work - forty-five years as a teacher and still going strong! Tommy is walking testimony to the positive effects of following one's passions.
He built a house, by himself, when he first started teaching in New York during the 1960s. Seven thousand square feet, mind you, with no prior experience. As I listened to him recount various anecdotes about buying the land (a killer deal), refusing shoddy or haphazard assistance (nothing beats one's own craftsmanship), resisting the collective jealousy of many who wanted him to fail, and connecting with children despite adult animosity...I thought to myself, we are rather alike, he and I. Not because of these particular experiences; mine have been different, less extreme and/or targeted in alternative ways. Rather, I think Tommy and I both have some kind of internal drive that anchors a conviction in our own perception of the world. I am not claiming that my views are more right or better than others, but that believing and adhering to them has been an effective strategy for me to arrive in (at least some of the) places I want to be.
I woke up this morning thinking about conflict: why it happens between individuals and what "it" is that occurs, the phenomena itself that we label "conflict." I know a bunch of analytical theories about why conflict happens, and plenty of communicative strategies for avoiding or resolving interactions that involve conflict. I believe conflict is an irreducible element of life. The challenge of conflict is balancing the tasks of managing oneself and respecting others. The mechanism of conflict is the meeting of two (or more) different interpretations of "reality" - the struggle is which version will take primacy. Collaborative relations have no assumption that one or the other viewpoint is more/less important or real than one's own.
I am such a slow learner. :-/
Anyway, I related to Tommy's story of building a house, both because I miss having a home to fiddle with, but moreso because the metaphor is suitable for my ambition. I want to build a house of ideas, a mental/social construction of possibility, a framework for interaction that enables collaboration as an equal alternative to hierarchy: a home of power with, rather than power over.
“I learned something new about you!” The Ever-Smiling Evil Indian gloated after I whined (!) about having never been claimed. “Your friends claim you.” (She really did say this, obviously a weak moment.) I know, but this doesn’t mean I believe! That’s the fundamental part – not exactly hard-wired into my brain – but the synaptic patterns I cognize as “not belongingness” (electrical stimulation among dendrites and axons in my limbic system) are encoded in neuronal firing patterns that can (only?) be changed by engraining long-term memory through “changes in the strength of the synapses between the nerve cells” (p. 8, Who do you think you are? A Survey of the Brain, The Economist, December 23, 2006).
The trick then, is manipulating the strength of those synaptic patterns, “changing the way that information flows through the neuronal network” (p. 8). One time when neuroscientists have found that synaptic strength change is accomplished is, believe it or not, during sleep! They don’t actually know how: one has to accept a comparison with sea slugs and worms to follow the argument Geoffrey Carr lays forth. :-) He presents the relationship among “sleep, dreaming and the establishment of long-term memories [as] known about for awhile” (p. 8), citing in particular studies of the hippocampus by Dr. Eleanor Maguire on the Knowledge of London taxi cab drivers (p. 7) and Dr. Matthew Wilson on electrical activity - dreams! - in the brains of rats “as it learnt something about the environment, such as how to run around a particular maze” (p. 8).
Identity, extrapolating from the above and other findings of modern neuroscience, is generated from (by, through) the subtle interactions of emotion and reason. Emotions are processed through the limbic system, particularly the amygdala and hypothalamus. Particular emotions (fear, anger, disgust, sadness) are conducted by the amygdala, and others (e.g., joy) with the hypothalamus. Memory is orchestrated by the hippocampus. Organizing all of these neurochemical and neuroelectrical processes is a function of language – Carr says “many … think the evolutionary pressure that drove the enlargement of the human brain was not a need to survive the natural environment but a need to negotiate the social one” (p. 9). Intriguingly, even categories of objects are associated with certain physical locations in the brain: for instance face recognition (always and only in the fusiform face area), images of places (parahippocampal place area) and writing (left fusiform gyrus) are always processed in the same place:
Somehow, all healthy developing brains not only work out that written words are a category to which it is worth allocatings its own piece of neural anatomy, but find it easiest to accommodate that category in the same piece of wetware. (p. 9)
The how of all these layers are being worked on at the level of genetics, with researchers aiming to pinpoint which genes are responsible for which synaptic connections, and theorizing about language and the mind. “Though no one has yet proved the case, it looks as though the evolution of language and the evolution of theory of mind might not only be two sides of the same coin, but might actually be different specializations of the same basic structure” (p. 10). Carr comes down strongly in support of Steven Pinker’s language instinct (and, hence, Noam Chomsky), citing an array of behavioral evidence, the existence of a speech production area in the brain (Broca’s area), a speech-recognition area (Wernicke’s), and parallels between auditory and visual languages:
Nor is language processing merely a matter of decrypting and encrypting sound. Deaf people who communicate using sign languages (which have all the grammatical and syntactic features of spoken language) also do their processing in Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas. If they suffer damage to these areas, it shows up in exactly the same way that it does in those who can hear. (p. 10)
What do humans, apes, elephants, and dolphins have in common? Awareness of self. This is a feature of consciousness that sets us apart from other animals. Reflecting upon the fact of self-awareness invokes theory of mind: “the ability not only to hypothesize what other minds are thinking, but to hypothesize what they are thinking about what you are thinking” (p 10).
The evolutionary value of this is that people can anticipate the actions of others in a way that helps them. But with language, they can not only anticipate the actions of others, they can try to manipulate them. (p. 10)
Enter interpreting – oh alright, it has been here all along! :-) – and mirror neurons. “A mirror neuron is one that is active both during the execution of a particular action or the production of a feeling by the individual concerned, and also when that individual observes the same action or feeling in another individual. In other words, it mirrors the actions and thoughts of others” (p. 10). But not exactly. Mirroring, based on a visual metaphor, is flawed from the start, since “visual experience…is a complete fabrication. What is consciously perceived is not a simple mapping of the images that fall on the retina. Instead, the signals from the optic nerves are deconstructed and re-formed in a process so demanding that it involves about a third of the cerebral cortex” (p. 12). Now, let me infer beyond what Carr explicitly states.
What is “mirrored” by mirror neurons are qualia – “consciously experienced feelings” (p. 11), but these are not necessarily the same, they are dialectical. We may both feel fear, or shame, or joy simultaneously, or your joy might elicit my grief, my anger your guilt, etcetera. This is because of the mutual reinforcement of a theory called neural Darwinism, which “combines two ideas. The first, as [Dr. Gerald Edelman] charmingly puts it, is that ‘neurons which fire together, wire together’ … provid[ing] the selective pressure that is the prerequisite for any Darwinian-based theory: to those neuronal networks that have shall be given, from those that have not, even what little they have shall be taken away.
The resulting changes are the physical basis of learning. (p. 11)
While Dr. Edelman restricts his claim to the internal neurochemistry of the brain, I am suggesting that such isolationism reduces the problem of consciousness to a false basis. Perhaps an opening to extend beyond the false autonomy of an individual is provided by the second idea in Edelman’s theory: re-entrant mapping. Here, Carr’s explanation reads like a communication textbook:
The process of learning can be viewed as one by which reality (as perceived by the senses) is transformed into a representation of reality. (p. 11)
These transformations, Carr continues, are described mathematically as mapping. “In Dr Edelman’s model of the brain…the maps themselves are mapped by other groups of neurons. It is the phenomenon of different groups of neurons watching each other that he refers to as re-entrant mapping” (emphasis added, p. 11). [Tangent: see this piece re William James on the Emotions, Mimicry, and the Social Self]
The anthropocentrism of neurons “watching” each other returns us to the problems of vision and the fact that even the perceptions of our senses differ. This variability of input/reception results in diverse – sometimes even contradictory – meanings, assertions of value, or evaluations of meaningfulness. Hence, the dilemmas of communication as we labor to create systems that enable survival and improve the human condition. If the key to learning lies in changing the basic neural firing patterns of daily experience, then the ways people talk about the experiences of living provides a powerful source of information about the phenomena of consciousness. Examining discourses enables framing to become apparent as a structure of knowledge: our own as well as others. The extent and depth to which the knowledge of how our own consciousnesses are structured can be transformed into changes at individual, societal, and institutional levels is an open question. [For instance, to what extent can we manipulate fractal geometry?]
Carr describes a particular mechanism of change as the “recapitulation of experience” (p. 8). (One must be amused by this proposed definition: "What usually happens after eating a parrot sandwich.") Time and repetition are crucial components – both in terms of what has been documented with powerful technologies such as the fMRI (functional magnetic-resonance imaging – which has its critics, btw), and in securing (what I will call) the meaningfulness of memory. Taking time first, two absolutely fascinating details: rats in the experiments by Dr. Matthew Wilson “replay their experiences in their hippocampuses even when they are just resting, although, intriguingly, the pattern of electrical signals runs backward at this time” (emphasis added, p. 8). One could infer that memories are stored in chains of electrical impulses stemming from the most recent (closest in timespace) to oldest (most distant in spacetime). One can even imagine that links in this chain are not necessarily continuous through each-and-every-related experience, as what would matter is the strength and repetition of the neuronal firing pattern itself. The details of experiences that reinforce a synapse could easily be lost as dendrite firing to a specific/particular axon of another nerve fades without reinforcement.
The other totally compelling time detail involves the relationship between action and decision-making. Dr Benjamin Libet has shown (via electroencephalography) “that the process which leads to the act starts about three-tenths of a second before an individual is consciously aware of it” (emphasis added, p. 12). In other words, our synapses initiate action prior to what we imagine is our own intellectual, conscious, and deliberate choice: the mind is always playing catch-up with the brain. Does this temporal fact of physical reality seal the coffin on free will? I do not think so. Language is a mechanism for redirecting experience: not just for (attempting to) manipulate others but for reconstructing the structure of mirror neurons in our very own brains. The challenge, hidden like a seed in Carr’s prose, is not to merely repeat the spontaneous neuronal firing of new experience, but to recapitulate that pattern.
I may always be in the process of arriving just-after-the-fact of a neural firing of not-belongingness due to whatever obscure trigger sets off the conditioned synapses, but I can delay and interfere with its knee-jerk imposition of past reality. What comes out in terms of behavior may itself be warped, but at least it represents the evidence of learning, the desire for change. (See explanation of Vipasana, Camping in the Dawn Land.) Indeed, although inconsistent, I am aware of the establishment of new patterns - different responses than I've had in the past to certain stimuli. Acting in such a way as to continually reinforce these new ways of being is an effort that becomes easier with practice.
He fed us a feast. Not that you'd know He-of-No-Worries defended his phd the other day and is imminently en route to a post-doc in Munich. Rasta the Jamaican Impasta was here, and Andi (headed off to his own post-doc at Yale), the not - so - innocent friend from Columbia, and the Ever-Smiling Evil Indian kept us well entertained. Thoughts of ABD Singh drifted in the background (He of No Revisions).
An intriguing critique of the Indian media cast some doubt on the claim that India boasts the most mature democracy in the world.
Most important, however, are the certificates Dada wishes to distribute to his friends.
Sherri Tepper: Six Moon Dance, Grass, A Plague of Angels, The Family Tree, Gibbons Decline and Fall
Orson Scott Card: Xenocide, The Worthing Saga, Alvin Journeyman, Seventh Son, Prentice Alvin, Shadow Puppet, Treason, Children of the Mind, Red Prophet
Graham Green: Monsignor Quixote, The Power and the Glory
Poul Anderson: The Stars are also Fire
Deepak Chopra: The Return of Merlin
Sherman Alexie: Indian Killer
Ken Kesey: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Harper Lee: To Kill a Mockingbird
Margaret Mead: Coming of Age in Samoa
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
Robert Heinlein: Stranger in a Strange Land
CS Lewis: The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe
Kim Stanley Robinson: Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars
Marge Piercy: Woman on the Edge of Time
Daniel Keyes: Flowers for Algernon
Ursula K. LeGuin: Orsinian Tales, The Beginning Place, The Eye of the Heron, The Dispossessed
Madeleine L’Engle: An Acceptable Time, A Ring of Endless Light
Jean Auel: The Plains of Passage
Linda Lay Shuler: She Who Remembers
Lucia St. Clair Robeson: Walk in My Soul
Marion Zimmer Bradley: The Fall of Atlantis, The Firebrand, Priestess of Avalon
Isaac Asimov: Prelude to Foundation
John Barnes: Mother of Storms
Mary Stewart: The Last Enchantment
Star Trek: The New Voyages, and The New Voyages 2. edited by Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath
After spending hours shredding the evidence of broad swaths of my existence, it was kind of a few friends to allow me to join them for dinner despite the Orwellian eye of the blog. They promptly and thoroughly diminished the residual shards of self-importance to mere egotistical flotsam. With friends like these . . . !
I finished Morton’s novel this afternoon. “Love me, love my goblin,” Nora wishes of Isaac, but doesn’t know if he will (284). “She knew that this was going to be her life: wherever she turned, the suffering world would be upon her.
She didn’t know if she had stumbled onto a fact about existence or merely a fact about herself. Life isn’t just suffering; she knew this. Life is also joy and creation and procreation. Yes, we’re a community of suffering, but we’re a community of ecstasy as well. (278)
I identify with Isaac too. “It was amazing, the way thirty years can be irrevocably altered by one bonehead move” (262).
Tonight’s discussion themes over dinner verged on the morbid (aging, death by water, alcoholism), yet were tempered by laughter, teasing, and hopefulness. “You have too many friends.” Cassiopia was by turns sympathetic and a liability, the Ever-Smiling Evil Indian relished her pseudonymity, while the innocent friend ridiculed swimming only in water where one’s feet can touch bottom. I know I can tread water for some hours, but I will be sure to get well-trained in the use of emergency communications gear so that I can call for help when the seagulls, flies, and gusts of breeze appear!
“No matter how many wrong turns you make, you can always go in a new direction. As long as you’re alive” (257). Renee is an iconic representation of the future to Isaac; she reads Frederic Jameson on Hegel [The Cultural Turn]. Isaac wonders if
“what he really missed was the belief that there was an overarching meaning in his life . . . a thread that tied one day to the next, a bright thread of meaning that took the loose purposelessness of everyday life and gave it form and value and direction” (287).
We also spoke, tonight, of pedagogy and the ending of a course, which always seems to happen right when the norms get settled and the group is ready to evolve. Finally, a majority of individual students have become willing to be affected by the material and each other. Perhaps the institutional structuring of higher education was not deliberately designed to curtail critical re-education, but the course-by-course (teacher-by-teacher) system is starkly effective at cutting off community-building that might lead to social change. “Death moves in on you from a distance, taking things away. The circle of places you even dream of visiting becomes smaller and smaller” (195). Nora’s Aunt Billie has been like a parent to her, within the limits of her capacities.
Nora insists on treasuring the moments with her Aunt, loving her without reason: “Billie was kind, but it wasn’t because of her kindness; she was generous, but it wasn’t because of her generosity. The love wasn’t there because of anything Billie had done. It was just there. Certain people are given into our care, and we have no choice but to care for them” (188).
Nora admires Isaac’s photographs: “He had a distinctive style…a distinctive way of seeing people….his subjects, his people, seemed strong…
People, she was thinking, have handles, and different artists grasp people by different handles. Dostoevsky grasped people by their feverishness, their intensity. Yeats grasped people by their nobility of character. Whitman grasped people by their sexuality, or by whatever it is in us – something that includes but is larger than sexuality – that makes us want to merge with others. (168)
Time slowed for me today. For several stretches of road, coasting well under the speed limit, I felt oddly vacant. Nora muses “that maybe the point of life was to send one dream into the mind of the universe. Everything else in your life is incidental to the dreaming of that dream, but you can’t know which one it is” (263).
I believe we can choose which dream we want to shape the meaningfulness of our lives, but we may not be able to assess its success. After all my many (oh so many!) years on earth, my patience improves. Some times are for pleasure – being asked questions (162) by my friends tonight pepped me up a fair bit. Having a still mind is the most recent manifestation of patience – who knew such quietude is possible? Other times are for holding tight with “a love that [is] unbendable and complete” (140).
If I built an ontology on the triad of dreaming into mind, taking turns as necessary, and seeking the strengths of everyone I encounter, might this balance the force of devils and angels (Rilke), or Nora’s goblins and graces, warring for my soul? And who will remain my friend, as we try to make out each other’s words through the static of our own thoughts? (60)
"She was thankful for her life. She had the thought that she didn't regret anything she'd ever done, because the course of her life had brought her to this moment. She was grateful for everything, even grateful for her mistakes" (165).
This is Nora from A Window Across The River, which was feeding some sadnesses the other day. She is describing a transcendental moment, flying with friends in a small plane, passing from the city "beyond the bridge [when] it was like being ripped backward through the time barrier: the buildings fell away, and out her window, on the west side of the river, she saw nothing but lush green cliffs, everything looking as it must have looked a thousand years ago" (165). I have had a few experiences like that: I try to recall and grasp them tightly when their recurrence feels most improbable.
The story is about two artists, a writer and a photographer, and the nuances of their intimacy. Isaac's idealism about going into photography as a means of saving people had been amputated by experience: "it turns out you can't save anyone. You can only bear witness to their suffering" (153). Isn't this always true? Doesn't it always apply? Except in those literal situations when an action keeps someone from dying, everyone suffers their own way through this life. Meanwhile, despite the impossibility of salvation, we affect each other deeply: "If you as much as walk outside your home," Nora muses, "you find yourself with someone's life in your hands" (151).
I value my friends more than ever. Even those who bang me up during soccer (my wrist really hurts again after last night's spree!) It is good to be around friends who don't take your problems as seriously as you do, paraphrasing Nora's response (145) to a friend who mocks her problem of needing real people to inspire her creativity as a writer.
Then there is forgiveness. Nora has to forgive an Aunt who simply wasn't capable of taking care of Nora when her parents both died within a couple of years of each other while she was a teenager. She justifies her anger with a line from T.S. Eliot: "After such knowledge, what forgiveness?" As she matures, however, "Forgiveness brings knowledge of its own" (143).
Did Nora find forgiveness through the act of writing? Or was the relationship necessary enough that she would have arrived there regardless? For me, I know writing has helped me construct a consistency in my life's timeline, including expanding capacity for emotions I've at times thought could never arrive:
The diary gave her a way to link each day to the days that had come before, to link her life with the life she'd had when her mother was alive. Writing was the only way to join the days. (138)
A few results of interest on the survey Association of Internet Researchers listserv members: definitions of lurker and troll, influence of the searchability (i.e., findability) of member postings on the Internet, assessment of a community sensibility and norms for communication (topics, style of discussion).
I need to review their Ethical decision-making and Internet research closely for a project I want to propose for this upcoming academic year. I should also spend some time checking out The Center for Internet Research more closely, too.
The gauntlet thrown down when I entered graduate studies to try and earn a phd was the need to find conversations already underway in the academic literature and add my perspective. I've written many smallish pieces that have been published by journals and newsletters for sign-language practitioners in the U.S., England, and Germany. My first substantive contribution at the theoretical level came out this summer in the Benjamins Translation Library: The Critical Link 4: Professionalisation of interpreting in the community (see blurb). My article, "Why bother?" Institutionalization, interpreter decisions, and power relations is in Part V: Professional ideology: Food for thought (see abstract).
My submission for the next Critical Link volume presents a theme from the discourse of spoken language interpreters at the European Parliament, and engages a paradigm debate over conceptions of "interpreting": particularly where we locate meaning. These ideas are a foundational part of the dissertation I hope to write if the European Parliament will let me back for more research. I'm making the paper available for feedback and input. Please, if you read it, would you let me know what you think? The more conversations (input, feedback, critique) I can have with more practitioners and teacher-trainers, the more thoughtfully the project will develop.
Interpreters on Interpreting for the European Parliament.
(Download file)
A Window Across the River hooked me by the title. I suspect I am similar to the protagonist, Nora, in that I'm much better writing about real people than fictitious ones. Perhaps I divine frailities, but unlike Nora (I hope!) I am better at using words to reinforce possibility instead of despair. I found author Brian Morton's portrayals of intimacy compelling - and had to take a break.
Not that Clarice Lispector's The Hour of the Star is any lighter.
It is probably too much to say that Lispector anticipates my own journaled story, but there is no doubt she arrives there first: "...a story that is patently open and explicit yet holds certain secrets" as the outcome of an ambition
to write a story with a beginning, a middle, and a 'grand finale' followed by silence and falling rain" (13). She writes a "story [that] will emerge from a gradual vision - for the past two and a half years I have slowly started discovering the whys and the wherefores......of what? Perhaps I shall find out later. Just as I am writing at the same time as I am being read (12).
"How does one start at the beginning, if things happen before they actually happen?" (11)
She is not mocking Rilke, she agrees with him. "One cannot prove the existence of what is most real but the essential thing is to believe" (8).
Most of all, I dedicate [this narrative] to the day's vigil and to day itself, to the transparent voice of ... all those prophets of our age who have revealed me to myself and made me explode into: me. This me that is you, for I cannot bear to be simply me, I need others to stand up, giddy and awkward as I am... (7-8).
Rilke's Letters to A Young Poet are the souce of my favorite quote: "the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens." (Letter #8). This is why, Rilke argues,
it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate; and later on, when it "happens" (that is, steps forth out of us to other people), we will feel related and close to it in our innermost being.
I continue to practice my ability to believe.
I extend myself to faith.
Letter #3 includes one of my other favorite quotes:
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
Weirdness.
I woke up this morning freaking out that I've shared my current work with someone who may actually "steal" my ideas. I've sent the paper I wrote for Critical Link 5 to four people (one academic, two interpreters from the European Parliament, and a fellow graduate student). It is the academic I'm worried about - only because weeks have passed, and a few emails from me, and no acknowledgement (yet).
My first wave of concern occurred within a few days of sending my article (per request of this academic) on July 25. I had just officially submitted it by the CL5 deadline of July 20, 2007.
Much has been happening in certain areas of my personal life that may incline me toward more suspiciousness than usual: I actually hope this is a case of paranoid transference! Then, this morning's headline story from The New York Times gave me more reason to consider external influences:
“Trust was shaken today,” said Thomas Mayer, the chief European economist at Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt. “Credit depends on trust. If trust disappears, then credit disappears, and you have a systemic issue.”
I know it seems like quite a stretch, but I can imagine my whiff of fearfulness as an example of social metonymy. Here I am in my own private little bubble of "steph-ness", dealing with the current challenges and changes washing through my life, and sensing amorphous "things".... am I picking up on a general gestalt (such as the worldwide grief - that I was surprised to share so intensely - when Princess Di was killed) and importing it into the particular performance of my own being?
I witnessed a clear instance of social metonymy the other day, observing a group during a staff meeting. The newest member of the business happened to be the last person to have a turn during the warm-up/check-in activity. I was amazed at how leisurely the group was at filling each other in on their family lives, personal successes, and rewarding experiences from the office. No one seemed bored! There was a palpable sense of caring and acceptance, indicated mostly through humor and teasing, but also through thoughtful follow-up questions and visible signs of affirmation (the nonverbals of eye contact, body posture, and nodding). The last person spoke of the warm welcome and supportive environment, sharing their decision to use this workplace as a site where (my paraphrase) "I can be me." The accumulation of individual performances of "self" in this workgroup have created a collective culture that this newcomer was able not only to say (as in describe) but to actually embody, to enact with heartfelt sentiment. The clarity of integration between intention, action, and language about the intentions and actions shows how well this person will fit into the group (a confirmation of the interview/hiring process).
Dang neat stuff, if you ask me. :-)
from Shi-choo (Grandmother) the Evil Kachina
"These are our times and our responsibilities. Every human being has a sacred duty to protect the welfare of our Mother Earth, from whom all life comes. In order to do this, we must recognize the enemy - the one within us. We must begin with ourselves..."
(Shi-Choo elaborates): The outside is merely a reflection of our insides. My mind is designed to tell me that I'm not crazy for thinking what I am thinking. Even if I have angry thought, my mind is giving me excuses and reasons why it is OK to think what I'm thinking. I need to be knowledgeable about the laws of harmony and balance. I cannot twist the laws to serve me but I can adjust my life to serve the laws. This is the law - I am here to serve the earth. The earth is not here for me to misuse and abuse. Allow me the insight and knowledge of how to live in
Use these gifts as you will and pass them on if you can.
Allow Peace to surround you and walk with Balance and Beauty,
Shi-choo (Grandmother)
Related: a practical way of managing our environmental use and protecting the welfare of the planet may become available within the next year or so: maximizing energy use/minimizing costs.
See, if you hang out with those types long enough they learn all kind of things about you (such as how often you floss). Eeeck! New recommendations for old farts like me is to floss Twice a Day!
At soccer the other night someone said a stork was flying overhead. I am not sure I have ever seen a stork before! I thought I saw a pair of egrets the other day, near Poor Swamp Farm on the Norwottuck Rail Bicycle Trail, but I didn't notice markings distinctly enough to distingush them from white morphs of the Great Blue Heron. The other option is cranes, but none of them are just white like these two were. Thinking they might be, though, reminds me of watching sand hill cranes dance in Indiana oh-so-many moons ago. Phenomenal.
Downtown Amherst, Sunday night. GQ haircut, spiffy duds, trademark banter (Beyonce’s backup band members, Hermit Island, show production, and party locations. Did he tease about the blog? Hmmmmm....
Smart guy: defended his thesis a year ago (Trophy Children Don't Smile) and keeps up a very sharp website. Worth knowing.
Of the five blog hosting companies I contacted, only Greg read my initial email carefully enough to respond with a specific question that was responsive to exactly what I needed to know. Two of the others sent mass-produced (automated?) responses, and the remaining two did respond individually but with just trust us answers: "Yes, we can do that, go ahead."
The transfer is already complete! Hopefully there will be no more "bandwidth exceeded" messages that shut down the site for days at a time, occasionally at inopportune moments (like during Critical Link V last spring, sigh).
What remains now, is clean-up and more learning so I can do more sophisticated things. As in, find more ways to write myself into the world. :-)
"The giant brains who devised quantum mechanics, whatever that means" is the tagline for this book review in The Economist (14 July 2007.
Both Faust in Copenhagen: A Struggle for the Soul of Physics, and Uncertainty: Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, and the Struggle for the Soul of Science intrigue me.
An adaptation of the introduction to Faust in Copenhagen is provided by the author, Gino Segre, laying out his creative use of a play by the central physicists on Goethe's Faust as the organizational framework of the book. I'm definitely intrigued by the group dynamics - especially since the blogger linked to above agrees with another reviewer's diss of Bohr's actual contribution to the field. A New York Times review summarizes how the silly play upon "Faust, who in the legend sells his soul for universal knowledge... [became] in retrospect...profound." Another review in The Sunday Times blasts Segre's effort to link artistry and science with the lives of their progenitors is "where art and science differ. For understanding their work, Joyce’s and de Chirico’s lives matter. Pauli’s is irrelevant."
It seems I should read Faust first.
Regarding Uncertainty, The Economist review says the title is wrong because much more is covered than the Uncertainty Principle (a personal favorite). [Why? Because it articulates in the hard sciences what is known about language (see Burke, Billig, for starters): "the uncertainty principle posited that in many physical measurements, one can extract one bit of information only at the price of losing another."]
The Scientific American review (linked above) mentions something quite interesting: "Niels Bohr agreed with the basic premises of [Heisenberg's] startling insights but saw the need to 'make sense of the new quantum physics without throwing overboard the hard-won successes of the previous era.'" This is interesting in light of the debate about Bohr's contribution, as well as the critique of "logical inclusiveness" that Kuhn deconstructs as "closely associated with early logical positivism" (98): "[T]he view of science-as-cumulation is [closely] entangled with a dominant epistemology that takes knowledge to be a construction placed directly upon raw sense data by the mind" (96). Another reviewer explains that Uncertainty "illustrates the collaborative nature of science, especially of physics, and how major discoveries are usually the result of contributions over time by many individuals, with one or two leading figures providing the key insights that bring clarity to a particular issue." This is the same point emphasized by John Gribbin in The Scientists (see entry: The Middle is Always Light). This reviewer (Hugh Ruppersburg) continues, describing how author David Lindley places Einstein in the category designated by others to Bohr, as "the conservative elder doubter who believes that classical physics — its ability to predict with utter precision how the world must operate — must not be undermined by a theory holding that at a certain level there is no precision or certainty." From this angle, "it is Bohr who finally provides the vocabulary through which the world has come to understand the principle" - a direct counter to the critique that Bohr's contribution has no contemporary standing. At the same time, Ruppersburg seems to agree (in a parallel fashion, not directly) with the critic (cited above) of linking scientists' lives and work: "He [Lindley] also argues that the popularity of modern cultural, philosophical, and literary theories that depend on the notion of uncertainty, randomness, and unpredictability really have no real connection to Heisenberg’s principle, other than the fact that it helped popularize the notion of uncertainty in the 20th century. Heisenberg provided a metaphor for these theorists, nothing more." (I may beg to differ on this, but am not yet prepared to argue why.)
I am struck by the use of "soul" in the title of both works. Coincidentally (?), I was just contemplating the word in other writing this morning, suggesting it is too ambiguous because of its range of meanings (27 Google offerings). One of the articulations of soul that resonates with me is from the science fiction series, Alvin the Maker, which puts the forces of Making and Unmaking at the core of life. The physicists who worked on physics were aware of the double-edged sword of the knowledge they sought to uncover; it is interesting that the dialectical (?) tension between epistemology and ontology is invoked to characterize early physicists' search for knowledge.
[Two earlier blog references to Kuhn: Holding Form and Inside/Outside.]
More (selections from Reflexivity) on Burke: Definition of Human, Creation Myth, and On Hope and Despair.
I need a new hosting service that supports Movable Type. I also need to upgrade (my version, 3.15, is behind the times). What is web hosting?
pair networks has a refugee special that sounds like me!
2mhost also includes the option of a domain transfer, which is appealing.
Nexcess provides a detailed tutorial, that might be helpful once I get everything actually transferred (by someone besides me!)
AQHost has video tutorials and a website builder (which might only work with PCs, not Macs?)
LivingDot includes consulting; something I've been seeking for awhile.
Posted in my other blog - either my backup or an alternative? Perhaps I will begin to segregate certain categories . . . (maybe, maybe not, but it is an idea).
Also posted in my other blog, A Place in Space, since this one was unavailable due to maxxed out storage capacity.
