phenomenology: January 2006 Archives

I've been reading Orhan Pamuk's novel, Snow. Imagine the jolt of recognition when I saw the story about his arrest and subsequent trial, reported in todays NYTimes, A Way Forward for Turkey. His novel grapples with the precise forces and laws that have now impinged - most forcefully - upon his life.

The editorial in the Times uses this freedom of speech case to leap to larger context, as a means of framing the politics regarding Turkey's ascension to the European Union. Interestingly, one of the issues regards Cyprus - I saw a presentation on this last December by one of this year's European Field Studies participants. She was focused specifically on the border between Greek and Turkish Cypriot and the interactions and flow of people back and forth across it. I'm sure there must be some analogies to be made between the on-the-ground realities there and the abstracted political maneuverings of various groups for national power.

I finally read Wittgenstein's Poker, a book that's been on my shelf for far too long. What I most liked about it is how readable it is: one does not need any background in philosophy to enjoy the story, which does a nice job detailing the battle of ideas at the introductory level.

The poker incident is presented as a symbolic enactment of the clash in philosophy between two schools of thought: Karl Popper's embrace of problem-solving rationalism in the form of a principle of falsification - "I may be wrong and you may be right, and by an effort, we may get nearer the truth" (240) vs Ludwig Wittgenstein's linguistically-generated puzzles, "what many in the [Vienna] Circle misunderstood was that Wittgenstein did not believe that the unsayable could be condemned as nonsense. On the contrary, the things we could not talk about were those that really mattered" (158).

These philosophers followed (and to varying extents) diverged from the analytic philosophy of Bertrand Russell.

Or, the occult, meaning "hidden" or blocked from view. In terms of relationships, this is captured in the contemporary philosophical notion of intersubjectivity.

Mugwort (artemisia) can be used for strength, power, prophecy and healing (from The basis of magic in Harry Potter. Lest you distrust the source, Wikipedia agrees: "Mugwort was used from ancient times as a remedy against fatigue and to protect travellers against evil spirits and wild animals."

Mugwort is also known as common wormwood and has many wormwood relatives. Wormword has been used symbolically to denote bitter characters or realities, such as in The Light of Other Days, which I listened to on tape and continue to mull.

Bumped into a couple of colleagues yesterday and was telling them about the audiobook I just finished, "The Light of Other Days." However it happened, I mentioned the part about the past being immutable and one of them immediately shook her head in disagreement. "Just change the narrative," she said. Of course, I said, leave it to comm majors to disagree! There wasn't time then (we were going separate ways), but I want to pursue this a bit, because I don't think one person changing the narrative changes much of anything ...

This notion comes up in Clarke and Baxter's book, The Light of Other Days, which expands upon a short story of the same title by Bob Shaw written in 1966.

Parameter space is a notion in statistics; Clarke & Baxter apply it to physics and space/time. This link provides a couple of examples.

It seems a Henon Map is how one gets a visual.

I revisited the article I found after Shemaya mentioned the enteric brain to me. It’s densely biomedical, and I wouldn’t pretend to understand the actual chemistry involved, except that motility (the digestive action of the stomach and intestines) is linked to serotonin in some way. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter that has a lot to do with mood. Again, I don’t understand the actual reactions that stimulate sensation, but what I’ve been thinking about is the frequency with which – in my darker moments of the past couple of years – I’ve had the impulse to want to cut out my stomach. Rich said something similar the other night, about sometimes wanting to take a knife to his gut.

Kafka romanticized failure, and sadness,

so did Albert Camus: who "viewed a failure to act as a choice to surrender".

as well as Herman Hesse (actually a bit more positive about things; perhaps a good place to begin?), and Nietsczhe and Milan Kundera, one of whose novels was made into a movie: The Unbearable Lightness of Being....