Chain of Flowers, part 1

—Searching for Nephites in Mexico.

—Julia Galef's taxonomy of books.

—A counter-intuitive article finds that Tibetan Buddhist monks fear death more than other groups.

—Music from the Butt of Man in Hell In Bosch.

—Six Theses on Hamlet from Roy Tsao.

—Interesting Music conference at Columbia.

—Jim Hughes on Pernkopf's gorgeous Nazi anatomy.

—Maureen Mullarkey on the official Obama portraits.

—The latest Dahir Insaat idea — a flying train.

—Ronald Coffman wins the 2018 Schock Prize in Mathematics for his contributions to pure and applied harmonic analysis.

Notes from June 08, 2012

—It's possible to develop a strange relationship with a book, maybe a kind of obsession or a kind of love. 

But in love, we come to expect a response from our partner, and we expect to watch our partner change and grow. 

This presents a problem since books are static objects and can't respond to us or change. 

So we must be continually seeking to understand them in different terms than we are accustomed to.

This continual reinterpretation allows for the illusion of change in an otherwise static object. 

"Note On A Rainy Night To A Friend In The North"

Etienne Leopold Trouvelet, "Total Eclipse of the Sun," circa 1878

You ask me when I am coming. I do not know.
I dream of your mountains and autumn pools brimming all night with the rain.
Oh, when shall we be trimming wicks again, together in your Western window?
When shall I be hearing your voice again, all night in the rain?

[Li Shangyin, translated by Witter Banner]

Two Comments on Curiosity

"...[O]ver and above that lust of the flesh...there can also be in the mind itself, through those same bodily senses, a certain vain desire and curiosity, not of taking delight in the body, but of making experiments with the body's aid, and cloaked under the name of learning and knowledge. Because this is in the appetite to know, and the yes are the chief of the senses we use for attaining knowledge, it is called in Scripture the lust of the eyes

...[I]t is easy to distinguish between the way in which the sense pleasure and the way in which they serve curiosity. Pleasure goes after objects that are beautiful to see, hear, smell, taste, touch; but curiosity for the sake of experiment can go after quite contrary things, not in order to experience their unpleasantness, but through a mere itch to experience and find out."

[Augustine, The Confessions, Book Ten, section 35, translated by Frank Sheed]

The simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind, is Curiosity. By curiosity, I mean whatever desire we have for, or whatever pleasure we take in, novelty. We see children perpetually running from place to place, to hunt out something new: they catch with great eagerness, and with very little choice, at whatever comes before them; their attention is engaged by everything, because everything has, in that stage of life, the charm of novelty to recommend it.

But as those things, which engage us merely by their novelty, cannot attach us for any length of time, curiosity is the most superficial of all the affections; it changes its object perpetually, it has an appetite which is very sharp, but very easily satisfied; and it has always an appearance of giddiness, restlessness, and anxiety. Curiosity, from its nature, is a very active principle; it quickly runs over the greatest part of its objects, and soon exhausts the variety which is commonly to be met with in nature; the same things make frequent returns, and they return with less and less of any agreeable effect. 

In short, the occurrences of life, by the time we come to know it a little, would be incapable of affecting the mind with any other sensations than those of loathing and weariness, if many things were not adapted to affect the mind by means of other powers besides novelty in them, and of other passions besides curiosity in ourselves. These powers and passions shall be considered in their place. But whatever these powers are, or upon what principle soever they affect the mind, it is absolutely necessary that they should not be exerted in those things which a daily and vulgar use have brought into a stale unaffecting familiarity. Some degree of novelty must be one of the materials in every instrument which works upon the mind; and curiosity blends itself more or less with all our passions.

[Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Part One, section 1]

Note from May 21st, 2010

—Characteristic of small children: charming and superfluous explanation.

Pliny on the portents of the bees

"Bees provide signs of future events both private and public, when a cluster of them hangs down in houses and temples — portents that have often been presaged by momentous events. They settled on the mouth of Plato when he was a young child and foretold the charm of his very pleasing eloquence. They settled in Drusus' camp at the time of our great victory at Arbalo: indeed augurs, who always think the presence of bees is a bad omen, are not invariably correct."

[Pliny the Elder, Natural History, Book 11, section 55, translated by John F. Healy]

Harry Everett Smith's "No. 11: Mirror Animations"

The Preaching of Aimee Semple McPherson

The Tower of Babel

"The Tower of Babel," Pieter Bruegel the Elder. 1563.

— "And all the earth was one language, one set of words. And it happened as they journeyed from the east that they found a valley in the land of Shinar and settled there. 

And they said to each other, "Come, let us bake bricks and burn them hard." And the brick served them as stone, and bitumen served them as mortar. And they said, "Come, let us build a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, that we may make us a name, lest we be scattered over all the earth." 

And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower that the human creatures had built. And the Lord said, "As one people with one language for all, if this is what they have begun to do, nothing they plot will elude them. Come, let us go down and baffle their language there so that they will not understand each other's language." 

And the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth and they left off building building the city. Therefore, it is called Babel, for there the Lord made the language of all the earth babble. And from there the Lord scattered them over the earth."

[Genesis 2:1-9, translated by Robert Alter]

A selection of Joseph Cornell pieces

Excerpt from Zhuangzi

—"Zhuangzi was accompanying a funeral when he passed by Huizi's grave. 


Turning to his attendants, he said, 'There was once a plasterer who, if he got a speck of mud on the tip of his nose no thicker than a fly's wing, would get his friend Carpenter Shi to slice it off for him.

Carpenter Shi, whirling his hatchet with a noise like the wind, would accept the assignment and proceed to slice, removing every bit of mud without injury to the nose, while the plasterer just stood there completely unperturbed.

Lord Yuan of Song, hearing of this feat, summoned Carpenter Shi and said, 'Could you try performing it for me?' But Carpenter Shi replied, 'It's true that I was once able to slice like that—but the material I worked on has been dead these many years.'

Since you have died, Master Hui, I have had no material to work on. There's no one I can talk to any more.'"

[The Complete Works of Zhuangzi, translated by Burton Watson, Section 24]

Notes from October 26, 2009

—Nicholas Rescher's list of possible reasons as to why philosophy doesn't (seem) to make any progress:

(1) methodological differences lead to different results
(2) psychological differences among thinkers
(3) structural problems
      (a) originality is awarded
      (b) obscurity is awarded
(4) cultural differences among thinkers
(5) philosophy is a pseudo-discipline. Its questions aren't sensible or legitimate

Notes from March 24, 2010

"White on White," Kasimir Malevich, 1918

—Notes on "On the Possibility of Philosophical Knowledge," George Bealer

What are Intuitions?

(a) An intuition is an intellectual "seeming," not a sensory or introspective "seeming."

(b) Philosophical intuitions are a priori intuitions, not physical intuitions.

(c) They are not beliefs. I can have an intuition that something is right (a mathematical proof, for example) and simultaneously believe it is wrong. Also, belief is highly plastic; intuitions aren't.

(d) Not all intuitions are linguistic intuitions, i.e. intuitions about words and their applications.

(e) Not all intuitions are analytic, i.e. arriving from the combination of logic and the definition of terms.

(f) Intuitions can be mistaken. Locally, a single intuition can be wrong. Holistically, a person's systematization can be wrong.

Notes from September 29, 2010

—(4) Bees hate the taste of quinine.

Notes from May 21, 2010

—Panofsky on the medieval worldview: "the gratuitous clarification of function through form."

Notes from August 18, 2014

—A homeless woman dragging herself forward with a walker. A shabby dachshund slinks along behind her, as if embarrassed to be seen with her. 

Pliny on the tribe of Psylli

"There is a...tribe in Africa called the Psylli after King Psyllus, whose tomb is in the region of Greater Syrtes, as Agatharchides records. They produce in their bodies a poison deadly to snakes, and its odour puts snakes to sleep. Their custom was to expose children at birth to extremely fierce snakes and to use these snakes to test the faithfulness of their wives since snakes do not flee people born of adulterous blood."

[Natural History, Pliny the Elder, Book 7, section 14; translated by John F. Healy]

"Mystery and Magic of Mathematics: Martin Gardner and Friends"

Augustine on Study

"Grant me, then, space for my meditations upon the hidden things of Thy law, nor close Thy law against me as I knock. Not for nothing hast Thou willed that the deep secrets of all those pages should be written, not for nothing have those woods their stags, which retire to them and are restored, walk in them and are fed, lie down in them and ruminate."

[Confessions, Book 11, section 2, translated by Frank Sheed]

Two questions about Romanticism

Student: You mentioned that the psychoanalytic movement looked back on Romanticism. Could you expand on that?

Teacher: They are both very concerned with the process by which experience becomes memory and how the lives we live seem different to us than they actually are. They are both interested in the internal psychic economy. I'm not sure if the link here is causal; in other words, Freud didn't necessarily pick this idea up from Blake (though Freud did say that the poets got there first and he was merely repeating what they said). It may have just been that they were dealing with similar problems and so came up with similar answers.

Student: Wordsworth talks about how we should go to nature to re-orient our moral compass. You hear this idea a lot in the classical authors too. Is the idea the same do you think, or has it changed? Do they mean the same thing?

Teacher: The difference is how they conceive of nature. Virgil writes about an aristocrat's nature, nature idealized away from its connection to peasant labor. In re-writing Virgil, Wordsworth really focuses on the "lower class" elements, how connected it is with the vernacular and a certain form of life.