the universe will not be controlled by the likes of us
the title is a brilliant phrase uttered on the intertubes by AdamSelene @ theoildrum.com. this space accumulates other such short, poetic, and found-elsewhere insights into the limits of human cognition. it is a project dedicated to Wes Jackson’s vision of an “ignorance-based worldview.” a brilliant phrase uttered by his friend Wendell Barry in a letter.casting down the mighty from their thrones
Arvo Pärt’s Magnificat (1989), eerily and beautifully aligned with industrial scenes from 1950s urban America. not sure what to think of this yet, and i’m not sure how i even came across this (suddenly, i was watching it, having looked for something else). skyscrapers and gigantic industrial machinery, and the continuous flurry of human activity pushing these things along through the universe, have frightened me for some time now (they are like Sysiphus, multiplied into hordes). but this juxtaposition of post-modern choral music and post-war industry somehow seems to have something new to say about the problem of the human relationship to technology, the self, the universe, and God. what this something new is, i don’t know yet…
but speaking of which, i received this excellent photo from my friend Andrew of what he calls a ‘post-modern Sysiphus’:
a post-modern Sysiphus
songs from the metaxy
the prophet Jeremiah (Michelangelo, Sistine Chapel) was a contemporary of Heraclitus, as were Lao Tse, Zoroaster, and the Buddha. all of them participated in bringing about what's been called a Great Leap of Being, of which we need another.
lately i’ve been reading Heraclitus through Richard Geldard. to my joy, what the back cover of his book (Remembering Heraclitus) promised turned out to be true; through Geldard, i have advanced my appreciation and understanding of Heraclitus as “one of the principle sources of Western mystical thinking.”
here are some of Heraclitus’ fragments:
3. Listening to the Logos, and not to me, it is wise to agree that all things are One.
13. To God all things are beautiful, good, and just, but human beings have supposed some things to be unjust, others just.
15. Nature prefers to hide.
16. They do not apprehend how being in conflict it [the Logos] still agrees with itself; there is an opposing coherence, as in the tensions of the bow and the lyre.
39. You would not find out the limits of the soul, even by traveling along every path, so deep a Logos does it have.
53. I searched my nature.
And a thought from Geldard, inspired by his study of Heraclitus: Consciousness is not a part of us (generated, for example, by the brain); we are part of consciousness (the Greater Consciousness, the Logos). Just as any given radio can transform the flux and flow of all-pervasive electromagnetic waves into something locally coherent (a particular song, at a particular volume, in whatever room the radio resides), our central nervous systems are that which transforms Consciousness into little-c consciousness, our consciousness – a local coherence, or resolution, of peculiar being.
field galaxies
hubble deep field south
and:
galaxies in the south field of blue heron farm
this is why:
All that deserted space was singing
and I, lost and awed,
looking toward the silence,
opened my mouth and said:
“Mother of the foam,
expansive solitude,
here I will begin my rejoicing.
my particular poetry.”
From then on I was never
let down by a single wave…(from Pablo Neruda, This Is Where We Live)
waterfall of the gods
The Waterfall of the Gods
this is the waterfall where the law speaker of the alþing decided in 1000 AD that iceland would become a christian country. to demonstrate his seriousness, he threw his idols into the raging waters. a millenium later, iceland is no longer a christian country, which it probably really was for some while. time changes all things.
i like the idea of standing by a waterfall and deciding the fate of torrents of unborn people. this is a human act, one that may seem vain, or alternatively childlike. i’d like to find a waterfall and declare my allegiance to the Beloved, and to throw all my idols and fears and falsehoods into the water, and thus determine the shape of my childrens’ spiritual worldview, and that of their childrens’, and that of … (and all of them will add, i hope, their own waterfalls …) …
god speaks symphonically
Yesterday evening, this cloud and this tree were speaking.
recently said within lovely vortexes of human conversation, in which i had been given the grace to participate:
“What things have you to tell me today?” – Carrie
“Every detail matters. There is no meaningless anything.” – Link
“Nature is perfect. Nature is beyond design.” – Tony
“The earth is a big big,bright planet, and the sun is a big big bright star.” – Jasper
“Godness is very large.” – Camille
“If you build them, it will come.” – Adam
elements of my new life
the view from the House of Tony
the sun sets after a shared meal with the lovely neighbors
eating together, walking through fields splashed by wildflowers, running, reading, writing, building a cabin, sharing things, sharing ideas, sharing calm and edifying conversations, being open, being honest, being oneself, asking questions, listening to bluegrass (some of which live), thinking, watching plants grow, eating things grown by God and people (Murray/God’s collard greends sauteed with Tony/God’s wild garlic and corporate-industrial balsamic vinegar are delicious), thinking about and planning the New Paradigm for Everything: i love this life very much.
coming home from outer space
My feet, firmly standing on the grounds of the Kennedy Space Center
today, the Atlantis landed (in California, not in Florida, due to persistently bad weather). soon, the shuttle program will end (next year), and one wonders how far the next project – the Constellation Program – will get now that we are entering the new energy/economic paradigm.
i took the picture above while standing 6 miles away from launchpad 39-A, moments before Atlantis launched from America’s premiere spaceport – the Kennedy Space Center. i wanted to capture a moment of groundedness, a moment of peaceful irony, before that torrent of light and sound. looking at it now, it has accumulated more meaningfulness – living and working out here in the (relative) wilderness of Blue Heron Farm, far away from any spaceports, i could take an identical picture, if i wanted to.
is space our home? is home a directing force? in what direction am i traveling? will we, one day, leave space behind and let it reenter the realm of myth?
Hieronymus RS-24
Nozzle of a Pratt & Whitney RS-24 (Space Shuttle Main Engine)
VS.
Ascent of the Blessed (Hieronymous Bosch, 1490)
I mean, right?
Godspeed, Atlantis
a night launch, which this one was not, though it was originally scheduled to be
“Godspeed, Atlantis” — a message assembled in black letters on the sign board of a church here in Titusville. we saw it last night, out in the cool, dark breezes. we went to the water’s edge, too, last night, and looked out at Atlantis on her launch pad, flooded with spot lights. those lights were like the Aurora Borealis, slowly shifting as eerily beautiful light-shapes, only, unlike auroras, were sharpened into a cone. the quiet luminescence, the quiet anticipation of the next day’s launch, were beautiful, and there were breezes. the breezes made flags flap persistently, and it rustled the leaves of a 40-foot palm. and then the waning gibbous moon rose before our eyes above the horizon, bright, huge, and deep red. we saw it moving across the sky.
today, though, today was the launch. it was profound. it was incredibly loud. the light of the rockets was blinding. we could still see Atlantis as a small bright careening dot when she was traveling at 2,500 MPH.
this is what i wrote in my notebook half an hour before the launch:
like its namesake city, the orbiter seems a dream, a vector of the nostalgia for infinity. is a shuttle launch politicially neutral? why are these people here? to celebrate the achievements of man, not of nations, to revel in the play of excessive discovery. no one in this crowd of thousands will riot. all will be silent and awed, or else unified in exuberance, at liftoff, and all will wish Atlantis godspeed, and a safe return home to our planet.
this turned out to be true.
Godspeed, Atlantis! safe travels through the universe, and come back home to us safely, and with new knowledge!
to unfurl an adventure
11pm in Iceland, the sun was still strong.
to be home from iceland now, it is like a dream. before that adventure, we dreamed of it, while it happened, it seemed unreal, and now to be home, i have begun to reflect on the dreams before the trip, the dreams during it, the dreams after … there are layers upon layers of idealization and fantasy, and crisscrossings and foldings over of the past and future, here in my present thoughts.what will all of it mean? for a lifetime i will be inventing and reinventing What Iceland Was in my personal narrative, and the constant (sometimes quiet, sometimes loud) unfurling of that storytelling will be an adventure in itself.
this all reminds me of a feeling of a scene toward the end of Soderbergh’s Solaris (2002), where Kelvin narrates this while the rain falls:
Earth. Even the word sounded strange to me now… unfamiliar. How long had I been gone? How long had I been back? Did it matter? I tried to find the rhythm of the world where I used to live. I followed the current. I was silent, attentive, I made a conscious effort to smile, nod, stand, and perform the millions of gestures that constitute life on earth. I studied these gestures until they became reflexes again. But I was haunted by the idea that I remembered her wrong, and somehow I was wrong about everything.
we went to the moon today
or at least it seemed that way. we walked all over volcanoes, and beautiful scenes of desolation. present among the crew today were: sigurbjörg, isabella, hilda jana, ingvar, henry, myself, and a mysterious and compelling hungarian footballer whose name sounds like CC. it was only because of the graciousness of hilda jana and ingvar that the rest of us were able to go to this other planet some distance away (þakka þér kærlega fyrir).
moments:
Isabella beholds the wonder
Birch trees lunge toward white sky, out of volcano
In a cave, in a fissure, the water particles rising as steam
And this scene most otherworldly, starring the brave sigurbjörg, who disappears with hilda jana as ingvar leads the way into the Cloud…which reminds me of this, from the Cloud of Unknowing:
And if ever you come to this cloud, and make a home there and take up the work of love as I urge you, there is something else you must do as this cloud is above you, and between you and your God, you must put a cloud of forgetting beneath you, between you and all the creatures that have ever been made.
the sun has stopped setting
…we think. we went on a walk from 11:30 – 1:30 last night, and the sun was setting the whole time, and wouldn’t disappear below the horizon, and probably wouldn’t.
seeing the earthrise during the apollo 8 mission changed the astronauts’ lives (and everyone else who saw the photograph; that is, everybody); it was an ecstatic religious experience to see our planet from a wholly new vantage point, to see its situation in the cosmos, rather than as merely the backdrop, or horizon, or stage, for our ordinary activities (usually, the earth, to us, is not a planet, just as usually, to us, a window pane has no color.)
being in iceland is like that. the sun is somewhere else; its journey across the sky changes every day; its motions are not what we expect, nor can we tell what it’s up to. what it’s teaching me is that earth is a planet; i am becoming aware of where i am on the surface of that planet, in thinking of where we are in relation to the ever-changing sun.
this is what the sunlight in iceland is like, i think:
Nostalgia of the Infinite (Giorgio de Chirico, 1911)
planetary incoherence
there’s an article on bbc called ‘pollution “fights global warming.”‘ it discusses a recent finding that “global dimming” – the haziness of the skies since the 1960s, due to air pollution – has been responsible for an overall increase in photosynthetic productivity, allowing plants to sequester 10% more carbon dioxide than they otherwise would have. the article takes this to mean that two of mankind’s goals – reducing carbon emissions specifically and reducing atmospheric pollution in general – are somewhat antagonistic. this is an interesting example of unintended consequences that result when we set our sights on projects that should be obviously beyond our scope – for example, controlling the climate of an entire planet. unruly incoherence arises. the more we study what we can’t control, in an attempt to control it, the more dizzingly fragmented the range of possible actions becomes; conversely, the more we conform to nature, the more coherent and unified our possible responses to our discoveries become. masanobu fukuokoa employed some great adjectives for this. he called scientific agriculture (the attempt to control what can’t be controlled) “centripetal and divergent” and natural farming (the attempt to conform to nature) “centrifugal and divergent.” btw, i’m curious to see if this type of research will start to snowball (i.e. if there will be incentives to further support this finding) and if we’ll see political leaders use it to justify their projects which increase, rather than decrease, pollution (e.g. building coal plants or something), because fighting global warming is so urgent – i.e. the ends justify the means. this would not be a revolutionary for a politician. “the ends justify the means”-type thinking will always be centrifugal and divergent. but there are alternatives. they require, however, true spiritual vision and bravery, rather than desperate flailing in service of the status quo.
i saw ravens playing
in Iceland, the sun always seems to be in the wrong place. remember the last time you saw a solar eclipse, and everywhere you looked, not just at the sun and the moon, but the whole earth, the light seemed utterly strange, but beautiful? that’s how it seems to me every day here, when the sun is out. especially this past sunday. it was a stark blue, twilight day, and very windy. i went to the edge of steep slope that overlooks the airport, in the hopes filming a crosswind landing. what i didn’t know is that this is what i would see instead (if the embedded video doesn’t work below, here’s the youtube link).
hyperthought
interesting discussion going on @ theoildrum right now, re: a thought experiment wherein mankind is given unlimited resources. seems to be a consensus among the TOD crowd that this would be an unmitigated disaster (though we act as if this is what we all really want.) this thought experiment has been performed in much science fiction (aka speculative fiction) literature, with similar results. a tributary has peeled away from this discussion on the implications of almost unlimited mental stimuli – is this ruining our cognitive capacity? TOD reader eloiburger had a beautiful comment, in which he brings the movie Forbidden Planet as an example of such speculative fiction dealing with the first problem (unlimited resources), and ends on the second topic (unlimited mental stimuli) in this way:
ADHD is just one way for brains to be; hard to say whether that will be a pro or con for survival value. The Twitterers may be forming a new sort of anthill mentality. If birds are any indication, the surviving dinosaurs were the twitchy ones.
the girl in the purple dress
so last Sunday it was Pascha (or “Easter” if you’re into Ishtar – as this church might as well have been) except for the Eastern Orthodox (theirs is on Apr 19). my buddy Henry & i went to Akureyrarkirkja – a Lutheran church, state-sponsored. we went to the “family” service. i told Henry the word “family” in front of anything spells bad news; i told him they were definitely going to get out the guitars for this one. they did, and it got worse: a group of kids sang “Mama Mia” by ABBA, in English, which such resurrection-themed lyrics as:
Mamma mia, here I go again
My my, how can I resist you?
Mamma mia, does it show again?
My my, just how much I’ve missed you
this was after a PowerPoint presentation about two ball cap-wearing chickens fighting within the cramped confines of an egg, and eventually bursting out.
but one little girl refused to sing. she was maybe three years old. she wore an adorable purple dress, and pigtails, and she clasped her dress with her little hands, and spun in circles the whole time. it was a statement against the absurdity of the adults’ failure to take anything seriously in church. it was, that is to say, a satirical mockery of the vertigo of nihilism.
the painting in the header
i took a 900 pixel by 200 pixel chunk out of Caspar David Friedrich’s Mönch am Meer (monk by the sea) (1809-10), which i found at Marie’s blog At the Lighthouse. the painting in its entirety is more beautiful, and more hopeful (blue sky begins to appear.) i liked Marie’s comments on the painting:
The man in the picture looks so small in comparison to the vast sea, and of course the fact that he is a monk adds a whole extra dimension to the existential anxiety this painting inspires. The motif reminds me a great deal of the ending of Joyce’s The Dead, with the sea playing the same part as the faintly falling snow: Nature as a menacing force, something all-consuming that we cannot conquer, and thus a reminder of the terminality of our lives. Beautiful.
