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Here we have so fully confused the issue that we get few of the benefits of either approach. Modern academics have very little time for contemplation, and far too much of their work is in the service of the demands of society, which is growing more frivolous, distracted, and violent-minded by the day, to judge by the sorts of ideas that occupy front and center stage of our public lives. Rational arguments are drowned out in the mindless scream. They have a voice, of course, and many people hear it, but the effort of trying to filter out the dreck closes the ears to new ideas.

I'm still glad to be here, and thankful to the people who educated me. It's a good thing to have a strong mind that can stand up for itself, and a strong mind is something that can be passed on to other people, regardless of how talented they are. You don't have to be smart to think for yourself. But you do have to fight for it. Human societies only exist because there is some tendency in the mind to act with the group. That tendency gives rise to internal resistance and external pressure, because other humans feel the same desires. There will always be a tension between the university and culture; the question is how to respond to it.]]> General http://meliza.org/itoaeky/index.php?itemid=82 Thu, 26 Aug 2010 08:39:05 -0500 http://meliza.org/itoaeky/index.php?itemid=80 Even after all these years spring does not fail to surprise me, how it emerges with such terrifying glory from what seemed like bare ground. I don't worry so much about this planet when I know how quickly the grass will come up through the cracks and the nightjars take possession of the McMansions, but it is sad to watch us try to shut all that life, which is intimately ours, out of our hearts because it scares us.]]> General http://meliza.org/itoaeky/index.php?itemid=80 Tue, 11 May 2010 16:58:09 -0500 http://meliza.org/itoaeky/index.php?itemid=78
and,

"Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away. His nesting places--the activities that are intimately associated with boredom--are already extinct in the cities and declining in the country as well."

And we are hardly ever bored any more. We keep ourselves so busy there is no place for memory to grow into anything more than information, and this prevents us from encountering the things that can really change us.]]> slow information http://meliza.org/itoaeky/index.php?itemid=78 Wed, 31 Mar 2010 08:51:25 -0500 http://meliza.org/itoaeky/index.php?itemid=75

For Buy Nothing Day I went to Sleeping Bear Dunes, up in lower Michigan just west of Traverse Bay. It's about three hundred miles from Chicago, which took about seven hours to drive at my moseying pace. I love these long drives to the edges of the world, swimming up the interstates and their tributaries. I can't say much for small town Michigan. Muskegon, Ludington, Manistee, all seem molded from the same cheap plastic. I watched the town where I grew up follow the same trajectory, from open fields to pavement swarming with angry machines. It used to make me angry too; it used to have power over my own wild spaces. Now I just drive slowly, carrying my peace with me, looking at everything.

The dunes are formed by winds carrying sand over the lakes, where there is nothing to slow them down, until they reach the land and lose velocity. The shape of the dunes already there influences the movements of the wind, so the land shapes itself. This sort of feedback can lead to chaotic behavior: a five hundred foot dune seemingly content with its view will suddenly split in half or wander a hundred feet downwind. In such conditions life's contingency is immediately apparent.

And now it has laid aside its glory, and become small and quiet. Whatever you see is only a trace of its former existence, or its quiet hope for a future existence. It is a wilderness as profound as the emptiest desert. The heart's silences grow.

Knowledge of nature, like all knowledge, requires a setting aside of what had previously passed for truth. Anyone who claims science can be achieved without entering into ignorance and confusion is only a theorist. But in this respect the knowledge of nature differs: it is not only the mind that must be surrendered, but the body as well. If it is not placed, at least a little, at the mercy of the elements and its own needs, the most vital fact will be missed. You cannot even begin to speak the language until you become as vulnerable as the lives that you want to know.
]]> General http://meliza.org/itoaeky/index.php?itemid=75 Wed, 9 Dec 2009 18:41:26 -0600 http://meliza.org/itoaeky/index.php?itemid=73
It was an excess of beauty, and we had nothing to do but let it flow through our fingers.

]]> General http://meliza.org/itoaeky/index.php?itemid=73 Mon, 5 Oct 2009 22:30:53 -0500 http://meliza.org/itoaeky/index.php?itemid=72 There is a pleasant little mystery in the workings of physiology. So much goes on below the level of consciousness, but at times the more substantial changes become noticeable. The mechanisms are often unknown, and in any case they seem to have nothing to do with the inner experience of the transformation.

This is not to say that they are inaccessible to the understanding. The potter does not need to know the physics of clay to shape it. When the substance in question is governed by a complex web of finely balanced interactions -- when it is alive -- the supremacy of the intuition is even more evident. There are general rules, but these all contradict each other, and only become coherent to the observer who is completely immersed in the life that gave rise to them. It is a form of understanding that never destroys the sense of wonder.

I've been biking a lot this summer, ever since I moved up to North and Western, twelve miles or so from work. Not with any deep commitment -- I'll hop in the car if it's raining or if I know I need to stay late -- but enough to shave about 10 or 15 minutes off my time, and provoke my muscles into some unexpected construction. Age and experience have taught me to expect more complaining and a general tendency toward deterioriation, so the impression of there being some alien process at work in me is particularly strong.

There may be a general principle in this. Making a place for oneself in the world (which inevitably means society) is a process of setting up barriers. These are both internal to the mind, compartmentalizing the desires, and external to it, dividing the world into realms where various needs can be met. Experience creates forms and expectations, and an order emerges. But this order is static, and the internal life inevitably comes into conflict with it. Life is inherently inimical to these constructions; it accepts many contradictions, but its central unity will always find expression.]]> General http://meliza.org/itoaeky/index.php?itemid=72 Sun, 6 Sep 2009 16:48:07 -0500 http://meliza.org/itoaeky/index.php?itemid=71 In the dark unseeing conceive the source.
Knit with desire they spring up,
Surprised at their lightness. Something green
Gnaws at the stones in last year's tunnels,
Saved from ice by nimble hands
Serving other purposes.]]> General http://meliza.org/itoaeky/index.php?itemid=71 Fri, 21 Aug 2009 15:32:00 -0500 http://meliza.org/itoaeky/index.php?itemid=67 I linked a while back to a series of articles at The Hope Chest about vampire automobiles. Now there's an excellent article in Friday's New York Times by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan about the origin and development of the vampire myth, and why it seems to be gaining in power these days.

They emphasize that while the substance of the myth is probably very old, the modern species came into existence around the time when technology was making it possible to travel and communicate over great distances, drawing people into a ever tightening web in which information (and we have to include viruses in this category, which may explain the connection between vampires and disease in Nosferatu, for example) could spread with great rapidity. That web is only growing tighter:

The wireless technology we carry in our pockets today was the stuff of the science fiction in our youth. Our technological arrogance mirrors more and more the Wellsian dystopia of dissatisfaction, while allowing us to feel safe and connected at all times. We can call, see or hear almost anything and anyone no matter where we are. For most people then, the only remote place remains within. “Know thyself” we do not.

Or truly know each other, I would add.]]> slow information http://meliza.org/itoaeky/index.php?itemid=67 Mon, 3 Aug 2009 17:02:50 -0500 http://meliza.org/itoaeky/index.php?itemid=65 technology is any more or less real than one in which nature
dominates. What matters is not the habitat, but the life, and life is
a far greater thing than habitat, though it is always subject to it.
Where does the life exist? Not in the fortuitous arrangement of atoms,
or the dynamics of their interactions, or even in the organism itself.
No, the life exists because the organism responds to its environment;
it exists in the exchange between the organism and its environment; it
consists wholly of relationship.

One of the aspects in which human life seems to distinguish itself
from the rest of nature is that its deepest currents require a choice
to live in them. You can go through this world well-fed, successful,
acceptable to the hive, without once risking your hide and feeling the
wild grace of surrender. As the old man with the microphone says in
Richard Linklater's Slacker, "The necessary beauty in life is in
giving yourself to it completely. Only later will it clarify itself
and become coherent."

The question for me, by which I mean the thing I've got to find the
answer for, is how (and if) technology can contribute to my presence
in the world, to being open and responsive. Bikes are definitely in.
But the stuff that lets you be in ten places at once ain't doing
anything good for me.]]> General http://meliza.org/itoaeky/index.php?itemid=65 Wed, 22 Jul 2009 23:10:10 -0500 http://meliza.org/itoaeky/index.php?itemid=64 As clear a definition of a miracle as I've encountered, and one that the various partisans of Science and Religion simply fail to grasp, either from sloppy thinking or from a perverse desire to see these old friends come to blows:

The concept of miracle which is permissible from the historical approach can be defined at its starting point as an abiding astonishment. The philosophizing and the religious person both wonder at the phenomenon, but the one neutralizes his wonder in ideal knowledge, while the other abides in that wonder; no knowledge, no cognition, can weaken his astonishment. Any causal explanation only deepens the wonder for him. The great turning-points in religious history are based on the fact that again and ever again an individual and a group attached to him wonder and keep on wondering; at a natural phenomenon, at a historical event, or at both together; always at something which intervenes fatefully in the life of this individual and this group. They sense and experience it as a wonder. This to be sure, is only the starting-point of the historical concept of wonder, but it cannot be explained away. Miracle is not something "supernatural" or "superhistorical", but an incident, an event which can be fully included in the objective, scientific nexus of nature and history; the vital meaning of which, however, for the person to whom it occurs, destroys the security of the whole nexus of knowledge for him, and explodes the fixity of the fields of experience named "Nature" and "History". Miracle is simply what happens; in so far as it meets people who are capable of receiving it, or prepared to receive it, as miracle. The extraordinary element favors this coming together, but it is not characteristic of it; the normal and ordinary can also undergo a transfiguration into miracle in the light of the suitable hour. -- Moses (1946)

In other words, miracles have to do with meaning and symbol, which is a higher level of organization than that of physical causes. To attempt to explain them as natural or supernatural is a reductionist fallacy, on the same order as trying explain biology only in terms of its chemistry (or, less frequently, in terms of some supraphysical 'vitalism'). As Konrad Lorenz argues, the rules of biology encompass the rules governing inanimate matter, without violating them but nonetheless introducing an element that is simply not present in the less organized structures. Life, in some senses, is a more restricted form of existence, but it is precisely these additional constraints that make possible its incredible diversity.

I am reminded of Tolstoy's observation of the paradox in military and political hierarchies, that it is the elements at the top, the generals and marshals, who are the most constrained.
]]> science http://meliza.org/itoaeky/index.php?itemid=64 Tue, 14 Jul 2009 17:31:53 -0500