One of the things I enjoy most about used books are the scribblings prior owners leave behind. Sometimes they are bland little comments and all that is sparked is the sense that here was a mind that, while moved to write, the nudge was only just enough to move the pencil and not enough to perturb, and others, well, that’s what this post is about.

I bought a school edition of Selected Poems and Letter by John Keats that some student of long ago (published in 1959) used in a term of reading John Keats – although I doubt the student was in class as long ago as 1960. (Some of the notations and comments suggest a more recent youth in class with a used text.) The book is marked by both pen and pencil, a woman I think because of the curvature of the script. I can tell what readings she was assigned by what poems and letters are marked. Read, for example, were “The Eve of St Agnes” and “La Belle Dame sans Merci.” “Endymion” of course, or at least parts of it. (Parts of that poem are suspiciously empty of notation.  It is rather long, I suppose.) “To Homer” “Ode to Psyche”  to Nightingale, Grecian Urn and Melancholy and lastly “To Autumn.” But not “Bright Star.” Imagine that, but I suppose the class was long pre-movie.

It is the odes that come in for the most attention. There is hardly a line that has not been noted, commented upon. Some of those comments are quite revealing. There is a comment, for example, against “Ode to Psyche” that says “Psyche: winged creature, moth, butterfly.”

I imagine this young woman looked her up or perhaps more likely, was shown a picture as part of the class and was told the story of Psyche and Eros.  There she was, this student, who was being fed the cultural background necessary to roll inside Keats’ poems, to feel the empyrean pull, the net of connotations that Psyche weaves in someone who reads widely. Yet her comment, “winged creature, moth, butterfly” tells me that irrevocably her mind fell instead into channels built in her own life – a life of imagined earthly transformations, of animal metaphor, of compound eyes and multi-faceted truths, of a world based profoundly in the post-Romantic.

This is the thing about students, they are of their own time. When Keats wrote to Bailey that

I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of imagination – What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth – whether it existed before or not – for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty – in a Word, you may know my favorite Speculation by my first Book and the little song I sent in my last – which is a representation from the fancy of the probable mode of operating in these Matters – The Imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream – he awoke and found it truth.

he meant it literally. Truth is sought in the imagination, in the sensation Keats understood as Beauty, as the sublime. Not for us this. Truth is grounded at the moment. When we seek to understand we do not follow the pull of connotation into airy realms with earthly mirrors as Keats did. We link along more corporeal lines – Psyche – winged creatures – moths – butterflies.

Keats, his mind flew out to Milton  and the idea of the world he helped shape. The Imagination that is comparable to Adam’s dream is a reference to Book VIII of Paradise Lost, the stanza starting at line 452. “As with an object that excels the sense, / Dazzled and spent, sunk down, and sought repair / Of sleep, which instantly fell on me…” There I imagine Keats being pulled by the idea of overwhelmed senses, understanding as he did the intensity of feeling, of sensation, as the gateway to Truth. Not that I agree (nor would Milton have gone there with Keats either, I suspect), but regardless, I am not from either Milton’s or Keats’ time but from mine and so I think that truth is more usefully thought of as a multifaceted eye.

And then in Milton there is the dream itself and what Adam perceives while sleeping at god’s behest. Adam knows what goes on: he sees the wound in his side that presages Jesus’ own, Adam saw Eve grow from the rib, shaped by god’s hand. This ability, to perceive true in the divine sleep (imagination and/or death?) – Keats took this as reality. That is, there is another reality, a spiritual one if you like, in which truth is still perceived, still sensed but with less tempest. When he says (from the same letter to Bailey) that

we shall enjoy ourselves here after by having what we called happiness on Earth repeated in a finer tome and so repeated – And yet such a fate can only befall those who delight in sensation rather than hunger as you do after Truth – Adam’s dream will do here and seems to be a conviction that Imagination and its empyreal reflection is the same as human Life and its spiritual repetition.

he means it.

I see no evidence that the student who had this book before me understood that. It is clear from what she underlined that she was learning the rudiments of the Romantic Imagination but did she understand it enough to (temporarily) swim with Keats along his imaginative connections? I doubt it.

To be fair, I am much more likely to follow the winged creature-butterfly road myself. I am of now, just as the woman was who marked up the book with the sign posts of her mind. And to be even more genteel of spirit, I have to say that I am likely much older than the woman was when she studied Keats. This means, of course, that I have had more time to read, to think, to imagine the world as Keats knew it. I wonder if she still lives, and if she does whether she still reads Keats? And (my mean side rearing) does she know anything more about real winged creatures than she does about Keats? (I mean if you are going to base your connotative and metaphorical life (that is “meaning”) on something, it might be good to actually know something about that “something.”)

That’s the problem with now, I think. Most of us have lost the old links that allow Milton to speak about dreaming in our minds when we read Keats, but as of yet, we have not taken the material world seriously enough to understand reality as it appears from the compound eye of a winged insect. So we are adrift in life (as was Keats), but most of us (unlike Keats) are without a mental umbilical cord developed enough to keep us from drowning in such pools as existential nihilism. To be honest, most of me is really glad I no longer teach. I am no lifeguard and I strongly suspect one must first understand the “now” (for us that is the compound eye) in order to step off into the “then” with any chance of actual understanding. So what hope do young students of today have of understanding the ferocious richness of the past when they can’t even see the ground upon which they are standing?

Miserable old coot aren’t I?

You can see why many people are convinced of the magical nature of numbers.

via Wimp

I saw this film yesterday. Oh my. It was so glorious, so deeply moving, that I am still in the stage where I am checking to see if I can get tickets to McMurdo Station. Not that I would actually want to live there, but 6 months or so, yes I would want to do that. I can count penguins.

It’s the same thing as the cicada video I just posted. It’s so non-human that I feel as if I am just a part of things – a small, non-important part – and not the center of the universe. I find the switch from center to periphery deeply reassuring, a stunning pleasure.

This center of the universe thing: that’s the problem with cities, they lead you more deeply into the delusion that the universe is about being human, that our measure is also the measure of the rest of eternity, and of course it isn’t. The most horrible thing is that while the feeling of centrality persists, not only is it simply wrong, it is also deeply disruptive. I mean how can one actually attend to what is in fact the case when blinded by one’s own reflection? I mean it would be like assessing the possibilities of the world outside the home if all one’s widows were mirrors.

This film is a visual reminder of both our belonging and of the non-human nature of reality. I am deeply glad that Herzog was granted a pass to the base because, I suspect, this film is the closest that I will ever get to that booming silence.

I find things like this stunning. It is both beautiful and so completely non-human that entering into the edges of their world dislodges, temporarily I admit, my reality from its human-centered tendency. I deeply appreciate that when it happens. That ability to include the reality of another completely non-human being makes me feel like we might have some redeeming value as a species.

via Wimp

I hear One is the Loneliest Number is House’s unofficial anthem. Makes sense really, though I doubt most people sitting at tables playing with numbers are nearly as funny – or smart. Unkind of me I’m sure. I suppose they’re just not interested in the confusing, troubling and hard problems associated with displays of affection.

I mean who sits all day and does stuff like this? Oh. They get paid for it? That’s OK then.

Here’s another thing I’m having a hard time getting out of my head. These two pictures represent a single bag. The first is a pattern created by weaving the inner leaves of corn husks. The colors are probably yarn wrapped along the threads. The second image is the reverse side of the bag and is made of beads.

The bag is for sale for $2100.00 which I find both amusing and deeply distressing. According to the sale site the bag is from the late 1800s.  It’s Nez Perce. I cannot but help think of the hands that made it, that killed the deer, that tanned the hide, that traded for the beads, the needles, the thread, that sat for months wrapping and weaving the corn husks. And it is so very beautiful. I wonder if the person who buys it will go to a dance, will carry it on the floor and use it to bring themselves and their family good fortune, or if it will go in a locked collection somewhere. And I wonder what family created it – which one of the families still in Nez Perce country are the descendants of the hands that made this possible.

The thing that is amusing is that there was a point when this stuff was considered worthless, at best a token of a vanishing race. Anyway, enough gloom. What really catches me is its beauty. That’s the thing that really sticks.

How cool and easy is this.

For further instructions and video go here.

You may (or may not) be aware of the discovery of many new planets outside our solar system but it has become something of a hot topic.  Universe (that cool blog that recently moved over to ScienceBlogs) had an interesting take on the idea of scale which included the discovery, and  Samuel Arbesman posted an interesting article on what he calls mesofacts that also included the discovery.  He’s right that some things change at a rate that means we just don’t notice them, even things that are important to our continued survival. I blame evolution. We are primed to notice sudden changes —  like the panther that seems suddenly really, really interested in our presence in her and her kits’ personal space. Those kinds of changes make or break our chances for immediate survival and so have taken the lead in our bodies ranking system for what is going to cause a sudden behavioural modifcation (you know like the fight or flight thingy). Often the slow changes (like in climate) do not trigger the hormonal stimulants which jump start behavioural change. After all, a bad harvest or two? We are omnivores, the barley is low? Go eat millet, or the goat, or last year’s walnuts, they last for a long time, even if bitter, and then there’s dandelion greens, it would take a pretty major cataclysm to wipe those suckers out. It is hunger, another kind of hormonal trigger, that causes us to seek out alternate food sources. What it doesn’t do is make us stop acting like giant earth-predators and unbalancing the larger biosphere. That is reason’s role, but it is a newby and apparently not up to the job yet.

As Claire Evans (the writer behind Universe) said, it really is about scale.  She thinks that we are about to experience that wrench that comes with the realization that we are not, in fact, the scale against which the universe developed. And of course what the universe’s non-human scale means is that the things that are most critical to us, the things we think matter the most, almost certainly have no corollary in the vast reaches of all-that-is.

Things like language, mind, awareness, these are human things in that they are the consequence of the evolution of our bodies and the ensuing social change the evolution of our bodies and brains has stimulated (and of course of any other group of creatures that might evolve toward the same evolutionary “goal” of a proactive intelligence capable of rapid learning as a member of a deeply social species). There are so many philosophers that have talked of our capacity for awareness as if it is an attribute worthy of universal acclaim, as if, at bottom, awareness must be a fundamental principle of the universe like mass or the speed of light. This is the power of the meso-world on us. Call it middle earth or midgaard, it is a fantasy universe where things are in fact human-sized and human oriented. Unfortunately for us, but fortunately for the universe, we do not actually live in middle earth.

Now’s a good time to go watch a short video called The Evolution of Life in 60 Seconds.

And that’s just starting with the formation of the earth.  We barely register. In fact the only reason we do is because the creator of the video is human and probably thinks our existence matters. But to be fair I suppose we have made an impact as far as the earth is concerned. Well at least for this particular set of life forms that may well suffer extinction earlier than would have happened without our presence. But extinctions are a regular part of earth history so even this is nothing particularly out of the ordinary. Can you imagine a video “The Evolution of the Solar System in 60 Seconds“? Or “The Evolution of the Universe…”? We wouldn’t be a blip. I mean even the formation of the earth would barely register in the second imagined film.

I sometimes wonder what philosophy would be if we could get outside our middle-earth mindset. And teleology without a human orientation?  That would be fun.  Maybe the universe has been evolving all along toward the mechanisms that make a three toed sloth capable of enormous body temperature variation. Or maybe it is all about bioluminescence. Or the cephlapod ink sac. Or maybe life was just an accident on the way to limestone and the karst lands and their elemental denizens.

Wouldn’t that be fun? — to find out we do inhabit middle earth but that it was created in the image of a set of caves carved by the relationship between water, CaCO₃ and CaMg(CO₃)_2.

Personally I’d rather find out there is no meaning than find out I was an extra in someone else’s drama. That way I can make my own meaning, decide for myself what it all means, and then change my mind depending on how I feel that day. Much more fun, and in keeping with my middle-earth mind.

I mean, really, meaning?  Another of those human qualities that say nothing about the universe, whether big or small. But what else can guide us if not our quest for meaning?

Facts you say? Posh. Tish.

Found this at Deviant Art. Liked it, so I’m sharing it.

via Deviant Art