In case you missed the newsflash, the end of days will not be December 21 of this year. You will need to buy holiday gifts after all.

gosh, really? I guess I’m OK because either way I won’t spend money buying shit other people don’t need.

“That is correct, the world will not end,” says William Saturno, the Boston University archaeologist behind a new paper that could help put to rest the long-held myth that the ancient Mayans predicted a 2012 apocalypse—a belief still held by 10 percent of the world’s population, according to Reuters. “A cycle is ending, but a new one begins, according to the Mayans, who regard their calendar as a series of infinite cycles,” he says.

Huh, infinite? I suppose some idiot is now going to use this “new” fact and say that the big bang must be wrong because the Mayans predicted an infinite future.

What remains fascinating about the Mayans, Houston says, is their endless passage of cycles. Their culture “is really about renewal and continuity—and not about the ending of all days.”

Surprise! Another non-Christian civilization.

I was right. And nothing is changed because I still have other poems waiting in their queue and I almost certainly will check on them tomorrow. And I still have 3 or 4 unwritten poems circling the imagination and simultaneously trying to get written. Same. Same. Oh well.

Should be uncontroversial? Well, in a world where women were just people that would be true, but that’s not the case.

Still, as long as the oncoming firestorm doesn’t deter her or the Gates Foundation from wading into this new contraception research, I don’t care if she doesn’t realize how much many of her Church leaders hate her very being.

There’s also a good article over at The Daily Beast about the whole thing.

Part of what Gates hopes to do is to re-create the former broad-based consensus behind global family planning, but in a way that’s focused on women’s needs rather than on demographics. “This is about empowering women to be educated and to make a choice that they want to make,” she says. “And if you look at what happens demographically because of that choice, you then get some of these outcomes that people were hoping to get worldwide.”

“focused on women’s needs” – oh that would be nice.

Here’s the other thing–the US government in its Republican form has very largely been responsible for allowing the shut down of a women’s health focus. The current Democratic form has done very little to shift that. Of course they may not be able to since they are fighting decades of misogynistic policy that has shaped the way Americans see each other, and value women. And of course there’s been the racist backlash against Obama, so he’s having to fight just to get Congressional permission to blow his nose. Not a good scenario. But imagine allowing Romney to run things? Gawd.

Money runs things now, and even pays people like Gingrich to stand up an pretend to be a presidential possibility, and money running things appears to be mostly down-side. So it’s nice to see the occasional uber-wealthy woman have concerns for material things like enacted social justice. Ratzy must be gnashing his teeth.

Needing a wealthy woman to fix a world-wide human issue is not democracy by a long shot but this is what we have now. Let the battle of the bank balances begin.

I’m not going to list those but I’ve just added another.

I’ve been reading (on and off) Chance & Necessity by Jacques Monod. It was suggested to me by a reader here (Thanks!) and trusting her assessment I added it to my rather full current reading list.

I love science, and in particular chemistry and biology, so a book such as Monod’s was pretty much destined to be a good one for me. But this book!

I suppose what is so compelling for me about the book is not really the appeal to choice, or chance (as an explanation for our existence) or even reason, but rather the ideas that connect the shape of complex molecules and information. It’s that concordance of material expression and information; it feels like a rhizome growing at a high rate of speed down in the dark of my mind.

Here’s another oddity: for some reason this connects with Bachelard’s book on domestic space. Why that should be so I don’t yet know, at least not consciously. Apart from the two authors’ cultural commonalities, there seems little reason to connect them, but they are contiguous pieces in this developing “quilt” of mine. I know that somehow.

The idea that the nature of noncovalent chemical bonds and their energy potential underlies more gross forms as well as macromolecular structure itself as information–it tumbles my mind around with the implications.

In a section talking about the apparent contradiction between the idea of the genome “entirely defining” the function of a protein, and the idea that the expressed shape of a manifested protein has “surplus” information – this is it I think, the thing that messes with my mind.

He explains this apparent contradiction through chance in the form of environmental conditions.

A careful and detailed scrutiny of the mechanisms of molecular epigenesis disposes of this objection. The enrichment of information evidenced in the forming of three-dimensional protein structures comes from the fact that genetic information (represented by the sequence) is expressed under strictly defined initial conditions (aqueous phase, narrow latitude of temperatures, ionic composition, etc.). The result is that of all the structures possible only one is actually realized. Initial conditions hence enter among the items of information finally enclosed within the globular structure. Without specifying it, they contribute to the realization of a unique shape by elimitating all alernative stuructures, in this way proposing – or rather, imposing – an unequivocal interpretation of  potentially equivocal message.

The implications!

I popped over to the web and looked up a few reactions to Monod’s book. Of the  ones I saw, the majority were from religious fellows and Oh! they did not like the book. Not surprised. Essentially, should the biology/chemistry be correct, (Monod was a Nobel Laureate) macromolecular materially encoded information is the necessary engine by which matter comes to express sentience. Oh so very cool.

It does have a downside though. It makes me want to go back to school to take more degrees, but this time in science. And I just don’t have the requisite number of years it would take me to catch up on all the stuff I don’t know.

Meh.

Canada

International

Reproducing her work is next to impossible without putting up her pages as images, but this example should give you a taste. Even if you generally want poetry that is essentially a rhyming story, I encourage you to get a book of hers and have a look. They are little mixed-media packages of verbal/image art.

I mean doesn’t that just shake up your head?

What the “doctrine of signatures” says: “herbs that resemble various parts of the body can be used to treat ailments of that part of the body.”

Of course it’s ridiculous. In fact, it’s right up there with Comfort’s banana idea. Apart from the wondrous silliness of the idea, they both have at least two other things in common. Both arguments rely on 1) the existence of a Divine being that shapes each detail of the universe and 2)  that being shapes things with man as center of its concern.

There are two things that interest me in ideas like this. The first is the odd mental “logic” of people who speak about Mother Nature as a being with rights equal to, or in excess of human rights, and then stick with a philosophical system that plops humankind down as the center of the universe. Doesn’t that seem, to anyone, a bit of a contradiction?

The second, and most interesting, thing about this doctrine, is what it actually seems to indicate. The fact that most human cultures have something similar – learning to recognize plants by referring plant shapes to some well known (usually human) attribute – indicates an application of body attribute to memory and to social knowledge.

I think it a bit like reading shapes into clouds. One can do that and others can recognize it once the shape is pointed out. Constellations are the same. As are the dark and light regions of the moon. As far as I know all cultures read clouds, stars, and the moon as meaningful – and Lo! such readings miraculously fit the local stories, traditions, ideas about reality.

The real question seems to me to be why read the information back to the plant (star, moon, etc) and claim that the connection to our lives rests in the external world instead of in ourselves? I’m going to think about that for a bit.

Any ideas?

One example: I made what was supposed to be a quick trip across the border. I got to Peace Arch to find the promise of a 50-minute wait in the line up, so like any good citizen, I turn off the car engine whilst waiting. I forget to turn off the lights. The car dies in the line up.

Other cars start blaring their horns at me, but the car battery simply does not have enough juice left to turn over the engine. Sometimes I really do think I am on the slide down to dementia, and that it is going to be a quick trip.

On the bright side, we were right next to the Canadian border station. When my  daughter went for help two guards came with a portable jump starter and 45 seconds later, and a series of grateful thank yous the car was functional again.

I mean I like the idea of cars as the ultimate outdoor planter, but not in the middle of the border lane. And not when I’m still dependent on the frakker to get home.

Anyway, the day was like that.

Notes on process?
OK.
Coffee outside, or under a window with computer, or in bed with a baby computer _ in any of those cases, close eyes, breathe, breathe, tickle that fertile air space about 17cm in front of first vertebral rib (right side)_shudder_and wait. When words surface, start typing.

heh

love to get a gander re their response

Here’s one of her poems.

Tangling the Day

Tangle the day up
which is black
does not wish
you to shine
a yellow flower
on it, if it likes
butter -

That bee it composes -
daffodils, cyclamen,
a record going round, the sound
of Haydn's piano

& the car accidents
out on Broadway
so frequent now I rather like
the sound of a small collision
& don't bother
going out to see.

Such spare language. And the use of sound – like “a record going round, the sound” – I love it when poets do that, use long sounds together to exemplify the content. And the way “s” and “l” work in the line “the sound of a small collision”.  It’s music, of course, but not melodic exactly, but like the sounds air makes as it rushes through holes in rock. I rather like that power, and I like the sense of inhumanness it evokes. In that anyway, this poem reminds me a bit of Robinson Jeffers.