SubscribeNovember 20th, 2009
Trying the reread Faulkner
I have never been able to like Faulkner. I admire much about the books I have been able to struggle through, but I always finish them feeling raw and dirty.
This time it is The Sound and the Fury. In part I reread him because he is a very important American writer, in part because because not knowing Faulkner is to miss something vital about the growth of the American psyche and intellect, but really I decided to reread The Sound and the Fury because I still can’t figure out what it is about his books that causes me such distress.
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November 18th, 2009
Changing your mind: reading Friedrich Nietzsche and Sherman Alexie
I’ve been reading Sherman Alexie lately. I started with his book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and continued on with his War Dances. I’ve read other things before, the first being Reservation Blues and of course I’ve seen Smoke Signals. I read his work, mostly enjoy it, sometimes love it, and recognize its value both in a literary and in a social sense, but I do have problems with it. I’m going to talk about those problems but first I want to introduce another book – apparently totally unrelated – which, actually, was the genesis of this post.
The book is about Nietzsche as is called Pious Nietzsche: Decadence and Dionysian Faith. There is a review article about it here; the review is how I found out about the book by Bruce Ellis Benson. I have ordered it on the strength of the review but also because the notion of not being able to leave behind religious traditions is one I have seen first hand over and over and it was this part of the review that suddenly had me thinking of Alexie.
The article (“Was Nietzsche Pious” by Stephen N. Williams) says:
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November 14th, 2009
A reader’s responsibility?
In a class some years ago I, along with all the other students, had been asked to present on a particular piece of assigned writing. As luck would have it I was given an essay by Bruce Chatwin called “The Bey.”
Lucky, why? First, I like Chatwin’s writing. I like what he writes about and how he goes about presenting his words. Second, I knew what Bey meant and therefore had a much easier time of it than my fellow students.
Having been a student on and off for many years, I suspected that most, if not all, would read the essay but wouldn’t do the necessary investigative work to understand the world upon which Chatwin was commenting within the body of his essay. Based on this belief, I organized my presentation around the necessary details to understanding the piece. It turned out to be a correct assumption; after a successful presentation, I closed with a question to start the discussion. The question was “what is a reader’s responsibility when coming to a piece?” I was speaking to a room full of writers.
“The Bey” begins…
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October 21st, 2009
Crescent moon and culture crossing
Coming home from class there was a seriously beautiful crescent moon setting in the south west. Its upper tip looked like it was embedded in cloud and so it appeared to hang there, a pendulous yellow sliver hung from a cloud.
The air felt wet but the rain clouds had broken up during the 4 hours of class. The roads and fields were still sodden and it was warm so earth smells carried high and clear. Running home was like swimming through a light scented sea. Odd way to put it, but true to the experience.
I really like the class. Partly this is because the material is of deep personal interest, but partly it is because the way in which analytical philosophers disarticulate the body of any theory is so alien to me, it feels as if I am an anthropologist in an alien world – and I love that. It is really hard and takes a lot of work to learn to see in this new way, to predict how the next step of the argument for or against any position will go, or to, more generally, see the body of an argument as an articulated thing that can be dis-membered and re-membered.
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October 17th, 2009
Animal sensiblity, video addendum
How compassionate are humans compared to other animals?
This is what I mean about needing to be careful when assessing others by virtue of the content of our feeling complexes (see post just before this). Clearly, both humans and macaques have compassion but the content of that feeling complex is also clearly different when comparing the human and macaque versions. Of course, what is also true, is that the causal relations differ between our species when comparing the various complexes (say between the complex known as compassion, and the one known as respect [for authority]) and their place in the overall set of complexes.
This video is also rather strong support for the contention that we need to continually assess our intuitions about our own states and those of others using empirical evidence. If we don’t do this, then all we really do is assess what we believe to be true by virtue of what we believe to be true. And of course, doing this isn’t going to get us anywhere sane.
October 17th, 2009
Animal sensibility
Originally seen on Pharylngula, but also part of National Geographic’s Visions of Earth 2009, here is Dorothy’s body, and her troop’s witness of her passing.
Although I still have trouble understanding why, it still seems contentious to interpret the stance of this gathering of chimpanzees as some set of feelings related to grief. I suppose it must be the implications of those apparently expressed beliefs that is so disturbing. If they have grief, for example, that means they know something about what death means, which, in its turn, means the gathered chimps have a capacity to understand and express consequences to not just self but the group, which is an ability to abstract, which leads to the idea that they have what we usually think of as morality.
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September 27th, 2009
Kandinsky, art and perception
In Newsweek (I found it by way of Arts & Letters Daily) there is an article about Kandinsky called Kandinsky’s Influence on Painting is Far-Reaching. It’s a delight. Apart from the author’s insight there are 11 paintings loaded into the presentation. My favourite was Elizabeth Murray’s “Open Drawer.”
What the author (Peter Plagens) says:
September 25th, 2009
Absurdity and schedules of reinforcement
On Arts & Letters Daily I came across a link to an article titled “This Is Your Brain on Kafka.” The author summarizes the experimental data and has a concluding sentence that reads: “Man is perpetually in search of meaning, and if a Kafkaesque work of literature seems strange on the surface, our brains amp up to dig deeper and discover its underlying design.” So, yes. The absurd pushes us to think harder.
While I find that interesting, it made me think of Behaviourism, specifically schedules of reinforcement. When chaos is introduced into the rewards given for certain behaviours (i.e. food pellets for pigeons pecking a spot on the wall or the burst of pleasure we get for “getting” the meaning of something), it makes the learned behaviour harder to destroy, makes it more resilient. You might even say it makes us learn better. In other words, for us finding meaning is our reward just as the seed is for the bird; our learning is enhanced by a little chaos just as surely as the pigeon’s is.
That I find really, really interesting.
September 13th, 2009
On plants, intent and belonging, part 1
In the opening sections of The Secret Life of Plants the authors speak of Raoul Francé. Writing in the first decade of the twentieth century, Francé says that plants can move, can reach for things they want. At the time this is news, and stunning in its implications. But what are they, those implications?
Tompkins and Bird:
Plants, says Francé are capable of intent: they can stretch toward, or seek out, what they want in ways as mysterious as the most fantastic creations of romance.
Earlier in the passage the authors have cited the ability of a tendril plant to move toward a support, and change course if that support is moved. That kind of observation leads to the idea that plants have intent. I understand the leap; if it were a human being faced with such a need, our movements almost certainly would be accompanied by the intent to seek what we need to grow. I get sleepy at work, my hand reaches for the tea cup and along with it goes the experience of intending to stay awake. It’s natural for us to assume the universe does things the same way we do, but one of the possibilities that come with having the capacity to reason (or the intent to reason) is its use in questioning such assumptions.
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September 11th, 2009
Bachelard, souls, metaphor, dolls and experience
Bachelard is a dualist. No doubt about that. And of course I am not. For me there is no “soul” as distinct from the corpus. There is no “mind” as distinct from the body. Yet I find Bachelard’s book useful, insightful, a mine of things to think with.
Just because Bachelard thought his experiences meant there must be a soul doing the experiencing, doesn’t mean that what he experienced was itself useless for an old atheist like me. For me the question is, can what Bachelard experienced be lifted off its old foundations and re-sited on something less dualistic? Since things that emerge as a response to the world must also be of the world, I think that must be possible. Mind is of the world, so is the soul, so is creativity and love and belonging. Bachelard did experience the relationship between self and space that provided the starting place for that wonderful little book; and since there is no “soul” (as distinct from the corpus), nor “mind” (as distinct from body), it must be so that Bachelard’s body moving through the world was the source of these experiences. That’s my starting place with a text like this.
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