Layers of old-fashionedness • A person on a bicycle stopped to ask another human being (me) where the local library is. A decent dose of hope for humanity can take 15 seconds or less 🙂
There’s virtue in that picture [of the genome as a ‘highly sensitive organ of the cell’], but I think it points to a wider consideration: that the best narratives and metaphors for thinking about how life works come not from our technologies (machines, computers) but from life itself. … The ‘organic technology’ of language, where meaning arises through context and cannot be atomised into component parts, is a constantly useful analogy. Life must be its own metaphor.
And shouldn’t we have seen that all along? For what, after all, is extraordinary – and challenging to scientific description – about living matter is not its molecules but its aliveness, its agency. It seems odd to have to say this, but it’s time for a biology that is life-centric.
Anna Badkhen, “In praise of magical thinking”:
Because what is the world? A thaumatrope turning magical to profane to magical and back again. And then the tide rose and the abiding patience of big water took everything – the piss, the eggshells, the woman’s tracks in the sand, my sketching perch – and made anything possible, depravity and wonder alike.
Ah yes, the imfamous Euproctis chrysorrhoea. In their larva stage, these are better known by their Indonesian name, Rama-rama ekor coklat, which roughly translates “dirty rotten itchy bastard.”
Random Bookshelf Quote of the Day
Václav Havel, in 1986:
IBM certainly works better than the Škoda plant, but that doesn’t alter the fact that both companies have long since lost their human dimension and have turned man into a little cog in their machinery, utterly separated from what, and for whom, that machinery is working, and what the impact of its product is on the world. I would even say that, from a certain point of view, IBM is worse than Škoda. Whereas Škoda merely grinds out the occasional obsolete nuclear reactor to meet the needs of backward COMECON members, IBM is flooding the world with ever more advanced computers, while its employees have no influence over what their product does to the human soul and to human society. They have no say in whether it enslaves or liberates mankind, whether it will save us from the apocalypse or simply bring the apocalypse closer. Such “megamachinery” is not constructed to the measure of man, and the fact that IBM is capitalist, profit-oriented, and efficient while Škoda is socialist, money-losing, and inefficient, seems secondary to me.
To speak from experience is to be understood everywhere. To speak in abstract terms is to find no understanding.
— Jürgen Moltmann
A friend reminded me that the Kenyan Prayer posted this morning is much like this line from Mary Oliver. I like her more explicit praise for the humility of those who laugh and bow their heads — a combination with impossible-to-overstate significance and value. And with that thought, I kept going.🙂
From the cowardice that dare not face new truth
From the laziness that is contented with half truth
From the arrogance that thinks it knows all truth,
Good Lord, deliver me.
— Prayer from Kenya
Let life be enough
A video from our sunrise “elk ride” at Harriman State Park in eastern Idaho three years ago. Crank the volume way up for this one. Nothing brakes the morning silence like an elk bugle.