The brain is only 2 percent of the body’s weight, but it consumes 20 percent of the body’s energy. So using mind consciousness is very expensive. Thinking, worrying, and planning take a lot of energy.
Thich Nhat Hanh, “The Four Layers of Consciousness” Buddhadharma Summer 2006
And so for day 261
01.09.07
George Painter in his biography of Proust in the chapter “The Death of Saint-Loup” reports
[…] and in one of his letters of condolence to the heartbroken Mme de Pierrebourg he told her, alluding to the death of Bergotte, that in his ‘third volume’ she would find a discussion of ‘death, or rather this discord between the survival of the person we have lost, and his apparent annihilation from the universe’, which would bring her both pain and comfort.
Pain of loss enrobed in pleasing memory: a blanket view of the universe.
And so for day 260
31.08.2007
Jean H. Hagstrum in Eros and Vision Chapter 2 “Verbal and Visual Caricature in the Age of Dryden, Swift, and Pope” quotes from John Evelyn’s Numismata
Long before Pope made the ruling passion basic to some of his portrait caricatures, Evelyn associated that idea with the line or shape of graphic art: “And now we mention Picture, since the Posture, or Stroak of one single Line, does often discover the Regnant Passion.”
One thinks of Islamic calligraphy and Chinese brushwork.
And so for day 259
30.08.2007
“Morning” in The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman
wonderful description of awakening…
As the sun moved up the sky, it came past the rock above and touched her hair, and she began to stir, and when the sunlight reached her eyelids, she found herself pull up from the depths of sleep like a fish, slow and heavy and resistant. But there was no arguing with the sun, and presently she moved her hand and threw her arm across her eyes and murmured […]
Reminds one of a description of stretching in the morning to be found in the collection of narrative bits by Ursula Le Guin called Always Coming Home.
And so for day 258
29.08.2007
Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell entertains the reader with footnotes thus situating the reader as a type of scholar and thus kin to the magician protagonists of the novel (they read a lot of books, annotated books no doubt). The second note in the chapter entitled “The education of a magician” sets up an analogy whose terms are likely to criss-cross and become entangled (much like the plot in miniature).
Chaston wrote that men and fairies both contain within them a faculty of reason and a faculty of magic. In men reason is strong and magic is weak. With fairies it is the other way round: magic comes very naturally to them, but by human standards they are barely sane.
Apart from its semblance to the form of a semiotic square, it is the slippage of the term “sane” that makes the proposition enchanting.
And so for day 257
28.08.2007
Edmund White The Burning Library “Nabokov: Beyond Parody”
Whereas some Russian Formalists […] argued that parody is a way of disowning the past in an act of literary warfare, in Nabokov’s case we see that parody can be the fondest tribute, the deepest embrace, the invention of a tradition against which one’s own originality can be discerned, a payment of past debts in order to accrue future capital.
George Painter in his biography of Proust in the chapter “Purification through Parody” presents a similar function for parody albeit inflected towards a different sentiment:
There comes a time in the ascent of a great writer when, for the sake of his own future work, he must cease to admire even his greatest predecessors from a position of inferiority. Proust was now reaching the heights from which other summits appeared level with or lower than his own. His parodies were an antidote against the toxins of admiration.
Note: an antidote against the toxins not necessarily against the admiration.
And so for day 256
27.08.2007
Bruce Sterling Schismatrix composed in 1984 [Sterling writes in the preface dated 1995 that he wrote the stories eleven years ago] could be read through the lens of the contemporary concern over contagion and the exchange of bodily fluids. Look:
She slipped arms inside his loose kimono. “Shaper,” she said, “I want your genetics. All over me.”
Her warm hand caressed his groin. He did what she said.
Or see:
If it weren’t for the roaches, the Red Consensus would eventually smother in a moldy detritus of cast-off skin and built-up layers of sweated and exhaled effluvia. Lysine, alanine, methionine, carbamino compounds, lactic acid, sex pheromones: a constant stream of organic vapors poured invisibly, day and night, from the human body. Roaches were a vital part of the spacecraft ecosystem, cleaning up crumbs of food, licking grease.
In this fictional universe, the body can be imagined as a processor just as language can be imagined as processed.
This is the first book that I wrote on a word processor. […] Now I could do what I liked with words — bend them, break them, jam them together, pick them apart again.
Evidence:
Something fizzed loudly with a leaping of white-hot sparks. Startled, Lindsay braced to fight. Paolo was holding a short white stick with flame gnawing at one end. “A candle,” he said.
“Kindle?” said Lindsay. “Yes, I see.”
“We play with fire,” Paolo said. “Fazil and I.”
Indeed.
And so for day 255
26.08.2007
Algol “The Magazine about Science Fiction” vol. 12 no. 2, Issue no. 24, Summer 1975.
There is a half page advertisement (page 36) from/about the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool. The ad copy reads in part:
[…] is one of 73,000 active members of Saskatchewan Wheat Pool, a co-operative farm organization that’s a model of what farmers can do for themselves. Its goal is to bring stability to agriculture.
In the very same issue is an interview with Ursula K. Le Guin by Jonathan Ward where one reads in part:
When I make up futures I am playing games. I play them with all my heart and soul and put myself into it totally and yet I am not really trying to make a future that I believe in. I am content to take it as it comes. My social activism is separate from my writing. Except, perhaps, for this last book, The Dispossessed, in which being utopian, I am trying to state something which I think desirable — which is a world without authoritarianism. Where people are allowed to act spontaneously instead of always being part of a hierarchy directed from above. If more of that direction could come from below, that’s what I’d like to see.
And so for day 254
25.08.2007
Jean H. Hagstrum Eros and Vision: the Restoration to Romanticism has a generous note to the work of an other scholar. It is a classy reference. Deserves to be quoted in full, an example of the threads spun from one scholar for another. (page 247, note 31)
John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. P.H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 341. I believe it is valid to associate Locke’s view of the mind with sensibility, but I recognize that this association rests on a more fundamental matter, Locke’s use of consciousness as the criterion of personal identity. For a searching discussion of this belief, the background for it, and the reactions to it, see Christopher Fox, “Locke and the Scriblerians: the Discussion of Identity in Early Eighteenth-Century England,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 16 (Fall 1982): 1-25. The Lockean definition of the self is not an easy concept to derive from his work. Observe in Essay, pp. 2, 24-25, 27, how he wavers between identifying it with substance and saying it comes and goes with consciousness. See the useful article by David P. Behan, “Locke on Persons and Personal Identity” in Canadian Journal of Philosophy 9 (1979): 53-75. For a comprehensive and persuasive study of personal identity and consciousness in the early eighteenth century, see Christopher Fox, Locke and the Scriblerians (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming)
And so for day 253
24.08.2007
Peter Kline The Everyday Genius: Restoring Children’s Natural Joy of Learning — and Yours Too
Children are usually comfortable with expressions of strong emotion. When someone is crying they will give warm and affectionate attention. They know all about crying — it is one of their main activities. Recently I conducted a forty hour workshop for adults which was also attended by a seven month old baby. From time to time during the workshop someone would cry or express intense anger. Whenever this happened, the baby would attend closely to the expression of emotion. She was fascinated, but not distressed or anxious, and there seemed to me to be a loving expression in her eyes. Once the emotion had died down, the baby’s attention would wander. Babies respond directly not only to their own need to cry and rage, but other people’s as well.
It seems that emotional intelligence begins with an uncanny ability to focus.
And so for day 252
23.08.2007
