Imagine a 6 day week and 60 weeks in a year.
All in support of the four day work week.
Great for scheduling: shifts in 4, 8 and 12 hours with sufficient down time between.
60 gives five weeks to each month.
Gives a whole bunch of days for a big festival every leap year.
A truly civic calendar to replace the partisan Gregorian. Imagine. 24/6
And so for day 81
05.03.2007
Peter Levitt in the preface to Thich Nhat Hahn The Heart of Understanding: Commentaries on the Prajnaparamita Heart Sutra writes of the importance of bells.
With that in mind, when the bell was invited to sound we would put down our garden tools, our hammers, our paint brushes or pen, and come back to ourselves for a moment, breathing with a natural serenity, smiling a sort of half smile to ourselves and all those around us […] It is truly remarkable how deeply the sound of a bell can ring inside a person. After this pause we resumed our activity with renewed energy, perhaps even a little more attentively, a little more aware.
I like the figure of inviting the bell to sound. It reminds me that timers can be set for such reminders. (In the i-Apple world the clock can be set to call out the quarter hour.) Being in the space where machines are timed to activate and in their activation make noise allows one to compare the clock with the quality of light and thereby be responsive to multiple cycles.
And so for day 80
04.03.2007
To repair the damage, an invitation for wise investment. Usury extinguished. Retardation delayed. Bonds for reparations. Interest modest.
And so for day 79
03.03.2007
A friend sent a clipping in the mail of a Toronto Star article from the Endnotes section (Back stories, final thoughts, weird findings) D12 (Sunday, February 25, 2007). Christian Cotroneo’s article on Donald Crowdis who at the age of 93 is writing about his approaching demise on a blog concludes with a consideration of habit
“Habit is such a thing. . .” he says, “She’s not there. I don’t expect her to come back. [She is is 92 years old and his wife and is in a nursing home. They have been married for some 70 years.] Am I used to it? No.”
Are we ever used to every it?
Adrian Mackenzie in “Transduction: invention, innovation and collective life” writes
Technological change is consistently and emphatically represented in the form of new artefacts or objects, rather than practices, arrangements and ensembles.
Are we ever out of the practice of saying good bye and good bye?
“Practice” and being “used to”: not the same. However when folded into living they approach each other: getting used to practice.
And so for day 78
02.03.2007
snowward swords compass needles
And so for day 77
01.03.2007
In Volume 8, Issue 7 (February 20, 2007 – February 26, 2007) of Ubiquity in a piece entitled “Cyberspace, Cosmology, and the Meaning of Life” I follow the discursive dance steps of Albert Borgmann and am enchanted by a peculiar skip if not jump.
The seductive distractions of cyberspace can in part be explicated by comparing the spatial structure of focal reality with that of cyberspace. The structure of electronic information is in an informal sense topological. Cyberspace has structure. Sites are nested and linked on the screen in a definite order. But there are no measurable distances between them. Everything is equally near and far and equally and easily reachable, and hence I easily slip from the important by way of the interesting to the distracting. In focal reality, some things are near and others far.
There is a gap between structure and attention. The effect noted by Borgman is not necessarily caused by a flattened topography. As well, the discipline of topology points to phase space and permits the modeling of the attention as part of the realm observed. Hence a cyberspace can be understood as a form of hyperspace and both can be distinguished from the space of hypertext. The minute a reader whether machine or human, enters the flatland even space of hypertext and reads then the experience begins to resemble those of focal reality. Sometime ago in a place not here I wrote: “How “cyberspace” relates to “hyperspace” is a key to its metaphorics.”
Borgman weaves a story about loss of focal reality and stresses the need for a point of reference.
To deal with the confusing brilliance of technological information we need a point of reference that enables us to discern what in cyberspace is illuminating and what is distracting.
Could that point of reference be the clock and the system of time zones? A system that allows us to navigate synchronicities. And mark the beginning and ends of trips.
And so for day 76
28.02.2007
The most magical moment for me in The Tailor of Gloucester by Beatrix Potter is not the errant-running cat nor the kind helpful mice. It is the description of the result of the tailor’s labours. It must be the snow that introduces the description. Something about the uniform blanket of white which children who have grown up in winter climes know obliterates and subdues that adds a special dimension to the display of colour and texture.
When the snow-flakes came down against the small leaded window-panes and shut out the light, the tailor had done his day’s work; all the silk and satin lay cut out upon the table.
There were twelve pieces for the coat and four pieces for the waistcoat; and there were pocket flaps and cuffs, and buttons all in order. For the lining of the coat there was fine yellow taffeta; and for the button-holes of the waistcoat, there was cherry-coloured twist. And everything was ready to sew together in the morning, all measured and sufficient — except that there was wanting one single skein of cherry-coloured twisted silk.
Only upon slowing the reading and transcribing the adjacent passages do I gather that there is a sort of interference at work and I make the connection with the recollection of the spectacle of cherry trees in bloom so that “cherry-coloured” reads in this context as light pink as opposed to a deep cerise. A japonica patina.
And so for day 75
27.02.2007
Brillat-Savarin’s first Meditation from The Physiology of Taste provides an outline of six senses. There are the five of sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. The six is physical desire and is in the service of procreation. An impish me wants to invoke a translation of this seductive six sense. I want to drop the procreative imperative. I want to recuperate the six senses in the name of the sensus communis and make the erotic impulse flow heroically as the quotidian social glue that is not genitally affixed.
Read with a nice glass of wine in hand, M.F.K. Fisher’s translation invites the reader to use a wee bit of imagination to universalize the satiation offered by a good digestive act which magically results in the will to share one’s life with someone.
This active, troubling, imperious sentiment is common to both sexes; it brings them together and unites them, and when the germ of a new life has been fertilized, the two people can sleep again in peace; they have fulfilled the most sacred of their duties in thus making sure that mankind will continue.
There is no glossing over “the germ of a new life”. Pregnancy is the aimed for condition. Those of either sex coming together with those of either sex do also participate in the continuance of “mankind” read in the wide sense of humanity. They may or may not sleep again in peace. The fertile can sleep so. It doesn’t mean they will.
Fertile or not, rutting does engage the full five and a lively imagination to boot.
And so for day 74
26.02.2007
R.D. Laing in Self and Others in the first chapter “Phantasy and Experience” reproduces Susan Isaacs’s summary of the argument in her 1952 paper “The nature and function of Phantasy”. One of the views developed is that
The earliest phantasies are experienced as sensations; later they take the form of plastic images and dramatic representations.
This could be read as a succession (sensations followed by plastic images and then by dramatic representations) or as a fork (sensations giving rise to either plastic images or dramatic representations).
And in some sense the art of sculpture and the theatre arts are related to rhythm, sound and movement. The hollow thump of body against body.
And after a fashion the path from sensation to plastic image to dramatic representation or the path from sensation to dramatic representation (and by u-turn to plastic image) is re-conducted re-travelled. There is not a single origin but a constant origination.
And so for day 73
25.02.2007
