panta rhei

mostly will post photos & things here now:

panta rhei: http://omniafluens.tumblr.com/

mindfulness practice more effective than drugs

The results were stark. Not surprisingly, patients who escaped depression with the help of anti-depressants, and then stopped taking the drugs, relapsed about 70 percent of the time. The chemical boost was temporary. However, during the 18 month follow-up period, only 28 percent of patients in mindfulness therapy slipped back into the mental illness.

- Jonah Lehrer, "In Defense of Therapy"

from a north study window five cats behind me

after talking about halpin's "foundations of a philosophy of collective intelligence"

afternoon office window before discussing deleuze's "to have done w/ judgment"

european black pine adorning ecology action center downtown normal

reading doug robinson's chpt "shklovsky's modernist poetics"

TWSBI Diamond 540, clear demonstrator, medium nib, piston filler. Lamy blue/black ink. Capacity 2.6 ml. Designed 2010.

Lamy 2000, fine nib, makralon piston filler. Noodler's permanent black.
Capacity 2ml. Designed 1966.

the better angels of our nature: how violence has declined

Steven Pinker's 800 pg reminder as to how far we've come. After paddling in a pool.

the only way out is in

vipassana in an alabama prison

donaldson correctional facility

sinking of the edmund fitzgerald

On this day November 10 1975 the then largest freighter on the largest lake on the planet's largest body of freshwater, the Great Lakes, in whose region I was born, sank in a storm at 19:10 eastern, in 11 meter waves, in Canadian waters, 29 crew members perishing.

Three songs from that region stirred in me as a boy an incipient awareness of energy in meaning-rhythms. They were not the best songs, by any means, but the last remains my favorite, probably in part because it employs the doric mode, and as I grew up loving that immense lake, its history, and the smell of its water:

The Hamms beer jingle
The Song of Hiawatha
The Sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald

Ballads are repositories of cultural memory that help fix in us a shared sense of sorrow at loss and misfortune. The most successful ones, I think, are those which spring directly from real-world misfortune. Many ballads stem instead from cobbled together tales and stories, which is itself a testimony to the staying power of this genre as an archive of emotion.

"36 years ago, the Great Lakes freighter Edmund Fitzgerald and its crew of 29, succumbed to stresses caused in part by 40 ft waves during a 'white hurricane,' with sustained winds over 80 mph. Due to constructive interference (rogue) waves with heights of 70 ft, storm surge, overloading, a weakened hull, and possible top-side flooding through missing hatch covers, the 'Fitz' catastrophically split in two and sank 15 miles from Whitefish Bay in as little as 14 seconds."

The interference waves mentioned in the above YouTube comment are particularly significant on enclosed bodies of water near shorelines. Such wave patterns are sometimes called "waffled clapotis."

the intellectual virtue of kindness

Andrew Sullivan, at the Daily Dish, posts an email I sent about the criticisms some have leveled against Harvard for asking students to take a pledge of kindness. I like Andrew's blog a lot, though I disagree with him often (he's a theist, for one thing):

"This notion that intellectual rigor and kindness do not make good bedfellows is really misguided. It seems predicated on that old unexamined (and heavily gendered) bias between emotion and reason. But it's a false distinction abrogated by both modern neuroscience and some very old texts. I mean, Aristotle's eunoia - a beautiful, friendly mind - is considered in book 8 of the Nicomachean Ethics as not just the basis of a healthy polity, but as the chief means of energizing friendship and intellectual camaraderie.

So, there is a longstanding consensus that these energies of virtue and intellect are not separate. Emerson, in his great essay "Friendship," even goes so far as to say, "Our intellectual and active powers increase with our affection." I mean, he's straight-up saying that we are smarter and braver the kinder and more affiliative we become. That's extraordinary. And what's even more extraordinary is that modern neuroscience is bearing these things out.

Richie Davidson's lab at UW-Madison, the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience, has conducted some pretty fascinating studies that show an almost identical match in the blood flow patterns observed in the brains of advanced meditators who were asked to induce mindstates of both courage and compassion. What does that mean for doubters? That having a mind characterized by kindness actually *increases* the likelihood that one will speak it. Speaking one's mind, especially if it contains an insight that countermands or gainsays or thwarts received wisdom, takes courage. How could that induce intellectual tepidity?

Paul Ekman, a research psychologist specializing in facial expressions, goes even further in a study of some advanced meditators trained in cultivating mindstates of compassion and kindness. His studies suggest that meditators who have trained in inducing mindstates of kindness actually are preternaturally adept at recognizing deception and microexpressions in others - and he even goes so far as to say they are better at this than judges and police (who had previously scored the highest in his studies about detecting deception). See, for this last, Destructive Emotions, a book "narrated" by Daniel Goleman.

So it appears that, for some reason, inducing compassion in oneself causes one to see the social world more clearly, not back away from it out of shyness. Kindness is not, then, a tactic of avoidance, but a dialogic virtue: it is a skill that enhances relation and discourse."

On being kind to animals - Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, 

award-winning astrophysicist, author, and director of the Hayden Planetarium.

on this day in 1848

MY DEAR WIFE

I have not written to you a long while, but here I am in the land of Sodom where all the people's brains are turned the wrong way. I was glad to see John yesterday, and should like to have gone back with him, for I am very weary of being here. You might come and fetch me away, for I think I have been here long enough.

I write this in a green meadow by the side of the river agen Stokes Mill, and I see three of their daughters and a son now and then. The confusion and roar of mill dams and locks is sounding very pleasant while I write it, and it's a very beautiful evening; the meadows are greener than usual after the shower and the rivers are brimful. I think it is about two years since I was first sent up in this Hell and French Bastille of English liberty. Keep yourselves happy and comfortable and love one another. By and bye I shall be with you, perhaps before you expect me. There has been a great storm here with thunder and hail that did much damage to the glass in the neighbourhood. Hailstones the size of hens' eggs fell in some places. Did your brother John come to Northborough or go to Barnack? His uncle John Riddle came the next morning but did not stay. I thought I was coming home but I got cheated. I see many of your little brothers and sisters at Northampton, weary and dirty with hard work; some of them with red hands, but all in ruddy good health: some of them are along with your sister Ruth Dakken who went from Helpston a little girl. Give my love to your Mother, Grandfather and Sisters, and believe me, my dear children, hers and yours,

Very affectionately

JOHN CLARE

[written at Northampton Asylum, July 19th, 1848.

Clare never did leave Northampton Asylum, dying there 20th of May 1864]

[He stood 5 ft tall. His height stemming likely from malnutrition as a child. The son of a farm laborer, removed from school age 7 to work on a Northampton farm, a farm that did not belong to his family, and where he was made to tend the sheep and geese.]

June 11 1963

"As he burned he never moved a muscle, never uttered a sound, his outward composure in sharp contrast to the wailing people around him"

- David Halberstam, witness, New York Times correspondent

Thích Quảng Đức practicing vipassana

"The Vietnamese monk, by burning himself, says with all his strength and determination that he can endure the greatest of sufferings to protect his people..." - Thich Nhat Hanh

Happy Birthday Christopher Smart born April 11 289 Years Ago

On this day 1722 Christopher Smart was born as a premature baby. He suffered from  delicate health all his life. Most famous for his religious poetry, in particular his "A Song to David,” Smart wrote one of the strangest (I think) books in the language, the Jubilate Agno. “Jubilate” is the plural imperative “rejoice,” and “agno” the ablative of “lamb."

He was apparently a bright and likeable little kid. He attended Cambridge at Pembroke Hall in 1745, married Anna Maria Carnen, his publisher’s step-daughter, in 1752, and was admitted to St. Luke’s Hospital for the insane May 6 1757. Though the record of his various confinements in hospitals is unclear, this was the first of several. Much of the Jubilate was for some time thought to have been written in Bethlehem Hospital, otherwise known as Bedlam, but it is more likely he wrote most of it in the asylum at Bethnal Green.

Though the Jubilate was completed, or abandoned, in 1764, it was not published until William Force Stead’s edition of 1939, Rejoice in the Lamb: A Song from Bedlam, a title devised by Stead, the book thus suffering in this manner a one hundred seventy-five year lag, which brings new meaning to the literary term belatedness, meant to connote the lag between the writing of a piece and its publication or acceptance by a culture. (This record of 175 years makes the slow starts of Dickinson, Hopkins and O'Brien look like blips. I expect the record would be Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria which disappeared around 800AD and wasn't seen again until discovered by the great bookhunter, Poggio Bracciolini, in the year 1416 in a monastery in France).

What survives of the manuscript now is only a series of fragments. Only two extant editions are in any way dependable. The first is W. H Bond’s Harvard UP edition of 1954, and the second Karina Williamson’s Oxford UP edition of 1980 (which I purchased a few years ago for $75, the cheapest available price; the next cheapest with ABEbooks was $475).

Most of us first read from the Jubilate via its one most frequently excerpted section: the bit about his cat Jeoffry.

A book published by Bishop Robert Lowth in 1753 probably, Bond feels, influenced Smart’s experiment. The book, De sacra poesi Hebraeorum, was a pioneering survey of Hebrew poetry. Hebrew verse was heavily antiphonal in character (meaning lots of call-and-response), designed to be chanted by two groups. So Jubilate Agno seems to have been an attempt to alter English verse according to the antiphonally responsive principles of Hebrew poetry, hence all the Let’s and For’s.

This is what Samuel Johnson said about him:

"My poor friend Smart showed the disturbance of his mind, by falling upon his knees, and saying his prayers in the street, or in any other unusual place. Now although, rationally speaking, it is greater madness not to pray at all, than to pray as Smart did, I am afraid there are so many who do not pray, that their understanding is not called in question." (from The Life of Johnson)

Boswell goes on to quote, "Concerning this unfortunate poet, Christopher Smart, who was confined in a mad-house, he had, at another time, the following conversation with Dr. Burney. -- BURNEY. "How does poor Smart do, Sir; is he likely to recover?" JOHNSON. "It seems as if his mind had ceased to struggle with the disease; for he grows fat upon it." BURNEY. "Perhaps, Sir, that may be from want of exercise." JOHNSON. "No, Sir; he has partly as much exercise as he used to have, for he digs in the garden. Indeed, before his confinement, he used for exercise to walk to the alehouse; but he was carried back again. I did not think he ought to be shut up. His infirmities were not noxious to society. He insisted on people praying with him; and I'd as lief pray with Kit Smart as any one else. Another charge was, that he did not love clean linen; and I have no passion for it."

Looks like Smart (1) had a problem with alcohol, (2) prayed constantly, even in public, and (3) did not clean his underwear. I have had at least two friends like that.

Though am not a theist, I admire Smart's courage and the energy of his heart, and imagine most of us can sympathize with at least some of his difficulties.

Whatever about his condition, he wrote a divine thing when he wrote the Jubilate. It's come down to us in fragments. This is what Stead said about it: “To begin with, it is enough to note that he never systematically revised any portion of it for the press. A few revisions and insertions do appear sporadically…but there are many points exhibiting defects which the most careless author should have corrected in reviewing his work. Indeed, on these grounds alone Jubilate Agno had something of the appearance of a discarded experiment.”

It's pleasurable to think that one of the greatest poems written in English was an experiment.

Let the Levites of the Lord take the Beavers of the brook alive into the Ark of the Testimony.

the letter of fervent love for cattle

Around this time, Sayadaw started exhorting people not to eat cattle or oxen. He taught that oxen correspond to fathers who plow the land and give food to the family. Cows resemble mothers, who feed milk to their children. Human beings should not eat the meat of oxen and cows because they are so similar to parents. Sayadaw wrote many open letters at that time urging people to abstain from eating beef.

-- from "The Letter of Fervent Love for Cattle: or Gomettasa, an Admonitory Letter for the Abstention from Eating Beef,"

as found in A Short Biography of Ven. Ledi Sayadaw

poetry sometimes forgets about relationships

Poetry sometimes forgets about relationships. Because it tries to deal with too much abstraction. And in the end it’s the relationships which are so important. Especially in a world like today in which there is so much disaster and so much fragmentation. I think the notion of relationships ... is very very important. And in fact when you listen to our poets, it might be a good idea to discern who is aware of the importance of relationships and who is not. 

-- Kamau Brathwaite, as found on YouTube

npr story vipassana in an alabama maximum security prison

"I could see a significant decrease in behavioral problems"

"the program is not religious"

The exact method of meditation taught and practiced at this prison is also taught in about two hundred meditation centers around the world. Ten-day introductory courses are offered  at these places free of charge. There are about a dozen such centers in North America. For a complete world-wide list, visit www.dhamma.org.

My job.

pen under eyewear
Pelikan M400 Souverän, medium nib, c. 1980, says "W. Germany" in caplip metal. Noodler's permanent red

pen adjacent to eyewear
Pelikan M200, burgundy, medium nib, c. 2000. Noodler's permanent black

Maria Damon & Ira Livingston's Poetry and Cultural Studies: A Reader (U of Illinois, 2009). "It is time for this book. Poetry is studied more and more frequently with a cultural studies approach, and Damon and Livingston provide the perfect balance in this collection." Juliana Spahr

.

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gandhiji 1-30-1948 goodbye again

Kabira kharā bāzārameṅ,
liye kuḷhārā hātha.

Śiśa utāre, bhuīṅ dhare
cale hamāre sātha.

Kabīr says
"I am here with an axe
calling you.

Only one ready
to chop off her head
and throw it in the dust
can come with me."

mindfulness practice leads to increases in regional brain gray matter density

"[MRI] analyses in a priori regions of interest confirmed increases in gray matter concentration within the left hippocampus. Whole brain analyses identified increases in the posterior cingulate cortex, the temporo-parietal junction, and the cerebellum in the *MBSR group compared with the controls. The results suggest that participation in MBSR is associated with changes in gray matter concentration in brain regions involved in learning and memory processes, emotion regulation, self-referential processing, and perspective taking."

Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging

Volume 191, Issue 1, Pages 36-43 (30 January 2011)

*MBSR, as near as I can tell, appears to be at core a kind of vipassana.

"Over the December holidays, my husband went on a 10-day silent meditation retreat. Not my idea of fun, but he came back rejuvenated and energetic.

"He said the experience was so transformational that he has committed to meditating for two hours a day, once in the morning and once in the evening, until the end of March. He’s running an experiment to determine whether and how meditation actually improves the quality of his life.

"I’ll admit I’m a skeptic. [I'm not]

"But now, scientists say that meditators like my husband may be benefiting from changes in their brains. The researchers report that those who meditated for about 30 minutes a day for eight weeks had measurable changes in gray-matter density in parts of the brain associated with memory, sense of self, empathy and stress. The findings will appear in the Jan. 30 issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging."

- New York Times, Health Section blog, Jan 21 2011

.

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he manga wai koia kia kore e whitikia

one of my favorite youtube videos and i'm not sure why

paul gamache, former holder of the world record for freefall waterfall descent in a kayak, 108 ft, runs smith river oregon hole gorge on california oregon border at flood stage, 80,000 cubic feet/sec, heavily aerated water too small boat

i don't really know what bruni's singing, so it's not her words necessarily. maybe the song's melodic/rhythmic structure somehow matches the river. maybe it's just: who does this? who runs a river like this?

[there is some strong speech from a clearly good humored but naturally concerned person who is standing near the camera as his friend fights for his life]

For what is it to me that rivers run whole ages and their streams are never done 

- Henry Vaughan

Do not save love

for things

Throw things

to the flood

- Lorine Niedecker, wisconsinite

thanks to paul gamache for how to ride a cause of death, allhearted, potamophile

on thurs march 5 2009 paul gamache ceased being the world's record holder for freefall descent in a kayak that record was then held by pedro olivia at salto bello falls 127' on the rio sacre in brazil a tributary of the amazon in a jackson kayak rocker using a snap dragon spray skirt in 70 degree water but the new record is held by tyler bradt who april 21 2009 paddled off palouse falls in washington state 186' but clearly there is no world record for being allhearted there is a pali word sabbecittam which means allhearted that giant eddy line and that cabin sized recirculating hole don't do that again paul gamache or use a larger boat maybe

"Participating in an 8-week mindfulness meditation program appears to make measurable changes in brain regions associated with memory, sense of self, empathy and stress. In a study that will appear in the January 30 issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, a team led by Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers report the results of their study, the first to document meditation-produced changes over time in the brain's grey matter....

Previous studies from Lazar's group and others found structural differences between the brains of experienced mediation practitioners and individuals with no history of meditation, observing thickening of the cerebral cortex in areas associated with attention and emotional integration. But those investigations could not document that those differences were actually produced by meditation."

[The kind of meditation mentioned in the study is called MBSR (Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction), which is, from what I can gather, more or less a medicalized name for what appears to be a kind of vipassana]

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The momentum given ... by passage through sorrow is missing when peace is sought through avoidance. A flat life of calibrated retreat may appear placid and ordered to neighbors, but those who live minimally and timidly tread water, enduring a life of chronic anxiety-depression.

Cultivating Inner Peace, Paul R Fleischman, MD, psychiatrist and Vipassana Acariya

Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.

Moby-Dick, chpt 96

my cats dressed in polar bear suits

what the song asks

The question it asks is clear: Should those we knew and loved be forgotten and never thought of? Should old times past be forgotten? No, says the song, they shouldn't be. We'll remember those times and those people, we'll toast them now and always, we'll keep them close. "We'll take a cup of kindness yet."

- Peggy Noonan, "Days of Auld Lang What?: 

The Origin of the New Year's Anthem and What it Means to Us"

Kiran Bedi - Director General of Indian Police Service and Vipassana Meditator

Kiran Bedi transformed the largest and most violent prison in India, Tihar Prison, population 10,000, by instituting ten-day courses in Vipassana Meditation as taught by S. N. Goenka. Crime and violence in the prison dropped dramatically. See the Israeli film Doing Time, Doing Vipassana about Vipassana in Tihar Prison.

While she was police chief in the city of New Delhi, she had every police officer in the New Delhi Police Force sit a ten-day course in Vipassana Meditation. It completely changed the feel of the entire city of New Delhi.

"Kiran Bedi influenced several decisions of the Indian Police Service, particularly in the areas of narcotics control, traffic management, and VIP security. During her stint as the Inspector General of Prisons, in Tihar Jail (Delhi) (1993–1995), she instituted a number of reforms in the management of the prison, and initiated a number of measures such as detoxification programs, yoga, vipassana meditation, redressing of complaints by prisoners and literacy programs.[12][13] For this she won the 1994 Ramon Magsaysay Award, and the 'Jawaharlal Nehru Fellowship', to write about her work at Tihar Jail."

"[The DSM-IV] fostered an increasing tendency to chalk up life’s difficulties to mental illness and then treat them with psychiatric drugs." 

- Gary Greenberg 

on the doubts of Allen Frances (lead editor of the DSM-IV) 

and the increasing insurgency among psychiatrists against the DSM-5, due out in 2013, and its even laxer criteria for mental illness

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"The endlessness of reality / as the consequence / of the closeness of persons, / and the end of loneliness, / between or within persons, / is declared"

- Charles Olson is one hundred years today

[hat tip B Friedlander]

"Maria Glymour, an assistant professor of Society, Human Development and Health at Harvard, and her colleagues reported their findings on emotional support in stroke in the journal Neuroepidemiology. In this article, they reported that emotional support led to better thinking ability six months down the line and also greater improvement in thinking at the same time. This suggests that the mental stimulation offered by "emotional support" somehow affected the brain, such that even when there was significant damage to a brain region, the associated brain changes improve thinking."

in point of fact there is no Virginia either

[Forget whether there's a Santa. That's just an honored {and, in the below case, sanctimonious} ruse. What's really a puzzle is the stories we tell ourselves, almost w/out awareness, about our own existence.]

Dear Editor,

I am 8 years old.

Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, "If you see it in The Sun, it's so." Please tell me the truth: Is there a Santa Claus?

Virginia O'Hanlon

115 W. 95th St.

Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except (what) they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men's or children's, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that's no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

You may tear apart the baby's rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.

- The New York Sun, 1897

"Food is one part. Love is another part."

Day 10 Illinois Vipassana Meditation Center

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mittānukampako

Here again we find affinity with Heidegger, who claimed that the authentic discourse with the other is in fact silence. [fn., For Heidegger, the reason is that abolishing communication (in the daily sense of this expression) is the essential moment that accompanies authenticity, since it directs Dasein to his inwardness.]

- Dana Freibach-Heifetz

“Pure Air and Solitude and Bread and Medicine: Nietzsche’s Conception of Friendship" Philosophy Today (fall 2005), vol. 49 (3), 245-255.

"even there I was laughing"

"I never hate and I have never hated. Hatred brings only hatred."

Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there some day.

- Pooh's Little Instruction Book

sour adversity

Sukarāni asādhūni,
attano ahitāni ca.
Yaṃ ve hitañca sādhuñca,
taṃ ve paramadukkaraṃ.

Easy to do are things

that are bad and harmful to oneself.

But exceedingly difficult to do

are things that are good and beneficial.

Dhammapada 12.163

L et me em
b ra ce t
h ee so ur ad
ver sit
y

fo r w i s e m
en sa y it is t
he w ise st co
u r s e.

The idea that depression and other mental health conditions are caused by an imbalance of chemicals in the brain is so deeply ingrained in our psyche that it seems almost sacrilegious to question it....

It is, after all, a neat theory. It takes a complex and heterogeneous condition (depression) and boils it down to a simple imbalance of two to three neurotransmitters (out of more than 100 that have been identified), which, as it happens, can be “corrected” by long-term drug treatment. This clear and easy-to-follow theory is the driving force behind the $12 billion worth of antidepressant drugs sold each year.

However, there is one (rather large) problem with this theory: there is absolutely no evidence to support it. Recent reviews of the research have demonstrated no link between depression, or any other mental disorder, and an imbalance of chemicals in the brain (Lacasse & Leo, 2005; (Valenstein, 1998).

- Chris Kresser, "The Healthy Skeptic"

marie-claire alain

Another of the Schübler chorales, like the below but by another organist. I ran across this organist in a cd I bought when I was 21 or so. Not sure what it is about these chorales. Unlike "Wo soll ich fliehen hin," which is sadder than this, there is a sweetness, a happy kindness to this one. The title is something like come now, deity, from heaven to us here-under. Sometimes I understand why someone might think they need a deity.

buy nothing day

Most days for me are buy nothing days but Friday Nov 25 also really buy nothing in unison.

This is my friend. She is a fox. She is very dear. She lives on campus. Here she is summer before last beneath the windows of the old library, Williams Hall. Photo Daniel Enomoto. I've seen little foxes elsewhere in Normal, but never in daylight. Once walking on the sidewalk outside the Norfel apartments on Fell avenue, once outside the Wittenberg Lutheran Youth Center. I've seen many of them from the water on the hills that compose the banks of the Mackinaw. 

na paro paraṃ nikubbetha

nātimaññetha katthaci naṃ kañci 

byārosanā paṭighasaññā nāññamaññassa dukkhamiccheyya

Wohin soll ich gehen vor deinem Geist, und wohin soll ich fliehen vor deinem Angesicht? Führe ich gen Himmel, so bist du da; bettete ich mich bei den Toten [among the dead].

mercy for turkeys

"More than 300 million turkeys are killed in the U.S. every year - 40 million for Thanksgiving dinners alone. In nature, turkeys are protective and nurturing parents, as well as fast runners, who are able to use reason to outwit their pursuers. But most turkeys killed for food are raised in unnatural conditions, crammed by the thousands into windowless warehouses, where disease, smothering and heart attacks are common. Turkeys are drugged and bred to grow so large, so quickly that their legs are often unable to withstand their own weight. Countless birds slowly starve to death within inches of food after they become crippled and are unable to move.

At the slaughterhouse, turkeys are roughly snapped into moving shackles and have their throats slit by a spinning blade, often while fully conscious. Turkeys, and other fowl, are excluded from the federal Animal Welfare Act and Humane Methods of Slaughter Act, leading to institutionalized and rampant abuse that would warrant felony cruelty charges if the victims were dogs or cats."

Let me say here, up front -- if you haven't gotten the drift already -- that I am unabashedly fond of natural rivers.

- Tim Palmer, Rivers of California

1963 Nov 22

William James on Walt Whitman

The below from Wm James’s 1902 masterwork THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE: A STUDY IN HUMAN NATURE, specifically from one of the two lectures under the rubric "The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness" (notably James did not count himself among the "healthy minded" but felt he was one of the "sick souls," who had to be "twice-born") :

The supreme contemporary example of such an inability to feel evil is of course Walt Whitman.

"His favorite occupation," writes his disciple, Dr. Bucke "seemed to be strolling or sauntering about outdoors by himself, looking at the grass, the trees, the flowers, the vistas of light, the varying aspects of the sky, and listening to the birds, the crickets, the tree frogs, and all the hundreds of natural sounds.

It was evident that these things gave him a pleasure far beyond what they give to ordinary people. Until I knew the man," continues Dr. Bucke, "it had not occurred to me that any one could derive so much absolute happiness from these things as he did. He was very fond of flowers, either wild or cultivated; liked all sorts. I think he admired lilacs and sunflowers just as much as roses. Perhaps, indeed, no man who ever lived liked so many things and disliked so few as Walt Whitman. All natural objects seemed to have a charm for him. All sights and sounds seemed to please him. He appeared to like (and I believe he did like) all the men, women, and children he saw (though I never knew him to say that he liked any one), but each who knew him felt that he liked him or her, and that he liked others also. I never knew him to argue or dispute, and he never spoke about money. He always justified, sometimes playfully, sometimes quite seriously, those who spoke harshly of himself or his writings, and I often thought he even took pleasure in the opposition of enemies. When I first knew [him], I used to think that he watched himself, and would not allow his tongue to give expression to fretfulness, antipathy, complaint, and remonstrance. It did not occur to me as possible that these mental states could be absent in him. After long observation, however, I satisfied myself that such absence or unconsciousness was entirely real. He never spoke deprecatingly of any nationality or class of men, or time in the world's history, or against any trades or occupations--not even against any animals, insects, or inanimate things, nor any of the laws of nature, nor any of the results of those laws, such as illness, deformity, and death. He never complained or grumbled either at the weather, pain, illness, or anything else. He never swore. He could not very well, since he never spoke in anger and apparently never was angry. He never exhibited fear, and I do not believe he ever felt it."[38]

[38] R. M. Bucke: Cosmic consciousness, pp. 182-186, abridged.

Walt Whitman owes his importance in literature to the systematic expulsion from his writings of all contractile elements. The only sentiments he allowed himself to express were of the expansive order; and he expressed these in the first person, not as your mere monstrously conceited individual might so express them, but vicariously for all men, so that a passionate and mystic ontological emotion suffuses his words, and ends by persuading the reader that men and women, life and death, and all things are divinely good.

Thus it has come about that many persons to-day regard Walt Whitman as the restorer of the eternal natural religion. He has infected them with his own love of comrades, with his own gladness that he and they exist. Societies are actually formed for his cult; a periodical organ exists for its propagation, in which the lines of orthodoxy and heterodoxy are already beginning to be drawn;[39] hymns are written by others in his peculiar prosody; and he is even explicitly compared with the founder of the Christian religion, not altogether to the advantage of the latter.

[39] I refer to The Conservator, edited by Horace Traubel, and published monthly at Philadelphia.

Whitman is often spoken of as a "pagan." The word nowadays means sometimes the mere natural animal man without a sense of sin; sometimes it means a Greek or Roman with his own peculiar religious consciousness. In neither of these senses does it fitly define this poet. He is more than your mere animal man who has not tasted of the tree of good and evil. He is aware enough of sin for a swagger to be present in his indifference towards it, a conscious pride in his freedom from flexions and contractions, which your genuine pagan in the first sense of the word would never show.

"I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contained,

I stand and look at them long and long;

They do not sweat and whine about their condition.

They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.

Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,

Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,

Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth."[40]

[40] Song of Myself, 32. [James doesn't say which edition he's got this from - gg]

No natural pagan could have written these well-known lines. But on the other hand Whitman is less than a Greek or Roman; for their consciousness, even in Homeric times, was full to the brim of the sad mortality of this sunlit world, and such a consciousness Walt Whitman resolutely refuses to adopt. When, for example, Achilles, about to slay Lycaon, Priam's young son, hears him sue for mercy, he stops to say:--

"Ah, friend, thou too must die: why thus lamentest thou? Patroclos too is dead, who was better far than thou. . . . Over me too hang death and forceful fate. There cometh morn or eve or some noonday when my life too some man shall take in battle, whether with spear he smite, or arrow from the string."[41]

[41] Iliad, XXI., E. Myers's translation.

Then Achilles savagely severs the poor boy's neck with his sword, heaves him by the foot into the Scamander, and calls to the fishes of the river to eat the white fat of Lycaon. Just as here the cruelty and the sympathy each ring true, and do not mix or interfere with one another, so did the Greeks and Romans keep all their sadnesses and gladnesses unmingled and entire. Instinctive good they did not reckon sin; nor had they any such desire to save the credit of the universe as to make them insist, as so many of US insist, that what immediately appears as evil must be "good in the making," or something equally ingenious. Good was good, and bad just bad, for the earlier Greeks. They neither denied the ills of nature--Walt Whitman's verse, "What is called good is perfect and what is called bad is just as perfect," would have been mere silliness to them--nor did they, in order to escape from those ills, invent "another and a better world" of the imagination, in which, along with the ills, the innocent goods of sense would also find no place. This integrity of the instinctive reactions, this freedom from all moral sophistry and strain, gives a pathetic dignity to ancient pagan feeling. And this quality Whitman's outpourings have not got. His optimism is too voluntary and defiant; his gospel has a touch of bravado and an affected twist,[42] and this diminishes its effect on many readers who yet are well disposed towards optimism, and on the whole quite willing to admit that in important respects Whitman is of the genuine lineage of the prophets.

[42] "God is afraid of me!" remarked such a titanic-optimistic friend in my presence one morning when he was feeling particularly hearty and cannibalistic. The defiance of the phrase showed that a Christian education in humility still rankled in his breast.

If, then, we give the name of healthy-mindedness to the tendency which looks on all things and sees that they are good, we find that we must distinguish between a more involuntary and a more voluntary or systematic way of being healthy-minded. In its involuntary variety, healthy-mindedness is a way of feeling happy about things immediately. In its systematical variety, it is an abstract way of conceiving things as good. Every abstract way of conceiving things selects some one aspect of them as their essence for the time being, and disregards the other aspects. Systematic healthy-mindedness, conceiving good as the essential and universal aspect of being, deliberately excludes evil from its field of vision; and although, when thus nakedly stated, this might seem a difficult feat to perform for one who is intellectually sincere with himself and honest about facts, a little reflection shows that the situation is too complex to lie open to so simple a criticism.

In the first place, happiness, like every other emotional state, has blindness and insensibility to opposing facts given it as its instinctive weapon for self-protection against disturbance. When happiness is actually in possession, the thought of evil can no more acquire the feeling of reality than the thought of good can gain reality when melancholy rules. To the man actively happy, from whatever cause, evil simply cannot then and there be believed in. He must ignore it; and to the bystander he may then seem perversely to shut his eyes to it and hush it up.

March 23 1839 Boston: "o.k."

okay

radio interview about teaching in prisons

Danny Hajek, producer at WGLT and radio journalist, conducts an interview about my years teaching creative writing in prisons.

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In this same essay, [Freeman] Dyson writes,

"We are moving rapidly into the post-Darwinian era, when species other than our own will no longer exist, and the rules of Open Source sharing will be extended from the exchange of software to the exchange of genes. When species other than our own will no longer exist."

Has anyone else proposed such a future? Does anyone else want to live in it? Has anyone suggested how such a future (without pollinators, nitrogen-fixers, decomposers, without microbes in the soil and bacteria in the gut) would be possible? For the unifying impulse of the physicist, the idea might be satisfying—just one species—but for the diversifying impulse of the biologist, there could be nothing more chilling than this endorsement of mass biocide, Dyson’s cheerful embrace of extinction for everything but us.

- Kenneth Brower, "The Danger of Cosmic Genius"
Atlantic Magazine, Dec 2010

renouncing the factory farming of animals

The question is, if we don't say no to this, what do we say no to? If we don't say no to something that systematically abuses 50 billion animals, if we don't say no to the number-one cause of global warming, and not by a little bit, but by a lot, if we don't say no to what the UN has said is one of the top two or three causes of every significant environmental problem in the world, locally and globally, if we don't say no to something that is clearly - not clear to me, but clear to the World Health Organization - a prime factor in the generation of Avian and Swine flus, if we don't say no to something that's making our antibiotics less effective and ineffective, if we don't say no to something that causes 76 million of food-borne illness every year, just what do we say no to? This is not a case where we need to go to war with another country or spend a trillion dollars or elect a new government. We just need to say no to it.

- Jonathan Safran Foer

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vijaṭeti

to disentangle, untangle, disembroil, unravel

cooper's hawk on bough above garage

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working from home when sick

Is there a political ecology of laughter?

Or more interestingly: "What Bennett's theories about the way human agency is really composed of a plethora of non-human agencies is that it provides us a way of theory comes closest to reformulating the nature of laughter as"

My poor students. 

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