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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radiolab on interspecies empathy

Okay, this is amazing. Make yourself a cup of tea and set aside an hour.

(BTW, Clive Wynne is wrong.)

tarati

"cp. Lat. termen, terminus, Gr. te/rma, te/rqron; also Lat. trans"

"to cross [a river], to surmount, overcome [the great flood of life, desire, ignorance]

to get to the other side, to cross over, as in crossing the ocean of suffering"

the pleasures of kindness

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