1. 29 November 2008

    Glenn Gould: Variations, by Himself and His Friends

    McGreevy, John, ed.

    6 days ago

    Short pieces, written by Gould and acquaintances of his, some before and some after his death. Makes me want to get a ratty old chair and start using it whenever I play piano, Gould comes off as far beyond amazing.

    I took piano for a year or two when I was a kid, and hit all the mercilessly overplayed pieces (played through most of the Suzuki method if I remember, also Für Elise and Rondo Alla Turka plus others I’m sure). I couldn’t ever figure out how to read music, having relied mostly on my good ears, decent memory, and a willingness for both my Mom and teacher to show me how to do the things I couldn’t read. Pretty quick I got frustrated with recitals, in which I took very little joy either performing or observing, and that plus my frustration with those damn black circles that I couldn’t figure out how to read got me to give it up.

    I started playing piano again maybe a bit more than a year ago now, motivated by a Gould recording of the Anglaise from French Suite 3 in b. I’d heard the tune and it was beautiful, so I learned it (the RH, ‘melody’) on my mandolin. One thing led to another and I eventually decided to pick out the upper voice on the family piano, at which point my mom realized what I was playing and went back into the closet with our piano music in it and pulled out its score. I was playing it surprisingly well, and somewhere in here resolved to make a copy of the 33 bars and take it back to school with me to try and pluck it out in the basement of the HFA.

    Eventually I figured it out. I’ve always known which notes were which in the staff, but for some reason never been able to read anything fluently. It’s very much a stop–and–go process for me, and I’ll be dammed if I can read more than one note at a time, so forget left and right hand together. Truthfully, I can’t pretend to read any music at all until I’ve listened to it enough that it’s already there in my head, and I can almost just as well completely reconstruct it with my fingers and the keys—at least for the stronger of the two lines, picking apart Bach’s contrapuntal stuff this way isn’t something I’m much good at.

    Since then I’ve picked up a few more of the movements from the same suite (Allemande, Courante, Sarabande; not in that order) and I’m now working on the Gigue. This fall I signed up for bonified piano lessons at school, got hooked up with the most experienced teacher and it’s been very good. Last lesson she had me play through everything I knew (although as it usually goes we get distracted and end up just talking about stuff) and after the second part she had to ask who it was on my recording. I mentioned Gould, and she said that’s what she’d have guessed. Which hopefully means that I’m playing it well; if my inspiration can show through that well I can’t be butchering the notes. But anyway, all that was to say that she went off into the room where she keeps her mountain of music and books and brought this one out for me, so I went at reading it.

    Summary: Glenn Gould is awesome—and not in the trivialized popular sense of the word—but take it back to its roots: “Full of awe, profoundly reverential” (OED). In part it’s the Bach that has proved to be his touchstone. But there’s far more there than just the scored music. My teacher also gave me a disk of someone else playing through the French Suites so that I could compare. I listened to it on the drive home for thanksgiving. It was a beautiful drive, blue sky and a thin coat of wind–blown snow through the prairie. The music mostly sat in the background, I didn’t pay much attention. I didn’t have any issues with it until the third suite came up—my suite—and then I was pissed. I’ve listened to all of Gould’s recordings of the same at least once, but iTunes shows that I’ve mostly focused on the ones I’m working at learning. I’ve listened to the movements of the third suite 37, 22, 73, 13, 68, and 14 times, respectively. That’s for the 6 movements, totalling 8:58 as Gould interprets them. It’s also a lower bound, because when I do listen to them I like to repeatedly start back at the beginning without finishing the track, which doesn’t get counted as a ‘play.’ So they’re pretty well burned into my head. I can sit at a piano and play four of them from memory. I can sing the jig, which is what I’m working on figuring out right now.

    When they played through my car speakers, coming from someone other than Gould, I could hardly listen. There’s absolutely a world of difference there. It probably shows a lot about how well I actually read music that I didn’t notice all the amazing things Gould had done with these scores, I had his version in my head and whenever I didn’t know where to put my fingers I’d check the music, but I’d always be trying to play what I knew from listening as opposed to the scratches on paper that I don’t really understand. The pianist in question is Andrei Gavrilov, not a man without his chops. But there’s not a measure that I’d listen to again. Midway through the third, without remembering who was listed as the pianist for these I decided they sounded all too ‘russian’—either pounding along or tinkling slowly, carelessly melodramatic while lacking any sense of fluidity; and holy god, the tempo was always wrong! Surely enough, I checked and saw a guy named Andrei on the case. Gould’s rendition strikes me as much more buoyant; I don’t know, but if you threw both Gould’s and Gavrilov’s recordings of these suites into the water somewhere the former would always be swimming along comfortably and gracefully, while Gavrilov’s would be stroking madly just to keep above water, and only partially succeeding.

    Reading through this made me feel the same way I do when I listen to Gould’s works, and how I sometimes feel while playing the few that I can play myself, heavily grafted from Gould’s vision. There’s a bit of rapture, forgetting everything except for the feel of the keys under my fingers or the sounds snaking in through my ears. It’s such a pity that Gould went when he did. Even though he might have been well on his way to giving up piano entirely—in the same manner he gave up public performances—he was doing tremendous things outside playing with TV and radio, why do all the best have to die young etc. I finished up the car ride home listening to the first disk of him playing the WTC, feeling the need to wash Gavrilov’s Bach out of my system, and it was wonderful.

  2. 01 November 2008

    Anathem

    Neal Stephenson

    33 days ago

    Stephenson rocks once more. There’s such a great fantastical quality to his books, everything is stretched so close to absurdity but in such a way that you really just want to believe it. It’s great. This book makes me want a bolt, chord and sphere—how cool would it be if those were my three possessions?

    Started it monday, finished it up on the soccer bus ride last night. That gives me a good burn rate of about 200 pages a day.

    Stephenson’s bent here is almost spiritual. Where in his earlier books it was more techno–social (Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, Diamond age; at least as I remember them, rereads are now under consideration), and where the System of the World was historical and philosophic, here Stephenson takes his compelling and marvellous storytelling and wraps it around systems of existence and belief. There’s a very Emersonian transcendentalism (Emerson is even mentioned as an aside somewhere late in the book.)

    Which is great, I love it when a book comes along that meshes with my insufficiently explored innate feelings towards some subject, here that of ‘god/religion/whatever.’

    Nothing is more important that that you see and love the beauty that is right in front of you, or else you will have no defense against the ugliness that will hum you in and come at you in so many ways. Fraa Orolo, 109

    Why is religion such a universal in societies throughout history?

    That’s right, people have a need to feel that they are part of some sustainable project. Something that will go on without them. It creates a feeling of stability. I believe that the need for that kind of stability is as basic and as desperate as some of the other, more obvious needs. But there’s more than one way to get it. We may not think much of the sline subculture, but you have to admit it’s stable! Then the burgers have a completely different kind of stability. Orolo in dialog with Erasmus, 205

    I also love the formalized system of dialog, where it’s an objective of the theors to regularly argue with each other. If only people would actually do that! I’m generally a fan of arguing, and tend to do it just as often as I don’t. If only everyone else did as well…

    I no longer respected that oath. Or at least, I no longer trusted those who were charged with enforcing the Discipline to which I had sworn. But I couldn’t very well say as much to these friends of mine who did still respect it. 231

    Why do I hate politics? Why does going to church make me feel catatonic? It’s not that I hate democracy or that I think that believing in god in some unforgivably–backward and primitive notion; it’s more that both systems have steadily devolved in their lifetimes, leaving them (and their devotees) at the point where they garner at least as much of my disdain as they do my respect.

    …the Convox was political, and made decisions by compromise. And it happened all the time that the compromise between two perfectly rational alternatives was something that made no sense at all. 573

    I like the notion of introspectionist. 697

    Stephenson posits the idea that google should ensconce itself as useful to the web by generating endless amounts of crap in different places on the internet, thereby requiring people to use it to actually find anything worthwhile:

    Some of those businesses came up with a clever plan to make more money: they poisoned the well. They began to put crap on the Reticulum deliberately, forcing people to use their products to filter that crap back out. They created syndevs whose sole purpose was to spew crap into The Reticulum. But it had to be good crap. Samman, 795

    (Maybe google already came up with this, and that’s why they bought out blogger.)

    Mystic vs. Poetic (Laterran):

    The mystic nails a symbol to one meaning that was true for a moment but soon becomes false. The poet, on the other hand, sees that truth while it’s true but understands that symbols are always in flux and that their meanings are fleeting.

    “Anyway, my point is that guys like Flec have a weakness, almost a kind of addiction, for the mystical, as opposed to poetic, way of using their minds. And there’s an optimistic side of me that says such a person could break that addiction, be retrained to think like a poet, and accept the fluxational nature of symbols and meaning.”
    “Okay, but what’s the pessimistic side telling you?”
    “That the poet’s way is a feature of the brain, a specific organ or faculty that you either have or you don’t. And that those who have it are doomed to be at war forever with those who don’t.” Erasmus and Quin, 883-4

    And in the second-to-last paragraph of the book, Stephenson nails exactly and precisely they way I’ve tried to see the world for a few years now:

    Orolo said that the more he knew of the complexity of the mind, and the cosmos with which it was inextricably and mysteriously bound up, the more inclined he was to see it as a kind of miracle—not in quite the same sense that our Deolaters use the term, for he considered it altogether natural. He meant rather that the evolution of our minds from bits of inanimate matter was more beautiful and extraordinary than any of the miracles cataloged down through the ages by the religions of our world. And so he had an instinctive skepticism of any system of thought, religious or theorical, that pretended to encompass that miracle, and in so doing sought to draw limits around it. Erasmus, 889-90

  3. 04 January 2008

    336 days ago

    Constantly regard the universe as one living being, having one substance and one soul; and observe how all things have reference to one perception, the perception of this one living being; and how all things act with one movement; and how all things are the cooperating causes of all things which exist; and consider, too, how carefully intertwined are the threads woven together to construct this fabric, how dense is this celestial weave!

    Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Meditations

  4. 02 December 2007

    368 days ago

    … je me suis apercu que de tout temps j’ai ete obsede par l’impossibilite de me rendre compte de certaines actions ou pensees soudaines de l’homme sans l’hypothese de l’intervention d’une force mechante exterieure de lui.

    I realized that I’ve always been obsessed with my inability to understand certain abrupt actions or thoughts of man without hypothesizing the intervention of some malicious force acting outside of him.

    Charles Baudelaire on the Devil

  5. 16 August 2007

    Labyrinths

    Jorge Luis Borges

    476 days ago

    Selected Short Stories and Other Writings by Jorge Luis Borges.

    History, the mother of truth: the idea is astounding. Menard, a contemporary of William James, does not define history as an inquiry into reality but as its origin. Historical truth, for him, is not what has happened; it is what we judge to have happened. 43

    Whatever one man does, it is as if all men did it. For that reason it is not unfair that one disobedience in a garden should contaminate all humanity; for that reason it is not unjust that the crucifixion of a single Jew should be sufficient to save it. Perhaps Schopenhauer was right: I am all other men, any man is all men. 70

    From that imagination I went on to others, even more extravagant. I thought that our perceptions were the same, but that he combined them in another way and made other objects of them; I thought that perhaps there were no objects for him, only a vertiginous and continuous plat of extremely brief impressions. I thought of a world without memory, without time; I considered the possibility of a language without nouns, a language of impersonal verbs or indeclinable epithets. 112

    He argued with the men on whose judgement his fate depended and committed the extreme ineptitude of doing so with wit and irony. On the 26th of October, after a discussion lasting three days and three nights, he was sentenced to die at the stake. 125

    Tennyson once said that if we could understand a single flower, we should know what we are and what the world is. Perhaps he meant that there is no fact, however insignificant, that does not involve universal history and the infinite concatenation of cause and effect. Perhaps he meant that the visible world is implicit in every phenomenon, just as the will, according to Schopenhauer, is implicit in every subject. The Cabalists pretend that man is a microcosm, a symbolic mirror of the universe; according to Tennyson, everything would be. 163

    There occurred the union with the divinity, with the universe (I do not know whether these words differ in meaning). Ecstasy does not repeat its symbols; God has been seen in a blazing light, din a sword or in the circles of a rose. I saw an exceedingly high Wheel, which was not before my eyes, nor behind me, nor to the sides, but every place at one time.

    The Fearful Sphere of Pascal, 189, I’d link it up but can’t find it.

    For one man, Giordano Bruno, the rupture of the stellar vaults was a liberation. He proclaimed, in the Cena de la ceneri, that the world is the infinite effect of an infinite cause, and that divinity is close by, “for it is within us even more than we ourselves are within ourselves.” He searched for words to tell men of Copernican space, and on one famous page he inscribed: “We can assert with certitude that the universe is all center, o that the center of the universe is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.” 191

    Why does it disturb us that the map be included in the map and the thousand and one nights in the book of the Thousand and one nights? Why does it disturb us that Don Quixote be a reader of the Quixote and Hamlet a spectator of Hamlet? I believe I have found the reason: these inversions suggest that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers and spectators, can be fictitious. In 1833, Carlyle observed that the history of the universe is an infinite sacred book that all men write and read and try to understand, and in which they are also written. 196

    The world is an interminable chain of causes and each cause is also an effect. Each state derives from a previous one and determines the following, but the whole series could have not existed, since its terms are conditional, i.e., fortuitous. However, the world does exist; from this we may infer a non-contingent first cause, which would be the Divinity. Such is the cosmological proof; it is prefigured by Aristotle and Plato, later Leibniz rediscovers it.
    Hermann Lotze has recourse to the regressus in order not to understand that an alteration of objet A can roduce an alteration of object B. He reasons that if A and B are independent, to postulate an influence of A on B is to postulate a third element C, an element which in order to affect B will require a fourth element D, which cannot work its effect without F… In order to elude this multiplication of chimeras, he resolves that in the world there is one sole object: an infinite and absolute substance, comparable to the God of Spinoza. Transitive causes are reduced to immanent causes; phenomena to manifestations or modalities of the cosmic substance2. 205
    fn2. I follow the exposition by James (A Pluralistic Universe, 1909, pages 55-60).

    “The greatest magician (Novalis himself has memorably written) would be the one who would cast over himself a spell so complete that he would take his own phantasmagorias as autonomous appearances. Would not this be our case?” I conjecture that this is so. We (the undivided divinity operating within us) have dreamt the world. We have dreamt it as firm, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and durable in time; but in its architecture we have allowed tenuous and eternal crevices of unreason which tell us it is false. 208

    The Mirror of Enigmas, another that I marked for itself and not its subquotes. 209

    The universe, the sum of all things, is a collection no less ideal than that of all the horses Shakespeare dreamt of – one, many, none? – between 1592 and 1594. I add: if time is a mental process, how can thousands of men – or even two different men – share it? 223

    Via the dialectics of Berkeley and Hume I have arrived at Schopenhauer’s dictum: “The form of the phenomenon of will… is really only the present, not the future nor the past. The latter are only in the conception, exist only in the connection of knowledge, so far as it follows the principle of sufficient reason. No man has ever lived in the past, and none will live in the future; the present alone is the form of all life, and is its sure possession which can never be taken from it… We might compare time to a constantly revolving sphere; the half that was always sinking would be the past, that which was always rising would be the future; but the indivisible point at the top, where the tangent touches, would be the extensionless present. As the tangent does not revolve with the sphere, neither does the present, the point of contact of the obect, the form of which is time, with the subject, which has no form, because it does not belong to the knowable, but is the condition of all that is knowable.” 233

    Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges. 234

    History adds that before or after dying he found himself in the presence of God and told Him: “I who have been so many men in cain want to be one and myself.” The voice of the Lord answered from a whirlwind: “Neither am I anyone; I have dreamt the world as you dreamt your work, my Shakespeare, and among the forms in my dream are you, who like myself are many and no one.” 249

  6. 17 July 2007

    506 days ago

    For me the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity, the master of the instant which, in visual terms, questions and decides simultaneously. In order to “give a meaning” to the world, one has to feel involved in what one frames through the viewfinder. This attitude requires concentration, discipline of mind, sensitivity, and a sense of geometry. It is by economy of means that one arrives at simplicity of expression.

    I believe that, through the act of living, the discovery of oneself is made concurrently with the discovery of the world around us, which can mold us, but which can also be affected by us. A balance must be established between these two worlds – the one inside us and the one outside us. As the result of a constant reciprocal process, both these worlds come to form a single one. And it is this which we must communicate.

    Henri Cartier-Bresson

  7. 15 December 2006

    A Guide for the Perplexed

    E.F. Schumaker

    720 days ago

    EF Schumacher was a british economist, here he goes off into philosophy. He has a bone to pick with scientific dogma, calling for a more holistic view of the world than the materialstic Scientism that goes on in modern western society today

    In short, the whole base of our society is deteriorating under what our prevalent beliefs have become and we need a new way to look at things, which is of course, provided. Good stuff to think about – I’m not sure what I think of it yet – but it’s nice to have some controversy of idea.

    Materialistic Scientism

    Thus Cartesian evidence goes straight to mechanism. It mechanizes nature; it does violence to it; it annihilates everything which causes things to symbolize with the spirit, to partake of the genius of the Creator, to speak to us. The universe becomes dumb. 9, Jacques Maritain

    Levels of being, m being matter, x life, y consciousness, and z self-awareness. 18:

    • mineral (m)
    • plant (m + x)
    • animal (m + x + y)
    • man (m + x + y + z).

    A person, for instance, entirely fixed in the philosophy of materialistic Scientism, denying the reality of “invisibles” and confining his attention solely to what can be counted, measured, and weighed, lives in a very poor world, so poor that he will experience it as a meaningless wasteland unfit for human habitation. Equally, if he sees it as nothing but an accidental collocation of atoms, he must needs agree with Bertrand Russell that the only rational attitude is one of “unyielding despair.” 35

    I’m pretty sure I’m with his views on religion. I don’t know what god is, and can’t claim to be christian or of any other religion. To me religion is a way of explaining things and dealing with the world just the same as science.

    Knowledge comes about insofar as the object known is within the knower. 39, St. Thomas Aquinas

    As a materialistic scientist, he believes that life, consciousness, and self-awareness are nothing but manifestations of complex arrangements of inanimate particles – a “faith” which makes it perfectly rational for him to place exclusive reliance on the bodily senses, to “stay in the head,” and to reject any interference from the “powers” situated in the heart. For him in other words, higher levels of Reality simply do not exist, because his faith excludes the possibility of their existence. 45

    Faith chooses the grade of significance at which the search for knowledge and understanding is to aim. 45

    We must shut the eyes of sense, and open that brighter eye of our understandings, that other eye of the soul, as the philosopher calls our intellectual faculty, ‘which indeed all have, but few make use of.’ 47, John Smith

    These two quotes say the exact same thing, the first is from the book and the second is from my memory. Just a fun thing to notice.

    For the outer sense alone perceives visible things and the eye of the heart alone sees the invisible. 47, Richard of Saint-Victor (d. 1173)

    on ne voit bien qu’avec le coeur. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux. (One can only see well with the heart, the essential is invisible to the eyes.) Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, d.1944

    Science for understanding/manipulation

    The change of Western man’s interest from “the slenderest knowledge that may be obtained of the highest things” (Thomas Aquinas) to mathematically precise knowledge of lesser things – “there being nothing in the world the knowledge of which would be more desirable or more useful” (Christian Huygens) – marks a shift from what we might call “science for understanding” to “science for manipulation.” The purpose of the former was the enlightenment of the person and his “liberation”; the purpose of the latter is power. “Knowledge itself is power,” said Francis Bacon, and Descartes promised men they would become “masters and possessors of nature.” In it’s more sophisticated development, “science for manipulation” tends almost inevitable to advance from the manipulation of nature to that of people. 53

    The old science looked upon nature as God’s handiwork and man’s mother; the new science tends to look upon nature as an adversary to be conquered or a resource to be quarried and exploited. 54

    Ishmael anyone?

    The progressive elimination of “science for understanding” – or “wisdom” – from Western civilization turns the rapid and ever-accelerating accumulation of “knowledge for manipulation” into a most serious threat. As I have said in another context, “We are now far too clever to be able to survive without wisdom,” and further expansion of our cleverness can be of no benefit whatever. 55

    It is however important for us to realize that mankind is doomed to live more and more under the spell of a new scientific, social, and political mythology, unless we resolutely exorcise these befuddled notions whose influence on modern life is becoming appalling… For when gods fight amongst themselves, men have to die. 59, Etienne Gilson

    Religion is the reconnection (re-legio) of man with reality, whether this Reality be called God, Truth, Allah, Sat-Chit-Ananda, or Nirvana.

    I’d even add science into the above mix. But:

    Reality, Truth, God, Nirvana cannot be found by thought, because thought belongs to the level of being established by consciousness and not to that higher level which is established by self-awareness. 71

    Heart, life, science

    The term “heart” is of particular significance in the Orthodox doctrine of man. When people in the west today speak of the heart, they usually mean the emotions and affections. But in the Bible, as in most ascetic texts of the Orthodox Church, the heart has a far wider connotation. It is the primary organ of man’s being, whether physical or spiritual; it is the center of life, the determining principle of all our activities and aspirations. As such, the heart obviously includes the addictions and emotions, but it also includes much else besides: it embraces in effect everything that goes to compromise what we call a “person.” 73

    This one of my ideas about God, something within everything roughly analogous to spirit. Also evocative of Chris Alexander’s Wholeness.

    Mathematics, after all, is far removed from life: At its heights it certainly manifests a severe kind of beauty and also a captivating elegance, which may even be taken as a sign of Truth; but equally certainly, it has no warmth, none of life’s messiness of growth and decay, hope and despair, joy and suffering. This must never be overlooked or forgotten: Physics and the other instructional sciences limit themselves to the lifeless aspect of reality, and this is necessarily so if the aim and purpose of science is to produce predictable results. Life, and even more so, consciousness and self-awareness, cannot be ordered about; they have, we might say, a will of their own. 105

    Anti-evolutionism

    I can’t say that I agree with this, but it’s nice to think about.

    And lo! there is the cell, and once the cell has been born there is nothing to stop the emergence of Shakespeare, although it will obviously take a bit of time. There is therefore nor need to speak of miracles or to admit any lack of knowledge. It is one of the great paradoxes of our age that people claiming the proud title of “scientist” dare to offer such undisciplined and reckless speculations as contributions to scientific knowledge, and that they get away with it. 113

    Evolutionism is not science; it is science fiction even a kind of hoax. It is a hoax that has succeeded too well and has imprisoned modern man in what looks like an irreconcilable conflict between “science” and “religion.” It has destroyed all faiths that pull mankind up and has substituted a faith that pulls mankind down. [...] Evolutionism… is the most extreme product of the materialistic utilitarianism of the nineteenth century. The inability of twentieth-century though to rid itself of this imposture is a failure which may well cause the collapse of Western civilization. For it is impossible for any civilization to survive without a faith in meanings and values transcending the utilitarianism of comfort and survival. 115

    ...descriptive science becomes unscientific and illegitimate when it indulges in comprehensive explanatory theories which can be neither verified nor disproved by experiment. Such theories are not “science” but “faith.” 115

  8. 30 November 2006

    The Nature of Order Book 2: The Process of Creating Life

    Christopher Alexander

    735 days ago

    Architects are much too concerned with the design of the world (its static structure), and not yet concerned enough with the design of the generative processes that create the world (its dynamic structure). 4

    Real kindness is something quite different, something valuable in itself. It is a true process, not guided by the the grasp for a goal, but guided by the minute-to-minute necessity of caring, dynamically, for the feelings and well-being of another. This is not trivial, but deep; sincerely related to human feeling; and not predictable in its end-result, because the end-result is not a goal. Unlike the goal-oriented picture, which is imposed intellectually on our substance as persons, real kindness is a process true to our essential human instinct and to our knowledge of what it means to be a person. But the machine-age view showed a process like kindness as being oriented toward a goal, just as every machine too has its purpose — it’s goal, what it is intended to produce. 9

    The Principle of Least Action, 37: The principle says that the evolution of any dynamic system will always follow the path of least work.

    Under these circumstances, as layer upon layer of smooth unfolding takes place, what develops is a system of centers which is stronger, crustier, and more imbricated, and in which the centers (at first hundreds, then thousands, or tens of thousands) all reinforce and intensify each other. 65

    This, I believe, is an essential model which teaches us the real meaning of living structure, and which shows us these phenomena as naturally existing phenomena of beauty which will occur without effort in any world where the wholeness is allowed to unfold smoothly and truthfully, without disturbing previously existing centers. Once this is clear, we shall then have a vision of the world in which the world itself — all of it — animals, plants, mountains, rivers, buildings, roads, terraces, rooms, and windows — is part of a single system and a single way of understanding. 83

    Thus the world has entered a new phase. What is made, what is built now, what develops in the world, is governed by images and rules. It is no longer automatically governed by the existing wholeness. It is now governed by what we decide. 109

    The essence of successful unfolding is that form develops step by step, and that the building as a whole then emerges, coherent, organized. The success if this process depends, always, on sequence. A building design can unfold successfully only when its features “crystallize out” in a proper order. 129

    It goes on like that. It is not complicated, not pretentious, but simple and obvious. It is just common sense. 130

    Thus what I have referred to as the “rough, rambling” quality of so much that is good in the environment, comes from the light-hearted yet profound adaptation which such a simple stepwise process encourages, and which a more formal or controlled design process cannot achieve. 171

    Instead of using plans, design, and so on, I shall argue that we must instead use generative processes. Generative processes tell us what to do, what actions to take, step by step, to make buildings and building designs unfold beautifully, rather than detailed drawings which tell us what the end-result is supposed to be. 176

    *All* the well-ordered complex systems we know in the world, all those anyway that we view as highly successful, are generated structures, not fabricated structures. 180

    The step-by-step approach works. The all-or-nothing approach does not work. THis is the secret of biological evolution. During the course of evolution, the adaptation of the thousands and millions of variables that must occur to make one successful organism happens step-by-step, essentially one gene at a time. That is what makes evolution possible. It would be impossible for nature to “design” a system as complex as any organism all at once. 237

    Butterfly effect, 241: If we examine a complex natural system evolving, each next stage of its evolution depends on its previous stage. Mechanistic 19th-century science created a thought-model in which the next stage would be easily predictable from the previous stage. But it turns out that the world is not like the mechanical thought-model. More sophisticated discoveries have made it clear that in a complex system the next stage is dependent on the current configuration of the whole, which in turn may depend on subtle minutiae in the history of the previous wholes, so “reave-like” that there is no way to predict the path of the emerging system accurately ahead of time.

    To create a living world, successfully, we must again find ways of making all building processes move forward in this experimental, responsive fashion. That on thing alone, as a kind of bedrock for all design and all planning and all building, will change the world. 246

    What steps do you take, in what order? The most basic instruction I can give you as a guide for a living process, is that you move with certainty. That means, you take small steps, one at a time, deciding only what you know. You try never to take a step which is a guess or a “why don’t we try this?” Large scale trial-and-error, shots in the dark, simply do not work. Rather, you move by slow, small decisions, deciding one thing, getting sure about it, and then moving on.

    ...

    When I say that you should move in small decisions, I do not mean that the decisions should be small in physical scale. Rather, I mean that the content of each decision should be limited to a particular subject, to some feature of the design, disconnected from other matters, and floating, to an extent, by itself. 258

    We should run through the possibilities very fast, and reject most of them. If we do accept one, we should accept it, reluctantly, only when we finally encounter something for which no good reason presents itself to reject it, which appears genuinely wonderful to us, and which demonstrably makes the feeling of the whole become more profound. 258

    The crux of every design process lies in finding the generative sequence for that design, and making sure that sequence is the right one for the job. [...]

    Another way of saying the same thing is to observe that for many people, perhaps the most difficult thing of all in understanding living process, and in getting a proper sequence for the unfolding of the whole, is reconciling oneself to the idea of doing one thing at a time. 317

    It is only in its uniqueness to unique conditions, made necessary by find adaptation, that anything takes on living form. This is true to such an extent that if the structure of uniqueness at every part does not occur within a structure, we can be sure that it is not an unfolded whole, not a living structure at all. 324

    Just make it nice at every spot. 337

    In any living process, or any process of design or making, the way forward, the next step which is more structure-enhancing, is that step which most intensifies the feeling of the emerging whole. 371

    What matters is that the building — the room, the canyon, the paingting, the ornament, the garden — as they are created, send profound feeling back towards us. 372

    What I am saying then, is that before making anything, large or small, and before each step in the process of making it — before each step — we must be able to feel its emotional substance. 383

    The idea that a building becomes more “organic” if it has a more complex form, even when based on notions of the interior organization, is almost always wrong. 422

    Simplicity: making the essential in life come forward, and allowing the inessential to be laid aside. 462

    To understand the idea that the symmetries in a structure are “just right,” consider, for example, the flow of electricity in two parallel wires. Other things being equal, the current will flow equally in the two wires. Why is this? If we want to, we can invoke some rule like Ohm’s law or the principle of least action, to show why the wires carry the same current. But the deepest explanation, the most profound one, is simply this: There is no reason for the two wires to carry different currents, because the situation is symmetrical. Therefore, they carry the same current. In the absence of any reason, thing distribute themselves symmetrically. Asymmetries occur only where there are reasons powerful enough to generate them. 472

    ...the lack of need for “image,” again makes it possible for people to do just what is required, and nothing else. 478

    In the 20th century we assumed that to be simple is to use drastic geometric shapes lacking in structure. Yet nature teaches us that what is truly simple — a waterfall say — is vastly complex — as a structure — and yet vastly simple in its essence. Thus we must strive for something which is utterly simple, in the sense that there is nothing unwanted there, nothing extra. At the same time we know that if we succeed in being truly simple, we reach a find filigree of level upon levels in which every part is unique, each adapted to the one unique spot in the world where it lies. 489

    Frederick Taylor, mentioned 515.

    The traditional process of the architect then, what is it? [...] Making, designing, building, helping. 560

    The idea that feeling itself can become both criterion and instrument – that what is done, no matter how large or how small, can become personal, connected to the personal self of all human beings – and that this process then opens the door to a new form of society. That is truly revolutionary. That can shake the world. 567

    What I do know, and am certain of, is that the society of the future, the long future of men and women on our planet, will – must – inevitably be carried forward by this kind of process which allows the nourishment of the individual to happen at the same time that vast, and highly technical developments occur. 569

    It is the vision of a future living Earth that draws me on. Inspired by a throughly new view of structure, feuled by a view which sees living process as the origin of all life, this allows us to contemplate, for the first time, the idea that one day such living process will cover and completely generate, in biological fashion, the natural and human-made and built environment that we may ultimately learn to call our living Earth. 570

  9. 20 November 2006

    745 days ago

    You have noted the calming effect that the experience of cute things has on you. Beauty has the same effect, perhaps even more so, since too much cuteness can be grating, whereas the beautiful seems never to tire us. This calming aspect is key, many think, to the importance of beauty. Friedrich Schiller said that “the inevitable effect of the beautiful is freedom from passions.” Some things make us happy by satisfying our desires (a chocolate bar, the Leafs scoring), but beauty doesn’t work this way. This makes the experience of beauty special in a consumer-oriented culture. It isn’t only that negative images stress us; even the things that make us happy involve stress, since we spend so much time and energy trying to (a) figure out exactly what we desire and (b) obtain that. Beautiful things, in contrast, make us happy in and of themselves. Beauty can actually remove us from our desires, taking us beyond our personal wants and calming the spirit.

    Glenn Parsons

  10. 13 November 2006

    753 days ago

    It has been said, only too truly, that Plato was the inventor of both our secondary schools and our universities. I do not know a better argument for an optimistic view of mankind, no better proof of their indestructible love for truth and decency, of their originality and stubbornness and health, than the fact that this devastating system of education has not utterly ruined them. In spite of the treachery of so many of their leaders, there are quite a number, old as well as young, who are decent, and intelligent, and devoted to their task. ‘I sometimes wonder how it was that the mischief done was not more clearly perceptible,’ says Samuel Butler, ‘and that the young men and women grew up as sensible and as goodly as they did, in spite of the attempts almost deliberately made to warp and stunt their growth. Some doubtless received damage, from which they suffered to their life’s end; but many seemed little or none the worse, and some almost the better. The reason would seem to be that the natural instinct of the lads in most cases so absolutely rebelled against their training, that do what their teachers might they could never get them to pay serious heed to it.’

    Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies

  11. 04 November 2006

    Quicksilver

    Neal Stephenson

    761 days ago

    There isn’t really much that I can say. Here’s some previous stuff on Stephenson, who’s hands down my favorite fiction writer.

    I’m pissed that the last 35 pages of Quicksilver are the first chapter from the next in the series. The ending just ran up behind me and bashed me over the head. Not that it was stunning (a fault lots of people find with Stephenson’s books), but there was still a good chunk of pages between my right thumb and forefinger that threw me.

    The second I got done with it I hopped onto amazon to order the next two. It’s been awhile since I’ve really read at a good pace, much less stuff as good as Stephenson. They pull you through just like pulp/trash novels do, but after reading a Dan Brown or a John Grisham you feel almost guilty because reading the book doesn’t really get you anything. I’ve read a few, and they all just blur together. (If you want, you can switch the pronoun you for me in the rest of this…)

    Stephenson won’t just blow you away for the few days it takes to get through the book (I read 80 pages thursday, ~250 yesterday, and 100 today), but you can actually tell one of his novels from another. Which is a plus. I take it as a sign that they didn’t just rot my brain.

    If I had to describe Quicksilver (I can’t), I’d say it was history/science/fiction. All three about balanced. Its going on in mid 17th century england, featuring scientists at the genesis of the Royal Society in London. Daniel Waterhouse makes friends with Netwon, Liebnitz, and plenty of other bigwigs; not to mention sails through a flotilla of pirates in the second, temporally distant plot line. I’m not describing any more than that, you should read it.

  12. 09 October 2006

    Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

    Robert Pirsig

    788 days ago

    I don’t know what happened, but somehow I missed out on the fact that this is more or less a true story. I didn’t find the author’s note until I searched around on the internet for more about the author, who it seemed to me, knew my hometown of Minneapolis well (his hometown, in fact). As he mentions in an authors note right at the beginning, it’s based on actual occurences (There are photos documenting the trip).

    I got this book from the school library, which has a good set of older books. It’s a first edition from what I can tell, beautifully bound in an unadorned black hardcover. The only printing is on the spine, where it gives the author and title in boxy white capitals. I really want to figure out how to steal the book, swap the tags on it with a newer edition. I’ll see how much sway I allow my bad side.

    We’re in such a hurry of the time we never get much chance to talk. The result is a kind of endless day-to-day shallowness, a monotony that leaves a person wondering years later where all the time went and sorry that it’s gone. 15

    Reminds me of Thoreau, how people’s interactions are so contrived in our days. Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are.

    Problems with most technical writing (here describing a motorcycle manual):

    1. the motorcycle, so described, is almost impossible to understand unless you know how one works.
    2. The second is that the observer is missing. The description doesn’t say that to see the piston you must remove the cylinder head. “You” aren’t anywhere in the picture.
    3. The third is that the words “good” and “bad” and all their synonyms are completely absent. No value judgments have been expressed anywhere, only facts. 79

    A lot of the stuff I get from this book fits right in with the more and more popular argument for the ruby programming language – beauty is immensely important to whatever you do, be it painting or programming. It’s a value that has been ignored since god knows when, but doing something in ruby just feels better than doing the exact same thing in java, making it so much more meaningful.

    ...remarkable things happen, and you go flying across the countryside under a power that would be called magic if it were not so completely rational in every way. 100

    Our current modes of rationality are not moving society forward into a better world. They are taking it further and further from that better world. Since the renaissance these modes have worked. As long as the need for food, clothing, and shelter is dominant they will continue to work. But now that for huge masses of people these needs no longer overwhelm everything else, the whole structure of reason, handed down to us from ancient times, is no longer adequate. It begins to be seen for what it really is – emotionally hollow, esthetically meaningless and spiritually empty. 117

    To all appearances he was just drifting. In actuality he was just drifting. Drifting is what one does when looking at lateral truth. He couldn’t follow any known method of procedure to uncover its cause because it was these methods and procedures that were all screwed up in the first place. So he drifted, that was all he could do. 122

    Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, to read.

    You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it’s going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it’s always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt. 152

    John and Sylvia lived, or at least are said to live, on the same street as me. Colfax Avenue. 162

    “Peace of mind isn’t at all superficial, really,” I expound. “It’s the whole thing. That which produces it is good maintenance; that which disturbs it is poor maintenance. What we call workability of the machine is just an objectification of this peace of mind. The ultimate test’s always your own serenity. If you don’t have this when you start and maintain it while you’re working you’re likely to build your personal problems tight into the machine itself.” 165

    Programming with ruby.

    “The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn’t any other test. If the machine produces tranquility it’s right. If it disturbs you it’s wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed. THe test of the machine’s always your own mind. There isn’t any other test.” 165

    “The craftsman isn’t ever following a single line of instruction. He’s making decisions as he goes along. For that reason he’ll be absorbed and attentive to what he’s doing even though he doesn’t deliberately contrive this. His motions and the machine are in a kind of harmony. He isn’t following ant set of written instructions because the nature of the material at hand determines his thoughts and motions, which simultaneously change the nature of the material at hand. The material and his thougtts are changing together in a progression of changes until his mind’s at rest at the same time the material’s right.”


    “Sounds like art,” the instructor says.


    “Well, it is art,” I say. “This divorce of art from technology is completely unnatural. It’s just that it’s gone on so long you have to be an archeologist to find out where the two separated.” 167

    What’s wrong with technology is that it’s not connected in any real way with matters of the spirit and of the heart. And so it does blind, ugly things quite by accident and gets hated for that. 168

    Feininger, Church of the minorities. Apparently this hangs at the Walker art center, I haven’t been there in awhile and should probably go see some art.

    As a result of his experiments he concluded that imitation was a real evil that had to be broken before real rhetoric teaching could begin. This imitation seemed to be an external compulsion. Little children didn’t have it. It seemed to come later on, possibly as a result of school itself. 192

    Imitation being that kids in school form an idea of that which their teacher wants for them to do and conceives of any of their work through that idea. Brainwashed.

    This surprising result supported a hunch he had had for a long time: that the brighter, more serious students were the least desirous of grades, possibly because they were more interested in the subject matter of the course, whereas the dull or lazy students were the most desirous of grades, possible because grades told them if they were getting by. 199

    I’m pretty close to being done with school. It’s fun and all, but aside from the soccer team and the people, there’s not that much here for me. Rationalizations for staying are that hey, I’m having fun; it wouldn’t be much cheaper to have my own place (dropping out and moving in with my parents isn’t really a card I would want to or be able to play); only 1-2 years and I have the diploma; I do like playing on the soccer team, and the small college town atmosphere. Against: Goddamned expensive, burying myself in debt (although I could be trying harder to earn money to pay off loans), I like classes for the most part, but don’t really care about them, I’m more just doing them because the thing to do is do them. I do like school, but I feel bad for being here in that I really don’t care whether or not I end up in possession of a degree.

    “Quality is a characteristic of thought and statement that is recognized by a non-thinking process. Because definitions are a product of rigid, formal thinking, quality cannot be defined.” 206

    His Quality brings me back to Chris Alexanders Wholeness. I believe the most recent impetus, the one that finally got me to the library to check out Zen was a footnote somewhere in The Nature of Order, Book 1.

    “Now, to take that which has caused us to create the world, and include it within the world we have created, is clearly impossible. That is why Quality cannot be defined. If we do define it we are defining something less than Quality itself.” 251

    I like this bootstrapping problem. Will we ever understand the system of the world that created us? Will robots ever be able to understand the system of the world that created them? Because if they can, we ought to be able to. But what if we just can’t? Are we just thrashing around like fish out of water?

    Geometry is not true, it is advantageous 264 – One of my favorite ideas is that all of everything there is can be allegorized as just some wobbly and patched up scaffolding, barely able to hold up to the weight of all the responsibility we’ve given it. The scaffolding is built up around whatever there actually is, God, science, whatever you believe to be the driving force of the universe. But it’s terribly crude, because we humans are fickle and narrow minded simpletons who haven’t but deluded ourselves into the idea of having some sort of understanding about the world at large. We’ve built our knowledge of the world so heavily upon itself that it won’t take much to bring it tumbling back down.

    Peace of mind isn’t at all superficial to technical work. It’s the whole thing. That which produces it is a good work and that which destroys it is bad work. [...] The reason for this is that peace of mind is a prerequisite for a perception of that Quality which is beyond romantic Quality and classic Quality and which unites the two, and which must accompany the work as it proceeds. The way to see what looks good and understand the reasons it looks food, and to be at one with this goodness as the work proceeds, is to cultivate an inner quietness, a piece of mind so that goodness can shine through. 295

    Peace of mind – the whole thing.

    enthousiamsmos: Greek, literally “filled with god.” Wholeness, quality. Root word to our english enthusiasm. 303

    The real cycle you’re working on is a cycle called yourself. The machine that appears to be “out there” and the person that appears to be “in here” are not two separate things. They grow toward Quality or fall away from Quality together. 325

    The mythos-over-logos argument states that our rationality is shaped by these legends, that our knowledge today is in relation to these legends as a tree is in relation to the little shrub it once was. One can gain great insights into the complex overall structure of the tree by studying the much simpler shape of the shrub. There’s no difference in kind or even difference in identity, only a difference in size. 349

    This works well with my meanderings on everything we know just being a shitty scaffold build up, without much foundation, around what we think to be the nature of things. The further we go, the more corrupted our worldview becomes. The further away it gets from God, science, or whatever you believe to be the driving force of the universe.

    Religion isn’t invented by man. Men are invented by religion. Men invent responses to Quality, and among these responses is an understanding of what they themselves are. You know something and then the Quality stimulus hits and then you try to define the Quality stimulus, but to define it all you’ve got to work with is what you know. So your definition is made up of what you know. It’s an analogue to what you already know. It has to be. It can’t be anything else. And the mythos grows this way. By analogies to what is known before. The mythos is a building of analogues upon analogues. These fill the boxcars of the train of consciousness. The mythos is the whole train of collective consciousness of all communicating mankind. Every last bit of it. The Quality is the track that directs the train. What is outside the train, to either dies – that is the terra incognita of the insane. 351

    Phaedrus vs. Aristotle, Chris Alexander vs. Aristotle. 360

    Phaedrus remembered a line from Thoreau: “You never gain something but that you lose something.” And now he began to see for the first time the unbelievable magnitude of what man, when he gained power to understand and rule the world in terms of dialectic truths, had lost. He had built empires of scientific capability to manipulate the phenomena of nature into enormous manifestations of his own dreams of power and wealth – but for this he had exchanged an empire of understanding of equal magnitude: An understanding of what it is to be a part of the world, and not an enemy of it. 377

    I didn’t highlight anything in the last ~30 pages of the book, but that’s where it really gets good. The ideas of Phaedrus are out there, and now the story between the narrarator and Chris and life comes together, in a good way.

  13. 28 September 2006

    The Open Society and its Enemies

    Karl Popper

    798 days ago

    Assigned as part of a political philosophy class I’m taking. A modern look at and criticism of Plato’s The Republic, as well as a good thinking-through of political philosophy.

    the fundamental historicism prejudice – the doctrine that the social sciences, if they are to be of any use at all, must be prophetic. 5

    [Heraclitus] visualized the world not as an edifice, but rather as one colossal process; not as the sum-total of all things, but rather as the totality of all events, or changes, or facts. ‘Everything is in flux and nothing is at rest’, is the motto of his philosophy. 12

    The transition to oligarchy is completed when the rich establish a law that ‘disqualifies from public office all those whose means do not reach the stipulated amount. This change is imposed by force of arms, should threats and blackmail not succeed.’ 41

    The transition from democracy to tyranny, Plato says, is most easily brought about by a popular leader who knows how to exploit the class antagonism between the rich and the poor within the democratic state, and who succeeds in building up a bodyguard or a private army of his own. The people who have hailed him first as the chamption of freedom are soon enslaved; and then they must fight for him, in ‘one war after another which he must stir up… because he must make the people feel the need of a general’. 43

    And a quick aside, for at page 63 I was reading while watching Office Space and scribbled this in the margin: You know, the Nazis had pieces of flair… they made the Jews wear them. Peter, Office Space

    Man has created new worlds – of language, of music, of poetry, of science; and the most important of these is the world of the moral demands, for equality, for freedom, and for helping the weak. 65

    Plato was longing for the lost unity of tribal life: Only quoted because I came across John Zerzan earlier today via anarchia. I guess there are different ways of working towards a goal.

    Platonism vs. The humanitarian theory of justice, 94

    the alleged clash between freedom and security, that is, a security guaranteed by the state, turns out to be a chimera. For there is no freedom if it is not secured by the state; and conversely, only a state which is controlled by free citizens can offer them any reasonable security at all. 111

    What we need and what we want is to moralize politics, not politicize morals. 113

    Whatever authority I may have rests solely upon my knowing how little I know. Socrates, 130

    The authoritarian will in general select those who obey, who believe, who respond to his influence. But in doing so, he is bound to select mediocrities. for he excludes those who revolt, who doubt, who dare to resist his influence. 135

    A zing on modern schooling:

    Instead of encouraging the student to devote himself to his studies for the sake of studying, instead of encouraging in him a real love for his subject and for inquiry, he is encouraged to study for the sake of his personal career; he is led to acquire only such knowledge as is serviceable in getting him over the hurdles which he must clear for the sake of his advancement. In other words, even in the field of science, out methods of selection are based upon an appeal to personal ambition of a somewhat crude form. [...]


    It has been said, only too truly, that Plato was the inventor of both our secondary schools and out universities. I do not know a better argument for an optimistic view of mankind, no better a proof of their indestructible love for truth and decency, of their originality and stubbornness and health, than the fact that this devestating system of education has not utterly ruined them. In spite of the treachery of so many of their leaders, there are quite a number, old as well as young, who are decent, and intelligent, and devoted to their task. 135

    Ouch.

    Utopian vs. Piecemeal social engineering, 158…. This is almost worth it’s own entire post, we’ll see if I feel like coming back to it anytime soon.

    The Abstract Society. 174

    Pericles on Democracy. 186

  14. 24 September 2006

    802 days ago

    Stoicism

    Here’s me.

    Kjell Olsen802 days ago

  15. 22 July 2006

    The Metaphysical Club

    Louis Menard

    866 days ago

    A sort of charting of the flow of american philosophical though from the end of the civil war up and to the second world war, inspecting numerous characters in history. The 4 principle are Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, Charles Pierce, and John Dewey. The notion of pragmatism, that we assume beliefs for the purpose of dealing with what we perceive as the world, and those beliefs hold according to how well they allow us to cope. The system operates outside of absolutes – we strive to believe in what helps us to deal with the world however we may perceive it.

    My thoughts and notes, mostly notes.

    The nation blest above all nations is she in whom the civic genius of the people does the saving day by day, by acts without external picturesqueness; by speaking, writing, voting reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between parties; by the people knowing true men when they see them, and preferring them as leaders to rabid partisans or empty quacks. Such nations have no need of wars to save them. William James, 148

    [Insert your own quips here, I’ve had it with goddamn politics] But read the speech linked with his name, it really is nice.

    Charles Pierce was considered an intellectual elitist:

    “Do you follow me?” he is supposed to have asked one of his advanced classes during a lecture. No one did. “I’m not surprised,” he said. “I know of only three persons who could.” 153

    All events, even those which, by their insignificance, seem not to follow the great laws of nature, follow them as necessarily as the revolutions of the sun. In our ignorance of the ties that bind these events to the entire system of the universe, we have taken them to depend on final causes or on chance, depending on whether they occur and are repeated with regularity or without apparent order. But these imaginary causes have gradually receded with the widening scope of our knowledge, and they will disappear entirely before a sound philosophy, which sees in them nothing but the expression of our ignorance of the true causes. Pierre-Simon Laplace, 184

    Laplace’s Demon:

    An intelligence which, for a given instant, could know all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective situation of the beings who compose it, if, moreover, it was sufficiently vast to submit these data to analysis, if it could embrace in the same formula the lightest atom – nothing would be uncertain for it, and the future, like the past, would be present to its eyes. Pierre-Simon Laplace, 196

    Determinism, or predestination. You only have to wonder how long it will take for technology to figure out all this elastic metaphysical stuff, cut through all this angsty human deliberation on the world and construct just how things really work. Because we are building some pretty impressive intelligences these days.

    He, my brother, and other long-headed youths have combined to form a metaphysical club, where they wrangle grimly and stick to the question. Henry James, 203

    I think I have a new motto.

    Atheism is speculatively as unfounded as theism, and practically can only spring from bad motives. Chauncey Wright, 212

    I think I developed myself into somewhat of a pragmatist early on, I don’t know if it was the influence of anything in particular, but I hold the view that at some point the human mind got too big for its britches, its capacity exceeded what was necessary to find food and procreate. So we took on this whole thinking/reasoning thing, and have vacillated ourselves all over the place ever since. See religion and science over all the years, 100 years don’t go by without nearly every aspect of the world changing (for the better? surely having changed things in such a way, we would have thought so.).

    If the foundations of human development are cast as a sort of flopping about, not knowing anything better to do with this new capacity of communication and thought, where does that put us now? (And above anything else, I think at this point in life I’d don the cap of cynicist.)

    Belief is only a way to deal with the world. (218) Comes through concretely focusing on John Dewey, having been insinuated by all previous exploration. One of my favorite american figures. The only person within the book I’d really heard of before, I’d studied a bit on his theories of education and really liked them. I’d only heard of him in an educational context, and had no idea he was more than a teacher.

    The purpose of all scientific investigation is therefore to push our collective opinions about the world closer and closer to agreement with each other, and thus closer and closer to the limit represented by reality itself. 228

    It’s all just a game of influence, whoever can convince everybody of everything wins. The hardest thing about pragmatics to me is that it’s a means justify the ends kind of thing, it removes all final objectives. You don’t have goals, because those goals are actually equivalent to whatever means you use to accomplish those goals, and as a fickle human being you conceive of means and end separately, when really they are all tied up in each other. One of the lines of thought in the book I could only half follow, but it’s fun to think about.

    When he was on the Supreme Court, [Oliver Wendell] Holmes used to invite his fellow justices, in conference, to name any legal principle they liked, and he would use it to decide the case under consideration either way. ...When there are no bones, anybody can carve a goose. 340

    I love this. Friggin justices, they’re just messing with us.

    I am against bigness and greatness in all their forms, and with the invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, stealing in through the crannies of the world like so many soft rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water… The bigger the unit you deal with, the hollower, the more brutal, the more mendacious is the life displayed. So I am against all big organizations as such, national ones first and foremost; against all big successes and big results; and in favor of the eternal forces of truth which always work in the individual and immediately unsuccessful way, underdogs always, till history comes, after they’re long dead, and puts them on the top. William James, 372

    I haven’t quite digested this quote fully yet, but it struck me. Very 37signals, right under my nose in terms of having minimalist sentiments. Sort of an organic, way to develop, reminding me also of Christopher Alexander’s thinking on architecture (_invisible molecular moral forces_, patterns in a language).

  16. 02 May 2006

    947 days ago

    We are great fools. “He has spent his life in idleness,” we say; “I have done nothing today.” What, have you not lived? That is not only the fundamental but the most illustrious of your occupations. “If I had been placed in a position to manage great affairs, I would have shown what I could do.” Have you been able to think out and manage your own life? You have done the greatest task of all… To compose our character is our duty, not to compose books, and to win not battles and provinces, but order and tranquility in our conduct. Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately.

    Michel de Montaigne

  17. 21 April 2006

    959 days ago

    Sci-fi I like, Fictional Futures, Goldsmiths

    This is why I like design, because we can look at all these crazy things and float off into wildly abstracted spaces, but in the end it has to come down to stuff, and the stuff I really like is the everyday. That

    via Kjell Olsen959 days ago

  18. 17 April 2006

    962 days ago

    A Path of Hope for the Future

    Essay from Daniel Quinn, author of Ishmael. Which if you haven’t read, you need to.

    The extraordinary thing that is going to happen in the next two or three decades is not that the human race is going to become extinct. The extraordinary thing that’s going to happen in the next two or three decades is that a great second renaissance is going to occur. A great and astounding renaissance.
    Nothing less than that is going to save us.

    If there are still people here in 200 years, they won’t be living the way we do. I can make that prediction with confidence, because if people go on living the way we do, there won’t be any people here in 200 years.
    I can make another prediction with confidence. If there are still people here in 200 years, they won’t be thinking the way we do. I can make that prediction with equal confidence, because if people go on thinking the way we do, then they’ll go on living the way we do—and there won’t be any people here in 200 years.

    Humans don’t belong to an order of being separate from everything else.

    We’re like people living in the penthouse of a tall brick building. Every day we need 200 bricks to maintain our walls, so we go downstairs, knock 200 bricks out of the walls below and bring them back upstairs for our own use. Every day. . . . Every day we go downstairs and knock 200 bricks out of the walls that are holding up the building we live in. Seventy thousand bricks a year, year after year after year.

    We’re systematically destroying the biodiversity of the living community to support ourselves, which is to say that we’re systematically destroying the infrastructure that is keeping us alive.

    via Kjell Olsen962 days ago

  19. 06 April 2006

    973 days ago

    So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.

    Matthew 7:12

  20. 07 January 2006

    Ishmael

    Daniel Quinn

    1062 days ago

    You ought to go and read this book right now. There’s a summary on Wikipedia, I’d recommend it. But I have a few snips to make you read through.

    The sense that something is very wrong with a certain style of living 11, or that something big is being kept from you. where, coming from the guy, 45 I get it all the time, I’ve also always wanted to find a teacher like Ishmael.

    If you can’t discover what’s keeping you in, the will to get out soon becomes confused and ineffectual. Ishmael, 25

    having impure thoughts about saving the world... Narrator, 28

    Takers thought that the world needed someone to come in and straighten it out. Someone to put it in order. 71

    In order to become fully human, man had to pull himself out of the slime. And all this is the result. As the Takers see it, the gods gave man the same choice they gave Achilles: a brief life of glory or a long uneventful life in obscurity. And the Takers chose a brief life of glory. Narrator, 75

    The world was given to man to turn into a paradise, but he’s always screwed it up, because he’s fundamentally flawed. He might be able to do something about this if he knew how he ought to live, but he doesn’t – and he never will, because no knowledge about that is obtainable. So, however hard man might labor to turn the world into a paradise, he’s probably just going to go on screwing it up. Ishmael, 89

    Takers explanation for why things are going badly in the world: something is fundamentally wrong with people. Yet Leavers lived in concert with nature for three million years before the Takers branched off ten thousand years ago. 118

    The agricultural revolution sparked by the first Takers, is the manifesto on which the entire Taker society is based, as it was then, and as it will be until the Takers die off. 153

    I need to read the Bible.

    Quinn posits that parts of of the old testament are Leaver mythology, concerning the Takers.

    Adam and Eve (Adam meaning Earth or Man; Eve meaning Life or Woman) in The Fall of Man, god casts the Takers from his kingdom with a vengeance. The Takers, having eaten from the forbidden Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, now are able to decide who lives (themselves) and who dies (anything preventing them from living). Adam said yes to Life, and began to grow without limit. 180-81

    Cain and Abel represent the Takers and Leavers, Abel a shepherd, Cain a farmer. God favors Abel, yet Cain killed Abel. God then curses Cain to have to wander the earth the rest of his life. Having eaten the forbidden fruit, they rapidly proliferate, moving south, and killing herders and gathers. 173

    Even though the story of Adam and Eve made so little sense to us Takers (because it is Leaver mythology, demonizing the Takers), it’s a big deal because we directly identify with Adam: he is us. 184

    There’s nothing in the past for [Leavers]. The past is dreck. The past is something to escape from, something to be escaped from. Narrator, 210

    Whereas the Leavers infallibly have a rich connection back to the beginning of the earth – their method of living has evolved through thousands of generations stretching back millions of years. None of the Leavers just invented their cultures, the Takers did.

    And now the Takers have all but abolished that Leaver wisdom. 205-7

    Taker culture sees Leavers leading an incredibly grim life, but they actually really don’t. 220

    Yes. Far and away the most futile admonition Christ ever offered was when he said, “Have no care for tomorrow. Don’t worry about whether or not you’re going to have something to eat. Look at the birds in the air, They neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, but God takes perfect care of them. Don’t you think he’ll do the same for you?” In [Taker] culture, the overwhelming answer to that is, Hell no! Even the most dedicated monastics saw to their sowing and reaping and gathering in barns. Narrator, 228

    The Takers are those who know good and evil, and the Leavers those who live in the hands of the Gods. 229

    Takers assume that they are the pinnacle of the world, the best that it gets. It’s inherent in their culture – the earth was made by the gods in their name.

    The Takers jumped out of the hand of the gods – they’ve eschewed the evolution that ruled all species and ushered the Takers to the point at which they jumped off the wagon.

    They’ve removed the need for natural selection by deciding they knew what was right and what was wrong. They don’t need to adapt to their surroundings, they force their surroundings to adapt to their needs. 239

    Takers: the world belongs to man; Leavers: man belongs to the world. 239

    Yet the world does not belong to man, the takers have always been right.

    [Man’s] destiny is to be the first to learn that creatures like man have a choice: They can try to thwart the gods and perish in the attempt – or they can stand aside and make room for all the rest. But it’s more then that. His destiny is to be the father of them all – I don’t mean by direct descent. By giving all the rest their change – the whales and the dolphins and the chimps and the raccoons – he becomes in some sense their progenitor… Oddly enough, it’s even grander than the destiny the Takers dreamed up for us. Narrator, 242

    With man gone, will there be hope for gorilla?

    With gorilla gone, will there be hope for man?

  21. 31 December 2005

    Catch-22

    Joseph Heller

    1069 days ago

    Read the book a few months ago, and never came up with anything to say about it. I liked it, witty and biting, and would recommend that you go read it. But that’s all I’ve got.

  22. 17 December 2005

    God's Debris

    Scott Adams

    1083 days ago

    Philosophical fiction from Scott Adams, the guy behind Dilbert. Real good stuff, and available for free.

    I can’t really pull together any coherent thoughts right now, so here’s a dump of quotes.

    A belief in god would demand one hundred obsessive devotion, influencing every waking moment of this brief life on earth. But your four billion so-called believers do not live their lives in this fashion, except for a few. The majority believe in the usefulness of their beliefs – an earthly and practical utility – but they do not believe in the underlying reality. 28

    The best any human can do is to pick a delusion that helps to get him through the day. This is why people of different religions can generally live in peace. At some level, we all suspect that other people don’t believe their own religion any more then we believe ours. 29

    The human brain is a delusion generator. The delusions are fueled by arrogance – the arrogance that humans are the center of the world, that we alone are endowed with the magical properties of souls and morality and free will and love. We assume that an omnipotent God has a unique interest in our progress and activities while providing all the rest of creation for our playground. We believe that god – because he thinks the same way we do – must be more interested in our lives then in the rocks and trees and plants and animals. 34

    Eventually everything that is known by one person will be available to all. A decision can be made by the collective mind of humanity and instantly communicated to the body of society. 65

    You can change only what people know, not what they do. 107

    Conversation is more than the sum of the words. It is also a way of signaling the importance of another person by showing your willingness to give that person your rarest resource: time. It is a way of conveying respect. Conversation reminds us we are part of a greater whole, connected in some way that transcends duty or bloodline or commerce. Conversation can be many things, but it can never be useless. 114

    Awareness is about unlearning. It is the recognition that you don’t know as much as you thought you knew. 124

    The fifth level of awareness is the Avatar. The Avatar understands the mind is an illusion generator, not a window to reality. The avatar recognizes science as a belief system, albeit a useful one. An Avatar recognizes gods power as expressed in probability and the inevitable recombination of God’s consciousness. 137

    Your shadow is not a physical thing; it is an impression, a perception, left by a physical things. It is a boundary, not an object. 88

  23. 12 December 2005

    1088 days ago

    Renzo Piano

    the people who make the most noise often have the least to shout about.

    In some way, people believe that if you are permeable, if you are a good listener, you don’t have the quality of somebody with a firm attitude. But this is not true. I think people should try to teach young children that these qualities – stubbornness and a capacity to listen- might look like they are opposites, but they are not. This is what, fundamentally, I got from my mother.

    If you are the first in the class, I guess – I never experienced that – but I guess you grow up with the feeling that other people will learn from you. You are teaching others, not the opposite. And I feel that there is a moment when, unfortunately, because of that, you stop learning. You stop absorbing. And life is about learning, about grabbing every occasion. And art is about that; art is robbery in the noblest sense. It is taking things. Art! Art! In every sense.

    via Kjell Olsen1088 days ago

  24. 11 December 2005

    1090 days ago

    Albert Camus: The myth of sisyphus

    The workman of today works everyday in his life at the same tasks, and his fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that can not be surmou nted by scorn.

    The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.

    via Kjell Olsen1090 days ago

  25. 09 December 2005

    1091 days ago

    Simple means launching something

    I love these guys:

    If you find yourself talking more than walking, shut up, cut the vision in half, and launch it. You can always fill in the gaps later. In fact, you

    via Kjell Olsen1091 days ago

  26. 05 December 2005

    1095 days ago

    Rails and Django meet in Chicago

    This presentation from David is spectacular.

    Kjell Olsen1095 days ago

  27. 27 November 2005

    1103 days ago

    Democracy in Thin Air

    You see, you want me to speculate on the future of my country, which is one of the poorest in the world, while that wealthy Westerner cannot control the future long enough to get an apple from her bag into her mouth. There is no certainty but change. ?? Pradeep, a nepalese student??

    via Kjell Olsen1103 days ago

  28. 25 November 2005

    1105 days ago

    Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.

    Ben Franklin

  29. 09 November 2005

    1121 days ago

    Betraying Jesus - Jim Wallis

    Modern conversion brings Jesus into our lives rather than bringing us into his. We are told Jesus is here to help us to do better that which we are already doing. Jesus doesn

    via Kjell Olsen1121 days ago

  30. 1121 days ago

    Calvin and Hobbes - The last great newspaper comic strip.

    That’s the assumption that adults make because nobody else sees him, sees Hobbes, in the way that Calvin does. It would seem to me, though, that when you make up a friend for yourself, you would have somebody to agree with you, not to argue with you. So Hobbes is more real than I suspect any kid would dream up. Bill Watterson, on Hobbes.

    If you’re inclined to go beyond jokes and say something heartfelt, honest, or thoughtful, you have a tremendous opportunity. And best of all, because the comics are generally regarded as frivolous, disposable entertainment, readers rarely have their guard up. Bill Watterson

    I cried the day the last CH strip ran. I was almost 9, and Calvin was both my childhood idol and introduction to literature. I found the strip in its entirety floating around on the web a year or two ago, and the comic is just amazing. It hasn’t lost anything. I can still sit down to read it and get up two hours later wondering where the time went.

    via Kjell Olsen1121 days ago

  31. 03 November 2005

    1128 days ago

    Getting Real: It's a problem when it's a problem

    Make decisions just in time, when you have access to the real information you need. In the meanwhile, you

    via Kjell Olsen1128 days ago

  32. 23 October 2005

    1138 days ago

    Security by Hunter S. Thompson

    A man is to be pitied who lacked the courage to accept the challenge of freedom and depart from the cushion of security and see life as it is instead of living it second-hand. Life has by-passed this man and he has watched from a secure place, afraid to seek anything better What has he done except to sit and wait for the tomorrow which never comes?

    ...the only true courage: the kind which enables men to face the unknown regardless of the consequences.

    via Kjell Olsen1138 days ago

  33. 22 October 2005

    1139 days ago

    On Being Different

    Stuff like this is killing me. I’m in college right now, precisely because it’s just what everyone else does. I can’t say I love it. There are better things I can imagine myself doing. And it’s getting to be pretty banal.

    Doing things

    via Kjell Olsen1139 days ago

  34. 08 June 2005

    1275 days ago

    Transcendentalism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

    Have a good night surfing wikipedia re transcendentalism. I love this list, identify with almost everything on it.

    via Kjell Olsen1275 days ago

  35. 24 May 2005

    1290 days ago

    Genjo Koan

    The Genjokoan was written in the autumn of 1233 by Eihei Dogen, founder of the Soto Zen tradition.

    To study the buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away. No trace of realization remains, and this no-trace continues endlessly.

    Birth is an expression complete this moment. Death is an expression complete this moment. They are like winter and spring. You do not call winter the beginning of spring, nor summer the end of spring.

    When dharma does not fill your whole body and mind, you think it is already sufficient. When dharma fills your body and mind, you understand that something is missing.

    Now if a bird or a fish tries to reach the end of its element before moving in it, this bird or this fish will not find its way or its place. When you find your place where you are, practice occurs, actualizing the fundamental point. When you find you way at this moment, practice occurs, actualizing the fundamental point; for the place, the way, is neither large nor small, neither yours nor others’. The place, the way, has not carried over from the past and it is not merely arising now.

    Kjell Olsen1290 days ago

  36. Also somewhat recently

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