Bath garden view with wheelbarrow

Caffe view

Hike to Hot Springs

There is something perfect about hiking to a hot spring. The 10-mile journey is enough to make you sore, and then the soak in the tub, in the wilderness, helps feel relief. This reminded me of the "lost penny found" argument for the existence of pain - there is little as rewarding as a pain removed.

At the spring I met an acupuncturist. In retrospect this profession must have some of the same rewards for the patients. I have never tried acupuncture but perhaps I will someday. The hike back left me with bruises on my knee and ankle, because I was distracted by sucking my thumb (literally, I cut it chopping pears for the dessert) and fell.

Great camping recipes (that may have tasted so good because of hunger brought on by carrying a heavy backpack over 10 miles of up and down and fording a cold river):

1. Prosciutto Wrapped Pear
-very simple to make, but watch out with the knife!

2. Campstove Melange
Ingredients:
Pre-cooked lentils
Pasta
Oregano
Garlic
Onion
Prosciutto
Parmesan
Salt
Bread (optional)

Cook everything together over a campstove and then toast the bread if you lack utensils.

3. Intense Chocolate
Ingredients:
1 ziploc bag of dark chocolate chips
1/2 can sweetened condensed milk
water (but not too much)
Pear slices (optional)

Melt the chocolate in the milk. Use as fondue to dip the pear slices, or simply drink up.

4. Breakfast Melange
Ingredients:
Leftover Intense Chocolate
oats
1/2 can sweetened condensed milk
water (but not too much)
ground coffee

It would have been a good idea to bring quick-rolled oats. We ran out of gas...

5. Lazy Iced Tea
Steep about 4 bags of Earl Grey tea in a canister of pump-filtered river water. Tastes great after a couple of hours... Carefully squeeze out the bags and remove before drinking.

TIP: Bring whole pears and a knife. I've seen people take sliced fruit in ziplocs instead. Trust me, that tastes awful after a few hours on the trail. A sturdy knife can double as a can opener, and mine has a corkscrew attachment as well. Bring bandaids if, like me, you are clumsy.

Thoughts along the trip: Does a tree in the forest make a sound when it falls and there is nobody to hear it? Seems obvious to me that if there are atmospheric molecules to move then a sound is made. How about on a distant planet or the moon? Only if there is enough atmosphere. How can people even wonder about this question? I suppose it all depends on your definition of sound.

The leaves on the burnt trees by the river made a very interesting sound in the breeze, crackling against each other like a raffia curtain.

Trees in the Wilderness 2

Trees in the Wilderness 1

I know I need to sleep

I know I need to sleep because I feel I might be coming down with a cold, but I can't. I tried, and my mind filled with thoughts about upcoming social events, making up stories about the people around me. Not sad or anxious thoughts, but somehow I didn't feel tired any longer. I don't even feel hungry or needing sex or physical comfort, just wide awake. My mind trips to the hum of the traffic on the freeway, wondering what it might be like to be going on a journey right now. Where would I be heading, and what would I be leaving? I hear the Amtrak train blow its horn and think about train hopping. Maybe I should start counting sheep. Perhaps there are sheep on the train, going to slaughter. Not a good thought. The past and the future are both very present on trains, and the ability of one thing to stand for another. Me, sheep, sleep. I think about praying, remembering the prayer for leaving my soul in the hands of god when I sleep. Sleep like a little death that sustains us and keeps us alive a little longer. Night trains bearing unloved little elephants on their way to the circus.

Earlier I played on the stepping stones in the park, and noticed for the first time the inscription: Be the change you want to see in the world. But how would I know what will be the results of my actions? I must take some pictures of the my free yoga class in the park. It seemed on the face of it pretty good today. I feel inspired to try a new movement exercise next time, and have students pair up and take turns mirroring each other. I did that at the dance Friday, as is my habit, and somebody said to me felt good. Nobody had said that before and I hadn't thought about it. As a matter of fact, earlier I had mirrored someone because she looked sad and lonely, as though she wanted a dance partner, and she smiled and got really happy.

Friends are wonderful

This week I feel so grateful for my friends. On Sunday I was feeling a little lonely and discombobulated, and I felt like opening a bottle of wine so I called my friend and he came and joined me for dinner. We had a great discussion with my son about not sure what, and then my friend and I exchanged relaxing foot massages.

Later in the week I got caught on the far side of the Bay Bridge, having driven around the snapped cable on the way over to the city. Foolishly, I tried to drive back across the same bridge and ended up sitting in traffic for about an hour before being turned around. Friends were making a gourmet dinner using their new wedding gifts, and invited me to join them. We cooked scrumptious butternut squash soup with real nuts in it, duck in pomegranate sauce and brussels sprouts with truffle oil. I must get some truffle oil for the kitchen!

Then today a friend chatted with me on facebook and invited me to a moonlit hike tomorrow night. I hope that pans out! I would love to splash in the ocean at sunset, warm up in the pub with him, and then hike over the cliffs by the moonlight. I hope he picks me up on his motorcycle. That would be so cool...

You Are a Pool

You are a pool
I step into the water
not knowing
if it will be deep or shallow
warm or cold
if I will drown or float.

I step into the pool again
regardless
hoping to warm all this water
with my heart's faint glow

wondering if I will remember
how to swim
or if I ever learned.

And peace falls down on us
like snow.

A Poem for Joy

I wanted to write a poem for joy
That would conteract all the sadness in the world
A poem that dances from the page
Filled with wild mountains to climb
Blue sky, birdsong
Sunlight playing in the water
Between the tall trees
A poem filled with possibilities
Friendly upturned faces
Hands welcoming you to join the dance

From Albany Hill

Below, the jointed buses glide by
Like matchbox cars, the whir of their wheels
Subsumed in the general hum of traffic
Over passed only by the occasional BART train
Or the horn of an Amtrak train on the bay side

Eucalyptus leaves frame the view
Their vertical strokes a perpetual reminder
Of the inevitability of tears

I patiently await my turn on the rope swing
Overlooking the fog-enfolded Golden Gate Bridge
As the distant campanile keeps time
Too far away to see with the naked eye

But I know I can always come back
Another day

Objective Reality 2

So, during the discussion at the philosophy group yesterday, I revised my intersubjective view of objectivity in favor of the following: objective reality is that thing which human knowledge aspires to. Whether it exists or not is another question...

Is There an Objective Reality?

Thoughts for philosophy group tomorrow.

What is real? We think we know, can sense it. Plato (Republic) disputed this in his allegory of the cave. Socrates asks his student, Glaucon, to imagine prisoners in a cave forced to look only at the shadows cast on the wall of people, animals and other figures walking by in front of the fire. The prisoners think they know what they are looking at, this is their reality, until one prisoner is set free. He cannot immediately recognize the things that cast the shadows for what they are, although they are more 'real' according to this allegory. Once given time to acclimate to the sun outside, the prisoner loses his facility with recognizing the shadows and begins to appreciate his freedom. Socrates argues that intelligence and reason provide access to an ultimate truth of ideal forms, besides which the reality of our senses pales like the shadows on the cave wall.

As a culture, we are still obsessed with this anxiety over what exists, or what is real, cf. The Matrix.

Aristotle disagreed with Plato, and held that there is no such hidden world of ideal forms, only the sensate world and the world of real human constructs, such as the law.

Kant pointed out the problem is that we are limited by our senses and intuitions. There may be qualities of an object, the thing in itself, which we are unable to sense or know. Bishop Berkeley argued that the world of our senses is no more real than the world of our imaginations, except that we can exercise our will on the world of the imagination, whereas the real world is governed by the will of God. [As an aside, Berkeley used an apple as his first example of a real object. Food for thought - the apple of God's mind's eye]. Hegel said very little with a lot of words, culminating in a predilection for everything to come in threes, in this instance 'being' (aka existence), 'ideas', and 'nature', where nature is the synthesis of the external and internal worlds when they correspond.

So there are a number of possible scenarios here. 1) Reality is not what we think it is, but the privileged few get to see it by virtue of their superior education, reason, or fortune - the freed prisoner in Plato's cave, Neo in The Matrix. 2) Reality may be different from what we think, but we are limited by our senses and will never know for sure, in spite of our desire to know (Kant). 3) Reality is more-or-less what we see and think (Aristotle). 4) Reality is the realm in which the will of God is exercised, instead of our own will. In other words, reality defeats us (Berkeley). 5) Reality is the intersection between what exists and our ideas of it (Hegel).

Incidentally, Berkeley's view was preempted in the creation hymn from the Rigveda (c. 1500-1000 BC): "Whence this creation has come into being; whether it was made or not; he in the highest heaven is its surveyor. Surely he knows, or perhaps he knows not."
Which brings us by a leap of faith to Nietzsche's method of genealogy, looking at the origins of ideas as a battleground rather than a building site, and postmodernism with its notions of reality by consensus or intersubjectivity.

What is the problem? I think it is this. We commonly encounter both agreement and disagreement about the real objects of the world. Where the objects are more abstract (God, money, politics, love) there are both more disagreements and stronger feelings. People on the whole don't feel very strongly about, say, apples. We need a theory of reality or existence that can contain both agreement and disagreement, but we are ill equipped to imagine topologically beings walking around with worlds in their heads, of which some parts are shared and some parts private. So we fall down the rabbithole of metaphorical collapse, insisting one way or the other (subjective or objective) and justifying our position by flagwaving on the totem poles of realism and relativism.

Maybe there is some bigger picture where the music and the dance synchronize together, like in a movie? Ah forget it, I'm just trying to be Hegelian.

I think we must concede the question is unanswerable.

Speaking of which, I just discovered the word epistemocracy today. It means a Utopian society governed by rulers with epistemic humility, meaning they know (and acknowledge) what they don't know. Supposedly coined by Nassim Taleb in his 2007 book The Black Swan, it is spreading throughout the blogosphere perhaps thanks to the fact that Google's blogger recognizes it (and coincidentally not the word blogosphere itself) as a correct spelling.

Why does the internet impose itself so unquestionably on our reality, like an apple and not like a God?

Moving Apple Planting

I have moved Apple Planting in America here:

http://apple-woman.blogspot.com/

Where you will be able to follow pictures from our apple-core planting trip on Google maps via Picasa web albums.

Finally. It only took about 14 hours of work playing around with my new iPhone and the web to figure out how to do this.

The Young Girl and the Ammonite

When she was a young girl, maybe two or three years old, her family used to vacation at Lyme Regis, in Dorset. There were a few photographs in the family album that helped Cynthia remember this time. The crisp, cold feeling of the water as she ran in and out of the waves, the radiant '70's windbreakers where her mother sheltered on the chilly beach, the scary feeling of excitement atop the gigantic green slide on the way back home to their rented cottage, and the smell of coalfires in the evening air. In London there was no more coal burning after the clean air act, but her mother said the smell reminded her of her own childhood. Sometimes Cynthia wondered how many of these memories were true, and how many had been fabricated and embellished by speculation each time she looked again at the old photographs. But the photographs were black and white, so the radiance of the psychedelic windbreakers, and the greenness of the vast slide, were things she must have remembered. And, of course, the smell of coal, and the touch of the water.

And the ammonites. They never took pictures of the ammonites, but she remembered them clearly. Inset in the neighbours' whitewashed garden wall, all around the museum and on the pavement outside. She asked her father about them, calling them snails. Those are ammonites, he said, relics of ancient underwater sea-snails. He explained how a fossil is formed, by the dead creature being pressed into stone, and eventually rotting away, the cavity itself slowly filling with rock. Cynthia thought of the spiral inside the Brighton rock that her grandmother once gave her, and wondered if that too was a fossil. She searched underwater, among the seashells, for ammonites, wanting to prove they were not extinct, staying in the icy English Channel so long that her parents first worried about her feet turning blue and then since she seemed happy enough jokingly said to the concerned onlookers that she must have seal blood in her. On the way home, she drew ammonites in the sand, spreading the sand on the foot of the green slide and digging spirals in it until the last of the late evening sun vanished over the playground wall.

Eventually, her search turned from the sea itself to the rocks and cliffs of the sea wall. She dug at the rocks with her fingernails, trying to unearth fossils. It was tiresome work, and she was just about to turn to collecting seashells instead when she saw a large rock in the shape of a woman bending down and washing her hair. Cynthia felt the form of the rock, looking closely, and found to her surprise a tiny bit of the ridge of an ammonite's shell, with which she had become so familiar by rubbing her fingers on the neibhbours' wall every evening until they had become calloused. In her imagination, she pictured the ammonite sitting inside the rock, coiled in the woman's belly, like the fat ripples her mother called her 'spare tire'. She wanted it. It was her ammonite. But she had no idea how to get it out, and soon their vacation was over and they returned to London with only the black and white pictures in the family album, none of them showing the ammonites.

They never returned to Lyme Regis, for shortly after Cynthia's younger brother was born. Her mother placed Cynthia's hand on her belly, and instead of an ammonite she felt inside her brother kicking. He was born with a murmer in his heart, and a mitral valve prolapse which meant that he could die at any moment. Her father explained that the heart pumps blood through two loops, one to the lungs and one to the rest of the body. The hear squeezes the old blood into a new chamber, and the mitral valve stops it from coming back and mixing with the new blood. Like the valve on the big orange bouncy toy that he let her inflate. In her baby brother's heart, the valve was broken, so some of the blood flowed right back when the heart squeezed, making a murmering sound. She tried to listen to his chest on one of the brief visits he had at home, like listening to her grandmother's conch, hoping to hear the sound of the sea. But she didn't hear anything.

Instead of vacations, Cynthia went to kindergarten and her father picked her up while her mother was in and out of the hospital with the new baby. Her father took her to the Museum of Natural History, where she saw the giant ammonites in the entrance hall, just like her ammonite on the beach. She wanted to buy some little ammonites in the museum shop, but they were too expensive so they bought gemstones for her mother, for when she came home. Her mother put on a polite smile, when they hid the stones around the room for her, like fossils, but Cynthia saw her father's face fall. They both fussed over the baby, and Cynthia bounced around wildly on her orange toy, abusing it to see if the little valve would give way like the one in her brother's heart.

When she was an art student, Cynthia went back to Dorset, on a field trip to learn about stonecarving. She and her fellow students stayed at a caravan park on the cliffs, overlooking a small, dingy beach where they had bonfires every night and smoked. During the day, they drove to the quarry, all eight of them in one student's old Volkswagen Golf, with the windows rolled down, blaring Ziggy Stardust out loud to the rolling hills and craggy old people of this large village or small town. There they were lectured by a sculptor who taught art at the nearby community college, then let loose on the rocks, vaguely supported by a local stone mason. The rocks were not only from the quarry itself. The place was a graveyard for old gravestones. The town had decomissioned two cemeteries to make way for a shopping centre, and dumped the stones in the quarry. A few graves remained, ornamentally sandwiched between the Vodafone shop and a council estate, and it seemed nobody mourned the loss of the largest part. Then other towns began dumping their gravestones here from all over Dorset, adding to the natural resource of rock, undoing centuries of human labour and rebuilding mountains in the derelict quarry, piling up high on the cliffs what had long ago fallen into the sea.

Cynthia wandered among the discarded gravestones and boulders, liking the idea of finding something here to use rather than carving more stone out of the quarry's rockface. She started collecting interesting letters and inscriptions, copying them into her sketchbook. Then she sketched a boulder that looked to her as though there was a tortoise hiding inside. She wanted to find a form already hidden in the rock, so there would be less to carve out. She had no idea what she wanted to make, and so imposing her own will on the quarry was meaningless.

There was a rock that looked to her like a dancer, and another that looked like a woman, washing her hair. Cynthia began sketching this rock from all sides, drawing the form of the woman inside in the style of Henry Moore or Barbara Hepworth. Henry Moore sculpted woman as a landscape, and Barbara Hepworth made women coming out of the hills. They both drew with contour lines and frames, and so Cynthia proceeded to form her washerwoman from all angles inside of the rock. Then, something made her decide to feel the rock. This rock looked familiar. She did not normally imagine women washing inside of rocks. She knew exactly what she was looking for, and she found it - more by touch than by sight, because the whole thing was now faded and a little grimy. The ammonite ridge. Cynthia was convinced this was the rock from her childhood beach in Lyme Regis. She had found her ammonite again.

All plans to minimize carving by seeking a form close to the surface of the rock vanished from her mind, and she began chipping away with her hammer and chisel, mining for ammonite. The stone mason saw her and started to help, saying she had found a nice, big one. He could understand wanting to take it home. As they worked, he told her about how he became a mason, the years of training and the initiation consisting of carving two linked rings using only hand tools. The rock was hard, and after working all day they had only exposed a few centimetres of the outside curve of the ammonite's shell. It seemed to be intact. He suggested renting a power tool and generator to finish the job the next day, as Cynthia and her group were going back to London at the end of the week.

That night, they went to the local pub and drank apple scrumpy. Then they went back to the beach, and since they were out of dope somebody suggested smoking the wild fennel that grew all along the steep path back to the caravan. The next morning, Cynthia woke up in the bed, which was strange because she normally slept on the couch. The teacher from their art school came early, which was also strange, and told them that they had to go home. Apparently, the neighours complained that someone had been seen dancing around on the top of the caravan, threatening people with a mallet, and they were all making a lot of noise. Cynthia was taken aside and gently blamed for being the cause of this collective punishment. At first she remembered nothing. Then, she dimly recalled climbing up the front of the van. She was sure that she handed her mallet to someone down below, so that she could get a better grip, but perhaps they had passed it up to her later. Why was she holding a mallet?

A few weeks later, she and her brother drove back to Dorset to retrieve the ammonite. As children, they had never been close, since her parents took care to protect Jacob from the trials and tribulations of childhood, worrying about his heart. Cynthia felt left out and not a little jealous. Now Jacob was himself out of the house and going to college, and Cynthia hoped they could get to know one another as adults, beyond the constraints of their close-knit family. Once in the Dorset village, they found the friendly mason and with his help, hired a power tool and a generator. They had until sundown to carve out the ammonite, plenty of time since it was June 21st, the summer solstice and longest day of the year. Jacob was good at finding fossils. As a child, he had asked for an archaeologist's pick-axe for his birthday, and promptly came home with a large rock containing a dinosaur's footprint. His finding was confirmed by several bemused experts among their parents' friends. After extracting the ammonite, Cynthia planned to show Jacob the beach. Maybe they could light a bonfire together, to celebrate Midsummer's Night.

When they got to the quarry things started going awry. First of all, it was hard even for all three of them to carry the generator all the way from the car to the rock. Then, the thing wouldn't start up and they had to carry it all the way back and drive into town for a replacement. With two people chipping away by hand, they had revealed about a quarter way around the ammonite. It was nearly sunset when they finally got the second generator going, and Cynthia realized they would have to risk paying for another day's rental. As the sun was setting over the hills, tinging the white walls of the quarry with its red light, Jacob, who had been chipping away at the rock, suddenly collapsed.

Cynthia went through in her mind the steps of cardiac ressuscitation that she had learned years ago at a first aid class. She wondered if this was even the right thing to do for someone with Jacob's condition, the mitral valve prolapse. In that moment, she remembered a recurrent dream or nightmare she used to have about her brother, when they were younger. She had been left to take care of him while her parents went to get something out from the car. They were at a stately home, in the garden, a place way out in the countryside and larger than life. Jacob was just learning to walk, and he stumbled into a maze. Cynthia saw him enter, and ran after him, surprised he was not right there in the entrance. The passageway bent around in a spiral between the tall, dark green boxtrees. Cynthia kept going, expecting to find Jacob at each next bend, running faster and faster. Finally, she arrived at the centre of the spiral, exhausted, and there was no Jacob. She felt terrible. She felt so ashamed, what would she say to her parents when they came back and discovered she had lost her brother? They must be back by now, she should go out and ask them for help. To her surprise, she noticed there were not one but two exits from the place where she found herself, in her mind the centre of the maze. She looked from one to the other with increasing trepidation, trying to remember which passageway she had come from. Which was the way back out? This was the point when she always woke up.

While Cynthia hesitated, the stone mason, who knew nothing of Jacob's condition, had already applied CPR. Jacob spluttered awake, and asked where he was. Cynthia took him to hospital, while the stone mason returned the power tools. Ah well, she thought, he will get the ammonite himself another day. Small payment for rescuing my brother, while I was shamefully trapped in indecision. They had a long wait in emergency, because by now Jacob seemed to be fine. He told Cynthia how he had felt he was falling, not from the little rock but down a great cliff, as his life flashed before his eyes. He saw the light at the end of it. It was hours before he was seen by a doctor and sent home, and by that time Cynthia was too worried about him to attempt any bonfire on the beach. They stayed at a small, innocuous bed and breakfast which was already on the way back to London.

Cynthia and her brother never got close, and eventually he suffered a cardiac arrest and suddenly died. She held as a comfort the image of the light he saw at the end of his near-death experience in Dorset. A year later, when it was time to set the stone for his grave, she drove back just in case the ammonite was still there. To her surprise, there it was, exactly as they had left it, about a quarter revealed from the belly of the woman bending down to wash her hair. Cynthia found the stone mason again, and he helped her load the entire rock onto her van this time. She went back to her old sketchbook, and thought about simply carving the stone woman in the style of Henry Moore or Barbara Hepworth as she had first envisaged, instead of trying to get 'her ammonite' out of the rock. In the end, she did not have the heart to do even that. She simply lumped the whole thing on his grave. Maybe others would see in it the woman washing her hair, maybe not. Maybe they would find something different. The ammonite was there now, for all to see. At the end of the day, she didn't even know him.

Writing stories is a little like stonecarving. Sometimes one comes with a plot fully formed and one hacks away at the quarry, regardless of the shape of the rock. Sometimes one looks at the rocks of life and sees something hiding just beneath the surface, waiting to be told. If you take a moment to look at the rocks, maybe you will see something there. It's not always about finding ammonites.

Are Apples the Thingiest Things?

Out of curiosity, I searched on 'apple' through the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP). Apple is used in 42 entries, almost invariably as an exemplar or instanciation of objective reality. The first entry that came up was, interestingly, the one on pain. There, apple is used as an example of a thing we can all sense - we all see, hear, smell, taste the same apple - as compared with pain, which is private. We each have direct knowledge from experience only of our own pain, in our own bodies. Another entry was the one on neutral monism. Monism is the idea that everything consists of one kind of stuff. According to neutral monism (as opposed to idealism or materialism) this one stuff of reality is neither mental nor physical. Spinoza was a neutral monist, according to SEP. Apples are used to illustrate Bertrand Russel's strange notion that things are organized around holes, that happen to project their aspects into the minds of the observers:

"The characteristic feature of the of this construction procedure is that it gathers up into one object the spatially scattered appearances of the object they are said to constitute. A particular oddity to this way of proceeding is that the groups that are physical objects are “hollow”—the apple presents apple-appearances all around it but it does not present such appearances where it is, i.e., in the region occupied by the apple. This central region “may be as small as an electron or as large as a star.” (Russell 1927a, 217) It is this feature of the view that critics such as A.O. Lovejoy have in mind when they call Russell's view “centrifugal realism” (Lovejoy 1930, 203) according to which “all material things…are built around holes” (Lovejoy 1930, 198) Russell happily acknowledged this consequence of his view and expressed in such slogans as: “‘Matter’ is a convenient formula for describing what happens where it isn't. (Russell 1927b, 126)." (SEP)

Apples are interesting, because they themselves are organised around a core. A core is a thing like a heart, we use it for expressions such as 'core values' to mean something central and incontrovertible. As already mentioned, apples were used in Wikipedia to differentiate Aristotle's philosophy from Plato's. Plato believed in a world of universal forms, where the perfect apple might reside, whereas for Aristotle the essence of appleness was in the core of each apple. Maybe having a core is the reason apple was used in that example. Imagine it being a potato!

In fact, I suggest that the heart symbol used in European iconography bears a much stronger resemblance to the seed-case of an apple sliced along the core than it does to any of the anatomical parts it is said to depict (an ox's heart, a woman's vulva). Go ahead, open an apple and tell me if I'm wrong.

SEP has zero entries for avocado, and while oranges are mentioned they are rarely used in the same way as apples. There are many more pages using 'egg' than 'apple', but eggs are cited as much for their potential (to become a chicken, or an embryo) as they are for their thingness as eggs. Leading me to wonder, are apples the thingiest of all things?

More Apple-y Thoughts

When I used the Hebrew for apple in my username, people kept imagining that I was referring to the biblical story of Adam and Eve. I'm not sure why the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge is commonly depicted as an apple. According to Wikipedia, it comes from a confusion around the Latin word malus which means evil as an adjective, and apple as a noun. The Hebrew bible states simply the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad. The nature of the fruit is unspecified. This confusion reminds me that as a very young child, when I was learning to speak, I used to think that the expression 'by mistake' which I quickly learned to use when I did something wrong, was related to steak. I would imagine accidentally dropping a piece of steak on the floor. I didn't much like steak.

Knowledge is like a tree, it has stems and branches. It grows outward exponentially, as in the biblical 'be fruitful and multiply.' Think of all the articles published in scientific journals these days. So much knowledge, so much easier to access.

A few years ago when my grandmother was dying I went to the public library in the neighborhood of London where I grew up. The hallways were filled with crateloads and carts of books for sale or for free. The emptying shelves were being replaced by rows of computers. There was a line of people waiting for their 15 minutes free time on the public computers. When we want to know something new, or even remember something we once knew and forgot, we tend to look it up on Wikipedia. Wikipedia isn't like the thousands of articles spreading out from the tree of knowledge, it's like one branch or one web being whittled away by thousands of people. I wonder where all the rest of the knowledge goes? Maybe some of it keeps being rediscovered, like the bedframe I stub my toe on every morning. Douglas Adams wrote that there is a planet where the lost biros end up. Maybe there is a planet for lost knowledge. Maybe the lost knowledge goes like shooting stars to rejoin the Kabbalistic glow at the end of the universe, where it is all of one piece with the knowledge that remains found.

But what about the knowledge that simply is false, or at least very human? Like mistaking malus = apple for malus = evil, or the steak in 'by mistake'? Sometimes it becomes part of culture, and sometimes it remains only a funny image in a small child's mind.

I agree with the biblical story that knowledge of right and wrong is the most primitive kind, a binary representation of the branching structure itself. Aristotle held that knowledge stems from experience via reasoning, and he was the first to codify logic. But logic requires there to exist right and wrong thoughts.

Apple Planting in America

Inspired by Richard Brautigan's book Trout Fishing in America, I have decided to go Apple Planting in America and write a philosophical travel journal. When I drive across the country with my son, we will bring a box of apples with us and plant the cores as we go along, taking pictures of their locations with the GPS coordinates on a new iPHONE. Amazing what we can do, now! Someone could even go around after us finding them and taking them out, displacing them, or enhancing them by planting an actual appletree seedling.

I've always liked apples, the fruit, not the computers. Perhaps because they hit all the senses at once, sight, smell, touch, flavor - even sound (crunch). I use variants of apple in different languages as usernames and passwords for many things. Once I identified as a quince! In Hebrew, apple is part of the word for many other things. An orange is a golden apple, and a potato an earth apple. The latter is true for French, as well. The reason for using apples in this way is not because I like the fruit, it was simply because the first time I was required to make one I was trying to program an Apple-Mac computer in ThinkC. It quickly did the apple-thing on me. Macs always freeze when I try to use them, and display a timer icon. At the time, it was a little black-and-white clock, but in later years that was replaced by a rainbow-colored bow or hourglass that looked not entirely unlike an apple core.

When I first thought of this idea, I remembered a story about someone planting apple seeds across America. This was confused in my mind with a story about George Washington, or perhaps Lincoln, and an apple or cherry tree. I probably read both stories in an American Grade School reader when I was 6. It came from a used bookstore in Israel, and was one of the few new English books that I owned at the time, which I hadn't brought with me from London, so I kept it fondly even after the corner was chewed off by the dog.

Looking on Wikipedia, I quickly discovered that the story was about Johnny Appleseed, a real historical character and Swedenborgian missionary who traveled around the outposts of Ohio preaching about not harming animals, and planting nurseries with apple seeds supplied by the cider brewers who wanted more apples in America. Johnny Appleseed lived on other people's floors, wore discarded old clothing, and went barefoot in the summer.

It was George Washington who killed a cherry tree with his new hatchet, when he was 6, after being told it was good to use on wood. Then his father, outraged finding the stump, asked who had damaged the tree. Little George confessed to the act, saying he couldn't lie, and his father was so delighted that his son had spoken the truth he was not angry with him for killing the tree.

According to Aristotle, the form of an apple exists within each apple, whereas Plato thought there was a world of universal forms, where ideas exist like 'good' that have no particulars in this world. Aristotle thought there were particulars of everything.

I could have made the story be about Lincoln and an apple tree, and had his father as the itinerant seed planter. Lets try that. Lincoln, Sr. traveled around the West planting apple seeds, and preaching about not harming animals. Finally, he settled in Sinking Spring Farm, in Kentucky, with his young wife. One day his six-year-old son Abraham was given a hatchet, and told it worked well on wood. Trying it out, he accidentally killed one of his father's precious apple trees. Lincoln Sr. was outraged to find the apple tree felled, and asked who had committed this felonous deed. Unable to lie, young Abraham confessed. Although the apple tree was precious to Lincoln Sr. he was happy that his son had told the truth. Lincoln, like his father, avoided killing animals.

The truth, I think, is fleeting, like a trout. Reality is more like an apple. Memories are precious but often false. This meditation was made possible by Wikipedia, the collective efforts of many minds working together to perfect knowledge.

Many years ago, I planted a seed in Wikipedia. I planted the proverb "He who eats alone, dies alone," under Jewish proverbs, because my father used to say that. Curiously, I found out from a friend whom I lunched with that it was actually an Italian proverb. I could not find a biblical or other Hebrew source for the saying, so I surmised that its popularity in Israel could have stemmed from the stories of Holocaust refugees who had spent months or years wandering the shores of Italy before finally gaining passage to Israel. I did not change my entry in Wikipedia, but after a while I found the expression listed under Italian proverbs and removed from Hebrew ones. Interestingly, I now see that it has been reinstated in Wikiquote as a Jewish proverb as well as an Italian one.

The proverb has a number of possible endings. He who eats alone, dies alone. He who eats with others, dies of starvation. He who eats alone, chokes alone. Hey - this one is in Arabic and may account for both Hebrew and Italian interpretations. Spanish preservers 'chokes'. I think I caught a glimpse of the trout.

Some Days Things Work Out

Like when after trying on 6 pairs of jeans

to go with the cream blouse in the sale

I find some khaki shorts that are perfect

Or the server at Starbucks who

gives me a glass of water I never ordered

right before I spill my espresso

I wonder how to say to you that

you are beautiful to me, or if I should, and then

you send me an e-mail. And I don't have to.

Untitled

And what if there is no one there at all

To watch the drama of my life unfold?

I dance alone upon this puppet stage

Creating dreams of laughter, love and light

Images in the mind's eye, beckoning

nobody.

Crazy world!

This is a truly crazy world that we live in! It makes me feel warm inside to think that I have a life in the dreams and fantasies of so many other people, some of them near and some of them far away. Most of them probably don't even know me, or not very well. Some I have met only once or twice, and yet they keep thinking of me, just as I sometimes think about them. I think that this really is a connection, of sorts. We can't help being constructed this way, even at the edge of our capacity, when the mind breaks down from dementia or was never intact in the first place, we have this idea of the other. I have had clients who were developmentally delayed to the degree of being unable to tease out one day from the next, to remember their own age, or consistently hold onto the distinction between reality and fantasy. But even in this liminal state, we all dream of being with another, and wish to share these dreams. Maybe it's all there is left.

At some level I wish there were someone I could be with physically as well as emotionally. But then, that is harder, negotiating an actual relationship in the between of two real people instead of this fuzzy overlap amongst all our dreams.

Timing

How come sometimes a pair of eyes

A mouth, a kiss, a moment

Of connection become a you,

A you-niverse in my mind

Replacing all others?

And when is it ever safe

To fall in love in a world

So full of other people?

Dating etiquette

Is it worth waiting for the other person to write first? I know that theoretically this is supposed to be my role. But can I possibly be said to be myself if I do that? Surely I only want to be with someone who can take me the way I am. Maybe I need to change, or at least choose which is more important: personal integrity or finding a partner. [sigh]

A sad love story in three poems

Links in a Chain
May 2008
This you will not understand
How your face pressed itself
Into a loop, in my mind
Coming between me and my new lover
Not because of what you said
But what you did not say
Because of what you did not hear
Not what you heard
Because your eyes were always closed
You dance to the beat of your own drummer
Like a rat in a maze, always running
Around the same loop
In your own mind
'This you will not understand'
And I don't understand it either

The Gift of Doubt
June 2008
Sometimes the pale sun shimmers behind the morning fog
and I doubt it will ever burn through.
Maybe the order of days has been revoked?

I revisit the question: who am I?
As important as a fly
in the everlasting evolution of the universe.

And who are you? You turn my no into a yes
you turn my yes into a no and squash me
leaving the crazy footprints of my dance upon the sand

leaving me to doubt and know
I will build another castle in the sand
The sun will shine another day, and we'll both burn

in the endless cycle
dust unto dust unto dust

The Missing Peace

April 2009

The space inside my head is quiet

Now I have the missing piece

You gave me, that

you didn't have to give

You thought that the pieces

were interchangeable,

that women were.

No wonder your puzzle

didn't fit together!

You thought what flies with one

flies with another, flies

because it flies

Your world is very broken. You witheld

your whole self, and gave me

just one piece

and shattered mine

Look in the mirror

Look at yourself

You are neither

all good nor all bad.

When you are whole

you can give yourself

over and over

If you give piecemeal

part to me, part to her, part to her

you fall apart, dissembling

what you think you save.

Pick up the pieces!

I thank you for the missing peace,

the quiet space inside my head

Wide open, so much that it hurts

Is this how the sky feels

when the clouds are swept away?

Navel-gazing from dissertation

This is my second doctoral dissertation. When I was writing the first, my brother died of leukemia. He died of pneumonia following a complication of his bone marrow transplant, and I sat by his side as he panicked, distressed and unable to breathe. I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing. Eventually we said a brief goodbye and he was intubated. I sat by his side, holding his hand and not knowing what to do, while the ventilator pumped air into his lungs until his heart stopped beating.

In the early stages of working toward my second doctorate, I had a chance to remediate that experience by being at my grandmother’s deathbed. She was always a difficult woman, but she had lost the ability to speak, and in many ways this made things easier for her caregivers. We knew it was serious and came when we heard she had punched the orderly in the face who was trying to feed her. I took turns with my mother, sitting by her bedside, as my grandmother, like my brother, was dying of pneumonia. This time, thankfully, there was no talk of adding a ventilator or heroic measures to keep her alive. After two weeks, it was a Sunday when she was evidently about to pass away. The nurse had ordered morphine, but in the UK a doctor had to be called from another hospital to sign for it (see http://painpersonalitypsychotherapy.blogspot.com/2009/03/worst-of-evils.html for a discussion of the power of doctors over the dispensation of opiates). My grandmother was evidently in a lot of pain, although she was unable to use her voice to communicate it, doubly silenced if Scarry is right about the difficulty of putting pain into language (http://painpersonalitypsychotherapy.blogspot.com/2009/03/body-in-pain.html). Finally, the doctor arrived, and I went to her, holding her hand and making eye-contact to comfort her, and said, “The doctor is here, he can give you something to help with the pain.” I tucked her blanket and went to close the door, so she would not overhear the doctor and my mother talking in the corridor outside. By the time I got back to the bed, my grandmother had lost consciousness and never regained it. The doctor examined her and the morphine was added to her drip while my mother and I continued to sit with her, prayer book ready. But it was the gentleness of that last caring communication with my grandmother which I felt transcended my ordinary experiences, in a way that informs my work with patients in pain.

nebulous anxiety

I am worried that reading about someone with chronic sore-throats and flu has made me feel the same way. Quite possibly swimming in the bay for 20 min when I already had a scratchy throat was not a good idea. But I organized the swim, and two people drove up from the South Bay, so I didn't feel as though I had a choice. And it was glorious, at least swimming out toward the Golden Gate and feeling it get closer was, but then the beach seemed so far away and persisted in remaining so for far too long on the way back in. The water was decidedly crisp, and even with a wetsuit I felt significantly dizzy when I pulled myself out. Hell, I didn't even want to teach my yoga class this morning. I tried to call in sick, but there was no reply.

Now all I want to do is curl up in bed with a book, and it's only 8.30pm. Instead of writing, I've been planning my trip to the East Coast to look at colleges with my son. Somehow I feel that at 16 he should be planning this himself, but since it hasn't happened and we're flying next weekend I just had to step in. At his age, I was planning trips to Israel and all across Europe, without even the benefit of the internet. My ability to cope with travel must have peaked early, it seems to be such hard work now, and I feel anxious about getting maps, getting lost, missing appointments, or spending too much on car rentals and hotels. I should just relax, and consider it a pleasure trip.

I must remember to bring my camera, so that I am not always grabbing other people's pictures from online. Ah well, I can't find one. A picture in words: the dark gray bridge peeping under the dark gray clouds, more real and closeup once you are in the dark gray waves. Dark gray birds bob up and down on the water, in front of dark gray sails. The buildings of San Francisco in many shades of gray rain-stained and unmoving in the distance. I imagine myself splashing dolphin-like through the water in my dark gray wetsuit.

Spring in El Cerrito

Only the children seem to notice the water
bubbling from the brook, through the mulch
put there to stamp out the weeds.

They run across the bikepath
oblivious, their hands full of daffodils.

You walk your dog, head bent
on listening to your I-pod.
How could you hear
the birds in the bushes?

"I could eat those dandelions
but I won't," you say
gesturing on Bluetooth to the flowers
we used to call soursuckles
for which Californians have no name.

Mindful of loneliness

This evening I feel lonely. Why is it that my feelings vacillate so much? This morning I was feeling happy, hoping to reconnect with a friend tonight, and I know that is going to happen one of these days but not this evening and I feel lonely.

Maybe this is why I always make up a 'you' in my head to talk to, because the world of other people is inconstant and flickering. I am reminded of a poem by Sylvia Plath called Mirror, which I had to recite once for a drama exam. It had the lines: "Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall./It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long /I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers./ Faces and darkness separate us over and over." I wish that other people wouldn't flicker so much in my consciousness.

My loneliness could also be related to the fact I am writing about the pain of torture and war. By the way, if you're interested, I am posting chapters from my Clinical Research Project (literature review) here: http://painpersonalitypsychotherapy.blogspot.com/

My lonely feelings are perfectly reflected in Matt Haimovitz's rendition of the cello suites, which take up 3 cds in his version, whereas this morning I was listening to Yoyo Ma, on 2 cds. Perhaps this too plays a role in my changing mood, but there are only so many times I can listen to Yoyo Ma in succession. And the torture of moodishly elongated notes alternating with dancelike exhuberance sits well with writing about the irrational project of war.

I am also fond of this particular poem by Rilke about loneliness, which reminds us that finding a so-called life partner might not be the answer:
http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~pjk42/rilke_files/einsamkeit.html

Thoughts on male and female jealousy

After a conversation I had with someone the other evening, we came up with the following hypothesis. Jealousy is different in males and females, and seems to follow opposite (and hence equally irrational) order considerations. Men seem to be more jealous when their partner (either monogamous, polyamorous, or whatever) is seeing or in love with somebody that they consider inferior, a jerk, 'don't know what she sees in him.' On the other hand, women are more jealous when their partner (or former partner) is with a younger, more attractive, or accomplished woman, whereas they are less sensitive to him seeing a woman they consider inferior. For either sex, their view of the ordering seems the only rational one but clearly neither way is rational.

I wonder what you think of this hypothesis. Please feel free to add examples and counter-examples in your comments. In particular, I would be interested in finding out whether a man would feel more jealous if his former partner were with a jerk. It makes no sense to me that he would, but then the whole male perspective on jealousy makes no sense to me, and seems to hark back to primate ancestors giving in to the alpha male, never mind droit de seigneur. And how does it work for gays, lesbians, and others?

Blueberries

The words I am looking for
explode on the tongue like blueberries
in the middle of a kiss,
showering us both with laughter.
Juicy, just right, not too sweet.

I wish I could envelop you
with the warm haze I feel
my heart touching your heart
like friendly embers kindling
in the afterglow.

At Peet's Coffee

Clouds move. People move.
Cars fly by, going
who knows where,
but driving.

You pause for a moment
and I wonder if
I could have made
your day a better day
just by smiling.

Strains of the Swan

Waft through the Berkeley farmers' market
over the worried shoppers, under the rainclouds.
A high-strung Asian student in a short red dress
draws from her violin for a moment
the music we played at dinner last night
it lives in my head the rest of the day
I half-whistle half-breathe it on my way to yoga
and the next day, I hear it on the radio
waiting for my mentor, whose friend just died.
As I board the bus late at night in the rain
a boy too young to be so stoned
incomprehensibly navigates past the driver
who is pouring coffee into a styrofoam cup.
If I nod off, who will there be
to see my ship out at sea in this rain?
I split ten bucks on some onions
and give her five for the memory.

Thoughts on rationality

The topic for this month's philosophy group is 'are we rational?' To me it seems obvious that the answer is no. But lets look at the question from a number of different perspectives.

There are many ways in which humans could be rational. We could have a part that is rational, as contrasted with emotional, appetitive and spiritual or willful parts. We could have the ability to reason correctly. We could behave in a predictable fashion to further our individual or collective goals, or some other goal. We might collectively have the ability and desire to come up with better rules for reasoning about things.

The ancient Greeks (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle) conceived of the soul as having different parts, including a rational part, and various bestial-appetitive parts, and perhaps a spirit or will as well. We could be rational by virtue of having a rational part. Kant considered that there was a structure to reason. It couldn't be made to account for morality and duty, but it did explain for him the interaction between a-priori knowledge and knowledge derived from experience, including the synthetic principles by which a-priori ideas are put together.

Experiments by Tversky, Kahneman and others since the 1970's show that even if we have a rational part, we are very bad at making reasonable decisions based on certain kinds of information. For example, we overestimate the likelihood of conjunctions (two things happening together at once are never as likely as each one singly), we ignore base rates (the probability of somebody having, say, a deadly disease, based on the results of a screening test, depends on how prevalent the disease is in the first place), and we give false significance to illusory conjuctions (which accounts for part of the fascination of 25 random things and the like on facebook). In fact this is hardly surprising, given how long it took historically for humans to discover how to reason correctly based on probabilities - the thousands of years between the invention of language and money, and the theorems of Laplace and Bayes were likely filled with people losing out on bad bets. Those who gained were probably just lucky. Gigerenzer showed that when the information is presented differently in these experiments people will sometimes make the right decision, but this just begs the question - why have a commonplace way of presenting the information that leads to errors? And why don't people learn? Gigerenzer argues that human reasoning is ecologically valid because we have only a limited capacity to process information, and our survival dictates that we come up with decisions in the nick of time.

Economists like to think that people act to further their selfish goals, because this makes marketplace behavior predictable. Many studies show that this is not so. People favor egalitarianism (fairness) and punish cheating behavior even at personal cost.

Ed Stein argues in his book Without Good Reason that we should not jump to the conclusion that people are irrational, that this is an empirical question but the jury is out. He favors a naturalist epistemology (theory of knowledge) which is based on a mix of descriptions of people's beliefs and norms of how one should believe (reminiscent of Kant). Perhaps the errors people make in these cognitive experiments could be overcome by sufficient education. Bartley argues that we can be rational if we hold all our beliefs subject to logical and empirical criticism. Quine describes human knowledge as a web in which the outer, peripheral beliefs are subject to contrary evidence whereas the central ones are less so, but can move historically out - such as the belief that the sun circles around the earth.

I wonder if our belief that there is a rational part to the soul will shift far enough out that it can be abandoned, and what would be the effect of this. On the whole I think people's behavior is largely predictable and irrational, accounted for by a basic herd instinct compounded with various cultural traditions.

If we are irrational, the question 'are we rational?' becomes somewhat inaccessible, because we could never show that our beliefs about this were rationally based. However, assuming (or defining) that we are are rational would lead to obvious errors in predicting human behavior and beliefs, unless we decide that we are rational in exactly the ways we do behave and believe which would negate the purpose of using the word rational in the first place.

There is a difference between predicting human behavior and explaining or understanding it. Everyone seems to have a central belief about the structure of the soul, and most of these beliefs are culturally based, whether they come from Greek philosophy, various religions, or from Freud. This seems to be a class of belief which people hold subject to neither empirical nor logical criticism. It often includes impenetrable elements such as the unconscious or subconscious, the spirit, free will, consciousness, or even thought and reason itself.

I definitely see historical progress in our ability to make logical (rational) inferences concerning things like probability and in conditions of complexity where our basic intuitions are wrong. This progress is a cultural artifact that necessitates the existence of two things in my worldview. First, that some ways of reasoning are objectively better than others. Second, that humans have the potential capacity, given the right education, to see this. While I would dispute the contention that some people are more rational than others, I believe that historically some societies have had more knowledge about reasoning than others, and the collective ability to make more reasoned decisions and hold more reasonable beliefs, or at least to logically criticize false beliefs and wrong decisions.

Why is it so easy to fall in love?

I did it twice this week. Once as a result of (okay, pretty wonderful) sex and being accepted, and the second time simply from talking with someone who seemed to like me, and looking him in the eyes. Now I'm not sure whether I'm in love with both or if one, which. Being with the two of them concurrently makes no sense. I'll probably just wait and see who calls back, if anybody.

I have a theory about what I call the construction of the soul. Some people's minds, mine included, contain an inner conversation which is more a dialog than a monologue whereas other people each talk alone as 'I' on the empty stage of their mind. I have some friends whose souls are constructed like mine. I imagine the person to whom my thoughts are addressed as a soulmate, and being 'in love' with someone, in my world, means being that person. I think that the people whose soul is constructed differently mean something else by being 'in love'. Unfortunately, both of the men I'm in love with seem to have the other soul construction.

Maybe someday I will fall in love with somebody whose soul is constructed like mine, and we will vanish in a puff of our own imaginations.

Lessons in psychology

Some of us never wanted to leave the womb. We were too comfortable in its warm ooziness. Leaving our blanket, the world was cold and harsh. We walked around looking for mother, finding her in the touch of a partner's sleeve. Without that, we were too fearful and anxious to let go of our goals. Inside, we were all heart and our bodies were cradled in sleep.

Some of us couldn't stand being in the womb for a second, or wished it were sombody else's womb, not our mother's. We felt so much more comfortable resting our belly on the cool earth, creeping and crawling, free to look around at the beautiful world. We walked from our belly and hips, opening to the world around us like a sturdy rose.

We are the same and different. We are each all of these things at once, and another one every time. We learn from each other.

But can I really?

If I feel like it, can I really read the whole of Burnt Norton as an intro to my stress management group? And follow it with the 5 stages of healing: rolling around on the floor like an embryo, creeping like a snake, crawling, squatting and reaching, standing and walking. Followed by a traditional walking meditation.

It makes sense to me. The idea of being in the present moment, being one's past and one's future, emptying out and recasting.

Problems: the complexity of the poem (some people might be put off), the difficulty of the movements (creeping and crawling can be rough on the body). I will have to preface it all with some gently-gently instructions. What associations does this bring to you, without thinking too much? Imagine following the movements if it is uncomfortable for you to physically do them.

More problems: tomorrow morning I have to teach a gentle yoga class, and still not sure how much movement my knee will allow me. Hmm - I can practice the sequence of poses in Jon Kabat-Zinn's book. After all, the following week I need to teach them to the stress management group...

BURNT NORTON

(No. 1 of 'Four Quartets')
T.S. Eliot
I
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.
My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
Other echoes
Inhabit the garden.
Shall we follow?
Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner.
Through the first gate,
Into our first world, shall we follow
The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.
There they were, dignified, invisible,
Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves,
In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,
And the bird called, in response to
The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,
And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at.
There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.
So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,
Along the empty alley, into the box circle,
To look down into the drained pool.
Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

II
Garlic and sapphires in the mud
Clot the bedded axle-tree.
The trilling wire in the blood
Sings below inveterate scars
Appeasing long forgotten wars.
The dance along the artery
The circulation of the lymph
Are figured in the drift of stars
Ascend to summer in the tree
We move above the moving tree
In light upon the figured leaf
And hear upon the sodden floor
Below, the boarhound and the boar
Pursue their pattern as before
But reconciled among the stars.

At the still point of the turning world.
Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
The inner freedom from the practical desire,
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner
And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded
By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,
Erhebung without motion, concentration
Without elimination, both a new world
And the old made explicit, understood
In the completion of its partial ecstasy,
The resolution of its partial horror.
Yet the enchainment of past and future
Woven in the weakness of the changing body,
Protects mankind from heaven and damnation
Which flesh cannot endure.

Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.

III
Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.
Descend lower, descend only
Into the world of perpetual solitude,
World not world, but that which is not world,
Internal darkness, deprivation
And destitution of all property,
Desiccation of the world of sense,
Evacuation of the world of fancy,
Inoperancy of the world of spirit;
This is the one way, and the other
Is the same, not in movement
But abstention from movement; while the world moves
In appetency, on its metalled ways
Of time past and time future.

IV
Time and the bell have buried the day,
The black cloud carries the sun away.
Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis
Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray
Clutch and cling?
Chill
Fingers of yew be curled
Down on us? After the kingfisher's wing
Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still
At the still point of the turning world.

V
Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-existence,
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now. Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them. The Word in the desert
Is most attacked by voices of temptation,
The crying shadow in the funeral dance,
The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.
The detail of the pattern is movement,
As in the figure of the ten stairs.
Desire itself is movement
Not in itself desirable;
Love is itself unmoving,
Only the cause and end of movement,
Timeless, and undesiring
Except in the aspect of time
Caught in the form of limitation
Between un-being and being.
Sudden in a shaft of sunlight
Even while the dust moves
There rises the hidden laughter
Of children in the foliage
Quick now, here, now, always—
Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before and after.

catching up with myself

I thoroughly enjoyed teaching my stress management and meditation class tonight. Partly it has to be the feedback from the group. Somebody said she felt at peace in her body, and more freedom than she had ever experienced before. Another part is the preparation. I love preparing the meditations, it puts me in such a peaceful state of mind.

In other areas of life I am learning that a car really saves no time at all. I miss self-propulsion, whether on foot or bike, and use the extra freedom to browse online dating sites instead of writing my dissertation or catching up with work. I think I will try returning the car tomorrow. This is a reversible step, if I get too tired walking with my brace I can always rent another car.

I have been feeling rather argumentative, and wrote this philosophical rant:

TURNING SEARLE’S CHINESE ROOM ARGUMENT ON ITS HEAD

The Turing Test is a test of artificial intelligence. According to the test, if a human interlocutor cannot correctly discriminate between the answers of a human respondent and an artificial one, say a robot, computer, or software, then the artificial simulation can be considered intelligent. Searle presents the following argument to counter the Turing Test. Imagine a room with a set of instructions in English. Notes are passed into the room in Chinese, and the inhabitant of the room, who is an English speaker, looks up the answer in the instruction manual and returns another note in Chinese. He could easily pass the Turing Test, and yet does not understand a single word of Chinese. Of course, this is only a refutation of the Turing Test if we equate intelligence with understanding. But let’s move on.

Assuming the Chinese Room Argument is true, does my brain understand English? My brain only deals in nerve impulses and neuro-chemical signals. These are not in English. Therefore one can conclude that no part of my brain, nor the whole, understands English, any more than the inhabitant of Searle’s Chinese Room understands Chinese.

So what exactly understands English? Rejecting some sort of immaterial soul, I would say that I lie at the intersection between my brain, which speaks in impulses and chemicals, and the culture of which I am a part that contains the English language. We could illustrate this using the Chinese Room. The person outside the room, as well as the person who wrote the instruction manual, both understand Chinese. They are communicating via the English-speaking messenger. Similarly, I am communicating with other I’s in English via brains that speak in impulses and chemicals. Where do the I’s come from? We have no evidence that they can come into existence without brains, or some other physical manifestation. And they stop creating new thoughts once their brain dies. And yet, language is something that arguably can only exist between two or more people, so it cannot be tied to a single body. There can be no understanding of Chinese (or English) without being part of a social group. We are social animals, and our brains thirst to communicate with others as soon as or even before we are born, so that when we are born into a language culture we quickly become ‘I’s.

Can a computer have the experience of being an I? Perhaps only if it were designed to be really social.

I noticed this quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes on the wall of Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law:
"When I think thus of the law, I see a princess mighter than she who once wrought at Bayeux, eternally weaving into her web dim figures ofthe ever-lengthening past - figures too dim to be noticed by the idle, too symbolic to be interpreted except by her pupils, but to the discerning eye disclosing every painful step and every world-shaking contest by which mankind has worked and fought its way from savage isolation to organic social life."

Memo for first dates

I should not play chess with men on the first date. I feel both guilty about winning, and ultimately let down because of being too intelligent. Perhaps I should give my opponent the benefit of the doubt, and a chance to a rematch someday. Maybe first dates make men nervous at chess. He seemed to know more about the game than I do, but the pain in my knee made my play overly aggressive.