mills

Xenophanes, quoted by Karl Popper in “The Beginnings of Rationalism” and cited by the excellent Matt Young (who, along with Superfluidity, will surely have wiser commentary on Popper than I ever did).

The quote in full:

The Ethiops say that their gods are flat-nosed and black while the the Thracians say that theirs have blue eyes and red hair.

Yet if cattle or horses or lions had hands and could draw and could sculpture like men, then horses would draw their gods like horses, and cattle like cattle, and each would then shape bodies of gods in the likeness, each kind, of its own.

The gods did not reveal, from the beginning, all things to us; but in the course of time, through seeking, men find that which is better…

These things are, we conjecture, like the truth.

But as for certain truth, no man has known it, nor will he know it; neither of the gods, nor yet of all the things of which I speak. And even if by chance he were to utter the final truth, he would himself not know it: for all is but a woven web of guesses.

In anticipating Popper’s brilliant description of how we know what we know, presented alongside his solution to the problem of induction, Xenophanes demonstrates again: “There is nothing new under the sun.”

Claude Bernard, An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, quoted by Jace Cooke. This tension between the granular and the abstract, between detail and generalization, appears everywhere in human thought: from the problem of unifying quantum mechanics and general relativity to the impossibility of formulating historical theories or political systems without losing the individual to the relationship between memory and imagination.

That this irreducible structural tension exists in both animate and inanimate spheres of the universe seems almost mystical to me.

Cosmopsis, on finishing a book. She titled the post “Liminal states,” so I looked up “liminality” and found one of those words that opens the world wide to you, that seems to map out a territory one knew existed but one could not conjure or comprehend, but only experience mutely:

Liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning “a threshold”) is a psychological, neurological, or metaphysical subjective, conscious state of being on the “threshold” of or between two different existential planes… The liminal state is characterized by ambiguity, openness, and indeterminacy.

(1) How I’ve lived for so long without regularly using this word is a mystery; (2) I will use it far too much in the near future; (3) her description of finishing a book is precisely right. Sometimes I start to race through the sentences so quickly I lose whole phrases, even if there’s little narrative tension to the words.

Finishing a book is a remarkable feeling; it has no analogue that I know.

James Baldwin, from “Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation,” quoted by my friend Jack July, whom I miss.

I love this letter and I love Baldwin, but I wonder if he isn’t wrong about humanity: whatever its capacity for “destruction and death,” it is less than that of the rest of the living world and indeed of the universe, if one can consider cosmic events destructive. Which is to say: to whom does he compare us? A sublime ideal, one which exists solely by virtue of the tremendous imaginative capacities of the human mind, without which the very concepts of peace and justice, which he feels we violate, would not exist.

The best reason to be philosophical about death and destruction is not because we must resign ourselves to that idiot species known as man, with his imbecilic violence and chaos; no, for though we are violent we alone renounce violence; though we kill we alone regret killing; we alone care for the needy and lame, if imperfectly. I am an animal-lover, but I feel no sense of moral inferiority: animals are beneath morality, while we strive, if imperfectly, to embody it.

No, we should be philosophical about death and destruction because though we stand in opposition to them both persist, almost as though they are integral to the structure of the world: as though life cannot exist without death and creation relies on destruction. We must understand them and come to peace with them as though they are like gravity, heat, entropy.

His position might be restated: “We’re not angels, and I therefore feel we are worse than beasts, although we’ve invented angels and overtaken beasts in all measures of compassion, decency, love.” This is a common enough refrain: we are wretched, scarcely tolerable, and the world would be better off without us. I wonder what the proponents of this view see when they peer out into the emptiness of space, or at the bloody maw of some victorious predator, or the swarming ants devouring a nest of baby birds. We are the only moral agents in the cosmos, yet their moral outrage over our imperfection inclines them to wish us extinct: to leave a universe in which there is no restraint, no quarter for the weak, nothing but instinctual murder and the amoral order of ecosystems.

Beautiful Ordinaire’s voicemail performance of the “Meow Mix” jingle as transcribed by Google Voice, which evidently takes its cues from Philip Glass libretti.

Update: audio below.

Nadezhda Mandelstam, widow of the poet Osip Mandelstam, who was arrested and tortured and, in essence, killed by the Soviet State, in her memoir Hope Against Hope. Osip himself noted that

Only in Russia is poetry respected – it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?

Such histories can make one despondent, but there is also the consolatory power they posses: what we endure is nothing alongside the anguish of our forebears, and what they endured too pales in comparison to our distant ancestors, and so on.