tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-990560071636447122024-03-08T03:33:00.805-08:00The Capitalist AxiomaticIn machine enslavement, there is nothing but transformations and exchanges of information, some of which are mechanical, others human.BwOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02391137279845715902noreply@blogger.comBlogger641125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-99056007163644712.post-31633796823661330142024-03-06T11:50:00.000-08:002024-03-06T11:51:06.512-08:00The Body<div dir="ltr">This collection was another of the assigned books in my MahaSati course. These <i><a href="https://forestsangha.org/teachings/books/the-body?language=English">Dharma Reflections on Ageing, Sickness and Death by the Nuns of the Theravada Community</a></i> were originally talks given at various meditation retreats. While the talks do repeatedly reflect on sickness, old age, and death, they're mostly just standard Theravada dharma talks -- sutta heavy and focused on the four noble truths. Since it seems that every time I come back to 'standard' material like this I always find something new, I hardly mean this observation as a criticism, and I quite enjoyed most of the talks. I simply mean to observe that the subjects are treated more or less how they are always treated within Buddhism -- as the <a href="https://www.lionsroar.com/what-is-devaduta/">three divine messengers</a> that help us turn towards our suffering. So if you're looking for some way of <b>transcending</b> these conditions here, you are definitely barking up the wrong tree. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that the talks encourage us to <b>descend</b> into these conditions, to really inhabit the suffering they create, and to gradually become attentive to, present in, patient with, and ultimately accepting of, whatever is happening right now. <br></div> BwOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02391137279845715902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-99056007163644712.post-55139814691916517332024-02-29T10:15:00.000-08:002024-02-29T10:16:04.274-08:00The Wave in the Mind<div dir="ltr">Ursula K. Le Guin is one of my favorite science fiction writers, so it's probably no surprise that I also really enjoy her non-fiction. I read <a href="https://www.ursulakleguin.com/no-time-to-spare"><i>No Time to Spare</i></a>, her reflections on aging, apropos of her <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_K._Le_Guin">death</a> in 2018. This <a href="https://www.ursulakleguin.com/the-wave-in-the-mind">collection of essays</a> focuses mainly on the mystery and craft of writing. The title comes from a letter that Virginia Wolf wrote to a friend when she was suffering from "writer's block". She felt the characters and story were like an onrushing wave in her mind that was unable to break into words for lack of an appropriate <b>rhythm</b>. It's an appropriate title since quite a number of the essays are concerned with rhythm in both poetry and prose. From the perspective of someone who writes a lot, these are pretty fascinating. They're complemented by several related paeans to reading aloud that are enough to make one want to press a street urchin into service just to have an excuse to recite <i>The Lord of The Rings</i>. While there are plenty of opinions and ideas that would interest a general audience in this collection, I would say that it's squarely aimed at those of us who are both familiar with her work and writer's in our own right. Even within that Venn diagram, the real focus of the book is on the process of writing fiction, and even the particular story and character driven sort of fiction Le Guin usually writes. So while her descriptions of how to "pull a story from the air" are inspiring, I wonder whether they apply equally well to the type of more abstract short fiction, inspired by Chiang and Lem and Borges, that I'm most <a href="https://fipipefpipe.blogspot.com/2019/06/science-philosophy.html">interested</a> in writing.<br></div> BwOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02391137279845715902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-99056007163644712.post-38175988403498697412024-02-18T15:26:00.000-08:002024-02-18T15:27:01.643-08:00The Master and His Emissary<div dir="ltr"><div>A while back I heard interesting things about Ian McGilchrist's massive <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Master-His-Emissary-Divided-Western/dp/0300188374">tome</a>, so I picked up a copy at the cat bookstore just in case I someday managed to get around to it. Gradually, as my readings in the philosophy of technology began to coalesce around the idea that technical objects nicely illustrate a fundamental <a href="https://fipipefpipe.blogspot.com/2023/12/concretizing-nondual.html">dualism</a> in approaching the world, I began to wonder if the book could shed some light on the problem. On one side we find <b>teleology</b>. <b>Machines</b> execute fixed goals. It doesn't matter how complex the goal is, or how sophisticated or flexible the machines' approach to achieving it. Even the perfect automata still does a <b>particular</b> thing 'automatically'; even self-driving cars still just drive, and the most sophisticated AI chat bot ... chats. On the other side, we find <b>exploration</b>. <b>Life</b> establishes new goals. Which is in a sense to say that it <b>has</b> no true purpose, unless this would be to avoid getting permanently trapped by some impermanent goal. When we talk about freedom and <b>self</b>-determination we are inherently talking about the <b>living</b>. The<b> automatic </b>machine is the furthest thing from the <b>self-determining</b> organism. But the conflation of these two ideas seems to be at the core of many perennial philosophical debates -- there's constantly confusion between determining a <b>self</b> and a self which <b>determines</b>. </div><div><br></div><div>Now, when I first heard it, I was intrigued but skeptical of McGilchrist's claim that there is a clear consistent difference between the workings of the right and the left hemispheres of the brain. Wasn't this sort of facile opposition debunked years ago? After glancing at his "Preface to the New Expanded Edition" however, in which he speaks convincingly of his more nuanced and updated take on hemispheric difference, I decided to take the plunge. My thought was to add a different take on the same dualism between means and end, technology and life, matter and spirit. And McGilchrist definitely develops a dualism related to what we've been talking about, and in this sense the book was relevant to my purposes. In short, he identifies the Left side of the brain as the part that grasps and manipulates through analysis and abstraction (technology), while the Right side lives the particularity of our emotions and body in the context of a broader world (life). <br><div><br></div></div><div>Unfortunately, while it certainly reiterates it, McGilchrist doesn't do much to help us further explore this dualism. This is largely because his book sucks. I rarely quit reading something halfway through, but there are <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Society_and_Its_Enemies">exceptions</a>, and this is one of them. This has nothing to do with thinking that McGilchrist is <b>wrong </b>in any factual or philosophical sense. The problem is that he's ultimately a pretty simplistic thinker who <b>imagines</b> himself as a profound philosopher. As a result, he wastes an enormous amount of ink cramming his superficial understanding of anything and everything into the same repetitive left-brain-bad-right-brain-good box. His wild welter of disorganized ideas only acquires a profound gloss though sheer force of reductive repetition; the divided brain is only 'profound' because McGilchrist sees it <b>everywhere</b>. In this way he succeeds only in reproducing the same long list of antonyms he ridicules in his preface (xii). Of course, lining up various dualisms in two columns is a temptingly way of making sense of the world because it feels so complete and satisfying. However, no matter which terms figure in your lists, this style of thinking never even reaches the non-dual depths of understanding <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsJokes/comments/hqgvp4/why_is_the_force_like_duct_tape/">why the Force is like duct tape</a>. <br></div><div><br></div><div>Reading the blurbs and hearing the interviews, one imagines that <i>The Master and His Emissary</i> will be focused mainly on brain science. After all, the supposed point of the book is the profound importance of the different ways the left and right hemispheres of the brain see the world. Unfortunately, McGilchrist is no scientist. And if you read the <a href="https://channelmcgilchrist.com/about/">bio</a> carefully, you discover it carefully skirts the question of whether he's even a medical doctor (look like a <a href="http://FRCPsych">BM</a> is the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bachelor_of_Medicine%2C_Bachelor_of_Surgery">equivalent</a>). In fact, this is a just a philosophy book with a <b>chapter</b> devoted to summarizing some of the science related to hemispheric differences. And what a poor summary indeed! To begin with, despite studying literature, McGilchrist is a <b>terrible</b> writer. Many many sentences are so bad that I can only imagine the (lack of) grammar results from dictating them. The editing is atrocious both at the level of the text, and the level of the coherence of the ideas. The whole thing reads like someone's first draft or working blog, with almost no thought spared for how it (doesn't) carry the reader along. </div><div><br></div><div>Take, for example, this early chapter on the science behind the divided brain. Now, I've studied some science, in fact even some <b>neuro</b>science. I'm also receptive to his overall idea. And yet McGilchrist doesn't even come <b>close</b> to <b>convincing</b> me that there is coherent pattern to the differences between the left and right hemispheres. We are <b>told</b> again and again that the difference lies in <b>how</b> they operate, not in <b>what</b> they do. It's all meticulously footnoted. But almost none of the studies that demonstrate this difference are <b>explained</b>. McGilchrist simply <b>asserts</b> that this is what the mountain of research tells us. <b>Trust</b> him, he's cutting through all the inevitable controversy and subtlety that attends interpreting experiments like this and just giving us the overall picture. For anyone even a little familiar with this area, it beggars belief that his level of generalization is justified by the specific research he summarizes. But who knows? Since we don't hear much about the research itself and about how it convinced McGilchrist, how would we ever judge how far he jumped to reach his sweeping conclusions? We'd have to go read the whole bibliography ourselves and form our own opinions. This is just terrible <b>writing</b> pure and simple. It's no way to even <b>talk</b> about science, much less do it. No, without and argument, there is no science. That's what science is. <a href="https://movie-sounds.org/comedy-movie-sounds/quotes-with-sound-clips-from-the-big-lebowski/no-without-a-hostage-there-is-no-ransom-that-s-what-ransom-is-those-are-the-fucking-rules">Those are the fucking rules</a>. So while I can't pass any judgement on whether McGilchrist is <b>right</b> about how the left and right brain work, I can certainly claim that in a hundred pages he said almost nothing to make me <b>believe</b> he was right.</div><div><br></div><div>However, as I mentioned, <i>The Master and His Emissary</i> is really a philosophy book masquerading as a book about the brain. Less than a fifth of the text is devoted to neuroscience. So perhaps it's not terribly important whether his story about the science is convincing or not. Could we simply ignore the marketing and read it as philosophy, exactly as I proposed to approach it at the outset? We were already exploring a dualism that has so many names we're not even sure it's a <b>single</b> dualism. Maybe another name for the same split is Left and Right, even if these terms have no relation at all to the human brain. Perhaps the brain is not the issue here dude. If we read McGilchrist as a <b>philosopher</b> (which is how I imagine he sees himself) does his philosophy of left-right duality help to illuminate some of the deep issues that we've encountered in thinking about technology?</div><div><br></div><div>Nope. McGilchrist is interested in some interesting stuff. He has a long chapter on the origins of music and language. He writes about the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, Husserl, Wittgenstein, and his hero Heidegger. He tells us about the inadequacy of the materialist conception of the world and even outlines a theory of how our dualistic divide can be healed -- Right reabsorbs what it has given to Left in a moment of transcendent <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aufheben">aufheben</a>. But none of his thoughts on these topics is of any more use than his approach to the science. Everything is treated so breezily, from such a great altitude that it turns into an indistinct mish-mash. He alludes to all these profound philosophical ideas, but then slurs together many that are so profoundly <b>different</b>. I mean, do you really think those philosophers I named all shared the same core dualistic system? Despite the density and range of his text, McGilchrist is incapable of leaving us with anything more than the impression that everything can somehow be reduced to the distinction between Left and Right, Part and Whole. And of course, the holistic Right turns out to be primary and better in every sense -- ontologically, practically, ethically -- which begs the question of how on earth the Left triumphed in this Manichean struggle. In the end, his entire thesis is encapsulated in the breathless praise of Hegel's Right-Left-Right pattern (pg 203). We move from good unity to bad duality back to good unity. Everything must be mapped onto a schema that doesn't even have <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvAVM0FPfF4">four chords</a>. Thus the whole book suffers from something similar to Hegel's encyclopedic obscurantism -- it tries to makes the same simple idea sound profound by endlessly repeating it in fancy language. But <a href="https://fipipefpipe.blogspot.com/2023/02/the-world-is-neither-true-nor-real-but.html">we know</a> there's nothing more boring and more faux profound than the dialectic; it presupposes everything that it pretends to explain and makes a mere illusion of <b>real</b> change.<br></div><div><br></div><div>So I'm going to quit halfway through. The second half of the book promises to explain how the Left slyly triumphed over its better half. It's certainly a glaring question given McGilchrist's account. But at this point I can't imagine his answer would be at all interesting. And I just can't abide another ramblingly dense yet intellectually insipid 250 pages.<br></div></div> BwOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02391137279845715902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-99056007163644712.post-32696613000374779912024-02-14T12:03:00.001-08:002024-02-14T12:03:42.273-08:00Healing Trauma<div dir="ltr"><div>The first book in the <a href="https://heathersundberg.com/mahasati.html">MahaSati</a> reading list is Peter Levine's <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Healing-Trauma-Pioneering-Program-Restoring/dp/159179658X">Healing Trauma</a></i>. Levine has worked extensively with people who suffer from PTSD or sexual trauma and has developed a set of <a href="https://www.soundstrue.com/pages/healingtrauma">exercises</a> designed to help these folks. I have to admit that I approached the book with a certain caution because, while trauma seems to have become trendy, I'm quite grateful that my life hasn't felt very traumatic. Levine, however, insists that we almost <b>all</b> of us have some level of trauma stored in the body. And in the context of MahaSati training, the point is simply to explore strategies for dealing with reactive patterns stored in the nervous system. So if you too can find talk of trauma triggering, the ideas may make more sense if you recall that we all have bodies with nervous systems. Over time these systems acquire many reactions that operate well below our consciousness, and only some of them are useful and adaptive in the present. 'Healing trauma' then <b>could</b> be thought of as nothing more than developing some intentional regulation of our nervous system. <br></div><div><br></div><div>Levine's book is short, and mainly reads as an extended preface to the exercises he uses in a therapeutic context. Which is perhaps what makes it a bit unsatisfying from an intellectual perspective. It could be that he develops a more interesting <b>theory</b> of trauma somewhere else, but here at least there's no real explanation of <b>why</b> these exercises work. Instead, we really just get a metaphor. Trauma is what happens to the body of an animal when the natural stress-response mechanisms of flight, flight, or freeze are somehow <b>interrupted</b> in running their course. Note that it's not these instinctive mechanisms <b>themselves</b>, nor even the life-threatening stress of feeling like <b>prey</b> that lead to trauma. Trauma is fundamentally the 'stuckness' of being unable to respond to stress in a 'natural' way. I think it's fair to object that this metaphor doesn't even really rise to the level of being an explanation. But this objection carries less force when we see how adamant Levine is that trauma is <b>not</b> a <b>psychological</b> but a <b>somatic</b> problem. If this is true -- if trauma doesn't have much to do with how objectively awful the stimulus was, or how subjectively intense our psychological response to it felt, but is simply a sort of somatic blockage that leads us to repeat fixed reaction patterns -- then it's actually hard to imagine what a better explanation would look like. Why does the body get stuck? What causes it to release? We'd have to ask the <b>body</b> these questions directly, and ignore any psychological story that purports to articulate the body's response. </div><div><br></div><div>It turns out that this is exactly how it <b>feels</b> to do the exercises. There's a lot of physical shaking, discharge, and energetic flow. And it doesn't seem to <b>mean</b> anything. For me at least, this doesn't happen with every exercise, or even with most of them. But in my experience the ones that do work, work repeatedly, and, as it were, randomly, without any clear sense of understanding why they work or where this energy is coming from. There's no <b>story</b>, no images or words, there's just <b>energy</b>. In fact, it's unexplainable enough to make one wonder whether any progress is actually being made. It gives none of the satisfaction of 'figuring it out' that talk therapy can provide. It's just ... tension and release. I trust that over time this is doing something good for me? At a minimum, these practices do seem to improve awareness of the body.</div><div><br></div><div>Just for future reference, here's the list of 12 exercises.</div><div><br></div><div>1) Feeling physical boundaries -- tapping, showering, string tracing, massaging</div><div>2) Grounding and centering -- feeling feet or sit bones, feeling a pet</div><div>3) Resourcing -- listing internal and external resources</div><div>4) Focus on positive -- find an object with positive valence and think of positive past moments and feel their effect on you</div><div>5) Tracking the effect of thoughts and images on the body (pendulating)<br></div><div>6) Tracking the sensations of guided imagery -- this one requires tracking sensations as you listen to a brief audio story</div><div>7) Discharging fight -- feel the desire to push back against and defend by pushing against a partner</div><div>8) Discharging flight -- feel yourself running away from a predator by making running in place motions</div><div>9) Discharging freeze -- let yourself feel completely slumped, overwhelmed, and in despair, then slowly straighten out of it</div><div>10) Feel into the physical sensation of immobility, and then let it pass -- a low level everyday version of 9<br></div><div>11) Orienting -- let yourself look slowly around the room as you find your place in it<br></div><div>12) Settling -- hugging yourself in a series of postures designed to finish discharging energy<br></div><div><br></div></div> BwOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02391137279845715902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-99056007163644712.post-72681151584205106192024-02-12T09:17:00.001-08:002024-02-12T09:17:58.482-08:00The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms<div dir="ltr">I enjoyed the <i><a href="https://capitalistaxiomatic.blogspot.com/2020/08/the-fifth-season.html">Broken</a> <a href="https://capitalistaxiomatic.blogspot.com/2020/09/the-obelisk-gate.html">Earth</a> <a href="https://capitalistaxiomatic.blogspot.com/2020/10/the-stone-sky.html">Trilogy</a> </i>so much that I must have picked up any other N.K. Jemisin book that was on offer at the cat bookstore. Unfortunately, as you would expect from someone's debut novel, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hundred_Thousand_Kingdoms">this one</a> isn't as polished as the later stuff. Nevertheless, she's still a good storyteller and world builder, who can create complex characters you like enough to be invested in and frustrated by -- even if some of them are gods.<br></div> BwOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02391137279845715902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-99056007163644712.post-61942620183956997852024-01-20T13:59:00.000-08:002024-01-20T14:00:03.926-08:00The Thin Man<div dir="ltr">This was the second novel included in the Dashiell Hammett twofer I picked up at the cat bookstore. It was less interesting and less satisfyingly constructed than <a href="https://capitalistaxiomatic.blogspot.com/2023/12/the-maltese-falcon.html">The Maltese Falcon</a>, but there was still enough classy Nick and Nora (and Mimi and Dorothy) patter to be thoroughly entertaining. How about a little drop to cut the phlegm, honey? I'll be sure to watch the film version to see whether the ending is more obvious once you know it's coming. Part of what made this one less effective was that its big sprawling plot, with so many tangentially related characters, made the ending appear as something of a Deus ex Machina. When Nick explains the whole works in a concluding soliloquy, I didn't come away with that delicious impression that I should have seen it all coming (which I had at the end of <i>The Maltese Falcon</i>). Though it's possible this was just a function of reading it mostly late at night.<br></div> BwOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02391137279845715902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-99056007163644712.post-86406967947667611542024-01-08T10:55:00.000-08:002024-01-08T10:56:13.326-08:00The Screwtape Letters<div dir="ltr"><div>I came upon C.S. Lewis' Christian classic in a way the author would certainly classify as an example of Grace -- through the recommendation of my Buddhist meditation <a href="https://meditatewithtucker.com/">teacher</a>. As my <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGnFF5w5sro">esteemed colleague</a> at FPiPE has made pretty <a href="https://fipipefpipe.blogspot.com/2022/02/zarathustra-style.html">clear</a>, I'm just about the <b>opposite</b> a Christian. So it was extremely surprising to find that this strange articulation of the spiritual significance of Christ's life made me feel right at home. Naturally, a lot of this effect is due to the perverse manner in which Lewis elaborates what is, from an intellectual perspective, pretty standard Christian dogma. The letters of the title are the missives sent from an older and more experienced devil (Screwtape) to a much younger "tempter" (Wormwood) on the occasion of the latter beginning his training in the art of corrupting human souls. They describe all the psychological tricks that Hell possesses in its quest to separate us from "the Enemy". Combined with Lewis' dry wit, the infernal epistolary structure makes a brilliantly amusing device. </div><div><br></div><div>But what's most notable from my perspective is how frequently the devil's strategy overlaps with the precise psychological tricks Buddhism suggest we play on <b>ourselves</b>. We congratulate ourselves for abstract virtues like "saving the world", but treat the concrete people around us with indifference. We escape into the future or past as a way of cultivating an ignorance of the beauty and terror of the present. We let ourselves be captivated by worldly values to the point of excluding all things spiritual as intangible sentiment. And we simply and constantly forget the impermanence of our mind state and time here. These observations overlap so thoroughly with my (more or less) Buddhist viewpoint that it's enough to make me believe in a core set of 'spiritual' teachings shared by every religious tradition. Naturally, there are still many differences. While I think Grace fits smoothly into my views, I find the concept of Sin, and particularly Original Sin, downright pernicious. Nor is a battle between Heaven and Hell the metaphor I would chose in describing the plight of my soul. And yet, as Lewis describes this battle, I hear something terribly familiar. His devil is not very concerned with cultivating some intrinsic capacity for <b>evil</b> embedded in our souls. Instead, the road to Hell is paved with the <b>idea</b> of good intentions that obscure a <b>practice</b> of everyday ignorance and petty malice. Meanwhile, redemption is made possible not by overcoming our sinful essence, but through surrender and self-forgetfulness. May we all find <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avalokite%C5%9Bvara">it</a>. <br></div></div> BwOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02391137279845715902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-99056007163644712.post-81817261248724170382023-12-30T14:08:00.000-08:002023-12-30T14:09:27.900-08:00Compassion and Emptiness in Early Buddhist Meditation<div dir="ltr">Recently I've found myself doing more <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahmavihara">brahmavihara</a> meditation in general, with a particular focus on self-compassion (often appearing as compassion for my <a href="https://capitalistaxiomatic.blogspot.com/2021/12/no-bad-parts.html">parts</a>). On my last retreat, I was surprised to find that this seemed to open up the possibility of some of the immaterial <a href="https://capitalistaxiomatic.blogspot.com/2020/02/right-concentration.html">jhanas</a>. It also seemed to lead to an increasing ... blankness ... of experience, as if all the knots that made up the world of phenomena were gradually coming untied. All this was pretty vague however, so I decided to pick up another of Bikkhu Analayo's books, one which promised to somehow connect compassion and emptiness.<div><br></div><div>Unlike his <a href="https://capitalistaxiomatic.blogspot.com/2020/12/satipatthana-meditation-practice-guide.html">book</a> on the Satipatthana Sutta, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Compassion-Emptiness-Early-Buddhist-Meditation/dp/1909314552">this one</a> is not intended for beginners. Here, Analayo feels free to talk about things like the brahmaviharas and the jhanas without explaining them first. The reader is presumed to be fairly well versed in these concepts at the outset. Also presumed is an at least passing familiarity with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-sectarian_Buddhism">early buddhist</a> suttas, though since the book is structured as an in-depth examination of the instructions given in the Karajakaya, Culasunnata, and Mahasunnata suttas, Analayo provides an appendix with his own translations of these. </div><div><br></div><div>The basic trajectory Analayo suggests is summed up well by the final chapter entitled <i>Practical Instructions</i> -- 1) use the radiative form of the brahmaviharas as a concentration object to 2) access some level of the first three immaterial jhanas, then 3) proceed from the perception of nothingness to let go of the idea that there is any subject perceiving any thing at all, and 4) finally incline the mind towards Nirvana. While Analayo does not use the term, the penultimate step in this sequence, called the "signless concentration of mind", seems to be a form of <b>nondual</b> perception. Sense data continues but is no longer assembled into objects; <b>life</b> continues, but no longer belongs to a subject, even a subject experiencing 'its' absence of self. Analayo ultimately claims that even this nondual experience somehow falls short of the perfect liberation of Nirvana, though in the end its not clear to me what the difference would be beyond the conceptual category error that arises when we discuss the problem (Nirvana is not a <b>state</b>). </div><div><br></div><div>Needless to say, this is the very short version, and the book contains a wealth of more subtle guidance. Just to give an example, one point that will stick with me is the way the connection between compassion and emptiness actually comes about through the <b>boundless</b> and <b>radiating</b> aspect of the brahmaviharas. This form of practice links the tangibility of something like compassion to the abstractions of the sphere of infinite space, consciousness and nothingness. But I think Analayo suggests this approach not just because boundless radiation prepares one for the leap to boundless space and consciousness, but also because it grounds our deeper meditative experiences in a <b>moral</b> practice. So perhaps what we're trying to create here is some sort of ethico-meditative feedback loop where our goodwill towards the world lets us experience deeper internal states, and these deeper internal states in turn allow us to continue extending the circumference of our goodwill. And indeed, meditation does seem to work in just the way this model would imply -- it's not that bad feelings are permanently removed or avoided, but simply that, with practice, good states and good intentions become more numerous and more powerful. The change does not come from some third party perspective outside the system, but from a snowballing <a href="https://fipipefpipe.blogspot.com/2022/12/the-cultivation-of-eternal-return-2.html">cultivation</a> that operates from within. </div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div></div> BwOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02391137279845715902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-99056007163644712.post-43072465217577586822023-12-23T09:58:00.001-08:002024-01-08T13:46:09.607-08:00The Double<div dir="ltr">I've really enjoyed <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pevear_and_Larissa_Volokhonsky">Pevear and Volokhonsky's</a> <a href="https://capitalistaxiomatic.blogspot.com/2023/03/the-brothers-karamazov.html">new</a> <a href="https://capitalistaxiomatic.blogspot.com/2023/07/the-idiot.html">Dostoevsky</a> <a href="https://capitalistaxiomatic.blogspot.com/2020/05/notes-from-underground.html">translations</a>. And I've been thinking some about the strange feeling of echo that mindfulness or metacognition can produce. So when I saw that the couple had also done <i>The Double</i> and <i>The Gambler</i> as a <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Double-Gambler-Vintage-Classics/dp/0375719016">single collection</a>, I decided to go for it. As they mention in their introduction, <i>The Double</i> reads like a dress rehearsal for <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Double-Gambler-Vintage-Classics/dp/0375719016">Notes from Underground</a></i>. Certainly, they treat the same theme of a hyper-self-consciousness torn between a dignified self defense and an abject self loathing. As the title suggests, <i>The Double</i> personifies this inner tension as an outer relationship between a mid-level bureaucrat and his doppelgänger who comes to usurp his place at the same agency. It's the sort of magical realism we associate with Kafka, and a direct descendant of Gogol's <i><a href="https://www.gla.ac.uk/0t4/crcees/files/summerschool/readings/Gogol_TheNose.pdf">The Nose</a></i>. In other words, while it's an interesting story, it doesn't seem to me that Dostoevsky had really achieved his fully distinctive voice by the time he wrote it. Though the night when our poor hero, trudging through a blizzard of disappointment, first encounters his double on the Ismailovsky bridge is a truly memorable <a href="https://www.online-literature.com/dostoevsky/the-double/5/">scene</a> that definitely foreshadows the amazingly dramatic moments of some of the later novels.</div> BwOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02391137279845715902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-99056007163644712.post-1678989006788242692023-12-22T09:58:00.001-08:002023-12-22T09:58:44.848-08:00Farewell, My Lovely<div dir="ltr">This year's Noirpocalypse™ features the adaptation of another Chandler <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farewell,_My_Lovely">novel</a> that was released (in the US) under the title of <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder,_My_Sweet">Murder, My Sweet</a></i>. While, I definitely enjoy Chandler's hard-boiled style with its colorful metaphors and rapid-fire dialogue, I'm beginning to think that he just got drunk and made up these plots during an epic late night bender. Perhaps this one holds together slightly better than <i>The Big Sleep</i> or <i><a href="https://capitalistaxiomatic.blogspot.com/2023/01/the-long-goodbye.html">The Long Goodbye</a></i>, but there's still nothing like the sense of neat progression and I-should-have-seen-it-coming closure of <a href="https://capitalistaxiomatic.blogspot.com/2023/12/the-maltese-falcon.html">Hammett's</a> style. In this case, there are multiple not terribly well integrated subplots and details that are either designed as red herrings (whose redness is never addressed) or were simply left in place when the whole trajectory of the story changed. As with the other cases, the film adaptations actually serve as an improved second draft of the idea, with more care given to integrating the various strands into a (mostly) intelligible whole. Not that I'm complaining. You read Chandler for the ambiance of bourbon and legs, not for the literary design. And this one has <a href="https://youtu.be/H7lewne7Kak?si=3ysC0vgTaeLs1PgT">bourbon</a> enough to make you feel as large as Moose Malloy.</div> BwOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02391137279845715902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-99056007163644712.post-82490717198209033712023-12-13T11:10:00.000-08:002023-12-13T11:11:32.375-08:00The Maltese Falcon<div dir="ltr">I've been so interested in film noir over the past few years that I've decided to investigate more of the novels that inspired the films. So far I've only read a couple of Chandler's <a href="https://capitalistaxiomatic.blogspot.com/2023/01/the-long-goodbye.html">classics</a>, and one gem that JZ <a href="https://capitalistaxiomatic.blogspot.com/2023/02/black-wings-has-my-angel.html">recommended</a> (that was <a href="https://scriptmag.com/filmmaking/case-study-on-why-a-movie-can-take-decades-to-make-black-wings-has-my-angel">never</a> adapted for film). Now, however, I'm getting a little more serious. The cat bookstore had a copy of that packaged together Daschiell Hammett's two most famous novels: <i>The Maltese Falcon</i> and <i>The Thin Man</i>. While Hammett's prose is less crazily exuberant than Chandler's, his plot, at least in <i>The Maltese Falcon</i>, is much tighter. He constructs the sort of story that you read in couple of nights because you can't wait to uncover the next and final twist that slots all the angles into correct perspective. In contrast to the Chandler novels I've read so far, the package is in fact so neat and satisfying that they barely had to change anything to make the film.<div><br></div><div>While I can't say too much about the plot without spoiling the surprise, I will observe that I think Samuel Spade is much closer to the conventional hero than Philip Marlowe, which makes him a more suitable role model for a star like Bogart (and hence less suitable for portrayal by Jeff Bridges). On the other hand, rarely has there been a more totally ambivalent femme fatal role than the one here given to Brigid O'Shaughnessy. I'll make sure to pay special attention to how Mary Astor plays the part when I rewatch the film. </div></div> BwOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02391137279845715902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-99056007163644712.post-42935789908236468062023-11-23T09:10:00.000-08:002023-11-23T09:11:01.110-08:00Science and Cooking<div dir="ltr"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Science-Cooking-Physics-Homemade-Cuisine/dp/0393634922">This</a> wonderful survey of the physics of cooking was a Christmas gift (thanks nice sister!) that I've been slowly working my way through for a couple of years now. The lento tempo, however, wasn't due to the difficulty of the text. Sure, there's plenty of physics here, with plenty of charts and graphs, and even the odd equation. But all of the concepts they discuss -- diffusion, pH, viscosity, protein folding and unfolding, emulsions, microbes, etc ... -- are very clearly explained and presume no prior knowledge. They also do a great job of illustrating general principles through specific examples that you can try right in your kitchen; in fact, the book began as a Harvard class that included a lab work component. Given the excellent overview here, it would now be a much easier endeavor to tackle Harold McGee's <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Food-Cooking-Science-Lore-Kitchen/dp/0684800012/">classic</a>, to which the current authors are much indebted. Maybe if I'd read that as well, I wouldn't have screwed up the complicated candy cooking stage of this Cook's Illustrated Banoffee Pie <a href="https://www.americastestkitchen.com/recipes/15876-banoffee-pie">recipe</a>!</div> BwOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02391137279845715902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-99056007163644712.post-44628059575198767602023-11-20T17:04:00.000-08:002023-11-20T17:05:10.180-08:00A Trackless Path<div dir="ltr">I've listened to a few inspiring interviews with Ken McLeod on Michael Taft's Deconstructing Yourself <a href="https://deconstructingyourself.com/the-magic-of-vajrayana-transcript.html">podcast</a>. In one of them he mentioned <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Trackless-Path-Ken-McLeod/dp/0989515346">this</a> translation of and commentary on a poem written by the the 18th century Tibetan monk <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jigme_Lingpa">Jigmé Lingpa</a>. The poem itself is a very condensed set of Dzogchen practice instructions, including descriptions of possible pitfalls and remedies. Like most of these types of <a href="https://capitalistaxiomatic.blogspot.com/2023/08/the-recognition-sutras.html">works</a> it would be almost indecipherable without McLeod's commentary. However, given the slipperiness and, well, I guess, emptiness of the Dzogchen approach, this commentary can only remain very light and suggestive. Fortunately, this doesn't mean it has to be <b>abstract</b>. On the contrary, McLeod writes in clear simple language about his direct experience with something that's ultimately ineffable. As a result, there's not much point in attempting to summarize the thesis of a book like this. The main theme is clearly <b>rest</b>. Resting in awareness. Looking and resting. But the only way to read the text is to <b>use</b> it, to drop these seemingly vague instructions into a meditation and see what happens. This is also the only method that befits McLeod's <b>experimental</b> conception of a path which ultimately dissolves, as the title suggests, into a wide open landscape.<div><br></div><div><div style="text-align:center">Like an oak peg in hard ground</div><div style="text-align:center">Stand firm in awareness that knows</div><div style="text-align:center">And go deep into the mystery</div></div></div> BwOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02391137279845715902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-99056007163644712.post-77105203744474100962023-11-20T14:10:00.000-08:002023-11-20T14:12:12.444-08:00Nabakov's Quartet<div dir="ltr">While I'm not sure exactly how it ended up on the shelf, I imagine this <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Nabokovs-Quartet-Vladimir-Nabokov/dp/0297761838">collection</a> of four short stories was in the bargain bin at the local used bookstore. While I adored Lolita and loved <i>Pale Fire</i> with a burning passion, these stories struck me as rather forgettable by comparison. Interestingly, three of the four were originally written in Russian, and these earlier works have a completely different voice from the one I have come to associate with Nabokov in English. However, it's a much less <b>distinctive</b> one, that could nearly be confused with Dostoevsky (in the case of the first two stories) or Kafka (in the case of the final one). Only <i>The Vane Sisters</i>, written much later and requiring no translation, speaks with the author's characteristic parodic erudition. Though none of the stories especially struck me, they did make for a nice plane ride to Tuscon.</div> BwOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02391137279845715902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-99056007163644712.post-22806823272609623962023-11-20T13:35:00.000-08:002023-11-20T13:36:18.326-08:00Galápagos<div dir="ltr">I guess you would expect Kurt Vonnegut's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gal%C3%A1pagos_(novel)">novel</a> about the end of the world to be wry, funny, and above all anti-climactic. So it's no surprise when it turns out that, from the perspective of a million years into the future, "humanity" didn't end at all. As a species, we simply thought better of possessing these big brains that have caused us no end of trouble, and which, to top it off, have mostly <b>not</b> composed Beethoven's Ninth. Just like the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat%27s_Cradle">other</a> Vonnegut <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaughterhouse-Five">novels</a> I've read, this one makes you wonder how we manage to collectively sleepwalk our way through the absurdity of life without appreciating the full joy and sorrow of the cosmic satyr play staged at our expense. Which makes me think it should be required reading in every high school, despite the fact that it appears some of us just <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaughterhouse-Five#Censorship_controversy">can't take a joke</a>. <div><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">When confronted with the question of how the desire to improve the world fits with the notion of time presented in Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut responded "you understand, of course, that everything I say is horseshit."</blockquote></div> BwOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02391137279845715902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-99056007163644712.post-38886157153556875922023-10-27T10:12:00.000-07:002023-10-27T10:13:34.858-07:00How to Change Your Mind<div dir="ltr">Unfortunately, I can't say that Michael Pollan's <a href="https://michaelpollan.com/books/how-to-change-your-mind/">attempt</a> to capture the new psychedelic zeitgeist changed mine. Perhaps this is simply because it is aimed at readers who, like Pollan, start off pyschedelically and philosophically naive. I didn't need anyone to convince me that it might be interesting to alter my consciousness, nor that it can be done fairly safely with drugs, nor even that such experiences could have a profound and lasting effect on my worldview. For the already intrepid psychonaut, the book exhibits mainly the endearing, amusing, but also kinda boring, breathlessness with which one (faintly) recalls early experiments. So yeah <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118715/quotes/?item=qt0464804&ref_=ext_shr_lnk">dude</a>, this could be a-a-a-a lot more, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, complex, I mean, it's not just, it might not be just such a simple... uh, you know? <div><br></div><div>I agree completely. I sympathize with the mind-blowingness of It. All. I understand how hard it is to convey the ineffability of the experience without ending up in vague platitudes about how all is one (too late). I'm also frustrated by the fact that Pollan spent 400 pages chronically and neurotically doubting the reality of his own experience. While I am, again, no stranger to this type of doubting, there's also a pretty obvious spiritual and philosophical retort for it. <b>All</b> experience is real. You may experience unreal objects, but the experience itself cannot be unreal. Perhaps this is more tautology than theory. Nevertheless, keeping it in mind is inoculation against the dismissive scientific rationalism that aims to separate us from our experience. </div><div><br></div><div>For me, the most interesting part of the book was his history of early psychedelic research. While it seemed neither insightful nor particularly well told, it nonetheless brought some new shit to light. It would have made a great magazine article. </div></div> BwOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02391137279845715902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-99056007163644712.post-4972705373509820122023-10-06T13:05:00.001-07:002023-10-06T13:05:45.658-07:00Our Mutual Friend<div dir="ltr">Since I knew nothing of Dickens beyond <i>A Christmas Carol</i>, I chose my first novel in the old fashioned way -- I <a href="https://www.horseracingnation.com/horse/Read_The_Footnotes">read the footnotes</a>. Specifically, I read footnote 4 of Deleuze's <a href="http://www.after1968.org/app/webroot/uploads/deleuze-immanence.pdf">final essay</a>, where he refers to a single chapter in this enormous novel (the one where Rogue Riderhood nearly dies). The novel contains several great scenes, and this is one of them. The full list would include the foggy night on the Thames that it opens with, our hilarious initial encounter with the Veneerings, and a couple of the climactic scenes that can't be described for fear of spoiling the surprise for the many loyal readers who will undoubtedly be inspired to plough through all 900 some odd pages of this monster once they read this review. <div><br></div><div>Because it was really pretty entertaining. Yes, admittedly, it is way too long for modern tastes. Many scenes that seem designed to be read aloud for purely comic effect could be significantly shorter. But when you consider that the novel was published in installments over the course of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Mutual_Friend#Original_publication">20 months</a>, these diversions make a lot more sense. And yes, modern taste may also find the ending overly moralistic. I don't know what it was like in 1865, but these days it strains credulity -- even in fiction -- to see every bad guy either fully reformed or perfectly punished according to his just desserts. But the story is crafty, the characters exceedingly well drawn and relatable, and the writing shockingly experimental for so popular an author. Though, if I ever do read another Dickens novel, I'll make sure to do it as the author intended and only cover 50 pages a month.</div></div> BwOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02391137279845715902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-99056007163644712.post-47428588533680838512023-10-05T14:35:00.001-07:002023-10-05T14:35:42.463-07:00Radical Acceptance<div dir="ltr">Someone must have recommended <a href="https://www.tarabrach.com/books/">Tara Brach's</a> first book a long time ago, because it had been sitting in my to read list for quite a while. In the meantime, I've read a <a href="https://capitalistaxiomatic.blogspot.com/2020/06/loving-kindness.html">couple</a> of <a href="https://capitalistaxiomatic.blogspot.com/2020/01/a-path-with-heart.html">other</a> books that belong in the same "IMS dharma" genre as <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Radical-Acceptance-Embracing-Heart-Buddha/dp/0553380990">this one</a>. They're all an easy-reading combination of modern takes on core Buddhist principles, lightened with a mix of personal anecdote and case stories drawn from the author's teaching experience. While I've enjoyed them all, I found Brach's book the most affecting of the ones I've read. <div><br></div><div>She frames the goal of practice as awakening from a "trance of unworthiness", a deep and often subconscious feeling that it is somehow simply not okay to be the way we are. The idea that nothing is a problem, that everything is okay being the way it is, might sound like a simplistic reiteration of the vapid teachings of <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Pangloss">Dr. Pangloss</a>. Once we move beyond the facile misinterpretations to which this idea is prone though, we see that it's not a question of trying (futilely) to avoid acting or changing anything, but a question of becoming <b>intimate</b> with our experience, becoming <b>capable</b> of seeing all of it, excluding none of it. In other words, the opposite of radical acceptance isn't <b>activity</b> but simply <b>ignorance</b> -- we <b>ignore</b> our experience. Accordingly, Brach structures her book as a progressive investigation of the things we usually like to ignore. Our feeling of unworthiness, our body, our desire, our fear -- these are all experiences we thirst to make <b>disappear</b> as quickly as possible because we see them as problems to be solved and states to be avoided. We just want to make them <b>stop</b>. If, instead of struggling to alter these feelings, we pause to <b>embrace</b> them, however counterintuitive this may sound, we can gradually find that these states begin to lose some of their reactive power over us. They may even stop on their own. Or they may not. The goal really isn't to control of optimize our experience, but to <b>experience</b> it. Thus, Brach builds towards the Dzogchen idea that <b>all</b> experience is part of the one thing that <b>can't</b> ignore -- awareness. </div><div><br></div><div>P.S. I cried when her dog died.</div></div> BwOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02391137279845715902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-99056007163644712.post-81921796435400042562023-09-13T09:50:00.001-07:002023-09-13T10:00:51.876-07:00G.W. Leibniz -- Philosophical Essays<div dir="ltr">I've had <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Leibniz-Philosophical-Essays-Hackett-Classics/dp/0872200620">this one</a> sitting on the shelf for quite a while. As with so many things, <a href="https://fipipefpipe.blogspot.com/2019/04/differential-fields.html">my interest in Leibniz</a> began with Deleuze. Since I've long planned to read his whole <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Fold-Leibniz-Baroque-Gilles-Deleuze/dp/0816616019">book</a> on Leibniz, I wanted first to familiarize myself with the original material. This turns out to be a bit tricky in the case of Leibniz because he never prepared a single authoritative publication of his philosophical views. Instead, his ideas are scattered throughout various essays, letters, and notes, and there are several different collections of these available in English. In this volume, Ariew and Garber attempt to select and arrange pieces in roughly chronological order so as to provide an overall idea of Leibniz's thought and development. Reading through more of this material put my earlier encounter with <i>The Monadology</i> in a new context. Despite being written fairly late in Leibniz's life, <i>The Monadology</i> is not a deductive treatise comparable to Spinoza's <i>Ethics</i>, nor even a summary of the author's mature philosophical view. It's closer to a series of notes to himself by which Leibniz clarifies and orders <b>one</b> particular thread of his thinking (albeit a very important one, and certainly the one he became best known for). Since even Leibniz didn't manage to effectively summarize his own philosophy, I'm not expecting to do that here either. So I'll just write down a couple of things I found interesting.<div><br></div><div>His most interesting idea was clearly the monad, with the irreducible unity of its windowless interior eternally separated from an exterior matter that is continuously divisible to infinity. That is, for Leibniz, there are no <b>material</b> atoms, only <b>spiritual</b> ones. But it's also interesting to understand <b>why</b> Leibniz felt the need to invent the monad. The problem he faced was the <b>passivity</b> of pure matter, which in those days people saw as reducible to the combination of impenetrability and extension, neatly illustrated by the Cartesian model of a billiard ball world. In this world, the only consideration appeared to be the conservation of <b>momentum</b>, which is a simple linear product of the purely "geometric" concepts of mass (impenetrability) and velocity (change in extension). Leibniz could literally "prove" that this view was incomplete by constructing examples -- like a ball falling from a height to collide with another -- that showed there was something more than momentum involved in the dynamics of physical bodies, and that if you wanted to calculate what would happen, you would have to raise extension to a <b>power</b>. For him, this "more" or "power" indicated the activity of the monad. For us, it's just the conservation of <b>energy</b> -- the potential energy of a ball is proportional to the <b>square</b> of the height from which you drop it. Naturally, this argument isn't the <b>only</b> reason that Leibniz believes in the monad, but he does consider it one of his stronger arguments for its existence, judging by how often he returned to the example.</div><div><br></div><div>Another intriguing theme that runs through his philosophy is what he calls "the labyrinth of the continuum". The problem of the continuity of the real number line, along with the closely associated problem of the levels of infinity, really becomes urgent with the invention of the calculus. Leibniz is adamant that our customary way of envisioning the real number line is inadequate. It cannot be composed of an infinite set of <b>points</b>, which are just abstractions, but has to be thought of as the product of some sort of real <b>process</b>. This process is part of what Deleuze will take up in The Fold.</div><div><br></div></div> BwOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02391137279845715902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-99056007163644712.post-17075672316004716952023-09-12T13:41:00.001-07:002023-09-12T13:41:47.884-07:00Analogia<div dir="ltr">This will be the last George Dyson book I will ever read. While Turing's Cathedral was modestly interesting, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Analogia-Emergence-Technology-Programmable-Control/dp/0374104867">Analogia: The Emergence of Technology Beyond Programmable Code</a>, has more of the defects and fewer of the virtues that I <a href="https://capitalistaxiomatic.blogspot.com/2014/03/turings-cathedral.html">noted nine years ago</a> in my review of the former book. The histories Dyson relates -- of the Russian colonization of the Aleutians, of the last stand of the Apaches, of the invention of the atomic bomb, the biography of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Butler_(novelist)">Samuel Butler</a> -- are certainly not without interest. But his digressive, scattershot, yet somehow still overly detailed writing turns them all into a slog. And then on the philosophical or conceptual side it's just a jumble of half-baked concepts stirred together with a dash of futurism. I think Dyson imagines that he's describing the emergence of a new species of organism called the "analog computer". Somehow this new type of computer will make no distinction between program and data in the way we associate with the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_architecture">Von Neumann architecture</a> that powers the modern digital computer. As far as I can tell this is the entire explanation for the subtitle. Further, it seems this new monster aims to replace humans at the cutting edge of evolution, rendering us little better off than the Apaches. Or at least, so I infer from tiny thread of connection one might see glimmering between Dyson's almost unrelated stories. <div><br></div><div>George Dyson is interested in a lot of interesting stuff. But he's not a clear thinker, nor is he a clear writer. Fool me once ...</div></div> BwOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02391137279845715902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-99056007163644712.post-65920423797550034962023-08-27T11:47:00.000-07:002023-08-27T11:48:28.216-07:00The Recognition Sutras<div dir="ltr">I heard about Cristopher Wallis' resurrection and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Recognition-Sutras-Illuminating-000-Year-Old-Masterpiece/dp/098976138X">translation</a> of Kashmiri Shaivism way back in Michael Taft's VSM 1 class. Wallis is not merely a translator, but also a practitioner of this non-dual Hindu tradition that was nearly lost in the 700 years between the Muslim <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_conquests_in_the_Indian_subcontinent">conquest</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_of_India">Partition</a>. Accordingly, his goal is not merely to make this historic text accessible, but to actually make it come alive as a philosophy and a practice manual. Since <a href="https://hareesh.org/">Wallis</a> is also a Sanskrit scholar who has <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Tantra-Illuminated-Philosophy-Practice-Tradition/dp/0989761304">written</a> extensively about the Tantrik tradition that the Recognition school is a part of, it seems he's almost uniquely qualified for the job. Which is a lucky break for us, because, no matter how clear the translation, the original text would remain almost totally obscure if it weren't for his extensive, line-by-line commentary on it. <div><br></div><div>While I haven't precisely tried any of the practices in this book, many of them appear to be closely related to various Buddhist techniques. For example, he discusses something like a non-conceptual <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shikantaza">shikantaza</a>, a breathing exercise that sounds very similar to Goenka's fast body scanning, and a practice akin to Shinzen's "gone" that looks for the emptiness from which various phenomena arise and cease. Since it's difficult to learn techniques just from a book, I'm likely to stick with the versions of these I already know. As a result, for me, the book is more valuable for its philosophical stance than as a practice manual. Wallis progressively describes a version of monism that comes incredibly close to Spinoza. All phenomena are seen as simply modes in the unfolding of the non-dual God/Goddess Awareness (Shiva/Shakti). There is, however, one crucial twist that brings it closer to Deleuze's reading of Nietzsche's crowning contribution to the <a href="https://fipipefpipe.blogspot.com/2019/03/the-univocity-of-being-4-history-of.html">univocity</a> of Being. The heart of the Recognition school is the idea that <b>you</b> are this very awareness; <b>you</b> are God; <b>you</b> are Awareness itself, the groundless ground of Being. From a logical perspective, this suffers from all the usual recursive difficulties. But from a mystical perspective, it makes for an inspiring and bottomless vision of the world in a grain of scan. <br><div><br></div></div></div> BwOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02391137279845715902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-99056007163644712.post-89019437207664781832023-07-11T08:05:00.000-07:002023-07-11T08:06:19.747-07:00Nature's Metropolis<div dir="ltr">Upon discovering my interest in Barudel, Picketty, Fischer, Graeber, etc … more than one professional historian has suggested I read William Cronon's <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Natures-Metropolis-Chicago-Great-West/dp/0393308731">classic</a> history of Chicago. While they may have <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piled_Higher_and_Deeper#Themes">Piled it higher and Deeper</a>, these folks were not full of shit. The book is a fascinating, accessible, and yet rigorous history of Chicago from roughly 1840 to 1900. During this period, the city functioned as a gateway connecting the rural "Great West", as it was then called -- basically what we would now call the northern midwest area that stretches from the great lakes to the Rockies — to the urbanized Eastern seaboard of the country. By the end of the 19th century, Chicago's role in matching the easterly flow of commodities like meat and grain with the westerly flow of manufactured good and capital turned it into America's second largest city. Cronon's deepest thesis is that, because the city was a crucial crossroads during this unique period of expansion, the interdependent duality of city and country that emerged here shaped many of our later attitudes about urbanization, corporatization, and mechanization. The specific history of Chicago is part of what lent these processes the moral ambivalence they still carry in American life.<br><br>But of course there's much more to his history than this high level observation. Cronon begins by tracing the seeming inevitability or 'naturalness' of Chicago's position back to what was actually a fortuitous combination of circumstances. Originally promoted as a unique <b>waterway</b> linkage between the upper Mississippi valley and Lake Michigan (via the Illinois river and the Illinois and Michigan canal) most of city's growth was in fact due to the way it became the Eastern terminus of a <b>rail</b> network that gradually stretched further and further West. That is, from the beginning, its unique 'natural' advantages were relevant more as a pretext for the construction of what Cronon terms a "second nature" — the human infrastructure that gradually came to replace the original natural landscape so thoroughly that we take it with the same inevitability. Obviously, the notion of an 'original nature' is philosophically suspect. But by identifying a 'second' version, Cronon just aims to mark how the rails replaced the rivers as transportation conduits, the wheat replaced the prairie grass as the dominant flora, the domesticated cow and pig replaced the bison as ruminant herd animal, and the settlers 'naturally' replaced the Potawatomi. <br><br>Accordingly, he devotes chapters to the intersecting ecological and economic histories that created this new nature. We learn about the rise of the railroads that would eventually fan out from Chicago. We learn about the changing grain trade that would give rise to the futures markets that exist to this day at the Chicago Board of Trade. We learn about the forces behind the growth of Chicago's famous meatpacking industry and the way its less famous lumber industry eventually cut down every tree along every Lake Michigan bound stream in Wisconsin. Each of Cronon's stories is a fascinating and well documented business history by itself, but together they really convey the way the development of this central city reconfigured the entire <b>ecology</b> of the hinter-landscape surrounding it, turning it into a resource 'destined' for market exploitation. <br><br>Finally, there are also two very interesting chapters on Chicago's relation to the East, and particularly to New York. The city's growth depended not simply on its Western hinterland, but on the enormous Eastern capital invested in turning it into a transfer and processing point for commodities as they flowed towards the East. This position halfway between Western commodities and Eastern manufacturing markets also made Chicago the perfect distribution point as finished manufactured products moved back towards the West. The railroads, grain elevators, and giant ice-cooled meatpacking plants could not have developed without New York capital. Likewise, business model innovations like Montgomery Wards' or Sears' mail order catalogs could only have grown out of this environment.<br><br>It's truly a terrific history that I would <b>recommend</b> to anyone interested in the era, and <b>mandate</b> for anyone suffering from either of our great 21st century maladies: frontier nostalgiaitis, and eco-apocalyptic derangement syndrome. Thanks to CV and Dr. Mei for the recommendation!<br></div> BwOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02391137279845715902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-99056007163644712.post-46549420625923505132023-07-09T10:38:00.001-07:002023-07-09T10:38:54.005-07:00The Idiot<div dir="ltr">I found <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Idiot-Vintage-Classics-Fyodor-Dostoevsky/dp/0375702245">The Idiot</a> to be a more puzzling and less engaging novel than <a href="https://capitalistaxiomatic.blogspot.com/2023/03/the-brothers-karamazov.html">The Brothers Karamazov</a>. Since so much of it is taken up with dialogue detailing the various intrigues by which each character defines themselves in relation to the titular Prince Myshkin that it can sometimes appear to border on the soap operatic. The main action of the plot is confined to hardly more than two scenes. The rest of the book is a fairly elaborate set-up for the incredible scenes with Rogozhin. Still, there's something moving about Dostoevsky's depiction of what seems to be a completely and genuinely <b>good</b> man. Yes, he's like a child that wanders into the middle of a movie and wants to know ... why everyone is so unhappy. But isn't that exactly the question we all keep forgetting to ask ourselves? That's the puzzle of the idiot -- his goodness seems to consist in nothing more than compassionately mirroring back to us the best aspect of our intentions. While this may sound like (and from the Prince's perspective actually <b>is</b>) a philosophy of affirmation, its effect on others is mostly to make them aware of their pettiness without providing them the means to overcome it. Why are we wrapping ourselves in knots, scheming and intriguing against one another and even against ourselves, when at bottom we all desire the same peace and joy? Dostoevsky clearly conceives of this as a Christian question, and its certain that the Prince is a Christ figure. Less obviously, he also seems to conceive this question as somehow related to a contrast of foreign (ie. European) reason and Russian passion. Is our reason too hollow? Is our passion too overwhelming or too depraved? I think to understand Doestoevsky better on this point I would need to be more familiar with the intellectual and political climate of his day. And one of these days, I'm going to let <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Dostoevsky-Writer-Time-Joseph-Frank/dp/0691155992">Joseph Frank</a> explain it to me.</div> BwOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02391137279845715902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-99056007163644712.post-16938157037709850962023-06-29T16:51:00.000-07:002023-06-29T16:52:12.577-07:00American Born Chinese<div dir="ltr">After I read the NYT <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/24/magazine/american-born-chinese-disney.html">article</a> discussing a screen adaptation of a Gene Luen Yang's classic <a href="https://www.amazon.com/American-Born-Chinese-Gene-Luen/dp/0312384483">graphic novel</a>, I thought I'd investigate the problem of bringing his drawings to life. Sure enough, as the article mentions, it's pretty hard to imagine how anyone could play the novel's offensively "fresh off the boat" Chinese character Chin-Kee in 2023. Nor is it easy to envision how to deal with the fantastic plot thread of the kung-fu fighting Monkey King. I guess we'll have to wait for the show to see how it panned out. Of course, both these elements fit seamlessly alongside the more realistic portrayal of Jin Wang in the context of a graphic novel. These three main threads come together in an unexpected climax that makes for a thoughtful and heartwarming reflection on coming to terms with an outsider identity.</div> BwOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02391137279845715902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-99056007163644712.post-16854728763225686942023-06-13T14:18:00.000-07:002023-06-13T14:19:23.363-07:00Of Grammatology Part 1<div dir="ltr">So, my hand forced by the <a href="https://capitalistaxiomatic.blogspot.com/2023/05/mathematics-and-roots-of-postmodern.html">previous postscript</a>, I read some Derrida. This post covers only the introduction and Part 1 of his magnum opus ... because I don't plan on reading Part 2. While there are certainly some interesting ideas and suggestive passages to be found here, it turns out the Tasic's reconstruction of what Derrida <b>might</b> mean was significantly more interesting than Derrida himself. Frankly, as a magnum <a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/opus">opera</a> go, this one is pretty embarrassing. Derrida is quite simply a terrible writer. He produces a constant stream of run on sentences, fragments, and ambiguous grammatical references, all stitched together by rat's nest of parentheses, semicolons and dashes. In addition, both the whole book, and the individual pieces that comprise Part 1, are poorly organized mashups of loosely related thoughts that originally appeared as separate articles. It's like watching him throw spaghetti at a wall to see what sticks. I found his basic idea intelligible only because I am already familiar with several superior versions of it. So I sympathize with most folks who just consider this word salad. Of course, all of these critiques can be written off by Derrida and his admirers as the mere kvetching of us reactionary simpletons who have yet to break free of the demand a logocentric metaphysics-of-presence makes for authoritative and linear writing -- a writing that might <b>mean</b> something, that might <b>speak</b> with the <b>voice</b> of the author, that might proceed without simultaneously <strike>crossing itself out</strike>, putting itself "<i>sous rature</i>", like a man who first paints himself into a corner and then (his graphomania unsatisfiable) goes on to <a href="https://youtu.be/Z17S2Hyg78E?t=346">paint</a> right over himself. <div><br></div><div>Kvetching aside though, I might as well get what I came for and try to relate the interesting bits to Tasic, Deleuze, and this idea of the 'structure of emptiness' that I've been pursuing. It's actually possible to state Derrida's main idea in a straightforward fashion. Normally, we assume that writing is to speaking as speaking is to thinking. That is, first we think the thought in some sort of interior subjective space, which we are aware of as a sort of pre-linguistic voice in our head. Then we articulate that thought by speaking aloud, using the sound of language to communicate it. And finally, much later, we might make some marks on paper or screen that represent the spoken sound. This allows someone else to come along and 'breath life' into those marks again once we're long gone, and hear our thoughts <b>as if </b>we were right there speaking to them. Our traditional understanding of this chain of events imagines that nothing essential is lost in this process of double translation. The assumption is that if we use our language carefully we can perfectly <b>represent</b> the original pure idea that we had in our heads in spoken language, and that, since written language in turn perfectly <b>represents</b> the spoken language, we are able to transfer this idea intact to the mind of another at whatever remove of space or time. In short, we assume that the <b>signs</b> we use in language are <b>representational</b>. Derrida's idea is that this is simply <b>not</b> true, that language <b>isn't</b> representational, and that the double analogy between speech and phonetic writing leads us astray. In fact, Derrida takes this observation a step further and suggests that it is precisely this mistaken analogy that gets us into trouble to begin with. Our common sense understanding of the way phonetic (alphabetic) writing relates to spoken language works as the ur-analogy for our very concept of representation. We assume that writing makes a past object (the speaking voice) <b>present</b> again in symbolic form. To accurately and truthfully bring something that's not 'really' here into the present by means of some fixed sign is what representation <b>means</b> to us. Our underlying assumption is that to <b>be</b> real is to be <b>present</b>, and that to truly <b>know</b> the real is to <b>re</b>-present it in some transparent fashion. The 'naturalness' of phonetic writing's re-presentation, the way it seems to almost magically restore a lost origin, encourages us to forget about the whole complicated process that we summarize with the word "representation" and all the assumptions that go into it. As a result, we tend to take for granted both the essential reality (meaning) of the origin, as well as our ability to faithfully restore (communicate) it through signs. By contrast, Derrida wants to show us that this origin is a kind of myth, a thing that can never be restored because it was not there to begin with. And that therefore our signs don't refer to it as the signified but only to other signs, which refer to yet other signs ... ad infinitum. </div><div><br></div><div>I believe that brief summary does justice to Derrida's core idea. We could certainly flesh it out by relating it to predecessors such as Nietzsche's notion that there are no <a href="https://fipipefpipe.blogspot.com/2022/12/the-cultivation-of-eternal-return-1.html">facts</a>, only interpretations, or Heidegger's idea that Being essentially withdrawals, or Freud's observation that repressed content returns in distorted form. This is what the translator's long and somewhat wanky preface attempts to do. Instead, I've chosen to state the idea as a critique of representational thinking because that's one of the main themes of <i>Difference & Repetition</i>. Deleuze's nearly contemporary account of the same basic post-structuralist idea is so much more carefully constructed and thorough that it's a puzzle to me how Derrida could ever have become the poster child of postmodernity. The problem with representational thinking is that it is always tries to replace a <b>series of differences</b> with a <b>repetition of identity</b>. Instead, Delueze invites us to think of difference <b>in-itself</b>, prior to identity, and then to think of repetition <b>for-itself</b>, not as the repetition <b>of</b> some particular identity, but as the always ongoing process by which difference produces more difference, or <b>differentiates</b> itself. Derrida's deconstruction of writing provides another analogy for this structure. With writing, the original identity of the idea or meaning or object is <b>missing</b>. The author-itative voice is gone. What we get instead are patterns of differences -- marks on paper that refer to phonic marks that refer to experiential marks that refer to ... Each of these systems of marks is constituted by differences between the marks it uses (letter, phonemes, and as we'll see, time). And the way differences propagate from one system to the next is what allows them to be coupled in the structure we usually call "representation". Derrida spends most of his time discussing the impossibility of an original identity while simultaneously bemoaning our inability to escape from the craving for this "transcendental signifier" that would ground the whole chain of differences of differences. Deleuze simply gets on with showing how this concept of identity came to be <b>produced</b>. Derrida is right that the chain of differences doesn't <b>begin</b> with an identity, but since he inherits Heidegger's nostalgic obsession with questions of <b>origin</b>, he doesn't seem to clearly see that something like identity can be produced at the <b>end</b> of the chain, as a <b>limit</b>, a <b>simulacrum</b>. Of course, this identity isn't the <b>final</b> end of the chain, or some transcendental telos, but a coupling or resonance that kicks off a <a href="https://fipipefpipe.blogspot.com/2022/12/unlimited-becoming.html">new</a> round of differentiation. </div><div><br></div><div>I'm sure others have written more and more eloquently on the similarities and contrasts between Deleuze and Derrida. But I think I've read enough to get a sense of whether Derrida is, for me, worth pursuing further. Deconstruction seems to me a last ditch effort to resurrect the Hegelian dialectic. Only this time, the alpha and omega of the scheme are the <b>absence</b>, rather than the <b>presence</b>, of absolute Spirit. </div></div> BwOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02391137279845715902noreply@blogger.com0