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Saturday, May 21st, 2011
I shut my eyes and try not to think, but consciousness still streams on, a great river of contents in a succession of different conditions which I have been taught to call thoughts, images, memories, interior dialogues, regrets, wishes, resolves, all interweaving with the constantly changing pageant of exterior sensations of which I am selectively aware.-- Julian Jaynes
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind Here is something that has been running through my head as I read John Limber's essay "Language and Consciousness: Jaynes' 'Preposterous Idea' Reconsidered":
What about meditation? I have had mixed results with my occasional attempts over the years to meditate; but my understanding is that it is intended to address precisely this state of streamingly verbal consciousness. When one is in a successfully meditative state, so I believe, the stream of thoughts, images, memories, interior dialogues, regrets, wishes, resolves falls away and one is left with quiet interiority... Is this a reversion to bicamerality? In his piece "The Self as Interiorized Social Relations," Brian McVeigh suggests (if I am taking his point correctly -- it is an extremely dense essay) that hypnosis and spiritual possession can be seen as forms of reversion to the bicameral mentality. I wonder if meditation is another point in the same continuum -- I have heard meditative prayer described as "listening to the voice of God" which is certainly suggestive of something along these lines.
posted afternoon of May 21st, 2011: 2 responses
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Thursday, May 19th, 2011
 For my birthday gift, Ellen and Sylvia gave me Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness: Julian Jaynes' Bicameral Mind Theory Revisited, recently published by Marcel Kuijsten of the Julian Jaynes Society. Thanks, Ellen and Sylvia! It was just what I wanted.
Started reading the book last night -- not much to say about it yet other than it is a lot of fun to read and thought-provoking. I wanted to quote some passages about occurrences of hallucinated imagery in visual and textual art. (The first essay in the book, after a prefatory biography of Jaynes, is a short piece Jaynes wrote for Art/World magazine in 1981 called "The Ghost of a Flea: Visions of William Blake", about Blake as a transcriber of heard voices.) I'm interested to read Jaynes' 1979 article "Paleolithic Cave Paintings as Eidetic Images", not reprinted in this volume but referenced a few times -- this is a great book if considered only as a source of outside references. Kuijsten references a couple of other writers in support of the idea that cave paintings are transcribed hallucinations, including
David Lewis-Williams, who argues that cave art was painted by individuals hallucinating in trance states. Lewis-Williams noticed similarities between recent rock art of the San tribe of the Kalahari and that of much older European cave art. He learned that modern San shaman engage in trance dances to "contact another world" for various purposes such as healing the sick, then noticed that the San rock art from past generations did not depict scenes from daily life but in fact represented spiritual experience and trance.
Kuijsten also talks about European and American writers, poets and artists who
have been known to draw inspiration from actual hallucinations. Judith Weissman discusses this in her book, Of Two Minds: Poets Who Hear Voices [ooh! another ref. to follow up...]. V.S. Ramachandran... describes visual hallucinations in the writer and artist James Thurber. Thurber was blind by the age of 35 and experienced visual hallucinations that he incorporated into his work. ...While in Egypt in 1904, [Aleister Crowley] claims that for three days between the hour of noon and 1pm his "Holy Guardian Angel" Aiwass dictated the Book of the Law to him. In his book Equinox of the Gods, Crowley describes the event in detail, saying that as he sat at his desk, the voice of Aiwass came from over his left shoulder in the furthest corner of the room. ...Crowley himself did not entirely rule out the possibility that the voice came from his own mind:
Of course I wrote them, ink on paper, in the material sense; but they are not My words, unless Aiwass be taken to be no more than my subconscious self, or some part of it; in that case, my conscious self being ignorant of the Truth in the Book and hostile to most of the ethics and philosophy of the Book, Aiwass is a severely suppressed part of me. Such a theory would further imply that I am, unknown to myself, possessed of all sorts of præternatural knowledge and power.
posted evening of May 19th, 2011: Respond
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Wednesday, May 18th, 2011
Look at that: another year gone by... From National Geographic, an otherworldly photo of camel thorn trees in the Namib-Naukluft National Park in Namibia: Difficult, as Jason Kottke points out, to believe that this is a photograph rather than a Dr. Seuss illustration. Thanks for the link, Matthew!
 Update: Andrew Howley interviews photographer Frans Lanting about this image and about the Deadvlei salt pan. Click the photo for more images of Deadvlei and other Namibian wilderness areas.
posted evening of May 18th, 2011: 1 response
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Sunday, May 15th, 2011
(Guest post by Ellen)
A rainy day seems about the right time to go over the photos from our China trip last month and whittle them down to a fast-movin' slideshow of a manageable 40. You'll see Qing, our guide in Beijing, with Sylvia and Jeremy in Tiananmen Sq., the Sun and Moon Pagodas in Guilin, the Great Wall on a rainy day, the Forbidden City. All of the photos of sculptures are from the Art Zone in Beijing. The photo of the bird cages hanging in Mulberry trees is outside Yuyuan Gardens in Shanghai, and in the courtyard of Michael's House, where we stayed in Beijing, you'll also see a bird cage - these inspired our recent acquisition of Woodstock and Chirpers, green and blue parakeets residing in Sylvia's room. The photos of Sylvia, outside People's Sq. Train Station and inside, are near Sylvia's foundling site in Shanghai. The photos of the little kids and the photo of Sylvia with a camera in her hand, are taken at the Shanghai Children's Welfare Institute. The Buddha was in Suzhou. Sylvia reading a Chinese version of Harry Potter and Jeremy are taken on a boat in the canal city of Qibao. Sylvia on a bamboo raft was taken on the Li River in Guilin. The futuristic city is Pudong, taken from the Bund in Shanghai. The view taken from the little balcony to the street was from the Magnolia B&B, the place we stayed in Shanghai. The exercise equipment in a public area in Beijing was installed at the time of the Olympics - they're all over. (Reminds me a little of the enormous public swimming pool in the tiny town we stayed in Spain, put in during Franco's regime.) The red pandas, erhu playing musician, gorgeous flowering trees are taken in Seven Stars Park, Guilin. The chicken and quail eggs in the bucket are soaked in tea, and sold on the street. And check out the rock formation of Elephant Trunk Hill.
What photo do you like best?
posted evening of May 15th, 2011: 1 response
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I picked up Krakauer's Into the Wild at the South Orange Public Library's annual sale yesterday, and read it last night and today. It is a great read, hard to put down: it takes you into McCandless' world and into various historical frames with remarkable clarity. I have always admired Krakauer as a journalist; what he is doing here is not so much journalism as memoir -- he is examining himself through the lens of the research he did into McCandless' life and death. I wrote at the time I saw the movie that I found it sappy and that I expected the sappy qualities were Penn's additions to the story rather than Krakauer's writing. But they're not, or not precisely -- the book is an exercise in romanticization. What keeps it from being sappy is Krakauer's clarity about what he is doing in writing the book, about why he is romanticizing McCandless' life. The reflexive element of Krakauer's authorial voice was missing from the movie, so the problem was not additions by Penn but rather omission. Anyways: I found myself crying on the last pages of the book, and it came as something of a surprise how emotionally invested in the story, in the author's voice, I had become. Another beautiful thing about the book which was (as best I can recall) missing from the movie, is the epigraphs. Every chapter is headed with excerpts from the books McCandless was reading at the end of his life, and from other books Krakauer finds relevant to the case. His judgement is superb.
posted afternoon of May 15th, 2011: 2 responses
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Saturday, May 14th, 2011
Últimamente publicaba Jorge López unas fotografÃas increÃbles de su viaje a San Pedro de Atacama, y hoy me ha dejado sin hablar con los colores de su imagen de un momento perfecto:
posted morning of May 14th, 2011: Respond
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 bust of Pindar: National
Archæological Museum
of Naples
ἄÏιστον μὲν ὕδωÏ, ὠδὲ χÏυσὸς αἰθόμενον πῦÏ
ἅτε διαπÏÎπει νυκτὶ μεγάνοÏος ἔξοχα πλοÏτου
-- Pindar, Olympian Ode â… :
for Hieron of Syracuse
I got interested in this passage yesterday... I was trying to find out more about Œdipus and about Thebes, and one of the references was to Pindar's second Olympian ode. That particular reference* didn't turn up so much of interest; but I found the beginning of the first Olympian ode enchanting. Diane Svarlien translates it as "Water is best, and gold, like a blazing fire in the night, stands out supreme of all lordly wealth." I don't know Greek, but let's see how this works. The Perseus Digital Library makes it easy:
- ἄÏιστον μὲν ὕδωÏ: Water is best. This seems clear enough, I know "arist-" from its use in English, and "udor" is close enough to "water" for my ear. What does Pindar mean? That water is the most virtuous/noblest of the elements? It looks sort of like he's setting up water in opposition to gold; the lexicon at Perseus says μὲν ... δὲ can be rendered as "on the one hand... on the other hand" -- this does not come through in Svarlien's translation.
- χÏυσὸς αἰθόμενον Ï€á¿¦Ï á¼…Ï„Îµ... νυκτὶ: Gold blazing just like fire at night.
- διαπÏÎπει: It catches the eye.
- μεγάνοÏος ἔξοχα πλοÏτου: It looks to me like this phrase is meant to modify "gold" -- it's not too clear to me what "meganoros" is meant to do -- maybe in English this could be rendered as "but then again gold, the greatest wealth of great men, catches the eye; it blazes just like fire in the nighttime."
What does it all mean? ...Pindar is setting up some standards of greatness, it looks like, and then he is going to say that the greatest of all is the exploits of the Olympic contestants. Today in the NY Times magazine, Gary Wolf uses a different superlative in a similar construction when he calls gold "the most primitive form of wealth" -- seems like you could argue against that assertion, but anyways it caught my eye on the heels of reading Pindar.Another sort of amusing detail, for me anyways: AOTW one of the top Google hits for this passage is Belle Waring's post a few years ago at Crooked Timber about the badness of comments sections at various moderate-left political blogs.
 * "In such a way does Fate, who keeps their pleasant fortune to be handed from father to son, bring at another time some painful reversal together with god-sent prosperity, since the destined son met and killed Laius, and fulfilled the oracle of Pytho, spoken long before." -- Svarlien's translation
Update: I found my copy of Lattimore's translation of Pindar. (Which also is online at archive.org.) His rendering of the opening lines:
Best of all things is water; but gold, like a gleaming fire
by night, outshines all pride of wealth beside.
rings most pleasantly in my ears.
posted morning of May 14th, 2011: Respond
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Wednesday, May 11th, 2011
Everyone's fave surrealist is 107 years old today. He is 66 years and one week older than me.
posted evening of May 11th, 2011: Respond
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Below the fold, something that might become a first paragraph of a longer piece. I'm sort of wondering if it's worth pursuing; if you have any reaction to the piece I would be interested to know what it is. I'll post a comment a bit later concerning where I'm thinking about going with it; my hope is that its rhythm will grab the reader (or a particular few readers) and make him/her/them want to come along wherever I am going with it.
↷read the rest...
posted evening of May 11th, 2011: 3 responses
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by J Osner
Sinking into the warm black pillow of night. I’m dreaming
Masks, new faces, costumes I will wear
Internally, so I won’t know myself,
My face, my clean white tablet lies
There on the pillow looking up at me.
So paint! Draw crazy patterns on your cheeks;
Sculpt horns and wild protuberances, scars
Where your clean virgin skin is lying smooth.
Add blemishes and warts around your mouth,
Sprout tufts of wiry hair beside your nose --
just let yourself go,
make a May Day parade
of masks:
We’ll set them up
For all to see
We’ll let you know
Which ones will work,
Which ones will trick you out obscenely sinister unrecognized and sneaking stealthy sliding past
the doorways of your ego lurking dark around the alleys of your childhood memories;
And when I've gone to sleep I’ll see
My costumed armies waiting
And the desolation staging
Where they play.
posted morning of May 11th, 2011: Respond
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