Prospero's Books

Beginning, struggle, victory

Although I haven't been able to authenticate the quotation, Mahatma Gandhi is reported to have said

Every worthwhile accomplishment, big or little, has its stages of drudgery and triumph: a beginning, a struggle and a victory.

Gandhi could have been describing the three-part structure of Van Gennep's rites of passage, Campbell's monomyth, or the evolutionary process of living systems.

This post and this one say more about those structures.

(Thanks to WorkHappy.net for the quotation.)

 

An Inconvenient Truth

The new film An Inconvenient Truth, based on Al Gore's campaign to turn back global warming, is both disturbing and inspiring, with powerful photography and graphics and a dramatic score. Best of all, it ends with practical steps every viewer can take. Please see it, and visit its site.

Portals to the sacred

On her site, Portals to the Sacred, artist and therapist Emily Meek offers a striking collection of images, on such themes as the labyrinth, the mandala, and dreams. As the site says, "her dreamlike images capture visions of our relationship to the sacred, offering us an opportunity to reconnect with Soul and to remember who we are."

The appropriate image in this post, reproduced with the artist's permission, is "Tempest in the Soul." As always, you may click on it for a larger version.

Pandas prospering perhaps?

A rare piece of good news on the endangered-species front: Reuters today reported that the giant panda population in the wild may be as high as 3000, about twice as many as previously thought.

God's design specs

At Salon.com, Sara Miles and Paul Fromberg have written a stirring article, "It's a girl!," celebrating the election yesterday of Katharine Jefferts Schori (a former oceanographer, by the way) as presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church. Among their lovely sentences are these:

The "kingdom of God" -- a phrase used by Jesus and often equated by Christians with the church -- is like a weed growing in the tidy garden of human culture. It grows as it will, unbidden and frequently unwanted; its growth is always to God's design specs, not those of tradition-bound churches.

"Love's fractal geometry"

One of many fine poems in the book Verse & Universe (see What I've Been Reading) is "Chaos Theory" by Ronald Wallace. The journal Ploughshares has published it online.

Living in a fractal world

I've just come across a two-year-old account by Christopher Lydon of an interview with Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web. One paragraph offers a potentially powerful daily discipline involving the use of fractals to stay aware of living systems at all levels:

Sir Tim uses the word "fractal" a lot. We live in a fractal world, he kept saying, meaning a world of many levels of structure, where the shapes of mountains often resemble the shapes of sand grains at a different scale; or giant clouds replicate tiny puffs of steam, or human communities at the village level tell you about affinities and tensions at a global level. One of his most compelling digressions was the thought that we should organize our days accordingly. We should live some part of our lives in each of the human orders of magnitude: from the family unit of six to the global population of six billion. Spend a few moments of the day with a consciousness of our individuality, then our closest family circle, our 60-member squad, platoon or company, our 600-member church, our 6000-citizen village in a 60,000-citizen city, in a 600,000 metropolitan area in a 6-million member state; then: our 60-million nation on a 600-million continent, and on to our full species extension.

I wonder, would going "down" as well as "up" in orders of magnitude also be illuminative?

Another God/Dog posting already?

In his book Once upon a Number (see What I've Been Reading), mathematician John Allen Paulos explains that "any phenomenon in nature more complex than the human brain [with a complexity of perhaps three billion bits] is by definition too complex for us to comprehend" (158).

He continues:

In other words, there may be a relatively short "secret to the universe" program, a theory of everything having complexity, say, ten billion bits, that we're just too limited (i.e., too stupid) to understand. Although they differ ineradicably, both traditional religious and scientific approaches to a hoped-for theory of everything share the perhaps naive assumptions that such a theory can be found and that its complexity will be sufficiently limited to be understood by us. Why assume that?

. . . . Finally, since any comprehensible entity is, by complexity theory, of less complexity than we are, such an entity is not, for that very reason, an appropriate deitylike entity. People generally don't worship that which is simpler than they are. This natural reluctance to deify the simple (except possibly as a symbol) is consistent with a tendency among some to identify God with the great unfathomable, the incomprehensibly complex. Reversing the letters in God and the lines of this thought, we note that it is also consistent with a dog's deifying its master (assuming, that is, that the master is of greater complexity than the dog) (159-60).

(By the way, the dogs in the picture, Chip and Taffy—photographed before Chip grew to twice Taffy's size—live with Bette and me and probably do deify us. Our three cats, on the other hand, seem to remember that they were gods to the Egyptians so expect to be treated as such.)

(Also by the way, like God's dog, deified is a palindrome. Whatever that's worth.)

Stories as preparation for science

In his book Once upon a Number (see What I've Been Reading), mathematician John Allen Paulos gives yet another justification for studying literature:

The computer scientist David Gelernter has written that the study of the Talmud with its layered, ever more nuanced and cross-indexed stories, parables, conundrums, and commentaries, provides as good a preparation as any for rigorous scientific and mathematical reasoning. . . . The same is as likely to be true, I submit, of any sufficiently rich text that is pored over with sufficient intensity and thoroughness (143).

(For a related argument, see my earlier post "Genes as Storytellers.")

God's dog: more than a palindrome

Fred Alan Wolf, in his book The Spiritual Universe (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), writes that the trickster "comes to us as the shadow, that strange and complex set of traits we all have but hate to admit to" (220). He continues:

Since the soul within each individual often appears as the trickster, does anything like this occur to a society or perhaps to the world as a whole? In Native American traditions, such as the Navaho Nation's, the trickster appears during particular tribal rituals. The trickster/shaman dances and often acts the fool to remind the tribe to take an appropriate social action, usually one the tribe has been ignoring out of fear. Once the trickster has appeared, the people laugh and realize their collective folly.

. . . . The Coyote, although it weighs only about thirty pounds, is feared and distrusted by sheep ranchers in the United States and other countries. Yet it is considered to be God's dog by the native American peoples. They believe that to kill and skin the coyote releases its spirit and further upsets the balance of nature. To them it is as if we are killing a messenger from God. Perhaps we are.

The coyote is the trickster—the wolf we don't fear and the dog we can't trust—but has elements of both dog and wolf. The animal is bold and foolish, cautious and fearless, blending chaos and harmony. To some the coyote-trickster, existing in reality and myth, plays it both ways—calling both heads and tails when the coin is flipped. The coyote teaches us it is a mature elder and a reckless child. It is a clown, a force of nature, and a messenger (229-30).