Prospero's Books

An ancient scroll, preserving secrets of eternity

I've been rereading parts of James Gleick's 1987 book Chaos (see What I've Been Reading), and I'm blown away by two sentences about Edward Lorenz's equations that gave birth, in 1963, to chaos theory:

Years later, physicists would give wistful looks when they talked about Lorenz's paper on those equations--"that beautiful marvel of a paper." By then it was talked about as if it were an ancient scroll, preserving secrets of eternity (30). (emphasis mine)

Although I had completely forgotten that simile, it may well have been what started me on putting "signs, stories, systems, spirit" together in my writing, my teaching, and, more recently, this blog.

The work being done on complex, nonlinear systems has, for me, the same quality I find in the Book of Ezekiel, The Gospel of Thomas, The Revelation of St. John the Divine, The Zohar, the rituals of Freemasonry, the Divine Comedy, the plays of Shakespeare, Joyce's Ulysses, Meditations on the Tarot. That quality is the sense that these books--Prospero's books--both conceal and reveal the deep hidden truths of the Cosmos.

Healing rhythms

Can rhythmic poems prevent brain disorders? Maybe so.

Heather Wax, writing in the July/August 2006 issue of Science & Theology News, reports that research is showing the positive effects of rhythms on the brain:

Recent evidence has shown that if people listen attentively to a rhythmic stimulus, such as tribal drumming, mantra chanting or repetitive prayer, gradually their brain waves will begin to pulse in time with the tempo. The hypothesis is that this response, which spreads from the auditory cortex to other parts of the brain, can cause changes in mood, arousal and attention.

The rhythms, chants and prayers used in many religious ceremonies "can change brain wave states, reducing the symptoms of such things as attention deficit disorder, depression and mood disorders," said Gabe Turow, a visiting scholar at Stanford . . . . "It's almost an evolutionary argument for why these practices developed and remain--because they keep everybody sane" ("We Got the Beat," 59).

While the Science & Theology News article understandably focuses on religious uses of rhythmic language and music, there seems no reason why secular rhythmic poetry wouldn't have the same effect.

lastsyllable.net

My daughter, Casey, Development Director at the Baltimore Shakespeare Festival, this week introduced me to a great blog, lastsyllable.net, by Rachel Lee Cherry, a friend and supporter of the BSF. Rachel had me at her tagline: "Wrong about Shakespeare in a new way."

Rachel has come up with a great plan for this year's Blogathon. I'll let her tell you about it:

Yes, dear readers, I’m participating in this year’s Blogathon. I’ll be making a post every half hour for 24 hours, starting at 9 a.m. EST on July 29. Please sponsor me! Your pledges go directly to the Baltimore Shakespeare Festival, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. You can pledge an amount per hour that I blog, or you can just pledge a lump sum. The Blogathon doesn’t set a minimum amount, but BSF’s online donations are handled via JustGive.org, which does set a minimum of $5.

Me, I’ll be stocking up on Mountain Dew and Twizzlers, and during the Blogathon I’ll be reading Richard III and posting scene-by-scene literary (I hope) criticism, then screening Ian McKellen’s 1995 movie version and posting commentary. After that, I’ll slog through Titus Andronicus, which I haven’t yet read, followed by Anthony Hopkins’ version (1999). That should take me most of the way through — if it doesn’t, I have a Taming of the Shrew/10 Things I Hate About You backup plan — and I plan to end by screening Shakespeare in Love. History, tragedy, comedy, all in 24 hours. Sound like fun?

Please take a moment and sponsor now. Operators are standing by!

Since I'm way too old to stay awake for 24 straight hours, I'm participating in the Blogathon vicariously, through Rachel. I've made my sponsorship pledge, and I plan to comment on some of her Blogathon postings. I like Julie Taymor's film of Titus a lot.

The 28th emergence

Synchronicity strikes again.

A day after reading, then posting, a reflection by Greg Whetsel, the Grizzly Geek, on the emergence of Spirit, I began reading Morowitz's The Emergence of Everything (see What I've Been Reading.)

Morowitz, a biologist, traces the history of the universe through 28 emergences, incidences of a new property emerging from an existing complex system. Number 3, for example, is stars; number 9 is prokaryotes; number 15 is fish;  number 23 is toolmakers; and number 27 is philosophy.

For Morowitz, emergence number 28, still in progress, is spirit. He writes:

When I planned this chapter on emergence of the spirit I never realized how difficult it would be from a purely academic point of view. For the other emergences I know (if sometimes only dimly) what has emerged, while here I was trying to look to the future to the next emergence. This violates my epistemological imperatives. So for the moment, allow me to be a speculative futurist to think about what emergence we may be in the middle of (175-76). . . .

When one addresses the quest for the spiritual, it is some aspect of existence that goes beyond the biological (the second great emergence), and beyond the mental (the third great emergence), into the domain of something more psychic, "a formidable upsurge of unused power" (177). . . .

I assume that something new will emerge in human society, and it will present us with undreamed possibilities in science and the arts. This emergence requires our efforts and requires something spiritual that goes beyond the mind. There will be a new emergence, and we will play a part in what that emergence is. That is our destiny (178).

Spirit as an emergent property of life

Today my friend and former student Greg Whetsel, the Grizzly Geek, sent me an interesting message, from which I quote with his permission. The second and third paragraphs seem especially relevant on this day of emergent war in the Middle East:

I think of Spirit as an emergent property of life. The story that started me thinking in this direction was something I read probably 15 or 20 years ago. I can't even remember for sure where I found it, although it is in my notes somewhere.

The description was of a soccer game in Europe (they take soccer so seriously, y'know :-). There are several days of anticipation of the big game, including drunken revelry and trash talk between the rival groups. The game takes place in a large stadium and beer is plentiful. The game is close and the two groups of fans become highly excited. There is a questionable call and the crowd begins to yell at the officials. Someone throws a beer bottle and the riot is on. Fist fights break out in the stands and the crowd rushes the field. You can take this as far as you want, including fire and death, you get the idea.

The question being, if Spirit is involved, is it some evil spirit that swooped in from the great beyond? Or is it a property that emerged from the combination of anger, jealousy, alcohol abuse, competition, crowd mentality, and so on? Does that make it less "spiritual?"

Of course, on the more positive side, is love simply a biological response to propigate the species? Or, is it an emergent property that grows from a long-term relationship and a shared life? A melding of two complex lives (systems) giving rise to something that is greater than the sum of the parts.

If we just paid attention

Kelly Jones Sharp, a former student in our department, has written a great article on language for the Indianapolis Star. Here's a piece of it:

Speakers of Aymara, a language "spoken in the Andean highlands of western Bolivia, southeastern Peru and northern Chile," according to a just published paper in Cognitive Science, see the past as ahead of them and the future behind them. It is an "unusual culture-specific cognitive pattern" that challenges every other known spatial model of time. The past is ahead of them because they see only what they already know.

Time concepts are strikingly different for nomadic "Sea Gypsies" from Southeast Asia. According to a CBS "60 Minutes" report by Bob Simon last year, "The Moken don't know how old they are . . . Time is not the same concept as we have. You can't say for instance, 'When.' It doesn't exist in Moken language."

There's no "goodbye" and no "hello" in Moken. And because they spend their lives mostly on the sea accumulating few possessions, they don't have a word for "want."

Simon reported that the Moken "miraculously survived the (Southeast Asian) tsunami because they knew it was coming." They suffered not a single casualty because they read nature's warnings -- the receding sea, the dolphins swimming deeper, the cicadas gone suddenly silent.

Did their concept of time endow the Moken with the ability to see and hear what others could not? What might we all see if we just paid attention?

(The Wikipedia article on Sea Gypsies also reports on their foreknowledge of the tsunami.)

"We must make live tigers worth more than dead tigers"

Reuters reports today that the tiger's world is shrinking fast:

Tigers have 40 percent less habitat than they did a decade ago, due to intense poaching and the rise of an Asian middle class that puts pressure on the big cats and their environment, wildlife experts said on Thursday.

"Wild tigers and their habitats are in danger because they're suffering from international crime, economic exploitation and environmental depredation," said John Seidensticker, a scientist at the U.S. National Zoo and chair of the Save The Tiger Fund Council, a conservation group.

"We must make live tigers worth more than dead tigers, and landscapes with tigers worth more than landscapes that are missing this most beautiful cat," Seidensticker said.

(Be sure to click on the image to see it enlarged. Like most images in this blog, it's from Wikipedia Commons.)

Shakespeare, post-Taliban

Shakespeare's universality was demonstrated again this month in Herat, Afghanistan, where an Afghan company presented Love's Labour's Lost in the Dari language. According to Jacob Baynham, writing for the San Francisco Chronicle,

. . . before an audience of 250, five women on a stage of carpets took off their veils. Ripples went through the crowd. Five years ago, under Taliban rule, Herat's women could scarcely leave their houses. But this evening's event showed that times had changed in Afghanistan. The throng was gathered to watch something that was until very recently unthinkable . . . .

Trickster Shakespeare would have loved it. Challenging fundamentalist politics and morality was something he knew about.

(Thanks to News on the Rialto for spreading the word.)

A deeper and stranger story

My other main "reading" while driving home from Baltimore yesterday was an MP3 file of Krista Tippett's one-hour interview with John Polkinghorne on her public radio show, Speaking of Faith.

Polkinghorne, a physicist and Anglican priest, begins the show by saying

I think if working in science teaches you anything, it is that the physical world is surprising. And I was a quantum physicist, and the quantum world is totally different from the world of every day. It's cloudy, it's fitful, you don't know where things are, if you know what they're doing. If you know what they're doing, you don't know where they are. So that it's a complex world and quite different from what we expected. But it's an exciting world because it turns out we can understand it, and when we do understand it, we have a deep intellectual satisfaction. Now, if the physical world surprises us and is different from everyday expectation — common sense, if you like — it wouldn't be very odd, really, would it be, if God also turned out to be rather surprising. Things that are just on the surface, easy to believe, are not the whole story. There's a deeper, stranger and more satisfying story to be found, both in science and in religion.

The Speaking of Faith site is a treasurehouse of audio files, program transcripts, and supplementary materials.

A local habitation and a name

The highlight of my weekend in Baltimore--besides seeing my daughter, of course--was attending a special viewing of several very early editions of Shakespeare's plays (the first and fourth folios and several quartos) in the library of Evergreen House, owned by Johns Hopkins University. The viewing had been arranged for the cast and crew of the current Baltimore Shakespeare Festival production of A Midsummer Night's Dream--as well as several hangers-on like me.

Examining the First Folio reminded me of the power of symbols, in this case the power of our alphabet, and the words and sentences formed from it. I was struck by the fact that every Shakespearean performance I've ever seen (and at this point in my life I can boast that I've seen live performances of every one of the plays) was decoded from the little black marks in that book.

As I stood surrounded by the actors whose performance I'd seen the evening before, I realized that the author of that book--in collaboration with generations of theatre artists--had truly (in the words of Theseus in the Dream) given "to airy nothing a local habitation and a name."