Prospero's Books

Back far enough for a good picture

I just came across a couple of paragraphs I wrote in 1974 about the then fairly new photograph of the earth rising above the surface of the moon. The paragraphs were in a piece I wrote for a newsletter out of Rhode Island fittingly called Earthrise. That piece is one of many precursors of this blog:

Green and gold, like Goethe's Tree of Life, the earth rises. Blue and white, it hangs in blackness above the moon's gray horizon. No other photograph has ever inspired such awe. John Platt calls it "a great poem that may have done more to make us cherish our small and precious planet than anything else that has happened in this century." Joseph Campbell, the mythologist, writes that "all poetry now is archaic that fails to match the wonder of this view." . . .

One of the things modern man has forgotten is how to see the earth as a whole. We once had stories that enabled us to see our world as a total system; the most important of these were called "myths." Although we sometimes use the word to mean an untruth, real myths lie somewhere beyond questions of truth and falsity. "Mythic," I think, properly refers to scale. The Apollo photograph, showing our world as a whole, is perhaps the closes thing to a mythic image that our times can offer . . . .

Q: So you think that we went to the moon . . .

A: . . . in order to stand back far enough for a good picture.

Note: "Goethe's Tree of Life" is an allusion to two wonderful lines from Goethe that can be translated

Grey is all theory.
The golden tree of life is green.

Our earliest rituals?

Ritual and religion may be almost twice as old as we've thought, according to scientists who have examined artifacts in a cave in Botswana. According to Reuters, the find seems to indicate religious ritual among Stone Age people as long ago as 70,000 years. Before this discovery, the earliest indication of religion was in European caves about 40,000 years ago.

From a Reuters story by Alister Doyle:

Ancestors of Botswana's San people apparently ground away at a natural outcrop about 2 meters high and 6 meters long (6 by 20 ft) to heighten its similarity to a python's head and body, said Sheila Coulson, an associate professor at Oslo University. . . .

"The snake symbol runs through all the mythologies, stories, cultures, languages of southern Africa," Coulson said.

(On a personal note, Botswana is one of my favorite places in the world. I've never experienced more beautiful skies or more welcoming people.)

Shakespeare on film

Duncan Macleod and Ennis Macleod, in Australia, have begun a blog, Duncan's Shakespeare, reviewing film adaptations of Shakespeare, with links to other reviews and information.

So remember when you're feeling very small and insecure . . . .

Care2 has a beautiful and very funny e-card made up of space photos and animation, with a soundtrack of Monty Python's Eric Idle singing "The Galaxy Song" from the film The Meaning of Life. The card was created by Camilla Eriksson and also appears on her site.

Wikipedia includes a fact-check of the science in the song, finding it fairly accurate.

(Thanks to The Daily Grail for the tip.)

Embrace paradoxes

At ChangeThis, Charles Halton has published a manifesto titled "Never the Same: How to Create Transformational Experiences." Like other ChangeThis manifestos, it's tightly written and powerfully designed. Halton's manifesto, which begins, "Hello. Let's Change the World Together," is rooted in a deep understanding of complex systems.

The manifesto lists eighteen principles of leading change. I list them here to entice you into reading the whole manifesto:

1. Inspire Passion or Go Home
2. Create Controversy
3. Be Different
4. Be a Social Butterfly
5. Repetition is the Mother of All Learning
6. Humans are the Same
7. Humans are Different
8. Embrace Paradoxes
9. Repetition is the Mother of All Learning
10. Pass Along Methodologies
11. Don't Be a Slave to Fashion
12. Be Inefficient
13. Produce a Lot
14. Humiliate Yourself
15. Cultivate an Atmosphere of Trust and Safety
16. Stop Thinking You Know Everything
17. Be a Master of Surprise
18. Make It Clear

The time it takes a star to wink

At Real Live Preacher, Gordon Atkinson, a Baptist minister in San Antonio, has posted a rich and moving essay on the spiritual journey. The piece begins with "some signs of spiritual enlightenment":

• The embracing of paradox.
• The love of mystery in the presence of unanswered questions.
• The acceptance of your small place in reality.
• The willingness to engage in spiritual exercises without knowing how they will work or even what it would mean for them to work.
• The increase of the love, grace, forgiveness, and patience visible in your life.

The essay closes with this:

We have won the grandest of lotteries, and yet many of us refuse to take seriously the journey that is our birthright. Instead we sit around in the evenings watching reruns of The Simpsons, bickering over issues that will develop and conclude in the time it takes a star to wink, and picking at the scabs of our old wounds.

(Thanks to Leslie, at Karmic Knowledge, for the link.)

 

Inconvenient party-poopers

Jim Wallis, at God's Politics, posts a terrific quotation, from Thomas Cahill:

Prophets are, by their nature, inconvenient party-poopers. It is a mistaken notion that prophets can see the future. Rather, they tell us what is true right now.

I'm thankful for Karmen

Karmen, at Chaotic Utopia, continues to give us some of the most beautiful images on the Web. Her latest are Thanksgiving-themed. Please have a look.

What is this amazing thing?

At Scientific American's site, Mike Fischetti writes of the phenomenon of emergence in the vast system that is the World Wide Web:

. . . emergent properties are beginning to arise on the Web, and no one is studying how they have blossomed or what they may mean for society. E-mail led to instant messaging, which grew into social networks such as MySpace. The transfer of documents led to file sharing sites such as Napster, which led to user-generated portals like YouTube. Tagging documents with identifying labels is prompting the emergence of a Semantic Web, a global effort to allow computers to recognize not just what online documents are, but what kinds of information they contain and what it might mean. The Semantic Web promises to bring all sorts of useful data to users, not just text and imagery.

Fischetti's article reports on the Web Science Research Initiative, a new partnership of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Southampton. According to Southampton's Wendy Hall, codirector of the initiative,

We want to answer the question: What is this amazing thing that is evolving? Some people liken the Web to a living system. But its evolution is different. Living cells know what they're supposed to be; the Web, however, changes as people change it. The evolutionary pattern itself is constantly changing.