Prospero's Books

A falcon, a storm, or a great song

An essay in Slate, by Clive James, on the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) has reminded me to look again at one of my all-time favorite poems, "Ich lebe mein leben," from Rilke's Book of Hours. I love it in part for its evocation of the great spiral, the great chaotic system, that is our lives.

My favorite translation is by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy (see What I've Been Reading), but to avoid seeking permission from them, I'll quote an anonymous translation from the Picture-Poems site:

I live my life in growing rings
which move out over the things around me.
Perhaps I'll never complete the last,
but that's what I mean to try.

I'm circling around God, around the ancient tower,
and I've been circling thousands [of] years;
and I still don't know: am I a falcon, a storm
or a great song.

We are, of course, all three.

(If the translation I've used is copyrighted, please let me know, and I'll remove it.)

Year two begins

Today Prospero's Books begins its second year! Thanks to all of you who have visited, subscribed, and commented.

Beauty, elegance, symmetry

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," wrote Keats in "Ode on a Grecian Urn." In the March 2007 issue of Seed magazine, Associate Editor Joshua Roebke reflects on the beauty-truth relationship. After discussing some of the current limitations on scientific knowledge, he asks:

Could it be we are just too human to ever know something as majestic as absolute truth?

Fortunately, there are other ways to the truth. Mathematicians and physicists (along with artist [sic] and poets) maintain another oft-stated, instinctive faculty for sensing where truth may lie. Consider string theory, for example. String theory is physicists' vogue attempt to to explain the entirety of the universe at its most basic level, to reach the fundamental truth. But critics have derided the theory's proponents for doing little more than beautiful, difficult mathematics with no input from experimentation. As theory has outrun its connection with the real world intuition has stepped in and physicists now rely on a more subjective guide—that of beauty (or elegance, or symmetry) (62-63).

The dance along the artery

The animation company XVIVO has been winning awards for "Inner Life of the Cell," an animation produced for the Molecular and Cellular Biology Program at Harvard. The best-looking version of the film I've seen is at Harvard's own Multimedia Production Site, where it can also be downloaded free for educational purposes.

The film takes my breath away. The only words I can think of to describe it are from T. S. Eliot's "Burnt Norton," the first of his Four Quartets, one of the great spiritual poems of the last century:

The dance along the artery
The circulation of the lymph
Are figured in the drift of stars

Have a look, and you'll see exactly what I mean.

Drifting transformed into pilgrimage

A clipping from the Summer 1992 issue of Noetic Sciences Review carries a short piece on labyrinths by Alan Jones, Dean of Grace Cathedral, San Francisco. Jones writes:

The labyrinth represents the spiritual journey of humanity which does not proceed in a straight line but meanders in seemingly repetitive circles which nevertheless lead to a healing center.

Human beings have long known that their drifting needs to be transformed into pilgrimage (25).

And in a sidebar, Keith B. Critchlow notes:

The labyrinth is itself an astoundingly precise model of the spiritual understanding of the universe. Not only are the exact cosmic rhythms built into it but, as well, the other sacred measures that represent our relationship to the "journey back" to our spiritual wholeness (25).

Global warming

While tracking down more information on Gregg Easterbrook (see my previous post), I came across a 2006 paper he wrote on global warming for the Brookings Institution. It begins with the best one-paragraph summary I've found of the global warming consensus:

Here's the short version of everything you need to know about global warming. First, the consensus of the scientific community has shifted from skepticism to near-unanimous acceptance of the evidence of an artificial greenhouse effect. Second, while artificial climate change may have some beneficial effects, the odds are we're not going to like it. Third, reducing emissions of greenhouse gases may turn out to be much more practical and affordable than currently assumed.

We're improbable, we're here

The February 2007 issue of Wired features a fine group of short essays, by some of the world's best science writers, defining "What We Don't Know." Here's a sample, the beginning of a piece by Gregg Easterbrook on "Where Did Life Come From?":

Natural selection explains how organisms that already exist evolve in response to changes in their environment. But Darwin's theory is silent on how organisms came into being in the first place, which he considered a deep mystery. What creates life out of the inanimate compounds that make up living things? No one knows. How were the first organisms assembled? Nature hasn't given us the slightest hint.

After surveying the history and current state of the problem, Easterbrook concludes:

Did God or some other higher being create life? Did it begin on another world, to be transported later to ours? Until such time as a wholly natural origin of life is found, these questions have power. We're improbable, we're here, and we have no idea why. Or how (108).

MandelSwarm

"Watch two thousand particles swarm towards the boundary of the Mandelbrot Set."

(Thanks to JJ Ventrella for the toy, and to Karmen at Chaotic Utopia for telling us about it.)

A feast in dark midwinter

In the current Indiana Repertory Theatre production of Twelfth Night, the most interesting feature is Jennifer Johansen's Viola.

Of the dozen or so Violas I've seen, all I remember have been playfully plucky, amused by the confusion going on around them. This Viola is much more serious, always aware of the dangers inherent in being a woman, the only (she thinks) surviving member of her family, struggling to survive in an alien land. Amid the zaniness of this Caribbean Illyria, Viola reminds us that Twelfth Night, though a feast day, is still in dark midwinter.
 

The big picture

MSNBC.com has just added seventeen February pictures to its ongoing slide show of incredibly beautiful space photographs. (Click the "Launch" link at the top of the page's right column.) I know no better way to put the day's news in perspective.

(Thanks to The Examining Room of Dr. Charles for the link.)