Prospero's Books

With the whole tribe or whole earth in mind

In his book A Time before Deception, Thomas W. Cooper writes (p. 93) that native peoples around the world have "specific moral standards for communication." Those he lists are provocative standards for all of us who speak or write--that is, all of us:

1. listening fully with the heart, no matter how trivial or wrong the discussion may seem;
2. not interrupting another's communication;
3. not walking between conversants;
4. speaking softly, especially to elders;
5. speaking only by invitation when among a group of elders;
6. avoiding slander and defamation of all kinds;
7. communicating as an individual (contributing independent ideas to the council) first, then communicating in synch with the group (once policies have been set);
8. truth-telling;
9. inner communicating (morning and evening sanctification, periods of guidance) must precede outer communicating, openness to the Great Spirit is essential;
10. communicating with the whole tribe or whole earth in mind so as to honor others.

The only eternal bridge

Patricia, at BookLust, quotes from The World To Come by Dara Horn:

"Remember the story you learned as a child: When the hour arrives for us to proceed to the next world, there will be two bridges to it, one made of iron and one made of paper," Peretz intoned. His words were heavy, but his voice floated on rings of smoke, a breath of fire and ash waiting to descend and consume them. Der Nister swallowed, breathing in the master's air. "The wicked will run to the iron bridge, but it will collapse under their weight. The righteous will cross the paper bridge, and it will support them all. Paper is the only eternal bridge. Your purpose as a writer is to achieve one task, and one task only: to build a paper bridge to the world to come."

(Thanks to Changing Places for the link.)

Chalkdust in the atmosphere?

Muji, a chain of stores in Europe and Asia, is selling the beautiful, wooden Blackboard Globe, apparently available by mail in the continental United States, Canada, and the EU for 6.95 British pounds.

An ordinary globe just sits there; there's nothing we can do--short of destruction--to change it. The Blackboard Globe looks like a wonderful way to give children--and adults, too--a big-picture sense of the Earth as something with which we interact, something on which our actions have consequences.

It also looks fun.

(Thanks to moleskinerie for the tip.)

Intricate beauty born out of chaos

Karmen, at Chaotic Utopia, has posted one of her best-ever "Friday Fractals," an Earth-like planet she has formed by plugging a just-right seed number into a fractal formula. She writes:

As I toyed with the different settings, I couldn’t help notice how such intricate beauty was born out of chaos. Now, I could be speaking of the fractal, or of our planet. I’ll let you decide.

(Please check out the video she has posted, of the fractal Earth being formed.)

Ultra Deep

The September-October 2007 issue of Utne includes an article that originally appeared in the July/August 2007 issue of Orion. In it, Anthony Doerr writes about the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image, which he calls "the most incredible photograph ever taken." Taken over several months in 2003 and 2004, the image is an incredibly "deep" high-resolution look at a tiny, tiny section of space. Doerr describes it as "like peering through an 8-foot soda straw."

Doerr says that the photograph "should be in every classroom in the world. It should be on the president's desk. It should probably be in every church, too."

He quotes Einstein:

To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection . . . . this is religiousness.

Doerr concludes

Whatever we believe in--God, children, nationhood--nothing can be more important than to take a moment every now and then and accept the invitation of the sky: to leave the confines of ourselves and fly off into the hugeness of the universe, to disappear into the inexplicable, the implacable, the reflection of that something our minds cannot grasp (92).

(I just noticed that last year I posted a quote from Chet Raymo about the same image.)

Apologies

For the past several days, technical problems have kept some images on this blog from being displayed. Thanks for your patience.

Time to dress for fall

Autumn has come late this year to Indianapolis. Only today did I begin seeing truly spectacular reds and yellows in the trees.

North of here, around the Great Lakes, fall colors come earlier, of course. The European Space Agency has posted a striking photo, taken by the Envisat satellite on September 23, of leaves beginning to change around Lake Superior.

(The title of this posting is from the beautifully erotic lyrics of the song "The Summer Knows," with words by Marilyn and Alan Bergman and music by Michel Legrand.)

 

So do we think in pentametric lines?

I've often heard, and repeated, the assertion that Shakespeare's use of iambic pentameter--indeed any poet's use of iambic pentameter--somehow captures, and elevates, the normal rhythms of English speech. So I'm fascinated by a posting this week by Ron Rosenbaum, author of The Shakespeare Wars.

Rosenbaum quotes one of his readers, an Allan Henderson, who notes that the three seconds taken by a typical spoken iambic pentameter line may be related to the approximately three-second duration of our experience of the present. He credits Stephen Pinker's new book, The Stuff of Thought, for pointing our that "the human experience of the present moment is not a continuous flow,  but a roughly 3-second interval."

Henderson, citing Pinker (and I'm sorry that my attributions get so many layers deep here), writes:

Steven Pinker’s observation about the 3-second present comes from Ernst Poppel, a brain researcher at the University of Munich. Dubbed Poppel’s Law it says that “We take life three seconds at a time.” Poppel illustrates his law by pointing out that a handshake lasts about three seconds. So does the preparation for a golf swing, short-term memory, a phrase in spontaneous speech, the pause when channel surfing for a television program to watch, and  line of poetry. Pinker talks about this on page 189 of his new book THE STUFF OF THOUGHT, where he says “our intuitive conception of time differs from the ceaseless cosmic stream envisioned by Newton and Kant. To begin with, our experience of the present is not an instantaneous instant. Instead, it embraces some minimum duration, a moving window on life in which we apprehend not just the instantaneous ‘now’ but a bit of the recent past and a bit of the impending future.”

Rosenbaum and his commentators also continue a discussion, begun in The Shakespeare Wars, on the wisdom of including a slight break at the end of each spoken iambic pentameter line.

(Thanks to ShakespeareGeek for the reference.)

Bucky's knot

In the early 1970s, in Ann Arbor, I had the delight of attending a lecture by R. Buckminster Fuller. He planted himself "down center," on the edge of the stage's apron, and talked to us, rapidly, without moving, for (I think) two hours. The experience was intoxicating.

I can still see the rope he displayed, made from many different materials spliced together in a line. He tied a knot at one end, then moved the knot along the length of the rope, demonstrating that as the material making up the knot changed, its pattern remained. We are like the rope, he said, changing our molecules over and over again but maintaining the pattern that is us.

He didn't actually have a rope. He pantomimed it as he spoke. But I saw, and can see, it. And the very same knot is now composed not of cotton or nylon or hemp, but of thought and memory.

I was reminded of "Bucky" Fuller by a profile by Stephanie Smith in the September/October 2007 issue of Good magazine, and in an abridged version online.

For those who aren't familiar with Fuller, he was the creator of the now-ubiquitous geodesic dome, as well as hundreds of other things and ideas. Marshall McLuhan, another big-picture thinker of the mid 20th century, called Fuller "the Leonardo da Vinci of our time." Leonardo should be flattered by the comparison.

The great Globe itself

Far Explore has a beautiful set of photographs of Shakespeare's Globe, in London. Their quality is so high that I'm considering several of them for use as wallpaper or screensavers.

I've been teaching about Shakespeare's theatre for years, so when I first walked into the new Globe, I felt an especially eerie sense of deja vu, as if I had somehow walked into a familiar painting.

(Thanks to News on the Rialto for the link.)