Storm & Chicken (test post)

There was a windstorm that blew away all the cattle. All that remained was the basket I laid atop my beloved chicken in the final calm moments before the vortex opened up and swept away all that I had worked for. In the ensuing calm - a deathly calm like the interior of a crypt - I headed outside into the wreckage to see all that I had lost. From the side of what used to be the barn I heard a squawking and discovered my chicken, safe and sound beneath the small unsecured basket I had laid atop her quivering form.

Marijuana dioramas

Lastnight'sdream (like lastnight'sparty but about 1000x cooler - I wonder if anyone's used that already)

Microcosmic 3D landscapes - forest with brook, little hut/house with garden - which opened up out of wooden boxes. (Kinda like those party decorations that are flat round circles and then you open them up and turn them back on themselves and they become delicate spheres.) All the greenery was sculpted out of weed.

Owl of Minerva: Ideal Writing

15 December 2010
I strive for writing purged of all ornament, in which every word is absolutely necessary—purely structural writing. I want every word to matter; I want every sentence to deliver a revelation. I want my writing pulled taut at every scale like a spiderweb. I want to go with all my strength against the world of arbitrariness. My writing ought to be hermetic, each piece a self-enclosed world in which everything makes sense—little castle islands in a sea of trash, microcastles. I need not enclose everthing, but I do need to learn how to enclose.

Owl of Minerva: What Is The Next Frontier?

28 November 2010

What is the next frontier? In technology, the next frontier is smart matter. As Neri Oxman said, materials are the new software. That sounds metaphysical to me. That sounds like Leibniz. There we go: the new frontier is the nano world, the thinking of tiny structures on which everything depends. The new frontier is the search for fractal comprehension, seeing and understanding those identical processes that link together disparate scales. The new frontier is the vertical integration of reality. There can be no movement forward until we abandon, or at least backburner, our insistence on ontological certainty. Any scientist will tell you that scientists make models. They gather data and then formulate models that map onto the data as accurately as possible. To any scientist who is not disingenuous, the notion of “truth” should be meaningless and irrelevant. There is always an epistemological rift, a lacuna of essential heterogeneity, lying between the model and the phenomenon. A good scientist never confuses models of reality with reality itself. But the rest of us tend to make precisely that mistake, and we ought to stop immediately. We need to stop mistaking ways of thinking about reality for reality itself, and then turn our efforts to the question of what is the best way to think about the world. Or, rather, what is a different way to think about the world. We know from Hume and Kant that causality, the principle of interaction whereby the world becomes intelligible, is supplied by the mind itself. So why not try on a different pair of glasses?

And here is what I’m getting at: the world is due for a revival of the analogical paradigm. I no longer think it should supersede science, but it should certainly rap on the window of science’s corner office. The analogical paradigm is the way of thinking about the world such that analogical correspondence, not causality, is the principle of interaction. Mimesis—the unforced force of elective affinity. It yields a logic of inevitability. When something happens, its question is not “What caused this to happen?” but “Why did it have to be this way?” It moves like a strange oozing worm that merges end-to-end and then splits at the middle. Every moment contains the latent image, the master-key, of the next—by the force of affinity it draws toward and into itself what it needs. It completes itself, but by completing itself it also ends itself. The word “complete” means “whole,” but people forget that it can also mean “finished.” Aufhebung: the moment yearns to complete itself, but by completing itself it finishes itself off and becomes a new moment with a new blemish, a new Messiah waiting in the wings, a new lock waiting for the right key.

Owl of Minerva: Sand Constellations

I think about how I need to reclaim a cosmology. I think about some cosmic event on 21 December 2012 that might jazz up the night sky a bit, which makes me think of how the law of perspective is some sort of great equalizer because it makes wildly divergent scales commensurable.

He told me that matter and spirit and nous are all on the same spectrum, that they are all just monads, only in matter the monads are more densely packed and in spirit and nous they are more spread out. I said think of a desert at night, with sand below and stars above. The sand is packed together unintelligibly—the stars have space enough to have formed into constellations. But we should not for that reason worship the night sky, because the sand is only unintelligible for those without eyes to look closer. Sand also forms into tiny constellations. The stars are up there to teach us how to read the constellations of sand. The stars are forever beyond reach—if we spend our whole life looking up at them, and forget about the sand beneath our feet, we’re missing the whole point.