Consolations of the desert

After watching Patricio Guzmán's Nostalgia for the Light, I read a little about the Atacama desert, and came across this picture of penitentes on the Chajnantor plateau.

The is from a  helpful description by the photographer, or the ESO:

The precise details of the mechanism that forms the penitentes are still not completely understood. For many years, people of the Andes believed [them] to be the result of strong winds prevalent in the mountains. However, the strong winds have only a limited role in shaping these icy pinnacles. Nowadays, it is believed that they are the product of a combination of physical phenomena. 

The process begins with sunlight shining on the surface of the snow. Due to the very dry conditions in these desert regions, the ice sublimes rather than melts — it goes from solid to gas without melting and passing through a liquid water phase. Surface depressions in the snow trap reflected light, leading to more sublimation and deeper troughs. Within these troughs, increased temperature and humidity means that melting can occur. This positive feedback accelerates the growth of the characteristic structure of the penitentes.

The name penitentes comes from a culture with a heavy emphasis on guilt and punishment.  This seems out of keeping with a place so remote from humans. It would be nice to have another name and, while I don't believe in angels either except as figments of the human imagination, I'd rather call them angels.  They remind me little of Paul Klee's In Engleshut, where the several overlapping forms suggest a variety of possibilities, not all of them bad (and not, perhaps, as destructive as Walter Benjamin's vision of the Angelus Novus).

Image: ESO/B. Tafreshi

Awumbuk, Basorexia, and a cognitive passion

Judging by this extract, The Book of Human Emotions by Tiffany Watt-Smith looks like a lot of fun. Whose does not feel better for learning about Awumbuk is the feeling of emptiness after guests depart and Basorexia is the sudden urge to kiss someone? But the section on wonder seems off kilter. Watt-Smitth writes:

With its bewilderment, fear and dazed submission, wonder was thought such an important human experience for God-fearing scholars that when René Descartes made his inventory of the six “primitive passions” in 1649, he gave wonder top billing.

For Descartes, however, wonder was not about bewilderment, fear or dazed submission.  See this by Lorraine Daston:

“Wonder,” Descartes wrote, “is a sudden surprise of the soul,” reserved for what is rare and extraordinary. In his classification, it is the first of the passions, the only one unaccompanied by fluttering pulse or pounding heart. Disinterested but not indifferent, wonder is a cool passion that fixes on objects for what they are, instead of what they are for us. The wonder of wonder consists in the paradox of a cognitive passion: it has all the force of other passions like love or hate, but it helps rather than hinders reason. It is the passion aroused by anomalies, and the anomaly among the passions.

Watt-Smith continues:

In the centuries that followed people have tried to reinvest wonder with the cultural authority it once had...But for most today, curiosity, with its urgent need to discover and explain, has eclipsed slack-jawed wonder as an appropriate emotion.

I'd don't doubt the value of curiosity, but I don't think wonder has lost its 'cultural authority.' Here's John Herschel:

Accustomed to trace the operation of general causes, and the exemplification of general laws, in circumstances where the uninformed and uninquiring eye perceives neither novelty nor beauty, [the scientist] walks in the midst of wonders: every object which falls in his way elucidates some principle, affords some instruction, and impresses him with a sense of harmony and order.

A form of dawning horror

At the most we gaze...in wonder, a kind of wonder which in itself is a form of dawning horror, for somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins.

Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald

Image: Dresden, February 1945.  Via this.  See also these.

The question concerning technology

Fantasies — or nightmares — [such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein] are just stimulants to your imagination. What we should take seriously is the idea that the next stage of history will not only include technological and organisational transformations, but also fundamental transformations in human consciousness and identity. And these could be transformations so fundamental that they will call the very term ‘human’ into question. How long do we have? No one really knows…Some say that by 2050 a few humans will already be a-mortal. Less radical forecasts speak of the next century, or the next millennium. Yet from the perspective of 70,000 years of [behaviourally modern humans] what are a few millennia?

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari (2011)

Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann envisaged situations arising when thinking machines could cease to be either controllable or comprehensible by their makers. Implicitly, they recognised that machines would develop by natural selection -- process without purpose or direction.

The Soul of the Marionette by John Gray (2014)


Photo of sign at start of The Broomway by author

More possibilities than we imagine

We study history not to know the future but to widen our horizons, to understand that our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable, and that consequently we have many more possibilities before us than we imagine.

from Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari (2011)

Image from Mundus Subterraneus by Athanasius Kircher (1665)

A New World

At the beginning of A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1542), Bartolomé de las Casas writes "the marvelous discovery of the Americas...silence[s] all talk of other wonders." Then he reports on one of the worst genocides in recorded history.

About 150 years later, English explorers in North America begin many of their reports with rapturous descriptions of what they find. Andro Linklater writes in Owning the Earth (2014):

The extravagant fertility can be sensed in the language..."the millionous multitudes" of seabird, the "huge flights of wild Turkies," "such infinite Herds of Deare," "innumerable of Pines, tall and good for boards and masts," and forests of oaks with "great Bodies tall and streight from 60 to 80 foot before there be any Boughs in height," all of it fed by soil that was "like to manure" so that "we cannot sett down a foot but tread on Strawberries, raspers, fallen mulberry vines, acchorns, walnutts, saxafras etc."

The waters, too, were wondrous. In The Unnatural History of the Sea (2007), Callum Roberts notes:

Like the rivers in early medieval Europe, those of the New World ran pure and clear through thickly wooded valleys and flood plains that protected the soil from erosion. This newfound clarity must have dazzled people of the seventeenth century used to rivers like the Thames whose refuse-thickened waters slopped London's bridges and embankments.

In some places, according to an account of a 1608 reconnaissance of the Chesapeake tributaries (cited by Roberts), the fish were:

lying so thick with their heads above the water, as for want of nets...we attempted to capture them with a frying pan... 

We spied many of them lurking amongst the weeds on the sands, our captain sporting himself to catch them by nailing them to the ground with his sword, set us all fish in in that manner, by this devise, we took more in an hours than we all could eat.

Image: Map of Virginia by John White, 1585