A small but crucial part of everywhere

     Three movements of Symphony 41 pass by...And then the finale, its four modest notes. Do, re, fa, mi: half a jumbled scale. Too simple to be called invented. But the thing spills out into the world like one of those African antelopes that fall from the womb, still wet with afterbirth but already running.
     Young Peter props up on his elbows, ambushed by a memory from the future. The shuffled half scale gathers mass; it sucks up other melodies into its gravity. Tunes and countertunes split off and replicate, chasing each other in a cosmic game of tag. At two minutes, a trapdoor opens underneath the boy. The first floor of the house dissolves above a gaping hole. Boy, stereo, speaker boxes, the love seat he sits on: all hang in place, floating on the gusher of sonority pouring into the room.
      Five viral strands propagate, infecting the air with runaway joy. At three and a half minutes, a hand scoops  Peter up and lifts him high above the blocked vantage of his days...
      At six minutes into the amazement, the give galloping melodies align in a quintuple fugue. Lines echo and overlap, revealing where the music has been heading from the opening Do. They plait together too tightly for Peter's ear to make out everything that happens inside the five-way weave. The sound surrounds him, and Peter is immanent, inside it all, a small but crucial part of everywhere...

-- from Orfeo by Richard Powers (2014)

Dream maps

Aboriginal paintings are maps of land. It is necessary, however, to define precisely what is meant by a 'map' in this context. The danger is in transferring too literally a Western concept of topographical map on to Aboriginal cultural forms and making them into something they are not. Paintings are often discussed as if they were bird's-eye views of particular areas of land, as though reflecting an Aboriginal tradition of aerial photography. Seeing Aboriginal paintings from this perspective is superficially inviting because it provides a way in which people from another culture can find meaning in Aboriginal art. It is possible to relate nearly all Aboriginal art to landscape. But taken too far the analogy between Aboriginal art and maps can mislead because it oversimplifies and gives the wrong emphasis.

From an Aboriginal perspective the land itself is a sign system. The Dreamtime ancestors existed before the landscape took form; indeed, it is they who conceived it and gave it meaning. Rather than being topographical representations of landforms, Aboriginal paintings are conceptual representations which influence the way in which landscape in understood. When Aboriginal paintings do represent features of the landscape, they depict them not in their topographical relations to one another but in relation to their mythological significance.

-- from Aborginal Art by Howard Morphy (1998)

Image: Warlugulong (1976) by Clifford Possum and Tim Leura via NGV.

P.S. A comment from 2007 by Andrew Ray on the work of Rover Thomas.

Wondrous strange

In Hamlet the appearance of the ghost of the dead king leads Horatio to say, “O day and night, but this is wondrous strange.” The unexpected he calls by both its names: wondrous and strange...Hamlet answers him with a remarkable line that picks up Horatio's phrase “wondrous strange.” He says, “And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.” The moment of wonder or the appearance of a stranger is the classic opportunity for fear. Yet just as hospitality makes the stranger welcome and testifies to the empirical experience that on the whole this has not proved disastrous, so too the experience of wonder welcomes the strange as a stranger is welcomed. 

from Wonder, the Rainbow and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences by Philip Fisher (1998)


Image: Brocken spectre with a glory. Σ64 via wikimedia

"Surfing for the sublime"

Volunteers for Isis are surfing for the sublime and all that is lacking in the jaded, tired world of democratic liberalism, especially on the margins where Europe’s immigrants mostly live. Many are just “vacationers” for jihad, going to Syria over school breaks or holidays for the thrill of adventure and a semblance of glory. The beheadings are doing what the images of the collapsing twin towers did for al-Qaida, turning terror into a display of triumph over and through death and destruction. In Burke’s sense, a display of the sublime. As philosopher Javier Gomá Lanzón recently mused: is this sense of the sublime part of Isis’s attraction? Is the west’s failing its cynicism about a visceral rather than purely intellectual quest for meaning?

-- from Jihad's Fatal Attraction by Scott Atran

Update 15 Jan 2015: interview with Atran in Nature.

The Lady of the Cold

They went out on to the landing-stage and sniffed towards the sea, The evening sky was green all over, and all the world seemed to be made of thin glass. All was silent, nothing stirred, and slender stars were shining everywhere and twinkling in the ice. It was terribly cold.

Yes, she's on her way, said Too-ticky. “We'd better get inside.”...

Far out on the ice came the Lady of the Cold, She was pure white, like the candles, but if one looked at her through the right pane she became red, and seen through the left one she was pale green.

Suddenly Moomintroll felt the pane become so cold that it hurt, and he drew back his snout in rather a fright.

They sat down by the stove and waited.

“Don't look,” said Too-ticky...

The Lady of the Cold was walking past the bathing-house. Perhaps she did cast an eye through the window, because an icy draught suddenly swept through the room and darkened the red-hot stove for a moment. Then it was over...

The Lady of the Cold was standing by the reeds. Her back was turned, and she was bending down over the snow.

“It's the squirrel.” said Too-ticky. “He's forgotten to keep at home.”

The Lady of the Cold turned her beautiful face towards the squirrel and distractedly scratched him behind one ear. Bewitched, he stared back at her, straight into her cold blue eyes. The Lady of the Cold smiled and continued on her way.

But she left the foolish little squirrel lying stiff and numb with all his paws in the air...

“He's quite dead,” said Little My matter-of-factly...

“At least he saw something beautiful before he died,” said Moomintroll in a trembling voice...

“This squirrel will become earth all in his time” [said Too-ticky kindly]. “And still later on there'll grow trees from him, with new squirrels skipping about in them...”

-- from Moominland Midwinter by Tove Jansson (1957)

Das Nichts etwast

Quantum Field Theory, writes Alan Lightman, explains how all of space is filled up with 'energy fields,' usually called just 'fields' by physicists:

There is a field for gravity and a field for electricity and magnetism, and so on. What we regard as physical 'matter' is the excitation of the underlying fields. A key point is that according to the laws of quantum physics, all of these fields are constantly jittering a bit—it is an impossibility for a field to be completely dormant—and the jittering causes subatomic particles like electrons and their antiparticles, called positrons, to appear for a brief moment and then disappear again, even when there is no persistent matter. Physicists call a region of space with the lowest possible amount of energy in it the 'vacuum.' But the vacuum cannot be free of fields. The fields necessarily permeate all space. And because they are constantly jittering, they are constantly producing matter and energy, at least for brief periods of time. Thus the 'vacuum' in modern physics is not the void of the ancient Greeks. The void does not exist. Every cubic centimeter of space in the universe, no matter how empty it seems, is actually a chaotic circus of fluctuating fields and particles flickering in and out of existence on the subatomic scale. Thus, at the material level, there is no such thing as Nothingness.

Remarkably, the active nature of the 'vacuum' has been observed in the lab. The principal example lies in the energies of electrons in hydrogen atoms, which can be measured to high accuracy by the light they emit. According to quantum mechanics, the electric and magnetic field of the vacuum is constantly producing short-lived pairs of electrons and positrons. These ghostlike particles pop out of the vacuum into being, enjoy their lives for about one-billionth of one-billionth of a second, and then disappear again.

Image: Shiki 1 by Azuma Makoto via Smithsonian

A fragile project of making sense

The feeling of intelligibility is like an ocean surrounding the small island of things we truly know

...We are engaged in an ongoing fragile project of making sense

from Wonder, the Rainbow and the Aesthetics of Rare Experience by Philip Fisher (1998)


Image: clouds and shadows from the International Space Station. Image by Alexander Gerst via Colossal