Action Potential

"At this moment, in this place, the shifting action potential in my neurons cascade into certain arrangements, patterns, thoughts; they flow down my spine, branch into my arms, my fingers, until muscles twitch and thought is translated into motion; mechanical levers are pressed; electrons are rearranged; marks are made on paper.

At another time, in another place, light strikes the marks, reflects into a pair of high-precision optical instruments sculpted by nature after billions of years of random mutations; upside-down images are formed against two screens made up of millions of light-sensitive cells, which translate light into electrical pulses that go up the optic nerves, cross the chiasm, down the optic tracts, and into the visual cortex, where the pulses are reassembled into letters, punctuation marks, words, sentences, vehicles, tenors, thoughts.

The entire system seems fragile, preposterous, science fictional."

- Ken Liu (1976 - )
The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

Diffusing Into the Air

"See yonder leafless tree against the sky,
How they diffuse themselves into the air,
And ever subdividing separate,
Limbs into branches, branches into twigs,
As if they loved the element, & hasted
To dissipate their being into it."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882)
Collected Poems and Translations

Light All Around

"My first memory is of light,
the brightness of light,
light all around."

-  Georgia O'Keeffe (1887 - 1986)

"No one lights a lamp in order
to hide it behind the door:
the purpose of light is to
create more light, to open
people's eyes, to reveal
the marvels around."

- Paulo Coelho (1947 - )

"Whether in the intellectual pursuits
of science or in the mystical pursuits
of the spirit, the light beckons ahead, and
the purpose surging in our nature responds."

-  Arthur Eddington (1882 - 1944)

Maximizing Play

"In terms of the game theory, we might say the universe is so constituted as to maximize play. The best games are not those in which all goes smoothly and steadily toward a certain conclusion, but those in which the outcome is always in doubt. Similarly, the geometry of life is designed to keep us at the point of maximum tension between certainty and uncertainty, order and chaos. Every important call is a close one. We survive and evolve by the skin of our teeth. We really wouldn't want it any other way."

-  George Leonard (1923 - 2010)

Higher Dialectic

"The efficient or motive principle, which is not merely the analysis but the production of the several elements of the universal, I call dialectic. Dialectic is not that process in which an object or proposition, presented, to feeling or the direct consciousness, is analysed, entangled, taken hither and thither, until at last its contrary is derived. Such a merely negative method appears frequently in Plato. It may fix the opposite of any notion, or reveal the contradiction contained in it, as did the ancient scepticism, or it may in a feeble way consider an approximation to truth, or modern half-and-half attainment of it, as its goal. But the higher dialectic of the conception does not merely apprehend any phase as a limit and opposite, but produces out of this negative a positive content and result. Only by such a course is there development and inherent progress. Hence this dialectic is not the external agency of subjective thinking, but the private soul of the content, which unfolds its branches and fruit organically. Thought regards this development of the idea and of the peculiar activity of the reason of the idea as only subjective, but is on its side unable to make any addition. To consider anything rationally is not to bring reason to it from the outside, and work it up in this way, but to count it as itself reasonable. Here it is spirit in its freedom, the summit of selfconscious reason, which gives itself actuality, and produces itself as the existing world. The business of science is simply to bring the specific work of the reason, which is in the thing, to consciousness."

- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 - 1831)
Science of Logic

Transient Beauty

"The wabi sabi aesthetic ideals which have been employed not just in the tea ceremony but in nearly every form of Japanese artistic expression, have come to represent a bridge between the trappings of the material world and the pull we all feel, to a greater or lesser extent, to a life of austerity and simplicity. If the spirit is ready and willing, then a three-line haiku poem set in the tokonoma (the traditional alcove), complemented by a simple yet perfectly balanced flower arrangement, should be sufficient to push the viewer's awareness to new heights and to help him or her find a serene balance between the joy of life and the inevitability of the waiting void.

...

Wabi sabi is an intuitive appreciation of a transient beauty in the physical world that reflects the irreversible flow of life in the spiritual world. It is an understated beauty that exists in the modest, rustic, imperfect, or even decayed, an aesthetic sensibility that finds a melancholic beauty on the impermanence of things."

- Andrew Juniper
Wabi Sabi: The Japanese Art of Impermanence

The Watcher Joins the River

 

"Eventually, all things merge into one,
and a river runs through it.
The river was cut by the world's great
flood and runs over rocks
from the basement of time.
On some of the rocks are
timeless raindrops. Under the
rocks are the words, and some
of the words are theirs.
I am haunted by waters.
...
I sat there and forgot and forgot,
until what remained was the river
that went by and I who watched...
Eventually the watcher joined the river,
and there was only one of us.
I believe it was the river."

- Norman Maclean (1902 - 1990)

A River Runs Through it and Other Stories

Inner Sound

“Form itself, even if completely abstract ...

has its own inner sound.”

- Wassily Kandinsky (1866 - 1944)

“This idea that there is generality in the

specific is of far-reaching importance.”

- Douglas R. Hofstadter (1945 - )

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

“A map is not the territory it represents, but,
if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory,
which accounts for its usefulness.”

- Alfred Korzybski (1879 - 1950)
Science and Sanity

Secret of the Sea

"My soul is full of longing
for the secret of the sea,
and the heart of the great ocean
sends a thrilling pulse through me."

- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807 - 1882)

"Time is more complex near
the sea than in any other place,
for in addition to the circling
of the sun and the turning
of the seasons, the waves
beat out the passage of time
on the rocks and the tides rise
and fall as a great clepsydra."

- John Steinbeck (1902 - 1968)

Like Lichen on Rock

"Say you could view a time lapse film of our planet: what would you see? Transparent images moving through light, “an infinite storm of beauty.

The beginning is swaddled in mists, blasted by random blinding flashes. Lava pours and cools; seas boil and flood. Clouds materialize and shift; now you can see the earth’s face through only random patches of clarity. The land shudders and splits, like pack ice rent by widening lead. Mountains burst up, jutting, and dull and soften before your eyes, clothed in forests like felt. The ice rolls up, grinding green land under water forever; the ice rolls back. Forests erupt and disappear like fairy rings. The ice rolls up- mountains are mowed into lakes, land rises wet from the sea like a surfacing whale- the ice rolls back.

A blue-green streaks the highest ridges, a yellow-green spreads from the south like a wave up a strand. A red dye seems to leak from the north down the ridges and into the valleys, seeping south; a white follows the red, then yellow-green washes north, then red spreads again, then white, over and over, making patterns of color too intricate to follow. Slow the film. You see dust storms, locusts, floods, in dizzying flash-frames.

Zero in on a well-watered shore and see smoke from fires drifting. Stone cities rise, spread, and crumble, like paths of alpine blossoms that flourish for a day an inch above the permafrost, that iced earth no root can suck, and wither in a hour. New cities appear, and rivers sift silt onto their rooftops; more cities emerge and spread in lobes like lichen on rock. The great human figures of history, those intricate, spirited tissues whose split second in the light was too brief an exposure to yield any image but the hunched shadowless figures of ghosts.

Slow it down more, come closer still.

A dot appears, a flesh-flake.
It swells like a balloon; it moves,
circles, slows, and vanishes.

This is your life."

- Annie Dillard (1945 - )
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek