Touchstones and Palimpsests

"We’re so caught up in our everyday lives that events of the past, like ancient stars that have burned out, are no longer in orbit around our minds. There are just too many things we have to think about every day, too many new things we have to learn. New styles, new information, new technology, new terminology … But still, no matter how much time passes, no matter what takes place in the interim, there are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away. They remain with us forever, like a touchstone."

- Haruki Murakami (1949 - )
Kafka on the Shore

The panels of this triptych are "digital double exposures" of images taken at two very different times and places: the foreground consists of photographs of reeds in a pond and a tree basking in a warm sun one autumn day in 2003 at one of my favorite little parks near where my mom used to live on Long Island (before passing away in 2017); the background consists of splotches of paint I found on an old tire that was bobbing up and down in the Port of Piraeus in Athens, Greece in the summer of 2008 as my wife and I were waiting for a boat-ride to Santorini. The fusion of images serves as both touchstone and palimpsest, tinged with melancholy and hope. Melancholy, because ever since my mom's passing, the little park has become less a place to visit, and more a ghostly memory of times past; and the Athenian splotches of paint serve only to strengthen my wife's and my own longing for trips to "faraway places" that - before the pandemic - we used to take for granted. And hope, because though such memories of times and places are indeed ghostly, they also point to happy experiences yet to arrive. Memories fade, but meaning only deepens.   

"It is as if the Caru'ee were able
to perceive an echo of the past,
and unconsciously, as they built
upon a palimpsest of books written
long ago and long forgotten,
chanced to stumble upon an essence
of meaning that could not be lost,
no matter how much
time had passed." 

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

Silence

“How to be a Poet
(to remind myself)

i

Make a place to sit down.

Sit down. Be quiet.

You must depend upon

affection, reading, knowledge,

skill—more of each

than you have—inspiration

work, growing older, patience,

for patience joins time

to eternity…

ii

Breathe with unconditional breath

the unconditioned air.

Shun electric wire.

Communicate slowly. Live

a three-dimensional life;

stay away from screens.

Stay away from anything

that obscures the place it is in.

There are no unsacred places;

there are only sacred places

and desecrated places.

iii

Accept what comes from silence.

Make the best you can of it.

Of the little words that come

out of the silence, like prayers

prayed back to the one who prays,

make a poem that does not disturb

the silence from which it came.”

- Wendell Berry (1934 - )
 Given

Looking Inward

"He sees the truth as with a jolt. There it is, within his own being, lying deep down but still in his own self. There never was any need to travel anywhere to find it; no need to visit anyone who was supposed to have it already, and sit at his feet; not even to read any book, however sacred or inspired. Nor could another person, place, or writing give it to him; he would have to unveil it for himself in himself. The others could direct him to look inwards, thus saving all the effort of looking elsewhere. But he himself would have to give the needful attention to himself. The discovery must be his own, made within the still center of his being."

- Paul Brunton (1898 - 1981)
Advanced Contemplation: The Peace Within You

Mind at Large

"To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funnelled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he or she has been born -- the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to he accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it be-devils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things."

- Aldous Huxley (1894 - 1963)

Life & Entropy

"When things don't change any longer,
that's the end result of entropy,
the heat-death of the universe.
The more things go on moving,
interrelating, conflicting, changing,
the less balance there is -
and the more life."

- Ursula K. Le Guin (1929 - 2018)

The Lathe of Heaven

Agencies of Magic

"A retired English working-man is sitting at his table with his wife and a friend, a returned British sergeant-major from India. The sergeant-major shows his hosts an amulet in the form of a dried, wizened monkey’s paw... [which has] the power of granting three wishes to each of three people... The last [wish of the first owner] was for death... His friend... wishes to test its powers. His first [wish] is for 200 pounds. Shortly thereafter there is a knock at the door, and an official of the company by which his son is employed enters the room. The father learns that his son has been killed in the machinery, but that the company... wishes to pay the father the sum of 200 pounds... The grief-stricken father makes his second wish -that his son may return- and when there is another knock at the door... something appears... the ghost of the son. The final wish is that the ghost should go away. In these stories, the point is that the agencies of magic are literal-minded... The new agencies of the learning machine are also literal minded. If we program a machine... and ask for victory and do not know what we mean by it, we shall find the ghost knocking at our door."

A "updated" fable of the Monkey's Paw,
as quoted in a recent paper on Superintelligence 

Imperceptible Chains

"If man made himself the first object of study, he would see how incapable he is of going further. How can a part know the whole? But he may perhaps aspire to know at least the parts to which he bears some proportion. But the parts of the world are all so related and linked to one another, that I believe it impossible to know one without the other and without the whole.

Man, for instance, is related to all he knows. He needs a place wherein to abide, time through which to live, motion in order to live, elements to compose him, warmth and food to nourish him, air to breathe. He sees light; he feels bodies; in short, he is in a dependent alliance with everything. To know man, then, it is necessary to know how it happens that he needs air to live, and, to know the air, we must know how it is thus related to the life of man, etc. Flame cannot exist without air; therefore to understand the one, we must understand the other.

Since everything then is cause and effect, dependent and supporting, mediate and immediate, and all is held together by a natural though imperceptible chain, which binds together things most distant and most different, I hold it equally impossible to know the parts without knowing the whole, and to know the whole without knowing the parts in detail."

- Blaise Pascal (1623 - 1662)