zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — simultaneity in art, life, theology, war and thought ]
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We rip up the past to make room for the present, we staple the present onto the past, we lose much of the meaning our words and images once had in fragments, snatches and colors…

image credit: MR McDonald

Even the staples eventually rust.

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Still the past can at times be seen in the present, as earlier writing can still be seen in a palimpsest.

The Archimedes Palimpsest is [and I paraphrase] a Byzantine euchologion or prayer book manuscript, thought to have been completed by April 1229, and probably made in Jerusalem. Much of the parchment the scribes used in making the prayer book came from a earlier book of works by Archimedes, including his “On Floating Bodies” – a treatise of which no other copy survives. It seems the Archimedes manuscript dates back to tenth century Constantinople.

image credit: Archimedes Palimpsest Project

Erase Constantinople from your parchment, cut it and rotate it 90°, and you can build Jerusalem in its place. Peer deeply into prayer using multispectral imaging several hundred years later — and you may find combinatorial mathematics dating back more than two millennia…

What you are seeing in this image above is the workings of a mind two centuries BCE, transcribed in the tenth century CE, and made visible beneath and through other writing from the thirteenth, by twenty-first century tech.

So it is that Archimedes speaks to us today.

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A palimpsest, then, is a layering of time on time, and the world we walk and talk in is itself a palimpsest.

image credit: MR McDonald

The enduring, you might say, can be seen through the transient — the zebra crossing through the snow.

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To see two times at once — to see history, accurately or otherwise, as a metaphor for today — is to see simultaneously.

As in Sergey Larenkov‘s celebrated photos, in which World War II and the present day coexist:

image credit: Larenkov, Wrecked tank “Tiger” in Tiergarten park

[ edited to add: Larenkov takes black and white photos from WW II, shoots the same scene in color from the same position today, and masterfully stitches them together digitally to create an image that allows the ghost of the past to seen in the present — brilliant! ]

Here again, as in the magically surreal sculptures of Nancy Fouts, we see the power of mapping one thing onto a kindred other of which Koestler wrote.

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To tie all this back into the question of Which world is more vivid? This, or the next? — Stanley Hauerwas in his book, War and the American Difference: Theological Reflections on Violence and National Identity, suggests:

There is another world that is more real than a world determined by war: the world that has been redeemed by Christ.

He then clarifies his intent in saying:

The statement that there is a world without war in a war-determined world is an eschatological remark. Christians live in two ages in which, as Oliver O’Donovan puts it, “the passing age of the principalities and powers has overlapped with the coming age of God’s kingdom.” O’Donovan calls this the “doctrine of the Two” because it expresses the Christian conviction that Christ has triumphed over the rulers of this age by making the rule of God triumphantly present in the mission of the church. Accordingly the church is not at liberty to withdraw from the world but must undertake its mission in the confident hope of success.

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Indeed, both Christianity and Zen would say that the greatest palimpsest is the palimpsest in which the transient circumstances of one’s life can all but obliterate the imperishable truth that underlies them — a palimpsest whose deepest layers may be read not with x-rays but by insight.

Christ lived in two times, or more accurately, time and eternity — to him the palimpsest was transparent, and thus he spoke (in John 8:58) what I suspect are the most profound five words in the Gospels:

Before Abraham was, I am.

Happy Easter!

[ by Charles Cameron — gaming the future, rethinking thinking, NPS essay contest, mixing drinks ]
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I’d like to introduce what may be a new format for my DoubleQuotes and SPECS. It features two ideas — in this case, the telephone and the game console — which merge into one via some overlap between them — here, the iPhone.

You want the neurosciwence behind all this? Try Fauconnier and Turner‘s The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and The Mind’s Hidden Complexities.

It was a piece by Benjamin Kohlmann in today’s Small Wars Journal titled The Military Needs More Disruptive Thinkers that triggered this post.

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Listen up:

The future lies with those individuals who can see connections across a myriad of professions and intellectual pursuits.  The mind that can see that a phone and entertainment device can be intertwined into something like, say, an iPhone.  Or, an intellect that recognizes how secondary and tertiary networks are often more valuable than first-order relationships, thus creating something like LinkedIn.  Or the strategist who understands that crowdsourced, horizontally structured non-state actors pose a greater threat to our security than Nation states.

That’s from today’s Small Wars Journal piece — and when I read that paragraph, I was way too excited to read the rest, because:

1. That’s what my series of posts [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] on Arthur Koestler‘s notion of intersecting concepts has been all about, and…

2. I’ve been working on a family of games that will train people — pleasurably — in precisely this kind of “overlap” thinking for at least fifteen years now. Don Oldenberg of the Washington Post described one of my games as an “on-line match of ricocheting intellects” back in 1996.

But you’ll be hearing more on #2 in the not too distant, once our team has all its ducks in a row — and black swans permitting.

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Hey, this kind of thinking can get you noticed — it’s what last year’s Naval Postgraduate School Center for Homeland Defense and Security essay contest [link opens .pdf] boiled down to:

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If you’ll permit me a quick detour:

Not only that, it’s also the basis for cocktail hour!

It appears that the Bartender’s Guide was first published in 1862, so bartenders have been doing this — mixing ideas, mixing drinks — for at least a century and a half. Maybe the fact that they work with liquor has something to do with it.

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In any case, isn’t it time for the rest of us to catch up?

The future lies with those individuals who can see connections across a myriad of professions and intellectual pursuits.

[ by Charles Cameron — King Solomon’s battle order in the Qur’an, the speech of ants, science confirms scripture, two possible directions of scriptural interpretation ]
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If I might connect two recent strands of my thinking here on Zenpundit:

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One thing I have been puzzling over is the relationship between highly charged metaphysical realities in battle, and the physical personnel and materiel of war, in posts such as Quantity and Quality: angelic hosts at Badr and / or Armageddon and More “night watch” than “guardian angels” perhaps.

This Qur’anic passage, 27.16-19 which I shall quote in the Marmaduke Pickthall version, presents an interesting “battle order” in this regard:

And Solomon was David’s heir. And he said: O mankind! Lo! we have been taught the language of birds, and have been given (abundance) of all things. This surely is evident favour. And there were gathered together unto Solomon his armies of the jinn and humankind, and of the birds, and they were set in battle order; Till, when they reached the Valley of the Ants, an ant exclaimed: O ants! Enter your dwellings lest Solomon and his armies crush you, unperceiving. And (Solomon) smiled, laughing at her speech, and said: My Lord, arouse me to be thankful for Thy favour wherewith Thou hast favoured me and my parents, and to do good that shall be pleasing unto Thee, and include me in (the number of) Thy righteous slaves.

How’s that? “Armies of the jinn and humankind, and of the birds, and they were set in battle order…”

Note also the Jewish folk-tale concerning King Solomon and the ant… and Rumi’s telling, illustrated above from Walters manuscript W.626

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I have also been talking about mapping the conceptual way-stations that are found in conversations leading to radicalization – but that’s really just a target of opportunity for me, I am interested in mapping concepts in general. Here again, that Qur’anic passage is of interest.

That’s because it “maps” – in a very double-quote-ish way – to recent findings in science, as exemplified by:

Francesca Barbero, Jeremy A Thomas, Simona Bonelli, Emilio Balletto, Karsten Schönrogge, Queen Ants Make Distinctive Sounds That Are Mimicked by a Butterfly Social Parasite, in Science, Vol. 323 no. 5915 pp. 782-785 (2009).

Ants, it appears, talk among themselves, but the voices of their queens are distinctive: and the Maculinea rebeli butterfly larvae can mimic the speech of a Myrmica schencki queen. As reporter Jeremy Hance discussing this study puts it:

While ant vocalizations had not been as widely studied as their chemical communications, the researchers believed this might hold the key to the butterfly’s success. They recorded the vocalizations of both the ant workers and the queens, and discovered significant differences in the queens’ “dominant frequency and overall acoustics”. When the queen’s vocalizations were replayed, worker ants would gather around the caller and guard it. The researchers found that this was “consistent with the exalted status and protection afforded to queens in the hierarchy of a colony”.

Researchers then turned to the parasitical butterfly larvae, whose vocalizations were mimics of their hosts’. However, the scientists discovered that the sounds were 23 to 27 percent closer to the queens’ over the workers’, thus providing them with first-class treatment. While the butterfly larvae may use chemical resemblance to infiltrate the colony, once inside the colony it is the mimicked vocalizations that allow it to rise to the top, often at the expense of its hosts’ offspring.

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So ants talk, and butterfly larvae can communicate with them – successfully enough, in fact, that “living M. rebeli larvae are rescued in preference to ant larvae when a colony is disturbed,” and “nurse workers kill and feed their own brood to the social parasite if food is scarce”.

And so ants talk, and Solomon can understand them – enough so that their concerns about his army bring a laugh to his lips.

And the overlap between those two ideas – one scripturally based and dating back fourteen hundred years, the other a product of recent science – is of the kind that provides confirmation for believers of their belief along these lines:

the Qur’an says that ants speak, now science has shown this to be literally true… and this provides additional evidence that the Qur’an is Truth.

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Here, then, is yet another use of the “overlapping concepts” notion that I’ve explored in posts on Ada Lovelace, and more recently Nancy Fouts, Walter Benjamin, and the confluence of Hamlet and the Heart Sutra in a poem of mine…

Arthur Koestler affirms in The Act of Creation that such intersections are to be found at the heart of tragedy and catharsis, humor and laughter, and discovery and eureka: here we find them providing confirmation for religious belief.

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Such intersections can in practice be read in two directions, as Bernard McGinn notes in the article on Revelation he wrote for Robert Alter and Frank Kermode‘s Literary Guide to the Bible – here’s his comment on Martin Luther‘s interpretive process:

Earlier interpreters, such as Joachim (but not Augustine), had also claimed to find a consonance between Revelation’s prophecies and the events of Church history, but they had begun with Scripture and used it as a key to unlock history. Paradoxically, Luther, the great champion of the biblical word, claimed that history enabled him to make sense of Revelation…

When the overlaps are between scientific knowledge and scriptural statements, believers tend to read science as an empirical support for scripture – they don’t read scripture as supporting the findings of science.

When it comes to prophecy and fulfillment, however, the danger exists that current events will be forced into the Procrustean bed of scripture – as when JF Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and Barack Obama have each in turn been accused of being the Antichrist…

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The bullet image above is available from Way 2 Worship as wallpaper for your computer screen. The verse below it, James 5.11, is the verse the bullet “cites”.

Comedy, tragedy — or inspiration?

[ by Charles Cameron — looking through the eyes of tech, math, art, flies, and intelligence ]
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Imaging the winds and the waters…

I’ve been raising questions about the varieties of ways of seeing here — asking whether guardian angels can be more than guys on night watch and if so what that “more” means, invoking William Blake’s fourfold vision [see move 4], and so forth. And I tend to emphasize the visionary over against the material.

I thought I’d do something different this time, and show you two views of the world that science brings us, that we couldn’t have seen half a century ago unless you were Theodore von Kármán (below, upper image)…

let alone a century ago, unless you were Vincent van Gogh (lower image).

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In descending order, these four images are:

• the winds over a portion of the Americas, as depicted by Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg a few days ago, see also their current live feed
• a NASA image drawn from the Goddard Scientific Visualization Studio‘s Perpetual Ocean animation, hi-res Gulf Stream image
• a diagram of a Kármán vortex street, from Arthur E. Bryson, Jr., Demetri P. Telionis, “Kármán vortex street,” in AccessScience, ©McGraw-Hill Companies, 2008
• and Vincent van Gogh, Starry Night, in the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

The gentleman in the meditation goggles — he calls them “eye-bags” — featured in the “mini-SPECS” section of the Winds and Waters SPECS is my friend David Woolley, who alerted me to these simulations on his Just think of it blog today. David, btw, is the fellow who designed and wrote PLATO Notes, the first permanent, general-purpose online conferencing system, back in 1973.

The eyes features in the “mini-SPECS” of the Kármán / van Gogh SPECS are a fly’s “compound” eyes — “compound meaning that each eye has hundreds of facets (ommatidia or simple eyes).

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And that’s the point, isn’t it?

We as the human community have many eyes, many perspectives — the visionary, the technological, the abstract, the photographic, the artistic, the consensus, the minority opinion — such as that of Mr Justice Douglas in Sierra Club vs Morton, perhaps? …

Our intelligence — our intel too — should build on a rich and wide array of ways of seeing. After all…

… unless the above is just a recruitment slogan.

[ by Charles Cameron — a poem of mine, with continuing exploration of Koestler’s notion of creativity at the intersection of fields, showing how three thoughts are braided in a single polyphony ]
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A Meditation in Time of War
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It is for the artist to see skeleton behind flesh
when depicting war, tho’ beauty too
deserves a hint of her inevitable decay,
flesh being heir to dust and dust its progeny:

nothing is so mechanical visioned in paint
as the tubing that supplies a gas mask with air,
yet the throat is no different, constricted
by an urgency to breathe as breath snuffs out:

gone, gone, paragon, quintessence of dust, svaha!

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William Butler Yeats has a well-known poem with the same title, so I am borrowing from, flattering, and wondering whether I might sneak under the same mantle as a member of the illustrious departed here.

And Madhu, friend and friend of this blog, encouraged me some while back to post poems here on occasion, so this one is for her by way of a response.

I also wanted to post this particular poem here, though, because its last line nicely illustrates the same notion of overlapping or juxtaposed elements that Koestler claims lies at the heart of the creative process which I have been exploring in my recent posts on Klimt, on Nancy Fouts, and constellational thinking.

Because yes, I now have a book project under way, and it concerns the development of a new style of multifaceted, complex / simplex thinking.

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The first lines of my poem were triggered by one of those fleeting glances at a blog logo — in this case, the logo of the Kings of War blog from London, which I’ve shaved down a bit to give you a taste of here:
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It’s impressive, eye-catching — and then you get used to it.

So a couple of nights ago when I glimpsed it, I slowed down enough to take a quick but deliberate look, came away with an impression — not necessarily accurate as to detail, but giving me my emotional response to the piece — and worked and played to get it into words, making this what I believe is technically called an ekphrastic poem, a poem about a painting.

The original painting is a mural — José Clemente Orozco‘s Catharsis (1934), from the Museo Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City.

So that, with a little wandering of the mind, is what gives us the first eight lines. It’s the ninth and last line I want to comment on, here.

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That last line reads:

gone, gone, paragon, quintessence of dust, svaha!

And what’s happening here that delights me, and that gives the poem either a perplexing close or a powerful one, depending on the associations which the reader brings to bear on it, “happens” as follows:

I am letting two, or you might say three, streams of language that are very dear to me braid together in that last line.

There’s the mantra that sums up the entire Prajnaparamita or Perfection of Wisdom literature — a major strand in Buddhist teachings — at the end of the Heart Sutra:

Gate, gate, paragate, parasamgate, bodhi, svaha!

There’s the English translation of the same, which Thich Nhat Hanh explains thus:

Gate means gone. Gone from suffering to the liberation of suffering. Gone from forgetfulness to mindfulness. Gone from duality into non-duality. Gate gate means gone, gone. Paragate means gone all the way to the other shore. So this mantra is said in a very strong way. Gone, gone, gone all the way over. In Parasamgate sam means everyone, the sangha, the entire community of beings. Everyone gone over to the other shore. Bodhi is the light inside, enlightenment, or awakening. You see it and the vision of reality liberates you. And svaha is a cry of joy or excitement, like “Welcome!” or “Hallelujah!” “Gone, gone, gone all the way over, everyone gone to the other shore, enlightenment, svaha!”

— and which I remember from my days at Oxford in Edward Conze‘s much earlier English version:

Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond…

And there’s this, from Hamlet, Act 2 scene 2:

What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

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So “gate, gate, paragate” gives me “gone, gone, paragon…” — and “paragon” brings me to “paragon of animals … quintessence of dust”.

If you have all three of these utterances in mind — and each one of them is memorable the way a passage in Isaiah or Job, or some great Churchillian speech, or phrase in Melville or Dickens can be memorable — they will all three be present, braided together as a single music, a polyphony, a constellation of meanings, in that one last line.

Roll them on your tongue, taste the beauty in each one of them, the nobility, the evanescence of this human life. And now read the poem through again.