{"id":61440,"date":"2018-12-01T08:02:03","date_gmt":"2018-12-01T08:02:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=61440"},"modified":"2018-12-01T08:02:03","modified_gmt":"2018-12-01T08:02:03","slug":"borders-limina-and-unity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=61440","title":{"rendered":"Borders, limina and unity"},"content":{"rendered":"

[ by Charles Cameron<\/strong> — bulldozers and trains, more ]
\n.<\/p>\n

Watersheds are natural divisions of landmasses, long predating human presence upon the earth. Borders by contrast are a human invention — a fact that is nowhere more evident than in the borders known as the Durand <\/strong>Line, separating Afghanistan from Pakistan, and the Sykes-Picot<\/strong> agreement, which divided up the Ottoman Empire into British, French and Russian spheres of influence. Durand, Sykes and Picot were respectively British, British and French gentlemen. In fact, make that a DoubleQuote<\/strong> (mini):<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And while Pakistan recognizes the Durand line as an international border, Afghanistan does not. ISIS, disliked the Sykes-Picot line dividing Iraq and Syria enough to bulldoze it (upper panel, below)..<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And then there’s the Haskell Free Library and Opera House<\/strong> (lower panel, above)..<\/p>\n

**<\/p>\n

The Haskell Library straddles the US-Canadian border, and has served as a meeting place for Iranians in the US and their relatives, hoping to visit them from the Canadian side<\/a>..<\/p>\n

The library is a relic of a time when Americans and Canadians, residents say, could cross the border with simply a nod and a wave at border agents. It was the gift of a local family in the early 1900s to serve the nearby Canadian and American communities.<\/p>\n

“What we are so proud of is that we do have a library that is accessed by one single door,” said Susan Granfors, a former library board member. “You don’t need your passport. You park on your side, I’ll park on my side, but we’re all going to walk in the same door.”<\/p>\n

But after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the northern border hardened, and the law enforcement presence in the area is immediately visible. And in September, a Canadian man was sentenced to 51 months in prison for smuggling more than 100 guns into Canada, some of them through the Haskell library.<\/p>\n

Still, inside the building itself \u2014 decorated with wood paneling, stained-glass windows and, on the Canadian side, a moose head \u2014 the old ways mostly prevail. Patrons and staff freely cross the international boundary, marked with a thin, flaking black line extending across the brightly decorated children’s reading room and the main hallway.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Library — and Opera House!! — then, erases a border more or less, in a friendly manner, while ISIS erasesd another with force. In bith cases, we can sense a distrust of or distaste for artificial separations.<\/p>\n

**<\/p>\n

Those who are willing to make creative leaps from political geography to the wisdom of the far Orient will recognize the imagery of Pu, the Uncarved Block in Lao Tze<\/strong>‘s Tao Te Ching<\/a> — representing wood in its natural, uncarved state, end thus the whole, of which all entities are seeming parts, separated only by naming. <\/p>\n

G Spencer Brown<\/strong> addresses the same distinction in his book, The Laws of Form<\/a> — described appropriately enough by Wikipedia as “straddles the boundary between mathematics and philosophy” — between what Brown terms the Unmarked state, “which is simply nothing, the void, or the un-expressable infinite represented by a blank space.. No distinction has been made”, and the Marked State, in which one or more distinctions (Marks) have been made:<\/p>\n

In Spencer-Brown’s inimitable and enigmatic fashion, the Mark symbolizes the root of cognition, i.e., the dualistic Mark indicates the capability of differentiating a “this” from “everything else but this.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Spencer Brown notes that a Mark denotes the drawing of a “distinction”, and can be thought of as signifying the following, all at once:<\/p>\n

\n
  • The act of drawing a boundary around something, thus separating it from everything else;\n
  • That which becomes distinct from everything by drawing the boundary;\n
  • Crossing from one side of the boundary to the other.<\/li>\n

    .
    \nAll three ways imply an action on the part of the cognitive entity (e.g., person) making the distinction.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    Brown notes, wryly perhaps<\/p>\n

    As LoF puts it:<\/p>\n

    “The first command:<\/p>\n

  • Draw a distinction<\/li>\n

    can well be expressed in such ways as:<\/p>\n

  • Let there be a distinction,\n
  • Find a distinction,See a distinction,\n
  • Describe a distinction,\n
  • Define a distinction,<<\/li>\n

    Or:<\/p>\n

  • Let a distinction be drawn.”<\/li>\n<\/blockquote>\n

    **<\/p>\n

    My own DoubleQuotes<\/strong> format both draws distinctions (being binary) and erases them by asserting parallelisms between them (unifying or uncarving, unmarking them).<\/p>\n

    \"\"<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    All Spencer Brown quotes above are via Wikipedia<\/a>.<\/p>\n

    **<\/p>\n

    Okay, now there’s news of another diplomatically significant border crossing:<\/p>\n

    \"\"<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    That’s good — and it gives us yet another DQ:<\/p>\n

    \"\"<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    Connecting a prosperous free South with a totalitarian North across a border is a liminal matter, and thus inherently sacred — see my post, Liminality II: the serious part<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

    As we saw with the fall of the Berlin Wall, however, it is possible and maybe Trump <\/strong>and Pompeo <\/strong> — with a little help from Kim Jong-un <\/strong>and Moon Jae-in<\/strong>? — can pull it off.<\/p>\n

    Or maybe, Dennis Rodman<\/strong>?<\/p>\n

    **<\/p>\n

    Sources<\/strong>, some of ’em: <\/p>\n

    \n
  • The Guardian<\/strong>, Railway diplomacy<\/a>\n
  • PRI<\/strong>, For some Iranian families separated by the travel ban<\/a>\n
  • NYRB<\/strong>, The Map ISIS Hates<\/a> — hey, this by Malise Ruthven\n
  • Asia Times<\/strong>, Afghanistan takes center stage<\/a><\/li>\n<\/blockquote>\n

    **<\/p>\n

    Oh, ah, another couple of parallelisms, btw:<\/p>\n

    \"\"<\/p>\n

    \"\"<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    **<\/p>\n

    What’s the cyber border between the US and Russia?
    \n.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    [ by Charles Cameron — bulldozers and trains, more ] . Watersheds are natural divisions of landmasses, long predating human presence upon the earth. Borders by contrast are a human invention — a fact that is nowhere more evident than in the borders known as the Durand Line, separating Afghanistan from Pakistan, and the Sykes-Picot […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[527,133,1143,526,627,859,529,695,1223,319,428,98,502,855,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61440","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-afghanistan","category-book","category-borders","category-charles-cameron","category-doublequotes","category-form","category-games","category-korea","category-liminal","category-map","category-maps-of-war","category-north-korea","category-pakistan","category-tao","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61440","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=61440"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61440\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61469,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61440\/revisions\/61469"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=61440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=61440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=61440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}