Robinson Jeffers (excerpted from The Great Explosion, and The Beginning and the End)

the whole universe expands and contracts, beats like a great heart ...

diastole and systole

peace in our time was never one of God's promises; but back and forth, die

and live, burn and be damned,

the great heart beating, pumping into our arteries His

terrible life.

 He is beautiful beyond belief.

and we, God's apes--or tragic children--share in the

 beauty. we see it above our torment, that's what life's for.

He is no God of love, no justice of a little city like

 Dante's Florence, no anthropoid God

making commandments: this the God who does not

 care and will never cease. look at the seas there

flasing against this rock in the darkness--look at the

 tide-stream stars--and the fall of nations--and

 dawn

but why would life maintain itself,

being nothing but a dirty scum on the sea

dropped from foul air? could it perhaps perceive

glories to come? could it foresee that cellular life

would make the mountain forest and the eagle dawning,

monstrously beautiful, wings, eyes and claws, dawning

over the rock ridge? and the passionate human intelligence

straining its limits, striving to understand itself and the

unvierse to the last galaxy--

having made of many

one cell

they invented chlorophyll and ate sunlight, cradled in peace

on the warm waves; but certain assassins among them

discovered that it was easier to eat flesh

than feed on lean air and sunlight; thence the animals

greedy mouthes and guts, life robbing life,

grew from the plants; and as the ocean ebbed and

flowed many plants and animals

were stranded in the treat marshes along the shore,

where many died and some lived

from these grew all land-life

plants, beasts and men; the mountain forest and the mind of Aeschylus

and the mouse in the wall

what is this thing called life? ---but i believe

that the earth and stars too, and the whole glittering

universe, and rocks on the mountain have life,

only we do not call it so--i speak of the life

that oxidizes fats and proteins and carbo

hydrates to live, and from that chemical energy

makes pleasure and pain, wonder, love, adoration, hatred

and terror: how do these things grow

from a chemical reaction?

i think they were here al-

ready. i think the rocks

and the earth and the other planets, stars and

galaxies have their various consciousness, all things are conscious;

but the nerves of an animal, the nerves and brain

bring it to focus; the nerves and brain are like a burning-

glass

to concentrate the heat and make it catch fire:

it seems to us martyrs hotter than the blazing hearth

from which it came. so we scream and laugh, clamorous

animals

born howling to die groaning: the old stones in the door-

yard

prefer silence: but those and all things have their own

awareness,

as the cells of a man have; they feel and feed and in-

fluence each other, each unto all,

like the cells of a man's body making one being,

they make one being, one consciousness, one life, one

God

Enallagma aspersum

Azure Bluet

Enallagma aspersum (Hagen, 1861)

http://www.eol.org/pages/987196

caught a picture of this july 20th while sitting at the mines of spain in dubuque, iowa overlooking the mississippi. looked this damselfly and its lover were mating. it has an interesting technique of eating. it flies very rapidly dashing around. after it gathers a small piece of food it sits still and uses the far end of its tail (the tip that is black near segment 10) to feed itself at the mouth (segment 1). since this is peak season for these little guys, it isn't too much of a surprise that i saw them flying around. nonetheless, 'tis a beautiful specimen.

Magnificent Ruin

Magnificent Ruin

june playlist

some tunes i've stumbled across in recent days...

CREEP - you f/ nina sky
blawan - getting me down
blood orange - dinner
delorean - grow (taragana pyjarama remix)
disclosure - carnival
grimes - heartbeats (laurel halo remix)
ifan dayfdd - no good
james blake - to care (like you) (poppa mint remix)
machinedrum - TMPL
SBTRKT - wildfire
the goat - what a life i dream (balam acab remix)
holy other - touch
washed out - eyes be closed (grimes remix)
gil scott-heron and jamie xx- new york is killing me

also foals (total life forever), holy other (with u), blood orange, 116 and rising, baths (cerulean), darkstar (north), and balam acab (see birds ep) have been treating me well.

Social Scientific Methodology (I am...)

Though this is surely just Derrida ranting, as I hear from most that he usually does, I find it interesting about what he says regarding the concept of belief and how it's exposed though our language, specifically "I am." In the social sciences, particularly (yes, I'm calling you out Carl Couch) in the New Iowa School (Symbolic Interactionism in Sociological Social Psychology), we attempt to measure identity through this methodology. Essentially, you are handed a questionnaire and asked to respond to twenty blanks that start with "I am." Though you have probably already thought of some critiques that could blunder this method already, let me tell you my favorite. First off, this is a culturally bias scientific methodology. In Spain, for instance, identity is a rarely posited quandary in comparison with the hypertextuality of the internet and/or (generally speaking) the more postmodern U.S world of academics. I only suppose this, because I get very shallow, half-baked responses from just about anyone that hasn't studied philosophy. In fact, it has become a hobby of mine in recent months to raise the question of what exactly it means to be Andaluz, Córdobes, or Spanish. I plan on pursuing this in the future as a research interest depending on whether or not I can find an adequate method to pin down the problem. In any case, if I were to attempt to use this method I would come to the immediate problem of wondering what to translate. If you are not familiar, in Spanish you can express first-person meaning through Ser or Estar, the former being more permanent and the latter more temporal, to put in ratter general and speciously. In English, the meaning is not definite, but supposed in the question posited (at least in this context, which Derrida would also have something to say about). I would assume to translate this to Ser, therefore solidifying that an identity is a more permanent clause, which negates to at least some degree the work of Goffman (our ability to act out our role in relation to the situation) and symbolic interactionism in general.

Obviously, we find the gaping flaw inherent in Sociological identity research. I have always argued its ignorance to temporality and lack of principles inherent in Process Philosophy, which is rather ironic considering Pierce and Dewey's grand influence in both schools of thought. Have we completely ignored the work of Jung, Gilbert Simondon and Bernard Steigler, whose work on individuation, has demonstrated these methodologies fallacious? Are we really trying to capture something that is clearly too dynamic and complex to nail down in a questionnaire like that? Certainly we, as scientists, must come to a more adequate way of dealing with methodology and going beyond language to understand the neural mechanisms that underpin the thoughts and, thus, identities that cause our behavior. Furthermore, we must understand what mechanisms we need to reproduce them via technology, like cyberneticist Norbert Weiner. Sure, easier said than done, but why do we sit around and watch while the "real doctors" do all of the work?

Orla Barry & Rui Chafes at Museu Colecção Berardo

Iberian Essence and Existential Intimacy

O poeta é um fingidor

Finge tão completamente

Que chega a fingir que é dor

A dor que deveras sente

The poet is a faker

Who's so good at his act

He even fakes the pain

Of pain he feels in fact.

                    Fernando Pessoa

Não sou nada 

Nunca serei nada 

Não posso querer ser nada 

À parte isso, tenho em mim

todos os sonhos do mundo

I am nothing

I shall never be anything 

I can't want to be anything

Apart from this, I have in me

all the dreams in the world

                      Álvaro de Campos 

I spent this three days in Lisboa, Portugal with a couple of my Italian friends, the German dame I went to Tenerife with, and my good American friend Charlie. I found it rather inspiring, especially after coming across the latter of these two poems. I had never heard of Fernando Pessoa before, but I look forward to dabbling further into his work. The poem, with an essence difficult to reproduce in English because of its awkward phrasing, meshes quite well with a lot of things going on in my life right now since I am, first off, reading The Stranger by Albert Camus, and, secondly, feeling this existential angst provoked by a constant discontent seemingly inherent in my gene-pool (only half-kidding). I might add this isn't anything serious (at least in terms of physical reality), but rather a ruminant perpetuation in line largely with what I read from continental philosophers, who I have a great interest in since I was roughly 17. It's rather interesting the widespread influence of such ideology in our films (e.g. recently viewed Abre Los Ojos or I Heart Huckabees) and the like, but even more interesting the drastic difference in what people take from it and how they implicate it in their lives. Regardless, take a gander at some of Pessoa's work and if you get a chance to visit Lisboa, I highly suggest you do so. I was struck by the beauty of its language (though I'm sure some beg to differ), and was simply amazed by its modern and contemporary art museum at the Museu Colecção Berardo near the Belém Tower. Carlos Lobo and Mário Macilau's exhibits were incredible and especially inspiring, as I have been pondering a trip to Africa or Eastern Europe, in order to take photographs and to study the gypsy folk-music culture of the Roma in the Ukraine in the former, or to photograph native tribes and volunteer in the latter case (a little less though out). Of course, this is pending due to financial concerns and acceptance to an appropriated institution in the coming summer. It seems like an obligatory end to fulfill and, again, something that needs to be confronted in order to deal with my recent and/or long-lasting existential meditations. Vamos a ver en el año que viene.