And Counter-Intuition Replied…

[Video: studio version of “I’ve Seen All Good People,” by Yes]

From whiskey river:

Not a few, but everyone, makes art. There is no art beyond the sensibility of the people confronting it: art is an interaction between object and beholder. The idea of a human being forced to concede the superiority of a work of art without in fact being able to participate in judging that quality is a surrealistic idea. In my area, the coyotes are still the best poets.

(William Stafford)

…and:

learn to say “I don’t know”
learn to say “I can’t say” “I don’t remember”
learn to say nothing

train your memory to fail
recognize that you have the right to make mistakes
to stay mute

insist that the noise in your ears is due merely
to history’s winds or to the changes in pressure
that make mirages out of daily life

(Urszula Koziol, To a Young Man)

…and:

In a dream I meet
my dead friend. He has,
I know, gone long and far,
and yet he is the same
for the dead are changeless.
They grow no older.
It is I who have changed,
grown strange to what I was.
Yet I, the changed one,
ask: “How you been?”
He grins and looks at me.
“I been eating peaches
off some mighty fine trees.”

(Wendell Berry)

Not from whiskey river:

When even the brightest mind in our world has been trained up from childhood in a superstition of any kind, it will never be possible for that mind, in its maturity, to examine sincerely, dispassionately, and conscientiously any evidence or any circumstance which shall seem to cast a doubt upon the validity of that superstition. I doubt if I could do it myself.

(Mark Twain, from “Is Shakespeare Dead?” [source])

…and:

When talking about past, present and future, people all over the world show a tendency to conceive of these notions spatially, [Rafael Nunez, a cognitive-science researcher] said. The most common spatial pattern is the one found in the English-speaking world, in which people talk about the future as being in front of them and the past behind, encapsulated, for example, in expressions such as the “week ahead” and “way back when.” (In earlier research, Nunez found that the Aymara of the Andes seem to do the reverse, placing the past in front and the future behind.)

In their time study with the Yupno [people of Papua New Guinea]… Nunez and colleagues find that the Yupno don’t use their bodies as reference points for time — but rather their valley’s slope and terrain. Analysis of their gestures suggests they co-locate the present with themselves, as do all previously studied groups. (Picture for a moment how you probably point down at the ground when you talk about “now.”) But, regardless of which way they are facing at the moment, the Yupno point uphill when talking about the future and downhill when talking about the past.

Interestingly and also very unusually, Nunez said, the Yupno seem to think of past and future not as being arranged on a line, such as the familiar “time line” we have in many Western cultures, but as having a three-dimensional bent shape that reflects the valley’s terrain.

([source])

…and:

Perhaps the most curious [culture using a “body-tally” system] is the Yupno, the only known Papuan people for whom each individual owns a short melody that belongs to them like a name, or signature tune. They also have a counting system that enumerates the nostrils, eyes, nipples, belly button and climaxes in 31, for “left testicle,” 32, “right testicle” and 33, “penis.” …what is particularly intriguing about the Yupno’s phallic number is that they are actually very coy about it. They refer to the number 33 euphemistically as “the man thing.” Researchers were unable to discover whether women used the same terms, since they are not supposed to know the number system and refused to answer questions. The upper limit in Yupno is 34, which they call “one dead man.”

(Alex Bellos [source])

…and:

An engineer, a physicist, and a mathematician find themselves in an anecdote, indeed an anecdote quite similar to many that you have no doubt already heard. After some observations and rough calculations the engineer realizes the situation and starts laughing. A few minutes later the physicist understands too and chuckles to himself happily, as he now has enough experimental evidence to publish a paper. This leaves the mathematician somewhat perplexed, as he had observed right away that he was the subject of an anecdote and deduced quite rapidly the presence of humor from similar anecdotes, but considers this anecdote to be too trivial a corollary to be significant, let alone funny.

(Anonymous [source])

…and:

Transcendentalism

The professor stabbed his chest with his hands curled like forks
before coughing up the question
that had dogged him since he first read Emerson:
Why am I “I”? Like musk oxen we hunkered
while his lecture drifted against us like snow.
If we could, we would have turned our backs into the wind.

I felt bad about his class’s being such a snoozefest, though peaceful too,
a quiet little interlude from everyone outside
rooting up the corpse of literature
for being too Caucasian. There was a simple answer
to my own question (how come no one loved me,
stomping on the pedals of my little bicycle):

I was insufferable. So, too, was Emerson I bet,
though I liked If the red slayer think he slays—
the professor drew a giant eyeball to depict the Over-soul.
Then he read a chapter from his own book:
naptime.
He didn’t care if our heads tipped forward on their stalks.

When spring came, he even threw us a picnic in his yard
where dogwood bloomed despire a few last
dirty bergs of snow. He was a wounded animal
being chased across the tundra by those wolves,
the postmodernists. At any moment
you expected to see blood come dripping through his clothes.

And I am I who never understood his question,
though he let me climb to take a seat
aboard the wooden scow he’d been building in the shade
of thirty-odd years. How I ever rowed it
from his yard, into my life — remains a mystery.
The work is hard because the eyeball’s heavy, riding in the bow.

(Lucia Perillo [source])

___________________________

Note: The Missus and I are in Miami at the moment — about the most counter-intuitive place for me to be, anyhow — which explains several things: (1) the lateness of this post; (2) the more-or-less static video (no facility for actually uploading to the audio-player thingum I usually use); (3) the generally scattered “feel” of the post. And now that I think about it, “I’ve Seen All Good People” is probably a sort of counter-intuitive musical selection for me.