Douglas Hofstadter

Regarding Incongruity — Baffled, Maybe, But with Eyes Wide Open

May 7, 2021 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Now Hiring Parts,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) For some rumination about the photo, in the context of incongruities, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

Dear Friend
(excerpt)
I become each day more reckless,
too impatient for summer, the unbearable heat,
the calm that comes with it. There are no hills here,
not one, and I’m bored with the stillness
of the yellow field outside my window. And you,
who cannot keep still, who can never
look back, where will you go next?
How will I find you?
Can you feel the world pull
apart, the seams loosen?
What, tell me, will keep it whole,
if not you? if not me?
Send a postcard, picture, tell me
how you’ve been.

(Blas Falconer [source])

…and:

Now, as far as I was concerned, there are two ways of living, and because we’re on a ball in space these were more or less exactly poles apart. The first, accept the world as it is. The world is concrete and considerable, with beauties and flaws both, and both immense, profound and perplexing, and if you can take it as it is and for what it is you’ll all but guarantee an easier path, because it’s a given that acceptance is one of the keys to any kind of contentment. The second, that acceptance is surrender, that there’s a place for it, but that place is somewhere just before your last breath where you say All right then, I have tried and accept that you have lived and loved as best you could, have pushed against every wall, stood up after every disappointment, and until that last moment, you shouldn’t accept anything, you should make things better.

(Niall Williams [source])

—

Not from whiskey river:

Although nobody planned it that way, most of us wind up emerging from adolescence with a deeply nuanced sense of what is real, with shades of gray all over the place. (However, I have known, and probably you have too, reader, a few adults for whom every issue that strikes me as subtle seems to them to be totally black-and-white — no messy shades of gray at all to deal with. That must make life easy!) Actually, to suggest that for most of us life is filled with “shades of gray” is far too simple, because that phrase conjures up the image of a straightforward one-dimensional continuum with many degrees of grayness running between white and black, while in fact the story is much more multidimensional than that.
All of this is disturbing, because the word “real”, like so many words, seems to imply a sharp, clear-cut dichotomy. Surely it ought to be the case that some things simply are real while other things simply are not real. Surely there should be nothing that is partly real — that wouldn’t make sense! And yet, though we try very hard to force the world to match this ideal black-and-white dichotomy, things unfortunately get terribly blurry.

(Douglas R. Hofstadter [source])

…and:

The Festival of Almost Getting There
At the festival of almost getting there
Zeno pokes his head out halfway, asks
directions, half-heartedly, to the train,
admits he’s been riding on the tortoise,
been running after arrows to watch them
stand still. He understands course, path,
way, even relative position (dichotomize,
divide) but motion’s still a figment:
distance halved and halved (split infinity,
twin trajectory) the long, long way, and all
that longing (two-fold, doubled) (moments,
instants, continuous or discrete) for some
unfamiliar end—such unforgiving progress,
portioned, yes, bisected. A half-assed effort?
No, he’s as good as got it. So much struggle
and amends. Sure, we’re goddamned tired of
this much waiting, but look! He’s halfway there.

(Renée Ashley [source])

__________________________

About the photo: The caption to this entry in my #jesstorypix collection on Instagram: “In retrospect, the HR manager at the heavy-equipment retailer decided, the Spring 2021 recruitment campaign had been quite misguided. If only he’d known the psychiatrist residing next door was THE ‘Hannibal Lecter’…”

Most often, I think of puns as “verbal coincidences”: two meanings just happen to collide at an intersection shaped like a single unit of sound. But “getting” a pun also relies on choosing fun over common sense: not doing the possibly difficult work of choosing “rightly” or “wrongly,” but just lazily recognizing the existence of a choice at all: a choice between the superficial “meaning” of an arbitrary passage (word, phrase, sentence) and the, other, generally more interesting and, well, profound and true meaning. Asserting “I don’t get puns” means, in effect, “I recognize the alternatives, but why should I skip between them when I can simply walk?” But taking just such a sprightly and incongruous leap — from word to word, from concept to concept — is the whole point… not just of puns but of any jokes. No?

[Aside: as clever visitors will have noticed, the very first word in this post’s title is a bit of a pun (albeit not an especially sprightly one): (a) “regarding,” in jargon-speak for “concerning the matter of…”? or (b) “regarding,” literally looking at and taking the measure of?]

[back to top]

“I Do Know That I Know What I Know, Because I Know I Do”

March 15, 2019 by John 4 Comments

[Image: “When I Grow Up I Want to Be A Ballerina. No, An Astronomer. No, A Ballerina.,” by Tom Waterhouse. Found on Flickr, and used here under a Creative Commons license. (Thank you!)]

From whiskey river:

What do we know for sure? That’s the real question. That’s what the cogito is. That’s what solipsism is. This isn’t theory. This isn’t belief or faith. This is the basic fact of existence. It’s all about figuring out exactly what we know for certain as opposed to everything else. It’s truly amazing that something so glaringly obvious and irrefutable is so universally ignored by science and philosophy and religion.

(Jed McKenna [source])

…and:

We don’t live our lives by choice, but by default. We play the roles we are born to. We don’t live our lives, we dispose of them. We throw them away because we don’t know any better. And the reason we don’t know any better is because we never asked. We never questioned or doubted. Never stood up. Never drew a line. We never walked up to our parents or our spiritual advisers or our teachers or any of the other formative presences in our early lives and asked one simple. honest, straightforward question. The one question that must be answered before any other question can be asked:
“What the hell is going on here?”

(Jed McKenna [source])

[Read more…]

…And So Seeing the Radiance

January 11, 2019 by John Leave a Comment

[Images: “Non-Geometric Geometry #1 (color) and #2 (black-and-white,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) These two images were the starting and ending points of a series, in which I gradually drained color from the original (top). As the color palette shrank, I realized where I’d seen this kind of geometry before: photographs taken in wind tunnels. Later, examining actual wind-tunnel photos, I discovered that it wasn’t those after all… but I know I’ve seen it somewhere! First person to answer the riddle for me (runningaftermyhat AT johnesimpson DOT com) gets a free professional print of either of these two shots. Seriously — it’s driving me crazy!]

From whiskey river:

In preparing this memoir, I have stuck to facts except when facts refused to conform with memory, narrative purpose, or the truth as I prefer to understand it. Wherever liberties have been taken with names, dates, places, events and conversations, or with the identities, motivations and interrelationships of family members and historical passages, the reader is assured that they have been taken with due abandon.

[…]

In a weird way, it’s a memoir of not my life, but my imaginative life, like a history of my imagination.

(Michael Chabon [source])

…and (italicized lines):

Shaving in the Dark

How old is the sun today

Where are the shoes of yesteryear

What an evil potato goes through
we can never know, but
I’m beginning to resemble one

Ah, a little light now

It is the hour
the moment
when it becomes possible
to distinguish a white
thread from a black,
so prayer begins

I see a shadowy reflection now our fingers touch

There’s nothing like what is

fragile and momentary
as the pale yellow light along the windowsill
in winter north
of nowhere yet
if not for winter, nothing
would get done

would finally get done

I’ve been all around this world

and not to die in hell
not to die in the flames of hell homeless with a cell phone
please

There’s nothing like today

And contributing one’s atoms to the green universe
how strange is that

and some have managed to live in a constant awareness
that all things, every evil thing
will be forgotten, neglecting
to mourn for every radiant thing, and so seeing
the radiance

(Franz Wright [source])

…and:

When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of elimination: once you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogma, the truths that are not your own but other people’s, the mottos, the slogans, the out-and-out lies of your nation, the myths of your historical moment—once you have removed all that warps experience into a shape you do not recognize and do not believe in—what you are left with is something approximating the truth of your own conception.

{Zadie Smith [source])

[Read more…]

What We’ll Never Leave Behind (Until We So Often Do)

September 1, 2017 by John Leave a Comment

[Video: “September When It Comes,” by Rosanne Cash; performance by Rosanne and Johnny Cash. (Lyrics)]

From whiskey river:

Lines Lost Among Trees

These are not the lines that came to me
while walking in the woods
with no pen
and nothing to write on anyway.

They are gone forever,
a handful of coins
dropped through the grate of memory,
along with the ingenious mnemonic

I devised to hold them in place—
all gone and forgotten
before I had returned to the clearing of lawn
in back of our quiet house

with its jars jammed with pens,
its notebooks and reams of blank paper,
its desk and soft lamp,
its table and the light from its windows.

So this is my elegy for them,
those six or eight exhalations,
the braided rope of syntax,
the jazz of the timing,

and the little insight at the end
wagging like the short tail
of a perfectly obedient spaniel
sitting by the door.

This is my envoy to nothing
where I say Go, little poem—
not out into the world of strangers’ eyes,
but off to some airy limbo,

home to lost epics,
unremembered names,
and fugitive dreams
such as the one I had last night,

which, like a fantastic city in pencil,
erased itself
in the bright morning air
just as I was waking up.

(Billy Collins [source])

…and:

A common misconception is
The belief that thinking is
The creation of thought.
Rather, it is
The reception of thought from
A source which has no name and
From a place that cannot be found.
Since one can’t decide to think
Nor can one decide
Thoughts’ contents,
Why does one
Claim their ownership?
Is every sound Wu Hsin’s because
He can hear them?

(Wu Hsin [source])

…and:

Well, the terrible fact is that though we are all more or less thinking of something or other all the time, some of us are thinking more and some less. Some brains are battling and working and remembering and puzzling things over all the time and other brains are just lying down, snoring and occasionally turning over. It is to the lazy minds that I am now speaking, and from my own experience I imagine this includes nineteen people out of every twenty. I am one of that clan myself and always have been.

(Ted Hughes [source])

[Read more…]

Caught Unawares

July 7, 2017 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Your reflection may be you,” by Simon Matzinger. Found on Flickr and used here under a Creative Commons license. (Thank you!)]

From whiskey river:

If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next — if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions — you’d be doomed. You’d be as ruined as God. You’d be a stone. You’d never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You’d never love anyone, ever again. You’d never dare to.

(Margaret Atwood [source])

…and:

Imagine that one day you are out for a walk in the woods. Suddenly you see a small spaceship on the path in front of you. A tiny Martian climbs out the spaceship and stands on the ground looking up at you…

What would you think? Never mind, it’s not important. But have you ever given any thought to the fact that you are a Martian yourself?

It is obviously unlikely that you will ever stumble upon a creature from another planet. We do not even know that there is life on other planets. But you might stumble upon yourself one day. You might suddenly stop short and see yourself in a completely new light. On just such a walk in the woods.

I am an extraordinary being, you think. I am a mysterious creature.

You feel as if you are waking from an enchanted slumber. Who am I? you ask. You know that you are stumbling around on a planet in the universe. But what is the universe?

If you discover yourself in this manner you will have discovered something as mysterious as the Martian we just mentioned. You will not only have seen a being from outer space. You will feel deep down that you are yourself an extraordinary being.

(Jostein Gaarder [source])

…and:

Psychologists and psychiatrists are moving from their traditional hostility to ecstasy to an understanding that it’s often good for us. Much of our personality is made up of attitudes that are usually subconscious. We drag around buried trauma, guilt, feelings of low self-worth. In moments of ecstasy, the threshold of consciousness is lowered, people encounter these subconscious attitudes, and are able to step outside of them. They can feel a deep sense of love for themselves and others, which can heal them at a deep level. Maybe this is just an opening to the subconscious, maybe it’s a connection to a higher dimension of spirit — we don’t know… The journey beyond the self is not safe or predictable. On the other hand, staying in the self also has its risks — boredom, staleness, sterility, despair. Ultimately, there’s something in us that calls to us, that pulls us out the door.

(Jules Evans, thrive [source])

[Read more…]

Department of Unmagical Thinking

May 19, 2017 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “1688 miracle,” by nebojsa mladjenovic on Flickr. (Used here under a Creative Commons license; thank you!) For more information, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

A certain man… once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exact day, a Friday apparently, he was eating a large fish—but there was no diamond inside. That’s what I like about coincidence.

(Vladimir Nabokov [source])

…and:

Making a Fist

We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men.
—Jorge Luis Borges

For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,
I felt the life sliding out of me,
a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.
I was seven, I lay in the car
watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass.
My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.

“How do you know if you are going to die?”
I begged my mother.
We had been traveling for days.
With strange confidence she answered,
“When you can no longer make a fist.”

Years later I smile to think of that journey,
the borders we must cross separately,
stamped with our unanswerable woes.
I who did not die, who am still living,
still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,
clenching and opening one small hand.

(Naomi Shihab Nye [source])

[Read more…]

Please Continue. But Count on Interruptions.

February 12, 2016 by John Leave a Comment

[Video: “Stay Go,” by Robert Cray, from his album Shame and A Sin.]

From whiskey river:

You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine.

(Wallace Stegner [source])

…and:

As the pen rises from the page between words, so the walker’s feet rise and fall between paces, and as the deer continues to run as it bounds from the earth and the dolphin continues to swim even as it leaps again and again from the sea, so writing and wayfaring are continuous activities, a running stitch, a persistence of the same seam or stream.

(Robert Macfarlane [source])

…and, from whiskey river’s commonplace book:

From The Long Sad Party

Someone was saying
something about shadows covering the field, about
how things pass, how one sleeps towards morning
and the morning goes.

Someone was saying
how the wind dies down but comes back,
how shells are the coffins of wind
but the weather continues.

It was a long night
and someone said something about the moon shedding its white
on the cold field, that there was nothing ahead
but more of the same.

Someone mentioned
a city she had been in before the war, a room with two candles
against a wall, someone dancing, someone watching.
We begin to believe

the night would not end.
Someone was saying the music was over and no one had noticed.
Then someone said something about the planets, about the stars,
how small they were, how far away.

(Mark Strand [source])

…and:

If you found a contradiction in your own thoughts, it’s very unlikely that your whole mentality would break down. Instead, you would probably begin to question the beliefs or modes of reasoning which you felt had led to the contradictory thoughts. In other words, to the extent you could, you would step out of the systems inside you which you felt were responsible for the contradiction, and try to repair them. One of the least likely things for you to do would be to throw up your arms and cry, “Well, I guess that shows that I believe everything now!”

(Douglas R. Hofstadter [source])

[Read more…]

Sculpted in Smoke

November 9, 2012 by John 3 Comments

[Video: Google Doodle celebrating choreographer Martha Graham’s 117th birthday on May 20, 2011. For information about the Doodle’s construction, see the Google Doodles blog post here. (I also came across a single large (2MB), frame-by-frame image of the animation, from start to finish; find a copy here.) The video’s uploader cleverly quotes for the “soundtrack” a brief phrase from Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring — which Graham choreographed.]
From whiskey river:

Do You Have Any Advice for Those of Us Just Starting Out?

Give up sitting dutifully at your desk. Leave
your house or apartment. Go out into the world.

It’s all right to carry a notebook but a cheap
one is best, with pages the color of weak tea
and on the front a kitten or a space ship.

Avoid any enclosed space where more than
three people are wearing turtlenecks. Beware
any snow-covered chalet with deer tracks
across the muffled tennis courts.

Not surprisingly, libraries are a good place to write.
And the perfect place in a library is near an aisle
where a child a year or two old is playing as his
mother browses the ranks of the dead.

Often he will pull books from the bottom shelf.
The title, the author’s name, the brooding photo
on the flap mean nothing. Red book on black, gray
book on brown, he builds a tower. And the higher
it gets, the wider he grins.

You who asked for advice, listen: When the tower
falls, be like that child. Laugh so loud everybody
in the world frowns and says, “Shhhh.”

Then start again.

(Ron Koertge [source])

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. … No artist is pleased. [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.

(Martha Graham [source])

[Read more…]