Excerpts from my Bhutan journal, again

Here's another ditty from my journal I kept while trekking through Bhutan:

A rat prances to Prague
for breakfast
2 in the afternoon, melting
coffee beans sizzling on a
platter.
rattle.
ring the police

Now don't be so critical. Remember, I was short on oxygen.

And now my favorite one so far:

rain like a leg fallen asleep
a gray tent house, amorphous
water dribbling through its skin
dirt specks like ticks
spelling constellations
a chocolate milky way

I'm guessing on that last one, I was in the tent, probably trying to sleep. Unfortunate things happen to people who can't sleep.

Excerpts from my Bhutan journal

Its 12:30 and not wanting to go to sleep I reached for my journal from my Bhutan trip, which was sitting above my bed. I remember, Near the end of the trip, strands of nonsense twirled through my head and I was compelled to write some down. Here's a sample:

Wake at 5.
Its 8. hours bundled
in a dream of seconds
stretching the dawn
along the rough horizon

Its 5. light dinner. Its 6.
Dark. Step out into nothing
the world at your feet
like a tight rope line
Now its 11. The thinnest silence
you've ever heard
Your heart beating time.
One by 2. One by 2.

Its 11. Enclosed by immeasurable
counters, counting each
day each hour each minute

Each minute, one foot at a time
along the rough rope.
grasp it. it is morning

minutes flowing into an eddy
of time
collected like stamps
sent off to distant places,
locomotion.

Miss Rosie by Lucille Clifton

when I watch you
wrapped up like garbage
sitting, surrounded by the smell
of too old potato peels
or
when I watch you
in your old man's shoes
with the little toe cut out
sitting, waiting for your mind
like next week's grocery
I say
when I watch you
you wet brown bag of a woman
who used to be the best looking gal in Georgia
used to be called the Georgia Rose
I stand up
through your destruction
I stand up

-- Lucille Clifton

thanks Tara

A play comparing two proofs of the quadratic reciprocity law

Two hilarious math professors at New Mexico State University wrote a play, set in 1844, featuring a discussion between Gauss and Eisenstein about quadratic reciprocity.


http://www.math.nmsu.edu/~history/schauspiel/schauspiel.html

The Book of Thel

I just ran across a great poem by William Blake which starts with Thel's Motto:

Does the Eagle know what is in the pit?
Or wilt thou go ask the Mole?
Can Wisdom be put in a silver rod?
Or Love in a golden bowl?

I'm writing the midterm essay for my music history course. The assignment, named "The Tale of Two Periods," is to contrast one Baroque piece of music with one Classical, in conjunction with the contrast of two corresponding poems.

Here's the rest of The Book of Thel

Gorilla evacuation

The evacuation of a dead Mountain Gorilla in the Virunga National Park of Eastern Congo

thanks to Brent Stirton and bbc.com

Schiller and Hesse

This passage from On the Aesthetic Education of Man reminds me of Herman Hesse's powerful interpretation of Siddhartha's passage to enlightenment through the world of Man.

One of the chief reasons why our physical sciences make such slow progress is obviously the widespread and almost insurmountable tendency towards teleological judgements, in which, as soon as they are used constitutively, the determining faculty is substituted for the receptive. Nature may touch our organs as vigorously and variously as you please -- all her diversity is lost upon us, because we are looking for nothing in her but what we have put there, because we do not allow her to come forward to meet us, from without, but rather strive with impatiently anticipating reason to go out from within ourselves to meet her. And if in the course of centuries one man comes along who approaches her with calm, pure and open senses, and therefore encounters a number of phenomena which we by our anticipation have overlooked, we are mightily astonished that so many eyes in such bright daylight should not have noticed anything. This premature striving for harmony before we have gathered together the separate sounds of which it is to consist, this violent usurpation of the intellectual faculty in a field where its authority is only conditional, is the cause of the sterility of so many thinkers for the greatest benefit of science, and it is hard to say whether sense-faculty which admits of no form, or reason which abides no content, has done the greater harm to the extension of our knowledge.

Not to say Schiller is leading us to the conclusion that these problems can be resolved through the adherence to and practice of transcendental philosophy. On the contrary, he states earlier that the nature of such views contradicts the harmony and unity of opposing forces that is the hallmark of aesthetic philosophy, that is, the subjugation of the natural impulse by the purely intellectual impulse. This antagonism breeds division and discord.

Goethe's view of my frivolous ambitions

"Distance is like the future. A vast twilit entity lies before us, our perception is lost in it and becomes as blurred as our eyesight, and we yearn, ah, we yearn to surrender all of our Self and let ourselves be filled to the brim with a single, tremendous, magnificent emotion, but alas... when we hurry to the spot, when There becomes Here, everything is as it was before and we are left standing in our poverty and constraint, our souls longing for the balm that has eluded us. Thus the most restless vagabond yearns in the end to return to his native land and find in his cottage, in the arms of his wife, with his children around him, and in the occupations that provide for them, the joys he sought vainly elsewhere."

From The Sorrows of Young Werther

No, I do not have a wife and kids. But the There being Here and Here being There could foreshadow the time to come.

genius

I've started reading Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, and if there's anything like a rose-colored wish, a magical romantic wonderland, then here it is in prose and spades.

"Oh my dear friend, would you like to know why genius so rarely breaks its bonds, why it so seldom bursts upon us like a raging torrent to shatter our astounded souls? My friend, it is because of the sober gentlemen who reside on either side of the river, whose precious little summerhouses, tulip beds, and vegetable gardens would be ruined by it, and who know so well how to build dams and divert all such threatening danger in good time."