Rays of Light

An optical glory at An Teallach, Scotland,

from the wiki commons. 

Glory of the Altar of the Chair of St. Peter, at St. Peter's Basilica,

designed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini in the mid-17th Century.

"Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then - the glory - so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man's importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories."
 - John Steinbeck
East of Eden (thank you, whiskeyriver)

The Theoretical Fixed Point in the Turbulent Aeviternity

Today we know the heavens are not fixed, but in a state of ongoing motion. Physicists today talk of an infinite, gradient web of vectors, matter under the influence of four or five distinct tendencies, at the entire range of scales. As evidence, our age-old quest to measure and predict the precise movement of our planet, to know the length of a day, is continually confounded by variations in orbit, rotation, precession, nutation, and combinations of smaller, fuzzier movements.

The universe is, by definition, constant, pervasive action. All things in motion at all times, to paraphrase Aristotle. Every speck vibrates. Every galactic cloud is turbulent. You perceive the falling of a book, from table to floor, only as a motion relative to your own; because, remember, that you too, are in always in motion. A fixed point can only be the Eye of God. "Whole simultaneous" and "interminable" says Aquinas.

From the Catholic religion comes the notion of an alternative temporal reality, aeviternity, outside but integral to our plane of existence, lying between the fleet cosmos of human perception and the infinite dimensionlessness of eternity. This is the realm of angels, who neither suffer the passing of time as mortals, nor share in the omnipresence of gods. Aeviternity is distinct from other super-cosmological dwellings of the divine, from Heaven to Hell, Svarga to Naraka, the Happy Hunting Grounds or Mt. Olympus, in that it is identified specifically by its dimensional relationship to the universe of humankind. It is a scholastic solution for understanding what lies between us and the ultimate Divine Eternal, the proposal of which, incidentally, generates more puzzles. A mystery box packed with more mysteries, such is the way of the universe, and therein lies the charm of an Aeviternity, and therefore evaporates some body of conceptual doubt as to whether it contains some inherent analogical truth.

Nobody said anything about the blogosphere

The geosphere includes all the lifeless things of the universe. The dust, rocks, fireballs, and icycles.

The biosphere refers to those things in the cosmos that are living. It is said that the geosphere gives rise to the biosphere.

The noosphere is the realm of the human mind. It suggests a topography of human reason and belief, complete with the graceful beaches and rocky coastlines in between.

live long live dirty

Somebody estimated that 90 percent of the Earth's biomass lives underground, in the form of bacteria. Pound for pound, nine times more life lives in the dirt than up here where we typically think of life as living. Bacteria have been found in oil resevoirs four miles below the Earth's surface. You pick the most inhospitable places you can imagine--the 650 degree waters boiling out of vents at the bottom of the ocean--265 times more pressure than what we live with--and there are bacteria there.

This picture shows you what can happen when a bacteria that thrives in our armpits and crotches everyday gets under the skin and settles a colony.

Here's a nice S. J. Gould article on the ubiquity of bacteria.
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/library/gould_bacteria.html

infinite potential

There is one simple Divinity found in all things, everything has Divinity latent within itself. For she enfolds and imparts herself even unto the smallest beings. Without her presence nothing would have being, because she is the essence of the existence of the first unto the last being.
Giordano Bruno, from The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast

Herein, perhaps, lies the secret: to bring into existence and not to judge. If it is so disgusting to judge, it is not because everything is of equal value, but on the contrary because what has value can be made or distinguished only by defying judgment. What expert judgment, in art, could ever bear on the work to come?
Gilles Deleuze, from Essays Critical and Clinical

seeking truth

hecho poético
"poetic fact"

sentipensante
"thinking with the heart"

While thinking with the mind will lead one to Understanding, thinking with the heart leads one to Fearlessness.

Meta-Musicology

Plato felt the best harmony was one that "imitates the utterances and accents of a brave man engaged in warfare."

In "The Politics," Aristotle wrote: "Any musical innovation is full of danger to the whole state, and ought to be prohibited . . . when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the state always change with them."

In 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini instituted Iran's first ban against Western music, declaring, "Music dulls the mind because it involves pleasure and ecstasy, similar to drugs. It destroys our youth who become poisoned by it."

Malcolm McLaren said "Punk was just another way to sell trousers."

natural monocultures

Stenochlaena: Climbing Fern


65 million years ago, a meteor named Chicxulub struck Mesoamerica, wiping out 95 percent of the living things in North America. The first species to propogate the sterile clay was an ancestor of the Malaysian Climbing Fern that now covers entire islands in the South Pacific.

North America was almost entirely covered in climbing fern for tens of thousands of years.

Transparent Things

A thin veneer of immediate reality is spread over natural and artificial matter, and whoever wishes to remain in the now, with the now, on the now, should please not break its tension film. Otherwise the inexperienced miracle worker will find themselves no longer walking on water but descending upright among staring fish.

-Vladimir Nabakov

The Eye of God

All things in constant motion.
Stillness is a dream, fit only for poetry.
Every position is always defined relative to other things that are also in motion.
A fixed point could only be the Eye of God.

Sentipensante & Aeviternity

SENTIPENSANTE
thinking with the heart
Feelings and thoughts operating in perfect concert.
The word was first used by Eduardo Galeano, Uruguayan author, quoting some fishermen on the South American coast.

AEVITERNITY
a state of temporal presence that lies outside of time
...and therefore outside of the changing universe.
The concept comes from Christian mythology, as the celestial home of angels.

on human-o-centrism

If a triangle could speak, it would say that God is eminently triangular.

--Gilles Deleuze

Important Numbers

The Buddhist Incalculable:

1 followed by 352 septillions of kilometers of zeros
allowing that one zero occupies a length of one-thousandth of a meter
and being the length of one life of the universe

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Planck's Constant:

6.6260693 x 10-34 Joule seconds
(very small)
This number is used in calculations derived from the observation of subatomic physics. If a different number is substituted, the equations don't work out, so, it is often said, the universe would fail to exist as we know it.

Life Seeks to Cross the Void

If the whole world was covered with asphalt, a crack would form, and in that crack, grass would grow.

--Ilya Ehrenberg

7.83 HERTZ

Base Resonance of the Earth