Asamprajanya

I’m in the weeds on my knees pawing dark earth
looking for my squash among prolific opportunist grasses
and broad-leafed virtuosos at finding sustenance
in the garden of a part-time farmer—
finding advantage in his jammed schedule,
in life’s necessary distractions and precious
irrelevancies, his asamprajanya

On knees I sweat under an indifferent sun
to undo the effects of looking the other way
while rooted intruders ensconced themselves
in a life of ease throttling zucchini
under the erratic care of a life-long
junkie of mysteries, dreams and peeks behind scenes,
looking for grails among wild greens
which threaten his squash’s fundamental urge to bear fruit,
who counts angels and grasps at clouds
while many weeds take root
.

Jim Culleny
8/7/16

*Asamprajanya (Sanskrit): inattentiveness, non-alertness

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by Leanne Ogasawara

The other night, I was dancing with the Dalai Lama. We were in a large auditorium that looked like a high school gym– and in front of a packed audience sitting in the bleachers, we danced, just the two of us–cheek to cheek. I am not actually such a huge fan of his holiness– so this all was rather unexpected.

As we were floating and twirling ballroom style out on the dance floor, he pressed me very close, and giggled– and I started to laugh; and then still in my dream, I thought, “Wow, maybe I died and this is heaven…”

Paradiso

I've long wondered, why it is that right from the very start, peopled have preferred Dante's Inferno to his Paradiso?

Am I the only one who– while utterly unable to imagine hell– often finds myself lost in dreams of paradise?

It's true, I love to fantasize about paradise.

Often imagining it like a Persian garden, there is the intoxicating fragrance of roses, jasmine and gardenias. There is music and gently perfumed spring breezes. And people picnic, unendingly.

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by Dave Maier

Consider how difficult it has been to get Big Tobacco to admit that cigarette smoking is bad for you at all, let alone that it kills many thousands of people every year. In particular, you might remember that time when all the major executives swore under oath at Congressional hearings that cigarettes are perfectly safe. Consider as well that most tobacco profits come from heavy users of tobacco, not smokers of only the occasional cigarette. So the all-important bottom line – public health be damned – can be preserved only by recruiting new heavy smokers as the older (or not so older) ones die off or quit. For Big Tobacco, this means targeting children, who are not only risk-takers by nature, but very often concerned above all to be cool. If cigarettes are risky and cool, then children will become smokers, and many (some studies say 30%) will become hooked, preserving corporate profits for another generation.

Marijuana prohibitionists hold the analogous establishment of Big Marijuana up as a nightmare scenario. If big money is involved – as of course it is – it is quite natural to worry that Big Marijuana will be just as bad as Big Tobacco: fighting warning labels, putting out deceptive and child-friendly advertising (Joe Camel = Joe Cannabis?) fighting class-action lawsuits with expensive lawyers, and so on. Prohibitionists point to the existence of yummy cannabis edibles (THC-infused gummy bears! “Pot Tarts”!) and fanciful marijuana strain names (“Girl Scout Cookies”! “Green Crack”!) as evidence that even the nascent legal cannabis industry has our defenseless children in its sights.

The most vocal proponent of this line is Kevin Sabet of the anti-legalization organization Project SAM [Smart Approaches to Marijuana]. Sabet represents a new development in prohibitionism, consciously distancing himself from old-school drug-warrior tactics in the hope of reaching a more moderate audience. In terms of actual policy recommendations, in fact, Sabet sounds quite a bit like yesterday’s marijuana reform activists. NORML's Roger Roffman, for example, whose book we looked at last time, spent most of his career pushing not for legalization, but for decriminalization, and more generally a reconstrual of marijuana policy not as a matter for law enforcement but instead as a public health issue: not arrest and incarceration, but education and treatment.

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by Matt McKenna

Though the target demographic for Suicide Squad can’t yet vote in the United States, it was was still thoughtful of director David Ayer to create a PG-13 film that educates children as to the state of the Republican Party. By fashioning the silly misanthrope protagonists in Suicide Squad after Republican candidates, Ayers deftly describes the sad circumstance many Republican politicians and voters are experiencing this election cycle–they dislike the candidates they’re obliged to support.

For those unfamiliar with the Suicide Squad comic book franchise, the protagonists are a group of DC Comics villains who are pressed into service by the United States in order to battle other, even worse villains. These anti-heroes, who share a cinematic universe with Batman, Superman, and other superheros in similarly boring films, are compelled to fight alongside the “good guys” because the good guys have threatened to detonate an explosive device implanted in each of the villain’s necks. It does seem a bit unfair to call the team the “Suicide Squad” given that if the protagonists don’t go along with the plan, their heads will be blown off. Alas, I suppose a more accurate title like “Hostage Squade” isn’t quite as mellifluous.

If the concept of Suicide Squad seems like a breath of fresh air compared to the noxious wind that accompanies most of the other Marvel and DC comic book movies, prepare to be disappointed. While the protagonists may not be the trite, righteous do-gooders we’ve been forced to endure over the past decade of me-too comic book cash-grabs fashioned in the form of feature films, the plot centers around the same tired tropes as its predecessors. Like the similarly incoherent Ghostbusters film from earlier this summer, Suicide Squad involves an action-figure-ready gaggle of wry underdogs charging into a skyscraper to battle a supernatural being who, before destroying the world, must first conjure a glowing beam of light and shoot it into the sky for two hours. Why does this evil spirit monster need to project a glowing energy beam through the ceiling? I don't know; Maybe that detail was covered somewhere within the bountiful dialogue, but even if it was, I can't imagine myself thinking, “Ohhh, okay. Sure, that makes sense.” Anyway, what Suicide Squad lacks in an interesting plot, it certainly makes up for in its uncanny depiction of the current state of the Republican Party.

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by Bill Benzon

These songs of mine have to be played. They mustn’t be lost, they have to be out there….They’re Byzantine and their ‘roads’, their tunes are ancient.
–Markos Vamvakaris

To read this book, this as-told-to autobiography of Markos Vamvakaris, is to confront how strange is this thing we call writing, the child of this strange thing in which we live, called civilization. It is not that Markos, as he came to be known, is uncivilized. It is not that. Living at the time and place that he did, Greece during the early and middle twentieth century, he couldn’t avoid it, this civilization.

But he could resist it. And that he did, with wine, women, and song. Hashish too, more than the wine, and the bouzouki, along with the song and more than the women. Civilization didn’t win, neither did Markos. But I wouldn’t call it a draw either. It was a dance.

* * * * *

I knew almost nothing about rebetiko – Greek urban folk music with Asian influence – when I began reading this book, this circle dance between Markos the road warrior, Angeliki Vellou-Keil, scholar and scribe who published the material in Greek in 1972, and Noonie Minogue, who translated and edited this English edition (2015). Yet the story herein set forth, Markos Vamvakaris: The Man and the Bouzouki, that story is a familiar one: poverty, social marginalization, drugs, rubbing shoulder with criminals, womanizing, dedication to craft, and the transformation of a nation’s musical culture. Rebetiko has been likened to the blues, and the stories of major blues musicians have all those elements. It is a story of resistance, survival, and transformation.

Markos Vamvakaris was born in 1905 on the island of Syra in the Cyclades in the South Aegean Sea. That puts it on one of the major crossroads of world travel and trade for three millennia, between mainland Greece to the West and Turkey to the East. Its largest city, Ermopouli, was the major Greek port in the second half of the 19th Century, and a center for commerce and industry. Many different peoples have lived in and passed through Syra, as they do today in these days of destruction and despair in the Middle East. The dance of snivilization, as James Joyce called it, power and domination, freedom and music, pomp and circumcision, the bouzouki vs. bullets. Markos snubbed the law and the songs won. For awhile.

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By Jonathan Kujawa

Photo by W. Bentley [1]

In 1611 Johannes Kepler wrote a scientific essay entitled De Nive Sexangula; commonly translated as “On the Six-Cornered Snowflake”. It was the first investigation into the nature of snowflakes and what we'd now call crystallography. Since he was a gentleman and a scholar back when you could be such a thing without being ironic or a hipster, Kepler gave the essay as a New Year's gift. As Kepler wrote on the title page:

To the honorable Counselor at the Court of his Imperial Majesty, Lord Matthaus Wacker von Wackenfels, a Decorated Knight and Patron of Writers and Philosophers, my Lord and Benefactor.

As the title suggests, Kepler's main concern was the question of why snowflakes are almost always six-pointed. In his essay Kepler ponders the shape of honeycombs, flowers, Platonic solids, and the Fibonacci Sequence. The shape of a snowflake doesn't seem to be imposed from the outside (as a scientist, “God did it” doesn't quite cut it as an explanation). He speculates, then, that there must be an internal cause for the six points. Nowadays we'd call it an emergent property of the snowflake.

Kepler next imagines that when moisture freezes it forms little “beads of vapor”. If so, it must be how these beads are arranged which gives rise to the shape of a snowflake. Thus Kepler is led to consider how one may pack together beads. In particular, he considers the question of how they could be packed together as tightly as possible. That is, how can we pack spheres together in such a way as to minimize the volume of the space between them?

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“When you hit a wrong note, it’s the next note you play
that determines if it’s good or bad.” —Miles Davis

Next Note

There are no bad notes
if you’re open, cool and quick

there’ll be a next note:
first rung on a ladder from a ditch

new rudder of a boat
you'll sail to hope from glitch

The chance is not remote
you'll rise to praise from bitch

if you'll crack your shell and note
that next can overcome a hitch

you may courageously re-quote
and take your tune from poor to rich

by Jim Culleny
8/14/16
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Painting by Vagharshabadi
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by Daniel Ranard.

“Every choice we make is totally predetermined,” you hear someone say, a little too loudly, from a nearby table at the coffee shop. “If we had a big enough supercomputer, and we knew the exact configuration of all the atoms that make up a person and their surroundings, we could calculate their future perfectly!” This sounds like an excited young scientist or amateur futurist. But imagine replacing “supercomputer” with “super-mind,” and it sounds more like the French polymath Laplace, writing about determinism 200 years ago. In fact, as far back as antiquity, you can find philosophers speculating that all motion follows rules.

I imagine that humankind first witnessed the power of this idea when astronomers predicted the motion of the planets, leading to an image of the heavens as an orderly machine. Newton brought the laws of the heavens down to earth, positing that all matter follows the same rules, from celestial bodies to falling rocks. His theories made plausible the image of a clockwork universe, ticking in accordance with mechanical law. At the time, it was difficult or even ridiculous to imagine that living things followed the same rules, and many believed that life had its own spark or guiding force, apart from the mechanistic laws. But advances in biology and chemistry slowly convinced scientists that life is part of the clockwork, too. By the late 1800s, this idea permeated scientific circles and even literature–Dostoevsky's characters raged against the possibility that mathematics determined their decisions.

Since Laplace's time, our physical theories have changed, and our philosophical ideas have grown more sophisticated. With our new knowledge, what could we say to a nineteenth century thinker, existentially worried about living in a clockwork universe? What could we say, for example, to Dostoevsky's “Underground Man” in Notes from the Underground? He's concerned about a world where all human actions are “tabulated according to… laws, mathematically, like tables of logarithms.” Phrasing the question in terms of free will and scientific determinism, many philosophers today declare that there's no need to pick between the two—free will and determinism are compatible. Other philosophers see the compatabilist argument as a mere redefinition of terms. But in addition to the philosophical question, there's also a more scientific question. According to modern scientific theories, is it true that the world behaves mechanistically and allows perfect prediction?

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by Genese Sodikoff

Recent outbreaks of the bubonic plague in Madagascar offer a glimpse into the dynamics of past outbreaks, the Plague of Justinian (sixth to eighth centuries), the Black Death (fourteenth to seventeenth centuries), and current wave of “Third Pandemic” plagues that began in the nineteenth century. Over the past few years, genetic studies of the bacillus, Yersinia pestis, have revealed why the pathogen was so devastating, killing tens of millions over centuries. Yet much about it remains mysterious.

Tracing the plague's dynamics on the ground raises hard-to-solve questions, hard because of the material conditions in countries of Asia and Africa, where most of today's epidemics erupt. Impassible roads, lack of equipment, broken-down communication networks, proximity to rats in homes, and traditional healing and mortuary practices enable the plague to persist and evolve. Antibiotics contain the plague, but these are not always easy to get, nor are the proper dosages always consumed, in poor, remote areas.

I have just returned from a trip to Madagascar, where I visited the site of the August 2015 plague outbreak (14 cases and 10 deaths). I have a lot to learn, but my burning questions concern how long Y. pestis can survive inside a corpse or underground. For medical workers there, answers could help control outbreaks. And if it turns out that the dead are only ephemerally infectious, an overhaul the current policy on burials and funerary rites would be welcome news. The policy is a source of major anxiety for relatives of plague victims, who are prohibited from burying their kin in family tombs for seven years. For most, accumulating enough money to be able to transfer a body over a long distance is an enormous burden, so the seven years may stretch out indefinitely. Those who die of plague in the hospital may not receive the customary funerary rites from their family. All told, plague victims are unable to transform into proper ancestors. They are lost souls.

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by Katrin Trüstedt

The assumed Islamist terror attack in Munich two weeks ago that was part of a series leading to claims that “terrorism has now reached Germany” turned out to be something else: the shooter actually targeted ‘immigrants', and carried out his attack on the fifth anniversary of the 2011 Norway attacks conducted by his hero Anders Breivik, the far-right terrorist and self-declared fascist. Because the shooter had Iranian parents, people jumped to conclusions, but then became increasingly confused – not only as to whether to call this act an act of terrorism or a killing spree, but also whether to link it to an Islamist, or rather, a right-wing ideology. What makes the reaction to this particular shooting interesting is the incapacity of getting the story straight. While the drive to create a narrative with a clear distinction between some kind of ‘us' and some kind of ‘them' was obvious enough in the shooting, the specific contents of that opposition confused the attempts to make it fit an expected pattern.

The recent obsession of certain right-wing intellectuals in Germany with the idea of thumos is an interesting example where the position of a ‘we' standing up against a ‘them' seems more important than the actual content of that opposition, and the position, moreover, turns out to be somehow informed by what it opposes. While these intellectuals rally to reaffirm a thumos which is supposed to mean something like wrath or rage and connotes an invigorating vitality, one cannot help but suspect that such thumos is exactly what its advocates see in the Muslims they work so hard to distinguish themselves from. Many former workers who now favor the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) do have legitimate anger, since the social democratic parties – like their equivalents in other European countries – have been neglecting them. Marc Jongen, one of the AfD's chief ideologues, on the other hand, philosophizes and elevates (or rather diverts) this anger into a value in and of itself, without the burden of actual issues. The anger, now thumos, is nobilitated as a philosophically deep temper with an ancient Greek term. Thumos should not be appeased – with, say, political interventions that actually solve a problem – but rather fueled and raised to a permanent level of tenseness. Jongen, formerly an assistant to German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, claims to speak for the bourgeois AfD supporters with a higher education who actually make up the majority of AfD voters.

The apparent lack of a certain level of thumos, of an inner force that Western Culture exhibits, became a subject, interestingly enough, in the context of the so-called refugee crisis. Faced with an imaginative ‘horde' of eager young Muslim men ‘overrunning' this country, apparently Western civilization started worrying about their state of thumos tenseness. Those cultivating these worries probably felt confirmed by representatives of the German economy insisting these highly motivated refugees eager to work are not only welcome here but actually much needed. This also goes for the demographic development, as Germany is a quickly aging population that does not produce enough offspring. It was against such a background that the thumos discourse evolved.

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by Katalin Balog

This is the second of a series of four essays on understanding the mind. You can read part 1 here.

The mind's relation to the physical world is a hard thing to understand. The difficulty comes in no small part from the fact that there are two, radically different ways of going about it: one is to look within, to understand oneself (and by extension, others) as a subject, a self; the other, to look “out”, at the world so to speak. The first method is subjective, humanistic, and is essentially tied to a particular point of view. I can sense my frustration trying to come up with the right phrase. I know what that kind of thing feels like. I think I understand what it feels like for you as well, but only because of the familiarity with my own case. The second method is objective, it is based on observation of body, behavior and brain, and it is accessible to anyone, irrespective of their personal idiosyncrasies or their point of view. Its best embodiment is the scientific method. How the subjective fits in with the objective is one of the most vexing questions both in philosophy and life.

In the first part of this series of essays, I have looked at how a subjective, humanistic understanding of the mind comes under pressure from science. In the present essay and the next I look at the flip side of these hostilities: the pushback in some quarters of the humanist camp against science and objectivity. In the last, I will look at the prospects of a peaceful coexistence between the two sides.

I. Two worlds

The first major clash between the subjective and the objective approach didn't revolve around the mind directly; it concerned the world. In the 17^th and 18^th century, Galileo and Newton brought about a monumental change in the way we understand the physical world. According to the new physics, all physical change can be explained completely in terms of certain quantified properties of matter in motion – properties such as size, shape and velocity. The fact that these features were quantifiable allowed for a mathematical formulation of the laws of nature. The view of the physical world that emerged is mechanistic; in an only slightly misleading metaphor, it implies that the physical world is a vast machine, its movements and changes described by precise law. This is a shocking view, come to think of it.

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Elemental

skysea sliced by blade
honed to a slick edge by the god of knives
drawn now across a bluegray scrim

bloodless sharp white
clean as a whistle

you might almost hear it whisper
but for its mystic stillness

more thought than thing,
free of bone and gristle
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by Jim Culleny
8/3/16

Photo by Terri Amig
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