Overlooked Heroine, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus*
Bruegel chose the moment when young legs
closed like a pocket knife into the waiting sea.
Later, someone called it a mundane disaster;
said, “it couldn’t have been helped,” the flash
of a diving bird that turned out to be a boy.
I say this: Whatever suffering there was,
you brought it to the scene yourself.
You chose to be the shepherd who watched clouds
while a hawk studied sheep from the tree.
You chose to be the sleeping sailor, heavy
in the crow’s nest of that harbor ship,
or the fisherman too busy with his worms.
You must have known by heart the plodding path
walked by a horse wearing leather blinders.
And the ploughman, how did he greet tragedy?
Why, he had laid down his dagger and moneybelt
in the shade, and would not leave them unwatched.
He was no hero, he ploughed without swerving
and let one foot step soft into the turned furrow.
And there, in the field already ploughed,
was a spot on the ground, a pale mound
which proved upon closer inspection
to be the white skull of an old man, settling.
If he noticed either sinking body
the ploughman merely shrugged:
the Dutch have a proverb: De ploeg gaat over lijken
—the plow passes over corpses.
He’d become accustomed to such mounds,
the hard sound leg bones make.
He’d merely lift the blade a bit, and urge
the horse with his whip, “push on.”
I knew his whip, and something of suffering.
I was the ploughman’s daughter Bruegel failed to notice.
I dried my little dress on a branch after the quiet rescue.
by Kathleen Heideman
from decomP Literary Magazine
* After Pieter Bruegel’s painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, 1558.
About halfway through Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s three-hour film someone asks Yūsuke Kafuku, an actor and theater director, why he didn’t cast himself as the titular character in his production of Uncle Vanya. “Chekhov is terrifying,” he replies. “When you say his lines, it drags out the real you.”
We’ve talked about the very origin of life, but certain transitions along its subsequent history were incredibly important. Perhaps none more so than the transition from unicellular to multicellular organisms, which made possible an incredible diversity of organisms and structures. Will Ratcliff studies the physics that constrains multicellular structures, examines the minute changes in certain yeast cells that allows them to become multicellular, and does long-term evolution experiments in which multicellularity spontaneously evolves and grows. We can’t yet create life from non-life, but we can reproduce critical evolutionary steps in the lab.
When I reviewed Vitamin D, I said I was about 75% sure it didn’t work against COVID. When I reviewed ivermectin, I said I was about 90% sure.
HOW OUR BRAIN,
Most American newborns will arrive home from the hospital and start hitting their developmental milestones, to their parents’ delight. They will hold their heads up by about three months. They will sit up by six. And they will walk around their first birthday. But about 1 in 10,000 will not. They will feel limp in their caregivers’ arms, won’t lift their heads, and will never learn to sit on their own. When their alarmed parents seek medical help, the babies will be diagnosed with spinal muscular atrophy, or SMA, a neuromuscular disease in which certain motor neurons of the spinal cord progressively deteriorate. The disease is triggered by a genetic malfunction that boils down to the gene called SMN2 (survival motor neuron 2), which causes bits of vital proteins to assemble incorrectly, resulting in progressive muscle weakness and paralysis.
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Today, the most powerful artificial intelligence systems employ a type of machine learning called deep learning. Their algorithms learn by processing massive amounts of data through hidden layers of interconnected nodes, referred to as deep neural networks. As their name suggests, deep neural networks were inspired by the real neural networks in the brain, with the nodes modeled after real neurons—or, at least, after what neuroscientists knew about neurons back in the 1950s, when an influential neuron model called the perceptron was born. Since then, our understanding of the computational complexity of single neurons has dramatically expanded, so biological neurons are known to be more complex than artificial ones. But by how much?
One of Mao Zedong’s best-known sayings is: “There is great disorder under heaven; the situation is excellent.” It is easy to understand what Mao meant here: when the existing social order is disintegrating, the ensuing chaos offers revolutionary forces a great chance to act decisively and assume political power. Today, there certainly is great disorder under heaven: the Covid-19 pandemic, global warming, signs of a new Cold War, and the eruption of popular protests and social antagonisms are just a few of the crises that beset us. But does this chaos still make the situation excellent, or is the danger of self-destruction too high? The difference between the situation that Mao had in mind and our own situation can be best rendered by a tiny terminological distinction. Mao speaks about disorder UNDER heaven, wherein “heaven,” or the big Other in whatever form—the inexorable logic of historical processes, the laws of social development—still exists and discreetly regulates social chaos. Today, we should talk about HEAVEN ITSELF as being in disorder. What do I mean by this?
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Daniela Gabor in Phenomenal World: