by Tim Sommers

“The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.” –Gabriel Garcia Marquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude

Here’s an apocryphal story that is so good, it should be true. In 1770 Captain Cook became the first European to land in Australia and so the first to encounter a leaping animal with a baby in its pouch. He pointed at it and asked a nearby aboriginal, “What is that?”

“Kan-ga-roo,” our fictional indigenous person responded. And, so, we call them “kangaroos”. Which means, in that local language, “I don’t know what you are saying.”

I always associate that story with Willard Van Orman Quine’s essay, “Ontological Relativity”, because the centerpiece of the essay is what he calls a “radical translation” scenario. We are trying to learn to translate a language that we have no independent knowledge of, a language that, as far as we know, is not related to any other language that we already know how to translate. Suppose a rabbit goes hopping by and a native speaker points at it saying, “Gavagi!” Even assuming we all agree on what pointing is, and we all think that pointing and talking at the same time associates the pointing with the talking, and we are sure that the spatio-temporal area occupied by what we would call a rabbit is what is being pointed at, assuming all that, how do we know whether they mean “There goes a rabbit!” or “Look at those undetached-rabbit-parts!” or “Some rabbitizing is going on over there”. Or, if you do the pointing, how do you know that what they are saying to you is not just, “I don’t know what you are saying”.

I know, I know, only a philosopher would wonder that. But, consider: what we think exists should be revealed by what we say, but what if it’s not? What if what exists is relative to what we say, but we can never be absolutely sure what anyone is saying about what there is? What if ontology, the part of metaphysics that is supposed to be, at a minimum, a catalogue of things that we think exist and are real, is relative to language and language is always indeterminate with respect to ontology. Should we be worried about this? Read more »

by Adele A Wilby

Although a further eighteen months remain till the next Presidential elections in the United States, speculation as to whether Donald Trump will be a one-term or two-term president is starting to gain momentum amongst political pundits and politicians across the globe. The reasons for the growing interest are varied, not least because for many the thought of another four years of Trump in office sends chills down the spine. His two and half years in office have revealed an astounding lack of knowledge and political skill by an individual with such wide-reaching global power and influence, represented reactionary policies, and a limited communication ability laced with a liturgy of lying that should outrage the sensibilities and conscience of a people, and provide justifiable grounds to disqualify him from any hope of returning to occupy the office as a representative of the American people. Yet the probability of Trump in the Oval Office for another four years is not yet off the table.

This stark reality became apparent recently in a brief interview on a news programme during which Alice Butler-Short, the President of the Virginia Women for Trump (2017) organisation, expressed what could only be considered an impassioned loyalty and defence of Trump, following the disclosure of the Mueller Report. Indeed, so enamoured was she of Trump, Butler-Short articulated a plan to campaign on the virtues of Trump amongst all levels and sections of society not normally Trump supporters, with a view to widen his voting appeal, and to put him back in office. But Butler-Short is not the only woman, or more specifically white woman, in the US, who views Trump through rose-coloured glasses; an army of female Trumpites, as the 2016 election results reveal, are an electoral force to be reckoned with by any politician who aspires to occupy the most powerful office on earth. How do we account for this support for Trump amongst white-women in the US, and what is the possibility of that history of support repeating itself? Read more »

Train station in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, in May of 2019.

by Niall Chithelen

I tried to accelerate out of winter, really speed through things, but I think I messed up and broke spring. Definitely something amiss—nothing grew in; instead a green city flashed into a grey one. Lawns were unfurled overnight, flowers appeared, and now I sneeze many times in a row each morning. This, I think, must be a sign.

I spent the winter going from indoors to indoors. I put my coat on the back of the chair before sitting down. I took 90-minute subway rides and 12-hour train rides. I overstayed my welcome on every phone call. I made mistakes.

Some might tell you that our haphazard “spring” originates with much larger forces, that its sudden appearance is in fact the party-state at work, its conflation with summer the result of climate change, its wonders and tatters all borne of humanity. They might mention beautification and propaganda. They might use the word “anthropocene.”

But I don’t know. I suspect it was probably some moment, something I did. Next year, everything might go back to normal, and next spring’s problems might once again be caused by humanity. I will make amends, do better, and maybe we can all go back to how it ought to be—locking eyes after a fifth sneeze, pausing, and then laughing together through our uncertain spring.

by Nickolas Calabrese

I don’t know anything about music. I make art, and like many artists I listen to music while working. Nearly every kind of music, but mostly metal for those time-to-get-serious moments. Atmospheric black metal with little discernible speech tends to work best, because it provides a setting such that one can become lost in the droning distortions when working on something. The music I like to hear is that which Kant would endorse as sublime – enormous walls of sound that result in a distractedness where one can go undeterred by outside forces. Of course an fMRI could show what is happening in the brain, what psychically galvanizes me while I listen to music in those moments, but I’m less interested in what’s happening to me as much as what’s happening to it: what happens to artworks when produced to a soundtrack?

Stepping back for a moment, it should be obvious that people of all stripes use music as a tool. Not just those who play instruments or sing or generally make music, but anyone who listens to music. It has an instrumental value in human culture. For instance, when the organ roars over the congregation the parishioners prepare to chant hymns to God. Or when you’re about to do a hard workout and you blast 50 Cent to get in the zone. Perhaps you want to set the mood for making love—easy, Marvin Gaye. When studying, many turn to classical because of it’s melodic flowering as ambient background noise. It is uncontroversial to say that many of us at some point or another use music as an instrument to hype us on what we are actually trying to achieve in that moment. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

As the job-displacing effects of markets and global integration and the cultural shocks of large immigration have rattled workers, particularly the less skilled ones, their reactive turn to populism in different parts of the world has dismayed liberals. This has been reinforced by resentment against centralized bureaucracies (not just in Brussels or Washington but also in Mexico City or Delhi or Jakarta) run by professionals and technical experts whose dispensations often ignore local realities and sensibilities. The alliance between liberals and workers that used to form the backbone of centrist democratic parties is getting frayed, as in the minds of many blue-collar workers the liberals with their mobile professional skills come across as privileged meritocrats and rootless cosmopolitans (‘citizens of nowhere’).

Global markets and mobility of capital have required standardization and harmonization of local rules and regulations, which some communities feel are ironing out their local distinctiveness and proximity-based personalized networks. Increasing market concentration in large corporate firms, their blocking of small business, capturing of state power in democracies through strong lobbies and copious election funding, and weakening of labor organizations and depressing labor share have made many small people precarious in their livelihood and suspicious of markets.

State-provided public services which are supposed to relieve the harshness of the market are everywhere riddled with bureaucratic indifference, malfeasance, and resistance to reform, while the better-off liberals are increasingly seceding from them. In developing countries the public delivery of social services is often so dismal (with inept, corrupt or truant official providers) that in contrast the image of voluntary community organizations (including charitable religious institutions run by Muslim, Hindu or Christian evangelicals) trying to fill in the gap is often much better than that of the state. Even when the state delivery mechanisms work reasonably well, the projects often do not involve the people but simply treat them as passive objects of the development process. (In rich countries communities have sometimes rejected negotiations over their heads by corporate and city officials to help investment in the community—as in the recent case of the failed Amazon investment proposal for Queens in New York). Read more »

.
—Thoughts of 77 summer solstices,
hopefully anticipating 78

Sughra Raza. Enlightened, April, 2019.

Digital photograph.

by Mary Hrovat

When I returned to school after my first marriage ended, I had to decide what to study. I’d been working toward a degree in history when I dropped out of a community college to get married, but I’d always been drawn to astronomy. One of the reasons I chose astronomy over history, or any other option, was that I felt that astronomy contained many of the other things I was interested in. To put it another way, I thought that if I didn’t study astronomy, I would regret it, but if I did study it, I wouldn’t necessarily lose touch with the other things I was interested in because they were all part of astronomy, in one way or another.

My degree is actually in astrophysics, and obviously it involved a lot of physics and mathematics. To see how the universe works, you have to understand gravitation, nuclear fusion, thermodynamics, atomic physics, and much more. In addition, to use and design telescopes and detectors, you need to know about optics, electronics, and materials science. Although I started out with very little background in math, I wound up with a minor in mathematics. By the time I had taken all the math classes required for the degree, and a fourth semester of calculus (which I hoped would help me understand my physics classes better), I was only three credits away from a math minor, so I took a class in linear algebra.

Astronomy also has obvious links to chemistry and geology. The story of the universe is, from one viewpoint, the story of chemical evolution, the development of more complex chemical elements as stars turned hydrogen and helium into more complex elements through nucleosynthesis. To study planets and moons, we can sometimes apply what we know about the rocks and weather and geological processes of Earth. Geology also comes into play in other ways. For example, one piece of evidence for the dinosaur-killing asteroid that struck Earth around 65 million years ago is a thin layer of iridium in Earth’s crust. Read more »

by Joan Harvey

In the dark times
Will there be singing?
There will be singing.
Of the dark times.
(Bertolt Brecht)

I like the idea of Industrial music as a kind of corrupted psychedelia – the same derangement of the senses, but the childhood innocence has gone. (Comment on YouTube of Throbbing Gristle’s Discipline)

I respond this way again and again, always a split second after each fricative machine growl. Half dreaming now and forced into pure response, I regress. The animal brain writhes sensuously in its own mere selfness. I am at the edge of a pleasure rarely visited. The possibility of ecstasy—being out of myself—is nearly always either novel enough to marvel at (a strictly front-of-brain act) or strange enough to scare me back into my body. (Alexander S. Reed, Assimilate 304) [i]

Most people I know not only don’t care for this music, but probably dislike it intensely.

I can’t really imagine people who don’t already enjoy this sort of music walking into one of these events and actually having a good time.

Therefore proselytizing should probably not be my aim.

We want to share our pleasures and convince others, but sometimes from the beginning it’s a lost cause.

Still, its a part of my existence most people don’t see. And in a way it’s somewhat surprising to me.

Oddly, I began going to industrial shows rather late in life.

They’re more in the line of a thing a teen goth would discover.

When we’re lucky we continually discover new pleasures.

And with luck, many of them. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Jeroen Bouterse

In the school vacation, I finally decided to go on what is probably my only-ever academic pilgrimage: I visited Max Weber’s tombstone in the Bergfriedhof cemetery in Heidelberg.

I had intended to go for some time. In my original plans, I’d go on foot (from the Netherlands) like a proper pilgrim, but after years of failing to go through I had come to realize that was not going to happen anytime soon. So I went by train. Which was too easy; I stood next to the monument before I knew it. I’m still coming to grips with the fact that only on the first time can you do a thing like this properly – that is, with enough ascetic self-denial to mark the purposefulness of your actions – and that I messed up that one chance.

Oh well. Isn’t it fitting to feel the charismatic potential of this particular relic being sapped by the very efficiency of modernity – the stahlhartes Gehäuse of the InterCity Express, working unfailingly to disenchant this tiny part of the world, too. Except for one detail, which I’ll get to later.

I fell in love with Weber as a history undergraduate. We read a fragment of the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. The combination of a big and, not unimportantly, Western-centered thesis with detailed, painstaking social and historical explanations seemed a best of two worlds. More than that, Weber’s explanations, rather than reducing the ideas and deepest convictions of the people and movements he studied to some other variable, gave center stage to those convictions. He demonstrated that historical explanation involved understanding the beliefs and values laid down in historical texts, thereby at least partly justifying what I felt most comfortable doing. Read more »

by Joshua Wilbur

As you read these words, someone (or some thing) could be creeping up behind you.

Maybe you’re sitting at your desk.  Or at your kitchen table. Or on a half-empty train. Behind you looms an encroaching presence, a silent observer. I picture a middle-aged man in a black suit — a tired and unfeeling assassin— but imagine whatever or whomever you like. A mythical monster, a scorned lover.

Someone might just be there. Right behind you. You won’t know for certain until you look.

* * *

We humans don’t have eyes in the back of our heads. Evolution didn’t budget for that luxury. Some animals—deer, horses, cows—have eyes on the sides of their heads, allowing them a wide field of vision. Other animals—humans, dogs, cats—have their eyes closer together and facing forward, allowing them to better judge depth and distance.

So while grass-grazers enjoy peripheral, panoramic vision their hungry hunters quickly spot them through dense forest. This suggests a simple rule of thumb for distinguishing the skulls of predators from those of prey: “Eyes in the front, the animal hunts. Eyes on the side, the animal hides.”

Eyes in the back, though, would require too many complex mutations, and we do well enough craning our necks to find food.  Our bodies have been molded over millions of years to fulfill carnal desires, desperate for what’s in front of us: arms stretching out, noses protruding, mouths gnawing ahead. Biology has determined our fate as forward-oriented creatures and given us a great fear of that which lies outside our perception. Read more »

Photo of moon with a jet vapor trail taken from my balcony in April of 2015.

by Gabrielle C. Durham

If you took Latin, then you probably have a larger vocabulary than the average bear, and you are more likely to have strong opinions on some words you vaguely remember based on Latin roots (cognates). For example, folks are more commonly using “decimate” to mean destroy or devastate, and it annoys the living materia feculis out of me. Decimate originally meant to kill every 10^th person, based on the Latin word for 10 (decem), which is so oddly and satisfyingly specific. “Devastate” and “destroy” are already well known and used, so why do they need another alliterative ally in little weirdo “decimate”?

Another little sneak is “cleave.” Meaning #1 is to adhere tightly and closely or unwaveringly. Meaning #2 is to divide or split, to separate, or to penetrate a material by or as if by cutting or tearing. The second meaning is where we get “cloven” as in “cloven hoof,” the tool “cleaver,” “cleft” as in “cleft palate,” and “cleavage.” Both versions arose before the 12^th century. The first meaning comes from Old English clifian by way of Middle English clevien. The second meaning comes from Middle English cleven from Old English cleofan and likely Old Norse kljufa, meaning to split. How can these words be so close for almost a millennium with polar opposite meanings? Read more »

by Abigail Akavia

Two weeks ago I celebrated Passover with my family. It was an intimate affair, just four adults and three preschoolers in the small dining room of our rented apartment in Leipzig. Our secular way of life makes Passover, for us, a holiday of light-to-non-existent religious content; nonetheless the richness of the symbolism and of the ritualistic foods is still something we enjoy. Making the Seder palatable to the kids, both the dinner itself and its ritualistic elements, became the central concern for us, their perpetually exhausted parents. The traditional text read in the Seder, the Haggadah, is cryptic in its Aramaic expressions and passages of Talmudic hermeneutics, on which the guests, both young and old, are encouraged to ask questions. But our distaste for the way the myth of Passover resonates in contemporary nationalistic discourse in Israel and elsewhere has brought us to include alternative content in our Seders, stories of other historical struggles towards freedom, which have often been conceived in terms that echo the story of Exodus. This year we read parts of the Hagaddah composed by Rabbis for Human Rights, which was originally read in a detention camp for African refugees in the Israeli desert in 2016, and includes Bob Marley’s Redemption Song. When we lived in Chicago, we told stories of Harriet Tubman and The Underground Railroad.

An Israeli Seder is not dissimilar to American Thanksgiving: a long meal that commemorates the founding of the nation, along with the post-nationalistic reckoning that both holidays can prompt. In both cases, a religious-historical myth becomes incarnated in food. Thus, the matzo, the most important culinary feature of Passover, reminds us of the unleavened bread that the Israelites hastily prepared when they fled their enslaving Egyptians. Every other part of the meal is also meant to symbolize part of the story, that of the Hebrews’ struggle to become a nation. (The series of hardships which the Seder is meant to recall may explain why the Seder meal, while as excessive as a Thanksgiving dinner, is arguably less delicious.) Read more »

in the matrix of a prism is magic
of two kinds, the inestimable
and that which can be counted

—the inestimable cannot be counted
by definition

if I say red is passionate hot sexy
or if I say red’s the color of death
in unstoppable bleeding
or that its fresh blush reminds me
of one spectacular sunrise
or the touch of you
there’s no calculation I can make
that will sum red’s isness because
as it comes by refraction
from the nothing of white
it may enter a zone
of the most inexplicable
part of mind which is always
putting its private spin on things

but

if I say red’s frequency is 4.3 times
ten to the fourteenth hertz
I’ve dropped into the estimable
spectrum of words which
…….. when so precisely split
leave’s no room for imagination
which just makes me blue

Jim Culleny
4/30/19