I’m Listening to Something
I’m listening to something.
I don’t know what it’s called but it’s Chopin.
It’s a tune Alexa pulled
from the high-capacity byte magazine
of her small black canister
which sits under a lamp upon a table
against the wall (where most of us have spent
at least a little time, in a sweat)
its power umbilical plugged to an outlet,
its invisible wireless wire
stretched taut to a router
its bluesy halo perfectly apropos—
but whatever song this is, it is necessarily of the moment
—and I had asked, after all, for classical,
so maybe Alexa knows more than I
of what this moment must consist
Of what it partially consists are sounds of bells
—not bells really but the closest thing
Chopin could come up with
to be played on something
that sounds bell-like but which (again)
I admit: I haven’t a clue.
Despite having a poet’s surfeit of words
you’d think I would’ve surveyed my ground
before committing to a page, but it’s just
spontaneous magic as I sit here
among Chopin’s luscious frequencies listening,
applying Chopin to the day’s doing,
wondering why Alexa has now, unexpectedly,
shuffled Ahmad Jamal into the mix,
wondering what Ahmad’s poignant,
corazón-filled jazz has
to do with
what this very now
surely is
Jim Culleny
10/15/17
There is a sense in certain quarters that both experimental and theoretical fundamental physics are at an impasse. Other branches of physics like condensed matter physics and fluid dynamics are thriving, but since the composition and existence of the fundamental basis of matter, the origins of the universe and the unity of quantum mechanics with general relativity have long since been held to be foundational matters in physics, this lack of progress rightly bothers its practitioners.
I was struck by a sentence in Susan Orlean’s The Library Book: “If nothing lasts, nothing matters.” This line was part of a discussion of memory, the fear of being forgotten, and the value of passing things on to future generations. I share a passion for the idea of continuity between generations (and I highly recommend Orlean’s book), but ultimately I don’t think that something has to last to matter. Alan Watts, in his book This Is It, says that “This—the immediate, everyday, and present experience—is IT, the entire and ultimate point for the existence of a universe.” It’s not about connecting with anything but what’s here in front of me now. (Easier said than done, of course.)
I teach two kinds of group exercise classes, and part of the certification processes for both disciplines devoted no small amount of attention to how to speak to your minions, uh, students.
“…And now to introduce our second panelist: Martha. Martha does believe that academic philosophy is worth pursuing, and she has – of course – written a book about it. Martha, can you briefly summarize your argument?”
My answering machine whirrs. From an echoing room, the chainsaw-voice shouts into a speaker phone:
One of the philosophical tools that seems utterly obvious to me is the so-called “use/mention distinction”. Because it strikes me as so obvious, it is always baffling to me that people seem to have such trouble with it.
I just read Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations for the first time. Not every word. It’s over a thousand pages, and there are long “Digressions” (Smith’s term) on matters such as the history of the value of silver, or banking in Amsterdam, which I simply passed over. I was mainly interested in what Smith has to say about work, so I also merely skimmed some other sections that seemed to have little relevance to my research. Time and again, though, I found myself getting sucked into chapters unrelated to my concerns simply because the topics discussed are so interesting, and what Smith has to say is so thought-provoking. Reading the book is also made easier both by Smith’s admirably lucid writing and by the brief summaries of the main claims being made that he inserts throughout at the left-hand margin.
