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| date | 2000-12-25:19:34 |
| SelfConciousness |
Food is one of the sensual pleasures we're allowed. A few days ago in the midst of Christmas preperations I ordered dinner from an Indian take-away place in town, and picked it up on the way home from the train station. I like spicy food, but have never ordered vindaloo before, having been told that it's really hot. So this time I did, and it changed my life. Saying vindaloo is hot is like saying that the ocean is wet or a redwood is tall. It is stunning, forceful, intense, amazing, overwhelming. It is the acme of sensual experience, the "furthest south" along a particular dimension of experience. It's good. I'm very vocal when I'm in the throes of sensual pleasure--I moan and groan and howl, and food is no different from anything else in this regard. I sometimes embarrass the people I work with when we go out to lunch, as I'm apt to interupt conversation with ejaculations of, "Man this is good!" followed by a moan, grunt or other suitable expression of pure pleasure. This was extreme, though. I literally couldn't contain my expressions of joy. It was amazing. And it made me realize that this is the way I am: I seek the extremes of experience. This is as true of metaphysics as it is of curry. I'm pretty sure the will that drives me to understand the ontology of the quantum world is precisely the same as what brings me pleasure in vindaloo and other intense experiences. In those two cases and many others there is a fundamental underlying desire to test the walls of the world, to try the edges of experience, to determine the limits of the possible by going beyond them. |
| Creatures |
The winter world is alive with creatures. Lots of things go dormant or leave for southern climes, but the lack of foliage and clear skies mean that what remains can be pretty spectacular. While walking the dog home today from my kid's grandmother's place I saw the most beautiful, big red-tailed hawk, cruising for mice. The freeze-dried sky was brilliantly clear, so the hawk looked like it was a few meters away instead of a few hundred. The haze in the air here really gets to me, a child of clearer skies. A friend from Newfoundland commented a while back that he was looking forward to going back home for a while so he could see blue sky. I'm from the other coast, but have the same feeling now and then, except I don't refer to it has home any more. The hawk soared and swept above me, far above. Every now and then it would sort of shrug in the air, coming to an almost full stop, but it never stooped. The mice were safe this Christmas morning. Later in the afternoon there were deer in the field and the back yard, chewing on the cedar trees. They seem to get along fine despite the cold, and they look good--big and healthy. They're a lot better adapted to this kind of weather than I am. |
| Play |
The solar eclipse came off just as predicted, which I guess shouldn't be a big surprise, but still is kind of cool. After opening presents this morning and visiting the kid's grandmother we came home and I got the helioscope out and caught a first view of the sun about 11:30 EDT. There was a tiny bite out of the solar disk, which grew steadly over the next hour until over half of it was covered, and the sun was big cresent-shaped grin in the sky. In the helioscope, of course, it was flipped, so it was a big cresent-shaped frown, but I decided to be a realist for the day and say that the image in the sky was really real, and the image in the helioscope was just an illusion. It cheered me up no end, thinking of it that way. Here's something I scribbled in my pocket notebook after a few fairly depressing poems about darkness and cold and the passing shadow of chaste and distant love:
At the point of maximum coverage, which was about 60% here, the light was just noticably dimmed, which was a little weird coming out of a brilliantly clear sky. The most amazing thing, though, was that the sunlight was cold. 60% less light is barely noticable, because the eye is an enormously adaptive organ. But 60% less heat is dramatic. Earlier in the morning I'd been sitting in the sun and was feeling toasty warm, too warm, almost. At the height of the eclipse I was sitting in the sun and could barely feel it's heat on the back of my hand. I pointed this out to the kids, and it seemed to impress them as nothing else did--it's hard to appreciate astronomical phenomena, I think. I saw an annular eclipse of the sun six or seven years ago, and it was impressive as hell, not just for its rarity (they only happen once a century or less) but also because the sight of a ring of fire in the sky is just creepy. But I heard people around me commenting on how tame it looked, not nearly so interesting as a true total eclipse, where the sky actually goes briefly dark and the stars come out at noon. I've never seen a total eclipse, so I can't make a fair comparison, but I have a hard time believing it would be more impressive than an annular one, which occurs when the moon occludes the sun when the moon is at the maximum distance from Earth, and so is not quite big enough to cover the whole solar disk, leaving a thin ring of star visible even at the moment of nominal totality. |
| Reading |
In the case of Tom v. Homer, the jury is still out. I'm taking this week off, and as well as playing a lot with the kids one of my goals is to get the Iliad off my back. I'm about 3/4 done, Patroclus is dead, the fight over his body is going on, and now there only remains for Achilles to wake up from his snit, go kill Hector, drag his body around the walls of Troy and get killed himself. After that at least the killing is mostly over, if my recollection is worth anything. It would be interesting to see what fraction of the whole is comprised of scenes that consist of nothing more than "X killed Y. X killed Z. A killed B. A was killed by X, who was then killed by P and Q." I'm betting over fifty percent of the--certainly over a quarter--of the work as a whole is like that. No matter how beautifully each act of senseless violence is described it gets a little tired after a while, like after the first two or three. I'm a bit suspicious that Homer just mashed together all the death-poems he'd ever heard, stringing a thin thread of epic narrative through the lot. No one seems to have noticed that the thread just isn't strong enough to bear the weight. An analysis that did not begin with the presumption that this is the greatest work of literature known to history would I think consign it to the role of a poetically brilliant but morally corrupt work. I hate it when I agree with Plato. ============ Bjo"rne Larrsen's Long John Silver is clever and enjoyable, but could have used considerable cutting, I think. The narrative is full of events, and yet there is something missing from it, something that failed to catch me up. I can understand Silver, and even see him as a likeable failure. But he is a failure--he never did anything very interesting with the life he was so intent on preserving. It reminds me a little of the Laws of Wealth, as formulated by Yeager and Ruttan, the people who flew around the world without refueling, in a privately funded project. When trying to scare up money they found that rich people were really boring, and hypothesized that the Gods of Wealth forced you to sign a contract in which they agreed to make you rich on two conditions: one was that you never do anything interesting with your money, and the other was that no one else be allowed to do anything interesting with it either. Silver is a bit like this, although the novelist is constrained by trying to write a plausible history of a fictional character. Suppose Stephenson's book was a true story, written by the real Jim Hawkins in 17-something-or-other? What sort of man is Long John Silver? What sort of world produced him and what happened to him after the events of the book? Larrsen does a good job of providing plausible and often entertaining answers to these questions, and I don't regret buying the book, but it's one of those many books to which the anonymous reviewer's complaint applies: "This is a good book, but not as good as it would have been had it been better." |