Magazine Rack

If you like something, please click on it. I am a thief of words for my personal notebook and you have the audacity to benefit from my diamond snatching without giving the creators at least a view? Click on some links. Click. Some of them are even better uncut. Some are lots of filler. Click anyway.

See:

🎢 20241105 tension and flow - AVA on bookbear express (Substack)

To love someone, I think, is to want to surprise and delight them. That's why I could never resent people who constantly flirt, because on some level they want to surprise and delight the world, and I'm always charmed by the vitality implied by that. And it is, at the end of the day, not easy to surprise and delight someone. You have to pay obsessive attention to what they're saying with their mouth as well as saying with their body as well as thinking but not saying. You have to keep hitting the ball.

And it's not just about dedication to the person—over a long time, in order to be interesting, you have to keep pulling from the external world. Like how you want to arrive at lunch with your best friends saying: Guys. You will not believe the gossip I have for you. You have to remain generative in order to keep things interesting.

Is it your responsibility to be fun? Certainly not. But is it your responsibility to have fun? No one else will tell you it is, but I guess I'll be the one to say it. If you do not remain alive to the world, the world will not remain alive to you.

This is fundamentally what's so striking to me about The Power Broker. Robert Caro keeps going for 700,000 words and he absolutely at no point takes his foot off the gas. It's completely electrifying for the reader. We are lit up by Caro's attention, absorption. The way he describes Long Island made me tear up. I don't care about Long Island, like, at all. Do you see what I mean?

People fall out of love when they lose faith in the story the other person is writing. You wake up one day and think: why am I trapped inside this narrative? I don't even like your prose.

🫱🏼‍🫲🏾 20231128 Writing as Communion - Henrik Karlsson on Escaping Flatland (Substack)

In my early twenties, when I wrote mainly spoken poetry, I used to say that the words on the paper are not the poem. The words are more like programming code. The poem is what the words turn into when you run them in the compiler of an audience. The poem is a mood in a room, it is the possibility for certain types of conversations in the lobby afterward—grown men crying, thinking about their grandmas, or something like that. The crying is the poem.

👼🏻 20230909 The Hero's Journey is a Jammed Door - River Kenna on Inner Wilds (Substack)

This pattern of leaving home, finding out who you are and what you're capable of, then coming back to be what you couldn't be before — it's been press-ganged into acting as the structure for many other kinds of stories, but it's not actually native to or appropriate for them. A story about deepening into your current place in the community doesn't actually fit the Hero's Journey. A story about mentoring youths who are going on their own journeys doesn't actually fit the structure either. A dozen, a hundred other types of stories and patterns from life are not native to this structure — but Hollywood and writers' workshops keep re-shaping them to fit anyways.

There's a good reason for this compulsive tic, though not a popular one to talk about. It is fairly obvious though, if we ask the question directly: why would someone obsessively re-enact, over and over again, the passage from adolescence to adulthood?

It's relevant — critical, maybe — to note that according to Plotkin, a vanishingly small minority of modern people ever make it to Early Adulthood. Almost no one makes it through soul initiation. The Hero's Journey stands before us, uncompleted. [...] Robert Kegan, for example, has noted that only a minority of adults surpass stage 3 of his framework, what he calls “Socialized Mind.” [...] Kegan and Plotkin are far from the only people in the field to come to similar conclusions.

the general youth-obsession, sex-obsession, and identity-obsession take on a very specific texture once you look at them as a very specific appeal to a culture stuck between adolescence and adulthood.
And within this frame, the obsessive repetition of the Hero's Journey makes a very specific kind of sense.

In general, when people compulsively repeat a certain behavior, it's because there's something there they need but aren't getting.

If we accept this as a useful frame, that the Hero's Journey is an enactment of a transition from adolescence to adulthood, and further entertain the frame that the compulsive re-enactment of the Hero's Journey is indicative of that transition's failure to complete, then the next question becomes "how and why does this transition so consistently fail to complete in most individuals?"

Something in you has to struggle, fail, and die. It's not for nothing that Plotkin calls Late Adolescence "The Wanderer in the Cocoon."
Cut [a cocoon] open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly... No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay.” (Pat Barker, quoted in A Field Guide to Getting Lost, by Rebecca Solnit)

We are not given adequate chances to feel our failure to the marrow; to sink into the deeper currents of grief and let go of what we must now admit was an deficient way of being. And so, we get taller without growing up. We itch at the Hero's Journey like long-lost twins fidgeting at their separate halves of a broken locket. We go to the theaters and the bookstores for one more turn on the Hero's Merry-Go-Round, one more spin where we can feel the key turn, and turn, but never quite unlock the door.

And after a while, the spinning becomes the point. Round and around, to escape your worries for a few moments. Any sense that the spinning was for something is lost.

I've seen hopes — and even some signs — that more and more people are re-discovering ways to complete the Hero's Journey [...] When society stops re-enacting the pattern in every medium at every chance, I'll take that as a sign that the underlying frozen energy has been dissipated.

🪄 20230517 I Kiss My Ghosts’ Sticky Foreheads - Jane Wong on Poetic Ambivalence and Feeding on the Past, Lithub

I message my friend Keith and bemoan the fact that I’m not psychic. That I’m not as powerful as my mother, that I can’t make things happen. [...] But Keith tells me: “Your poems are incantatory. You did inherit it.”

In my first book, Overpour, there’s a poem toward the end called “Ceremony” where I envision the future:
This is what we were promised: another life. / Today, I run with a flare in my hand like a bouquet of exploding flowers. / Today, I will not be transparent.
I wrote this poem before leaving the Bad One, forcing a future I wanted, needed in order to survive. And isn’t this memoir a kind of flare? Didn’t I need to write that poem in order to leave?

Each day, I rub my eyes with poetry, bleary in foggy morning light. I clear goopy line after goopy line out of their corners. It’s true. Poetry does make me feel powerful. Poetry’s magic does loosen the sinking weight of fear.

🤡 20230503 How “enlightened selfishness” can lead to a more fulfilling marriage - Agnes Callard interviewed by Sean Illing for Vox

This kind of craziness, nobody actually thinks, “Oh, the person should be institutionalized or they need to get help.” We think, “Oh yeah, of course, they’re in love, so that’s normal.” We’ve decided that crazy is normal in a certain kind of context. [...] Like, say the thing that people do where, they keep calling their ex and they keep texting them and they hate this person now. And they don’t wanna get back together with them, but they can’t stop themselves texting them. Totally familiar phenomenon, right?
Imagine somebody did that with a restaurant. They wanted to go to a certain restaurant and the restaurant’s closed. So they stand outside the door of the restaurant and they’re banging on the door and you walk up to them and you’re like, “You know, this one’s closed. There’s all these other open ones. Do you want to go to one?” “No, I can only go to this one.” “Is it because the food is so good?” “No, I hate the food.”

🩰 20230429 fuck me / marry me / kill me - QC on Thicket Forte (Substack)

i have learned many things about myself along the way. i have learned that i am ignorant, prideful, clumsy, jealous, easily hurt, easily distracted. i have been humbled before god by my weakness and my sins. i don’t want to deceive you. if our love is to be built on anything it can only be the truth. once i was told, that which can be destroyed by the truth should be, and those who said it did not understand what those words really meant, but i am arrogant enough to believe that i do. i want you to destroy what is untrue in me.
what is it going to be like to kiss you for the first time, after talking for ten uninterrupted hours, high on the mutual pleasure of being understood?

i wish i could offer you certainty. i wish i could tell you i know how this is going to play out, that i know what to do, i wish i could hold you close and tell you i’ll make everything okay and mean it. but i have learned that certainty is an illusion and in the wreckage of certainty all i have are my questions, when i hold you all i can offer you is the sound of my beating heart. will it be enough for you?

i want to make art with you, i want us to inspire art in each other, any kind, all kinds; music, poems, stories, the art of our bodies in harmony. whether we become friends or colleagues or lovers or husband and wife is not for me to decide, i cannot know the steps of our dance before we dance it. all i can do is play my part and then surrender to the space between us, which is vaster and wiser than either of us. it is in that space that we play our part in ushering in a new world, and then surrender to the yet vaster space surrounding us, the vaster dance.

let us invent entire genres of music to serenade each other.
but these are distant dreams. here, now, i only want to know: what wants to happen between us? what is waiting to be born?

🌳 20230425 Dostoevsky as lover: Looking for Alice, part 2 - Henrik Karlsson on Escaping Flatland (Substack)

They would tell her the most remarkable stories. As would the shopkeepers and the dog walkers and the archivists at the university library. Which was interesting, because Johanna herself was introverted and largely kept her thoughts private. But she had the same effect on me: the words that came out of my mouth when I talked to her continually surprised me. I didn’t know I had so much in me. I hadn’t known who I was until I talked to her.

Before we started dating, when I spoke to Johanna in the supermarket, at clubs, or in the street; giddy and mesmerized by the way our words meshed — that was not love. When we were waking up in bed talking, day after day — that was not love.

It is not about attraction or good feelings or needing someone. It is a way of showing up for others with care and curiosity. It is about doing what Johanna did to the people she met in the street, when she attended to them with open curiosity. Except you do it for several years instead of a few minutes. And the person you do it to returns the favor.

enable someone to expand themselves

The fascinating thing about [Mikhail] Bakhtin was that though [Problems of Doestoevsky’s Poetics] was ostensibly about the literary-technical problems in Dostoevsky’s writing, it had somehow managed to become the basis of a school of psychiatry.

Bakhtin’s core argument is that with Dostoevsky, fictional characters are not material used to advance a plot (as they were for Gogol or Tolstoy and still are for just about every other writer). Raskolnikov and the Grand Inquisitor are not finger puppets on Dostoevsky’s pinky and thumb. Rather, Bakthin argues, they are individuals Dostoevsky talks to. Dostoevsky treats his characters as if they were full human beings, who own the final word about themselves.
This fundamental respect for the autonomy of his characters explains one of the unstable and disorienting things about Dostoevsky’s books, especially Notes from Underground the characters seem to hear everything that the author (or the reader) thinks or says about them. And they refuse to be defined by these words. (“You imagine no doubt, gentlemen, that I want to amuse you. You are mistaken in that, too.”) They fight against all descriptions, trying to circumvent or undermine what other people say about them, they fight to remain free individuals.

A person can’t be contained in your ideas about them. This was a core idea for us. To whatever extent I assumed I knew who Johanna was, I treated her as something that I could fit in my head — as something smaller than me. But she couldn’t fit in my head, nor I in hers: that was the exciting thing about it. You can only ever know another individual if you meet them in open dialogue — if you treat them as unfinished, as capable of surprise.

Well, how does Dostoevsky do it? Instead of using his characters as mouthpieces for his ideas, what Doestoevsky does is craft situations in which the characters reveal themselves. And then he listens.

And the prompts Dostoevsky uses to make his [characters] reveal their innermost words are conflicts. Why conflicts? Because we often say what we really think only when everything around us is breaking, when a relationship is ending, when our hopes have been crushed, when we think we have failed beyond repair. We hide our true word, out of fear, until we break, and then it spills forth. Dostoevsky’s books are feverishly intense because of this: he is trying to push people into full crises, so he can hear their authentic voice.

“If I give this person the loving space where they can express their word for hundreds and then thousands of hours, what will happen then? What will they transform into?”
This, I think, is a healthy way to think about love. It is about being invested in someone’s continual expansion.

Before the kids were born, when we had more time, I often asked Johanna to read my essays aloud. Something about hearing them in her voice made me feel so good inside. Everything sounds funnier too, with her bursts of laughter.

One day, feeling very clever, I handed her a draft and asked her to read it. [...] At the end, the essay turned into a proposal.

We married in the bookstore where we met. It was the last day before they closed it down for good, so we had to hurry. The store owner was our only witness.

📖 20230202 Introducing: The World Behind the World - Erik Hoel on The Intrinsic Perspective (Substack)

What do you give away, when you write a book? What piece of yourself are you carving off, I mean? For a writer must treat himself like some sort of grisly compulsive, but mentally. There goes a childhood memory, now severed and served. There goes your first kiss. There goes your first bad break-up. There goes the enigmatic sad smile of your father.

In my first book, a novel, what I gave away was myself in my twenties, when I was flawed and prideful and angry but also poetic and barely containable. It's the reason the book has an emotionality I'm still proud of, and that I couldn't pull off now. I carved off chunks of personality and distributed them across characters, and after they left I felt quieter. Inside, I mean. But also, more lonely. As a person I was a bit smaller, and simpler.

despite how there is an inexhaustible supply of facts, eventually after many volumes a nonfiction writer has nothing left to give, and so their books get thinner, both physically but also metaphysically—they write the book because this is how they make their money, because they know nothing else. Thus the tenth book by a popular nonfiction writer is often some sort of wisp, risking nothing, carving off nothing. Occasionally, an older veteran writer, either of fiction or nonfiction, will overcome the barrier of experience, but only through audacity—meaning that the best cut their hearts out in the end.

It is strange to be in the business of hollowing yourself out. You become a peculiar salesman of self, gradually getting smaller each time. But being an author is also, in many ways, a deeply rewarding pursuit. So here I am, hoping you decide to check out my alien wares, to buy the jewelry I made from my own bones.

📚 20230123 Why You Should Read the Winner of 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature - Liesl Schillinger on Oprah Daily

In her 20 works of fiction and nonfiction (searing, stark novels written in a style she calls l'écriture plate—flat writing, direct and unadorned), [Annie] Ernaux conveys the reality of the lives of the woman she is and was, and the people she has lived among, with utter lack of euphemism, and with a detective's hunger for evidence. Reading her makes you catch your breath as you startle to see the patterns of human experience—intimate, professional, familial—that you thought were distinct to you, as universal and specific to certain time, social class, gender. She compares her technique to writing with a knife, not a pen— shearing flesh off the bone, exposing what lies beneath.

🫶🏽 20230117 Looking for Alice - Henrik Karlsson on Escaping Flatland (Substack)

When I was seventeen, my crushes were random. As if I was an untrained neural network trying to predict which image was a cat. Maybe this flurry of tan-colored pixels? Maybe this long bendy green thing? I got disappointed a lot, which was great because it meant by my early twenties, I could tell what I liked and what made me want to smash a cucumber to my face.

[in the opening of Into the Abyss] The Reverend is talking about how the Lord works in mysterious ways, and so on—it is exactly the type of conversation you want to avoid. It is very ChatGPT. It is the Reverend repeating things he’s said before—words that protect him, that allow him to perform the role of Reverend, instead of being what he is: a man named Lopez, who will soon have to watch a boy die.

At one point, the Reverend, as a part of a monologue about the beauty of God’s creation, mentions that he sometimes meditates on the beauty of the squirrels he sees on the golf course. Herzog, standing in a graveyard with nameless crosses, says, with mad Bavarian seriousness, “Please describe an encounter with a squirrel.”

Lopez is a bit surprised by the question, but he takes it in a playful spirit—his voice lifts, joyously. He starts to talk faster. (This is where the conversation shifts into the type you want.) He is no longer saying versions of things he has said before, he’s not protecting himself, he’s just there.

From that point on, it takes about ten seconds before he’s crying.

In interviews, Herzog likes to mention this conversation to explain his craft. “But how on earth did you know to say that?” says the interviewer. “Were you just trying to say something unexpected to unbalance him?” “No, it was not random”, Herzog says. “I knew I had to say those exact words. Because I know the heart of men.”

If you want to prompt someone to be authentic and playful and generative, you usually just need to ask them something where they have a rich experience to pull from but have never pulled an answer from that experience before. If you ask two or three increasingly detailed questions about something they tell you, you get there. [...] I tend to find that almost everyone is captivating and loveable when I manage to talk like this.

You are born with this weird interiority that no one else can see.

You can’t see it either at first. But if you run enough experiments you get a sense of how that inner space behaves. In particular, you can figure out which types of people can fuse with your interiority and expand it.

You will not be able to explain this fusion works. So don’t do it.

But when the interiorities do fuse: notice how things are set in motion.

😋 20230109 Eating and Reading with Katherine Mansfield - Aimé Gasston on The Public Domain Review

Throughout her letters and diaries, Mansfield analogises the act of reading with that of eating, particularly at her most frank, when writing “to” herself in her journal, or to Murry. [...] In 1921, she writes to her cousin, the novelist Elizabeth von Arnim: “I have turned to Milton all last week. There are times when Milton seems the only food to me”. Elsewhere she articulates the “sudden sweet shock” of delight that Henry James gives her. In a further letter to Murry, she describes “get[ting] up hungry from the french language [because she has] too great an appetite for the real thing to be put off with pretty little kickshaws”.

This dissatisfaction, Mansfield's letter concludes, is the result of being spoilt by too much Shakespeare, drawing sharp relief between the “rich” language of English, and the French, which she finds “hard to stomach”. The word “kickshaw” itself derives from French (quelque-chose) and is defined as a “fancy but insubstantial cooked dish, especially one of foreign origin”.

According to Oxford Reference dot com, kickshaw's first appearance is in Shakespeare's Henry IV Part Two (1597), in which Justice Shallow gives orders to his servant Davy for a meal to be prepared for Falstaff, including 'some pigeons …, a couple of short-legged hens, a joint of mutton, and any pretty little tiny kickshaws'.

In “The Modern Soul”, England is described as “merely an island of beef flesh swimming in a warm gulf sea of gravy” [...] while “At Lehmann's” brings us the son of a butcher, “a mean, undersized child very much like one of his father's sausages”, and a pregnant wife who is told to stay away from customers because she looks “unappetizing”.

In the title story, “Bliss”, food is everywhere, saturating thought and speech, and even evident in self-consciously avant-garde clothing (nut earrings and dresses like banana skins). The bohemians invited to Bertha's dinner party speak of plays entitled Love in False Teeth and Stomach Trouble, a plan for a fried-fish interior design scheme, and a poem called Table d'Hôte, which opens with the line: “Why must it always be tomato soup?” But this gustatory discourse is unrelated to passion or animal urges [...] The fish will rot, the soup in the poem will go rancid, but there will be another fad to replace it and the guests will have already turned away before they can witness the decay. Bliss and Other Stories most often depicts characters too entrapped by metropolitan intellectualism to know how to use their bodies and therefore eat.
In The Garden Party collection, widely considered to contain some of Mansfield's most accomplished work (with the fiction testifying to her pledge to create a kind of “special prose” which would pay a “sacred debt” to her homeland [New Zealand]), there is a marked shift.

🧘🏻‍♂️ 20230106 Five Mildly Anti-Buddhist Essays - Sasha Chapin on Sasha's 'Newsletter' (Substack)

The Buddha was a disagreeable maniac. He left a rich household and a beautiful wife so that he could find the answer to human suffering. To do this, he studied all the best psychotechnologies of his day, and found none of them satisfactory, eventually settling on his own blend, which he taught far and wide.

If the conclusion you take from this story is that you should be Buddhist, you are absolutely missing the point. The point is that we should experiment with everything and pick what best fits our situation, reverence be damned. There is no reason to believe that traditional Buddhist psychological theory and practice should be given ultimate preference, unless you believe that there have been no new psychological insights or useful tools created in the last millennium. [...] we also certainly have modern neuroses—bugs in our cultural programming that bear no resemblance to those of the nobility of the Himalayas of yore. Maybe we need some different tools for those.

The easiest way to define grasping, probably, is to list a series of experiential states that are nice or tolerable, and show how much worse they become when grasping is added.

Normal Emotion/Experience Plus Grasping

The bittersweet nostalgia of reminiscing about a friend or lover you miss. Stewing over the delusion that you will never truly love again, that everything good is in the past.

Eating some delicious ice cream and enjoying it. Eating far past the point of satiation because you must have one more second of the experience of sugar.

Normal Emotion/Experience	Plus Grasping
The bittersweet nostalgia of reminiscing about a friend or lover you miss.	Stewing over the delusion that you will never truly love again, that everything good is in the past.
Eating some delicious ice cream and enjoying it.	Eating far past the point of satiation because you must have one more second of the experience of sugar.

With more meditation practice, something even cooler can happen—you can learn to perceive the infinitesimal mental motions that compose grasping, and, in the process, gain the ability to stop a large amount of mental grasping before it starts. This is really cool, and it's a mental experience I'm glad to have enjoyed

You will obviously run into trouble if you brand yourself as Mentally Perfect in some way. Like, if you’ve become highly invested in the idea that you’re not supposed to experience mental turbulence anymore, this will naturally cause you to avoid stress and conflict, which could, in turn, cause you to avoid growth, accountability, and humility.

I would suggest that if your long-term contemplative life does not demonstrably cash out in some degree of increased behavioral nobility, then what you have is a talent for mental masturbation. And that’s ultimately not so bad! Some people spend their whole lives fucking other people over. Sitting quietly in private rapture is significantly better than that. But I believe there is more to aspire to.

Solutions: ~~click to see :)~~ OH my GOD he DELETED the POST before I could GET THIS DOWN now I am MORE DETERMINED to STEAL EVERY ESSAY 😱 🗒🤏👀 🥷

Withdrawal and indifference don’t need to be encouraged in a post-digital consumer world. That is what is supplied to us by default. Intensity and difference need to be encouraged—genuine striving and passion. The courage to love fragile transient things, to form deep attachments and let them sculpt and wound you. Desire for stasis and placation is the default. Desire for something more meaningful is the relatively unsung alternative.

Spiritual practice can reduce your normal boring suffering. One great thing you can do with that is replace it with suffering of a more vibrant flavor.

👔 20221230 What's the Problem with Antigone? - Bret Devereaux on A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry

The concept of a public-facing open forum for Classics is not the problem. Rather the problem is that in prioritizing famous writers whose names might bring clicks regardless of the worth of their ideas or the standard of conduct they have set as scholars, Antigone has ensured that many more early career classicists with new, valuable things to say of great interest to the public cannot do so here. In a remarkably short time, Antigone has, by refusal to prune, let the overgrown thorns of their garden block many of its gates, for those who lack the clout or tenure to risk it. It has created a self-closing forum to the great disservice of both potential writers and more importantly potential readers.

👨🏼‍🎤 20221020 Dear Vladimir Putin: If You've Read Dostoevsky, You've Tragically Misunderstood Him - Austin Ratner on Lit Hub

If some readers empathize with the child, but not with the adult man's rage and needs, Dostoyevsky seems to plead with them that they should. He makes the confession of “abnormal,” antisocial feelings into a virtue in The Brothers Karamazov. Admitting and verbalizing such feelings helps brothers Ivan and Mitya Karamazov not act on them. They “speak daggers,” as Hamlet says, “but use none.”

Sure, but also

🧩 20221019 When Freedom Kills - Michelle Jia on Chasing the Sundog (Substack)

- I can't relate to the loneliness, but I had the same thoughts from reading the same book.

🫂 20221011 For Beauvoir, it's friendship that lets us become truly ourselves - Skye C Cleary on Psyche

Zaza was Beauvoir's best childhood friend. They met at age nine, when Zaza sat next to Beauvoir at school and grew so close that teachers called them 'the inseparables' [...] by Beauvoir's own admission, her entire philosophy of friendship was shaped by her friendship with Zaza. [...] It is possible, certainly her mother thought so, that Beauvoir edged towards infatuation with Zaza. [...] Nevertheless, Beauvoir also said that 'the kind of love where you kiss' held no meaning for her.

Beauvoir wrote that 'for friendship to be authentic, it must first be free.' Of course, there must be some kind of reciprocity in friendship, but how that reciprocity manifests is often lopsided. We tend to lazily think of friendship as symmetrical, when most of the time it isn't - and doesn't need to be, as long as the friendship is based on intersubjectivity. [...] When we understand that we are each subjects for ourselves and objects for others - in other words, when we freely and reciprocally recognise that other people's lives are as real and vital as our own - then authentic friendship can flourish.

For Beauvoir, authentic friendship springs from an exalted level of cerebral amity. [...] In The Second Sex (1949), Beauvoir distinguishes between spiritual and carnal desire. Spiritual desire is the intellectual ecstasy sparked when friends are vulnerable; for example, when they share secrets and diaries, show tenderness, and exchange fervent letters.

Sometimes one friend takes advantage of the other and sadistically exploits them, disrupting their intersubjectivity and killing authentic friendship. Beauvoir didn't demand that Zaza feel the same way about her, but then nor did Zaza take advantage of Beauvoir's feelings. Thus authentic friendship could be maintained.

Beauvoir and Zaza were not physically affectionate. They referred to each other with the formal vous, and to other friends with the informal tu. But they were intellectually affectionate. They talked vivaciously about 'adult' things such as justice, Napoleon, travel, and classic books such as Don Quixote (1605-15) by Miguel de Cervantes, and the story of Tristan and Isolde. They introduced each other to scandalous books, and challenged each other's insights and beliefs, such as whether God exists, how marriages of convenience are similar to sex work, whether giving birth is like writing books, and how you can be sure a person will love you forever. They mocked their teachers and complained about their tyrannical parents. They shared secrets, insecurities, and coping mechanisms.

Beauvoir's life-long partner Jean-Paul Sartre read a draft of Beauvoir's novel The Inseparables. He didn't care for it. He said it was too sad. Or perhaps he was jealous. The intersubjective message of the novel certainly didn't gel with Sartre's early philosophy. Sartre believed that we can never trust one another beyond doubt, and therefore there is no foundation on which to connect with other people and understand them. [...] Crucially, for Beauvoir, our singularities are a 'metaphysical fact', but 'the tragedy of the unhappy consciousness [arises when] each consciousness seeks to posit itself alone as sovereign subject.' In a posthumously published notebook, Sartre wrote about the virtue of generosity and defined 'true friendship' as '[c]ombatants who together create a setting of intersubjectivity in their own way.'

🫦 20220614 Gloria by K-Ming Chang on Split Lip

🌏 20220204 We were voyagers - Visakan Veerasamy on visa's voltaic verses ⚡️ (Substack)

It's clear to me now that a significant part of why so many people in the world today are so chronically listless, distracted, confused, overwhelmed, bored, alienated and so on is that they have no sense of their own history. I don't mean that they don't know a bunch of facts and figures. I mean that their history is not embodied and internalized as living practice. They do not feel the past flowing on within them in a hundred waves. Museums are graveyards of history - pretty ones, sure, and great for visiting and learning from, but they are hardly enough to nourish a person's soul.

If you want to reduce all of this to “mere” status games, I'm actually completely okay with that. I say hell yes. The point is that we could be playing far more ambitious status games than the ones we're playing now. Sure, you could try to impress your friends by having the hottest take on the latest nonsense in the daily news cycle and win the weekly status game, or you could impress your friends and ascend into legend by playing for all of time. How did Al-Mamun of the Abbasids persuade the wealthy elite of his time to find it fashionable to care about astronomy? Why is this not as cool anymore? How do we change that? Let's dig into it. It's a serious question with tremendous consequences and I truly believe that we can figure it out by doing some reading and thinking.

💃🏻 20221006 Another Dumb Blonde: On the Controversial Adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates's Epic Novel - Heidi Seaborn on Lit Hub

#Reviews

I first read Blonde soon after it was published. [...] I came away from the novel thinking Marilyn had been a victim of the studio system and the usual misogyny that by that time I, too, was overly familiar with. Twenty years later, I read Blonde again. [...] Concerned with celebrity culture in America, I'd chosen this enduring icon as the star of my thesis [...]. I'd researched the hell out of her. So, this time reading Blonde, I saw how far Oates strayed from the biography of Marilyn Monroe.

This movie makes up trauma for Marilyn to have gone through and shows nothing of the agency she showed, how she worked on her craft and pushed for recognition to leverage for better deals. How she was determined, funny, and surrounded by loving friends and family.

But does that matter? It's entertainment after all, storytelling.

I can't help comparing Blonde to another recent film about a famous dead celebrity—Elvis. [...] Unlike in Blonde, Elvis Presley is multidimensional, nuanced, and human. Sure, Andrew Dominik is no Baz Luhrmann. But I wonder if the fact that Elvis relies on biographical research rather than a novel made it the more successful film for me (and most critics).

Blonde [the novel] is not the story of Marilyn Monroe. However, it is the blueprint for the film. Many of the scenes that have provoked the greatest controversy—and that veer the furthest from reality—are straight out of the novel. A novel that was lauded in the early aughts. But in the 22 years between the publication of Blonde and the film's arrival, the world has changed. We've had Harvey Weinstein and #MeToo. We've had a misogynist in the White House. We've had the strike-down of Roe v. Wade. What may have read as a fictious biography—or myth-making, as Oates describes her novel—became a film that is a demeaning and vulgar portrait not only of Marilyn Monroe, but of women in general.

🥵 20221005 What Can I Say To Make You Believe Me? On copper toxicity, the female body and the twisted mind of medicine - Michelle Jia on Chasing the Sundog (Substack)

If copper can kill a tree, why do we believe it is safe to put this same material directly inside our reproductive systems? Why do we believe that “local inflammation due to copper ions,” a spooky process not much studied since the 80s, can ever be fully local, fully contained, fully understood and managed?

I have not had my IUD for fourteen months now. I removed it myself, accidentally in fact, while taking a shower in Detroit and removing my menstrual cup. Suddenly — with a strange swoon of pain — the coil was in my hands, already oxidizing a bit in the pale light.

Then, over the next weeks, something strange began to happen. There had long been a buzz inside me, a kind of anxious static, and it was suddenly gone. Not quite sadness, not quite fear, the buzz simply cast a heavy pallor over things — gave every moment a sense of constriction, of potential loss. Now that it was gone I was experiencing a set of feelings I thought I had relinquished entirely with my youth: simple, blithe feelings, like the pleasure of merely being alive. [...] And then how surprised I felt to notice I had been doing that, as though some old part of me had suddenly woken up from a very long hibernation, shaken but essentially intact. Altered but sincere. It scared me how much better I already felt. I tried not to think about what it all meant.
Over the next few months I began to sleep less, noticing I could wake from 7.5 or 8 hours of sleep and feel fine. I lost weight, about 30 pounds in total — from a combination of concerted dieting and a body that suddenly seemed able to yield to its own transformation. It became easier to plan, to become optimistic about the future. My mental health stabilized in a way that made it easier to care for myself.

I felt rather like a woman whose life had been saved by an exorcism — grateful, but unable to speak the truth. Alive, but embarrassed by what had saved her. Indebted to forces mysterious and crude.

I hadn't thought of this for some time, of the copper IUD, or mineral balancing, or any of that — in large part because in daily life I try not to think about it all. But recently, I was forced to, because I once again had the symptoms of copper toxicity. Bloated, tired, feeling horrid and very sad, I gained 2-3 pounds over the course of a month in which nothing else had changed. I was reminded because a friend recently came over and commented on my copper cookware, [...] I stopped cooking with them. The feelings went away. Quietly, almost embarrassed that it had worked, I went back to my life, saying nothing, telling nothing, living on the patchwork I had made — a patchwork of knowledge systems meant to carry me whole.

💰 20220930 The Problem of Too Much Money - Judah on Be Wrong (Substack)

the countries that are exporting more than they import? They're doing about as well as an Employee of the Month [...] [Unused money is] about as useful as your “gifted kid” status from middle school. One way to look at a growing bank account is as a sign that you don't know what that money should be doing, or can't use it to get what you want.
The net importer is buying things they need and want, the net exporter is piling up IOUs, literal pieces of paper. You can't even eat this kind of paper, it's made of cotton and linen.

there's a lot of cash out there. What happens to it? People give it to banks. Or to investors, who give it to banks. Or to trust funds, who give it to banks. Or to insurance companies, who give it to banks. [...] banks run out useful places to give money to. [...] The money has to go somewhere, and so it does. It goes into billion-dollar gambling tables a.k.a. trading desks. It goes into companies building the future of trade-able JPEGs. It goes to people who give it to other people, who give it to other people, in the hopes of finding someone who knows what to do with it.

If you've ever tried to hire people, you know how incredibly hard it is to find the right person for the job. This is how it is with most things. The median worker is fairly unimpressive, the median restaurant is passable, the median NGO is terribly inefficient. The average thing is, by definition, kinda mid. People and projects who are worth investing in are rare. So money just continues floating around.
Imagination is rarer still.

👩🏻‍💼 20220913 Intense Corporate Valerie - Valerie Zhang on Val's Pals

🏺 20220907 First we shape our social graph; then it shapes us - Henrik Karlsson on Escaping Flatland (Substack)

By replacing a peer group that is low-skilled (such as a peer group in a school) with one that is exceptional (such as Mersenne's mathematical salon), we can leverage our human capacity to internalize our culture to foster exceptional talent. Erik Hoel calls this the peer replacement theory of genius. No one raises children like this anymore.

Now, I am sending these ideas into my pocket notebook, which will send them to my future self, who will send them to you—now. My five-year-old, watching me jot down the notes, my hands foamy from the dishes, is also an audience for my output, albeit the lesson she draws is another.
It is this overall flow, into you and out from you, that determines what you become.

Over time, I got good at modeling these reactions ahead of time. This changed my writing, and it changed me. I became shrewd-cute and the writing became not a line of words on paper but an instrument to manipluate my audience. This shaping is not bad in itself. The problem was rather this: the gravity field of this particular audience did not align with my ethics and aesthetics: their expectations pulled me away from the places my thoughts needed to go. The poems, in conforming to their laughs and tears, hollowed out.

Let me phrase what I've been saying in this essay in a slightly different way. What you want to create is a distributed apprenticeship in the art of being you. [...] by actively curating your “audience”, as well as what you let into your senses, you can [...] create an environment that pulls you in the direction you want to go.

👄 20220906 The gossip trap: How civilization came to be and how social media is ending it - Erik Hoel on The Intrinsic Perspective (Substack) [A review of The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow]

Click this link to see all the sweet sweet info in the introduction, not copied here.

In asking "What took so long?" the Sapient Paradox is the prehistoric analog of the Fermi Paradox. Instead of: “Why are we alone in the universe?” the Sapient Paradox asks: “Why were we trapped in prehistory [for so long]?” And just as the Fermi Paradox implies a Great Filter, the Sapient Paradox implies a Great Trap, a trap in which human society lived for, at minimum, 50,000 years, and, at maximum, something like 200,000 years or even more. [...] Steven Pinker, in The Better Angels of Our Nature, discusses a "Hobbesian trap" of mutual warfare between tribes.

My mother used to quote Eleanor Roosevelt all the time: "Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people."

A "gossip trap" is when your whole world doesn't exceed Dunbar's number and to organize your society you are forced to discuss mostly people. It is Mean Girls (and mean boys), but forever. And yes, gossip can act as a leveling mechanism and social power has a bunch of positives—it's the stuff of life, really. But it's a terrible way to organize society. So perhaps we leveled ourselves into the ground for 90,000 years. Being in the gossip trap means reputational management imposes such a steep slope you can't climb out of it, and essentially prevents the development of anything interesting, like art or culture or new ideas or new developments or anything at all. Everyone just lives like crabs in a bucket, pulling each other down. All cognitive resources go to reputation management in the group, to being popular, leaving nothing left in the tank for invention or creativity or art or engineering. Again, much like high school.

And this explains why violating the Dunbar number forces you to invent civilization—at a certain size (possibly a lot larger than the actual Dunbar number) you simply can't organize society using the non-ordinal natural social hierarchy of humans.

There's a lot of ancient instructions, just lying around, still in your cells. Weird hair growth is the result of a cell latching on to some ancient genetic instruction. Our predecessors had lots of hair everywhere, your cells get confused, and you begin to manifest your hirsute ancestors. The hairy tufts springing from your grandfather's ears are there because parts of him are literally devolving into an ancient creature.

What if there were a mental equivalent? After all, if we lived in a gossip trap for the majority of our existence as humans, then what would it be, mentally, to atavistically return to that gossip trap?

Well, it sure would look a lot like Twitter.

Of course we gravitate to cancel culture—it's our innate evolved form of government.

🫵🏼 20220823 Cultivating Agency - Nadia Asparouhova

A critique of societal -not personal- antinatalism

If “grit” - the desire to persevere when faced with a challenge, popularized by psychologist Angela Duckworth - has been the human trait du jour of the last fifteen-odd years, I suspect that “agency” - a belief in one's ability to influence their circumstances - could be the defining trait of the next generation.

The world doesn't happen to us; it is shaped by us. [...] If Gen X and Millennials grew up with a “digital divide,” perhaps Gen Z will face an “agentic divide”: those who believe they have the power to change their circumstances, versus those who do not. [...] It's not quite pessimism that's creeping into our consciousness like a cold bony hand, but rather the insidious belief that we are helpless to do anything to change the state of the world.

👮🏼‍♂️ 20220724 Don't Blame Dostoyevsky - Mikhail Shishkin on The Atlantic

The Putin regime has dealt Russian culture a crushing blow, just as the Russian state has done to its artists, musicians, and writers so many times before. People in the arts are forced to sing patriotic songs or emigrate. The regime has in effect “canceled” culture in my country. [...] That's how it was during the Golden Horde, that's how it was in Stalin's time, that's how it is today under Vladimir Putin.

Slaves give birth to a dictatorship and a dictatorship gives birth to slaves. There is only one way out of this vicious circle, and that is through culture. Literature is an antidote to the poison of the Russian imperialist way of thinking [...] and the regime today will do everything it can to prevent that.

The road to the Bucha massacre leads not through Russian literature, but through its suppression. [...] Russian literature owes the world another great novel. I sometimes imagine a young man who is now in a trench and has no idea that he is a writer, but who asks himself: “What am I doing here? Why has my government lied to me and betrayed me? Why should we kill and die here? Why are we, Russians, fascists and murderers?”
That is the task of Russian literature, to keep asking those eternal, cursed questions: “Who is to blame?” and “What is to be done?”

Ok but uhh this your boy?

👗 20220713 Learning the Elite Class - Aella on Knowingless (Substack)

I'm in a high end hotel/penthouse/conference venue, and a lady in a black uniform walks by, holding a platter of pre-filled champagne glasses. I pluck one off and start sipping it a little too fast.

“I'm thinking of running for office,” says the man in front of me. He has a greying beard and clean glasses. “I have some connections way back from boarding school who are thinking about funding me.”

I know boarding school is a thing, but I'd never heard of anybody I met, or any of their friends, having anything to do with boarding school for the first few decades of my life. Aren't those gender segregated, or is that just a trope? Is it all year, including the summer? Is that a thing where parents send bad kids? Unclear. I think it probably costs money to go, which is why I never heard anyone mention boarding school when I was growing up.

💭 20220412 Dreamers in Broad Daylight: Ten Conversations - Leslie Jamison on Ecstasy, the first of Astra Magazine's two issues.

🕵🏻‍♂️ 20220303 What classic Russian literature can tell us about Putin's war on Ukraine - Tim Brinkhof on Big Think

It is important that we give credit where credit is due. Leo Tolstoy and Dostoevsky — Putin's two favorite writers — each have created some of the most convincing arguments in favor of non-violent resistance to evil in the history of the human race.

Like Tolstoy, Dostoevsky believed in the inherent value of every human life. And, like Tolstoy, Dostoevsky had arrived at this conclusion via personal experience. In his youth, the author was arrested for discussing socialist literature and sentenced to die by firing squad. Fortunately, he was spared by a last minute pardon from the tsar himself.
The author's brief encounter with death launched his religious reawakening, turning him from a pragmatist into a spiritualist. In his fiction, Dostoevsky would often recount the terror and despair he had felt while attending his own execution, and posited that the existential dread of this situation alone was more than enough to justify abolishing the death penalty.

BUT

After serving years of hard labor in Siberia, Dostoevsky returned to Saint Petersburg to found a literary journal with brother Mikhail. Its writers called themselves pochvenniki, men who advocated a common allegiance to and respect for Russia's soil and natural resources.
Devotion to Russia was accompanied by antipathy, even hostility, toward European countries. Later in life, Dostoevsky traveled through Europe to seek treatment for his epilepsy and to escape creditors. In letters, he expressed a deeply rooted longing to return home while simultaneously reflecting on the many ways in which European people were spiritually inferior to Russians.

He daydreamed of a war between Europe and Russia and felt certain that Russia would win. The Russian spirit, Dostoevsky wrote in Dresden, will have “such sacredness that even we are impotent to fathom the whole depth of that force… nine-tenths of our strength consists just in the fact that foreigners do not understand and never will understand the depth and power of our unity.”
As Hans Kohn mentions in an article from 1945 titled “Dostoevsky's Nationalism,” the author's philosophy of humility and compassion is at odds with the enthusiasm he showed whenever the Russian Empire waged war to expand its territory. Dostoevsky waited for the moment when, in Kohn's terms, “the Slav world under Russia's leadership would fulfill its destiny.”
Dostoevsky used even stronger terms. “The present peace,” he wrote in his diary, “is always and everywhere much worse than war, so incomparably worse that it finally becomes outright immoral to maintain it… War develops in [man] for love of his fellow men and brings nations together by teaching them esteem for each other. War rejuvenates men.”

🚪 20220223 Good conversations have lots of doorknobs - Adam Mastroianni on Experimental History (Substack)

Givers think that conversations unfold as a series of invitations; takers think conversations unfold as a series of declarations. [...] It's easy to assume that givers are virtuous and takers are villainous, but that's giver propaganda. [...] It's easy to remember how lonely it feels when a taker refuses to cede the spotlight to you, but easy to forget how lovely it feels when you don't want the spotlight and a taker lets you recline on the mezzanine while they fill the stage. When you're tired or shy or anxious or bored, there's nothing better than hopping on the back of a conversational motorcycle, wrapping your arms around your partner's waist, and holding on for dear life while they rocket you to somewhere new. [...] When we're all standing on the perimeter of an empty dance circle, takers are the martyrs who will launch themselves into the middle and do the stanky legg.

Neither givers nor takers have it 100% correct, and their conflicts often come from both sides' insistence that the other side must convert or die. Rather than mounting a Inquisition on our interlocutors, we ought to focus on perfecting our own technique. And the way to do that, I think, is by adding a bunch of doorknobs.

DO NOT BE

A SOCIAL SLOB

USE CONVERSATIONAL DOORKNOBS

💘 20210328 how to avoid half-heartedness - Ava on bookbear express (Substack)

I think that people come alive when they're serious about what they love—when they choose to pay careful attention to what feeds and sustains them. [...] I think [crushes are] indicative of a desire to place happiness outside of ourselves.

When you're unsure of yourself, it's easy to be obsessed with the idea of love—the idea that happiness will arrive when someone else loves you. This can lead to you ignoring your own life.
Briana West: “You want [love] to provide for you what you think you cannot give yourself: stability, security, hope, happiness. So long as you function on this belief, you place “love” as being something that is outside of you when the reality is that you cannot see, create, or experience on the outside what you are not already.”

something to pour your love into, something that nourishes you

You can't believe that something, someone else will be a solution. It never is. If you're fundamentally ambivalent about yourself no one else can change that relationship. Everything you're reaching for is just a mirage.
Don't rely on someone else to give you what you need. Choose what nourishes you every day. See how strong you become when you remember that love is just reassertation, choosing something over and over. Do it one more time & watch mundane repetition become something transcendent.

😭 20210102 The Lost Art of the Manly Weep - Sandra Newman on POSKOK

But actually, the gender gap in crying seems to be a recent development. Historical and literary evidence suggests that, in the past, not only did men cry in public, but no one saw it as feminine or shameful. In fact, male weeping was regarded as normal in almost every part of the world for most of recorded history.

Consider Homer's Iliad, in which the entire Greek army bursts into unanimous tears no less than three times. King Priam not only cries but tears his hair and grovels in the dirt for woe. Zeus weeps tears of blood, and even the immortal horses of Achilles cry buckets at the death of Patroklos. Of course, we can't regard the Iliad as a faithful account of historical events, but there's no question that ancient Greeks saw it as a model for how heroic men should behave.

This exaltation of male weeping continued into the Middle Ages, where it appears in historical records, as well as fictional accounts. In chronicles of the period, we find one ambassador repeatedly bursting into tears when addressing Philip the Good, and the entire audience at a peace congress throwing themselves on the ground, sobbing and groaning as they listen to the speeches. In the 11th-century French epic The Song of Roland, the poet describes this reaction to the death of the eponymous hero: 'The lords of France are weeping bitter tears,/ And 20,000 faint in their grief and fall.' We can be pretty sure this didn't happen as described, but it's still remarkable that 20,000 knights swooning from grief were considered noble, not ridiculous.

Furthermore, the sobbing male hero wasn't only a Western phenomenon; he appears in Japanese epics as well. In The Tale of Heike, which is often cited as a source for the ideal behaviour of a samurai, we find men crying demonstratively at every turn. Here's a typical response to the death of a commander-in-chief: 'Of all who heard, friend or foe, not one but wept until his sleeves were drenched.'

In medieval romances, we find innumerable instance of knights crying purely because they miss their girlfriends. In Chrétien de Troyes' The Knight of the Cart, no less a hero than Lancelot weeps at a brief separation from Guinevere. At another point, he cries on a lady's shoulder at the thought that he won't get to go to a big tournament. What's more, instead of being disgusted by this snivelling, she's moved to help, and Lancelot gets to go to the tournament after all. The knights of King Arthur, King Mark, King Everyone are routinely reduced to tears every time they're told a heart-wrenching story.

St Jerome's letter to Eustochium has eight separate references to crying; he describes himself as being in ‘floods of tears’, ‘drenched with tears’, and ends by exhorting worshippers to ‘Nightly wash your bed and water your couch with your tears’. St Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, describes 175 separate crying episodes in a single 40-page section of his diary.

Weeping was such a central part of worship that it was written into the rules of monastic orders as a required accompaniment of prayer and repentance. Throughout the medieval era, disapproval of crying is confined to hypocritical tears, which were understood to be common in both men and women. Put another way, until recently, grown men actually forced themselves to cry publicly in the hope of impressing their peers.

There’s one glaring exception to this worldwide sobfest. As the medievalist Sif Rikhardsdottir of the University of Iceland notes, Scandinavians maintained a dry-eyed composure through these sobbing centuries. In her Medieval Translations and Cultural Discourse (2012), Rikhardsdottir illustrates this point by citing two versions of a medieval epic in which a boy hero is lost in the woods. The French hero dissolves in self-pitying tears; his Icelandic counterpart stoically admires the scenery and contemplates his next move.

Outside of Scandinavia, rampant male boo-hooing persisted well into the Early Modern period, and extended to parliamentarians as well as knights and monks.

But from the 18th through the 20th centuries, the population became increasingly urbanised; soon, people were living in the midst of thousands of strangers. Furthermore, changes in the economy required men to work together in factories and offices where emotional expression and even private conversation were discouraged as time-wasting. As Tom Lutz writes in Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears (1999), factory managers deliberately trained their workers to suppress emotion with the aim of boosting productivity: ‘You don’t want emotions interfering with the smooth running of things.’

👩🏻‍🔬 20201020 Tenacity, the Art of Integration, and the Key to a Flexible Mind: Wisdom from the Life of Mary Somerville, for Whom the Word “Scientist” Was Coined - Maria Popova on The Marginalian

💭 20200601 Book Review: Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind - Scott Alexander on Slate Star Codex

Julian Jaynes' The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind is a brilliant book, with only two minor flaws. First, that it purports to explains the origin of consciousness. And second, that it posits a breakdown of the bicameral mind. I think it's possible to route around these flaws while keeping the thesis otherwise intact. So I'm going to start by reviewing a slightly different book, the one Jaynes should have written.

Theory of mind, how people think of the thought of older cultures, how people translate old works.

a typical translation might use a phrase like “Fear filled Agamemnon's mind”. Wrong! There is no word for “mind” in the Iliad, except maybe in the very newest interpolations. The words are things like kardia, noos, phrenes, and thumos, which Jaynes translates as heart, vision/perception, belly, and sympathetic nervous system, respectively. He might translate the sentence about Agamemnon to say something like “Quivering rose in Agamemnon's belly”. It still means the same thing - Agamemnon is afraid - but it's how you would talk about it if you didn't have an idea of “the mind” as the place where mental things happened - you would just notice your belly was quivering more. Later, when the Greeks got theory of mind, they repurposed all these terms.

Suppose Achilles is overcome with rage and wants to kill Agamemnon. But this would be a terrible [idea]; after [thinking] about it for a while, he [decides] against. If Achilles has no concept of any of the bracketed words, nothing even slightly corresponding to those terms, how does he conceptualize his own actions? Jaynes:

The response of Achilles begins in his etor, or what I suggest is a cramp in his guts, where he is in conflict, or put into two parts (mermerizo) whether to obey his thumos, the immediate internal sensations of anger, and kill the king, or not. It is only after this vacillating interval of increasing belly sensations and surges of blood, as Achilles is drawing his mighty sword, that the stress has become sufficient to hallucinate the dreadfully gleaming goddess Athene who then takes over control of the action and tells Achilles what to do.

As you go about your day, you hear a voice that tells you what to do, praises you for your successes, criticizes you for your failures, and tells you what decisions to make in difficult situations. Modern theory-of-mind tells you that this is your own voice, thinking thoughts. It says this so consistently and convincingly that we never stop to question whether it might be anything else.
If you don't have theory of mind, what do you do with it?

Then, around 1250 BC, this well-oiled system started to break down. Jaynes blames trade. Traders were always going into other countries, with different gods. These new countries would be confusing, and the traders' hallucinatory voices wouldn't always know all the answers. And then they would have to negotiate with rival merchants! Here theory of mind becomes a huge advantage - you need to be able to model what your rival is thinking in order to get the best deal from him. And your rival also wants theory of mind, so he can figure out how to deceive you. Around 1250 BC, trade started picking up, and these considerations became a much bigger deal. Then around 1200 BC, the Bronze Age collapsed.

But as theory of mind spread, the voices of the gods faded. They receded from constant companions, to only appearing in times of stress (the most important decisions) to never appearing at all. Jaynes interprets basically everything that happened between about 1000 BC and 700 BC as increasingly frantic attempts to bring the gods back or deal with a godless world.

Now, to be fair, he cites approximately one zillion pieces of literature from this age with the theme “the gods have forsaken us” and “what the hell just happened, why aren't there gods anymore?” As usual, everyone else wimps out and interprets these metaphorically - claiming that this was just a poetic way for the Mesopotamians to express how unlucky they felt during this chaotic time. Jaynes does not think this was a metaphor - for one thing, people have been unlucky forever, but the 1000 - 750 BC period was a kind of macabre golden age for “the gods have forsaken us” literature.

So people got desperate. He says this period was the origin of augury and divination. Omens “were probably present in a trivial way” before this period, but not very important; “there are, for example, no Sumerian omen texts whatsoever”. But after about 1000 BC, omens become an international obsession. [...] And then there are the demons. Early Sumerians didn't really worry about demons. Their religion was very clear that the gods were in charge and demons were impotent. Post 1000 BC, all of this changes. [...] and angels, and prophets, and all the other trappings of religion. When the gods spoke to you every day, and you couldn't get rid of them even if you wanted to, angels - a sort of intermediary with the gods - were unnecessary. There was no place for prophets - when everyone is a prophet, nobody is. There wasn't even prayer, at least not in a mystical sense - as Jaynes puts it, “schizophrenics do not beg to hear their voices - it is unnecessary - in the few case where this does happen, it is during recovery when the voices are no longer heard with the same frequency.”

The Assyrians invented the idea of Heaven. Previously, Heaven had been unnecessary. You could go visit your god in the local ziggurat, talk to him, ask him for advice. But word went around that gods had retreated to heaven - some of the stories even use those exact words, blaming the Great Flood or some other cataclysm. The ziggurats shifted from houses for the gods to e-temen-an-ki - pedestals that the gods could descend to from Heaven, should they ever wish to return.

By 500 BC, the ability to hear the gods was limited to a few prophets, oracles, and poets. Jaynes is especially interested in this last group - he cites various ancient sources claiming that the poets only transcribe what they hear gods and goddesses sing to them (everyone else wimps out and says this is metaphorical).

Jaynes ends by referencing one of my favorite ancient texts, Plutarch's On The Failure Of Oracles. Plutarch, writing around 100 AD, is not a skeptic. He believes oracles work in theory. But he records a general consensus that they don't work as well as they used to, and that some day soon they will stop working at all.

The last oracle to fade away was the greatest - Delphi, perched atop a fantastic gorge as if suspended between Heaven and Earth. Jaynes tries to give us an impression of how important it was in its time; important people from all over the classical world would make the pilgrimage there, leave lavish gifts, and ask Apollo for advice on weighty matters. He thinks that the oracle's fame protected it; if a cultural validation is an important ingredient in god-hearing, Delphi had the strongest and best. Its reputation was unimpeachable. Still, in the centuries after Plutarch, its prophecies became rarer and rarer; the Pythia's few divine utterances became separated by more and more incoherent raving. Finally:

As part of [the Emperor Julian's] personal quest for authorization, he tried to rehabiliate Delphi in AD 363, three years after it had been ransacked by Constantine. Through his remaining priestess, Apollo prophecied that he would never prophesy again. And the prophecy came true.

if [American Indians, or Zulus, or Greenland Inuit, or Polynesians, or any other human group presumably isolated from second-millennium-BC Assyrians] were perfectly normal conscious people like us, then Jaynes is wrong about everything.

📖 20190910 Malcolm Gladwell Reaches His Tipping Point - Andrew Ferguson on The Atlantic

#Reviews

Although AF seems to be complaining about not understanding a book whose whole thesis is that nobody actually understands each other outside of small social circles, 😛 his scathing review of pop social science makes some valid points, such as chasing down MG's cited statistic about poets having the highest suicide rate and exposing how stupidly (ahem, uninformedly) it was calculated. There's also this gem about Truth-Default Theory, the theory that states that people are more likely to assume truth in the absence of reason to be suspicious:

"I don't know whether default to truth will enter the Gladwell lexicon with tipping point and stickiness. But his appropriation of the phrase does show that his attitude to social science remains unquestioning. When he encounters a study published in a journal with a complicated name, he defaults to swallowing it whole."

He ends the article praising MG for his newfound epistemological humility, which "of course, wouldn't have sold all those million books if he had begun practicing it 20 years earlier."

☠️ 20190313 Vagabond Mannequin - KB Carle on Jellyfish Review

🔄 20190210 Story Structure 102: Pure, Boring Theory - Dan Harmon

wayback date

The Rhythm of Psychology

Your mind is a home, with an upstairs and a downstairs.
Upstairs, in your consciousness, things are well-lit and regularly swept. Friends visit. Scrabble is played, hot cocoa is brewing. It is a pleasant, familiar place.
Downstairs, it is older, darker and much, much freakier. We call this basement the unconscious mind.
The unconscious is exactly what it sounds like: It's the stuff you don't, won't and/or can't think about. According to Freud, there are dirty pictures of your mother down there. According to Jung, there are pipes, wires, even tunnels down there that connect your home to others. And even though it contains life-sustaining energies (like the fuse box and water heater), it's a primitive, stinky, scary place and it's no wonder that, given the choice, we don't hang out down there.
However, your pleasure, your sanity and even your life depend on occasional round trips. You've got to change the fuses, grab the Christmas ornaments, clean the litter box.

This is the rhythm of psychology: Conscious-unconscious-conscious-unconscious-etc.

The Rhythm of Society
only instead of "consciousness," a society's upstairs is "order," and its basement is "chaos."
Whereas the health of an individual depends on the ego's regular descent and return to and from the unconscious, a society's longevity depends on actual people journeying into the unknown and returning with ideas.

Like people, societies become neurotic and can eventually break down when they make the mistake of thinking the downstairs shouldn't exist. America is a terrific example of this

The rhythm of society: Order-chaos-order-chaos-etc.

Resonance

Now you understand that all life, including the human mind and the communities we create, marches to the same, very specific beat. If your story also marches to this beat- whether your story is the great American novel or a fart joke- it will resonate. It will send your audience's ego on a brief trip to the unconscious and back. Your audience has an instinctive taste for that, and they're going to say "yum."

💃🏻 20181106 The Craft of Writing Empathy - Nuar Alsadir on Lit Hub

Excited to finally have the opportunity to get to know them, I blurted out a series of questions—how long have you been here, what are you working on? They offered detached, clipped answers until the one advised, “Here, in Europe, when we try to get to know someone, we don’t ask questions. We enter into conversation and get to know a person by the way they think.”

Right now I’m talking to you ego-to-ego

Let’s say the baby is crying. The baby’s cry isn’t heard the way words are generally heard, cognitively. It enters the body. [...] She processes that raw emotion with the tools she’s developed through experience, then puts that processed emotion back into the world in symbolized form, which is to say, in words—“You’re tired.”

In Bion’s theory, the raw emotional data that the infant gives off are termed “beta elements,” which must then be ruminated on, metabolized by an “alpha function”—the mechanism of experiencing emotion from within, digesting it, and putting it back out in symbolized form.

Beta elements pass between people who are close—a parent and infant, lovers, friends, siblings—but also strangers on the street, on the subway, at the checkout counter of a store.

If you are performing alpha functions, digesting your work for your reader to the extent that it becomes a piece of American cheese in plastic wrapping, your reader can take it in as we take in processed foods, but it’s unlikely that much will remain for their bodies to contain and metabolize. That is the danger of over-editing, shining the surfaces and combing out all the knots (“The lines I love,” writes Walcott, “have all their knots left in”). A clean, processed piece of writing with no bumps or snags may not trigger existential shame, but is also unlikely to emit beta elements from your body to your reader’s body, your unconscious to their unconscious—to move them.

When we receive a poetic communication, we are stirred in our bodies: a primitive, primordial part of us is awakened—what psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott termed the “true self” and Jacques LeCoq called our clown. I ended up in a two-week, six-hour per day clown program as part of the research I was doing for a book I'm writing about laughter.

LeCoq, who began as a physiotherapist, believed “the body knows things about which the mind is ignorant”—a phrase that could be applied to the unconscious.

The more we sense the need to protect ourselves, the more we suppress primal instincts and try to blend in—or in the extreme, play dead (like hiding amongst a pile of bodies during a mass shooting). The social equivalent to playing dead is to put forward a façade—what Winnicott termed a “false self,” built around manners and protocol as opposed to spontaneous expression.

The clown gets up before an audience and risks letting whatever is inside seep out—just as patients in psychoanalysis free-associate and let their thoughts go wherever the mind takes them. While the analyst searches for the true self by way of material that reveals the unconscious, the actor in clown school seeks to discover it by way of their spontaneous expressions. These processes are similar to what philosopher Martin Heidegger termed alêtheia, or truth as unconcealment.

At the end of clown school, Bayes named our clowns through a process that lasted days. We each took the stage and underwent a kind of interview process that culminated in his deciding on a name that flagged something in us that needed to be explored. Most people cried—I mean sobbed, snot into red nose—as their clown was being named

As Winnicott says, “It's joy to be hidden, disaster not to be found.”

🩸 20180926 I endured it. It was fine - Allie Marini on Jellyfish Review

😂 20180101 Paul Bryant's Goodreads review of The Tunnel by William Gass

🗣 20171011 Not the critic who counts - Scott Aaronson on Shtetl-Optimized

There's a website called Stop Timothy Gowers! !!! —yes, that's the precise name, including the exclamation points. The site is run by a mathematician who for years went under the pseudonym “owl / sowa,” but who's since outed himself as Nikolai Ivanov [...] [Sir Timothy Gowers is a Fields Medalist] who's known at least as well for explaining math, in his blog, books, essays, MathOverflow, and elsewhere, in a remarkably clear, friendly, and accessible way. He's also been a leader in the fight to free academia from predatory publishers.

When I browse sites like “Stop Timothy Gowers! !!!” or SneerClub, I tend to get depressed about the world [...] But then I reflect that there's at least one glaring asymmetry between the sides.

when you read sowa's blog, for all the anger about the sullying of mathematics by unworthy practitioners, there's a striking absence of mathematical exposition. Not once does sowa ever say: “OK, forget about the controversy. Since you're here, instead of just telling you about the epochal greatness of Grothendieck, let me walk you through an example. Let me share a beautiful little insight that came out of his approach, in so self-contained a way that even a physicist or computer scientist will understand it.” In other words, sowa never uses his blog to do what Gowers does every day.

Similar comments apply to Slate Star Codex versus r/SneerClub. When I read an SSC post, even if I vehemently disagree with the central thesis (which, yes, happens sometimes), I always leave the diner intellectually sated. For the rest of the day, my brain is bloated with new historical tidbits, or a deep-dive into the effects of a psychiatric drug I'd never heard of, or a jaw-dropping firsthand account of life as a medical resident, or a different way to think about a philosophical problem—or, if nothing else, some wicked puns and turns of phrase.
But when I visit r/SneerClub—well, I get exactly what's advertised on the tin.

When I was in college, I devoured Ray Monk's two-volume biography of Bertrand Russell. This is a superb work of scholarship, which I warmly recommend to everyone. But there's one problem with it: Monk is constantly harping on his subject's failures, and he has no sense of humor, and Russell does. The result is that, whenever Monk quotes Russell's personal letters at length to prove what a jerk Russell was, the quoted passages just leap off the page—as if old Bertie has come back from the dead to share a laugh with you, the reader, while his biographer looks on sternly and says, “you two think this is funny?”
For a writer, I can think of no higher aspiration than that: to write like Bertrand Russell or like Scott Alexander—in such a way that, even when people quote you to stand above you, your words break free of the imprisoning quotation marks, wiggle past the critics, and enter the minds of readers of your generation and of generations not yet born.

the title of this post comes from the famous Teddy Roosevelt quote:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds;

🔬 20170513 Reality has a surprising amount of detail - John Salvatier

It's tempting to think 'So what?'' and dismiss these details as incidental or specific to stair carpentry. And they are specific to stair carpentry; that's what makes them details. But the existence of a surprising number of meaningful details is not specific to stairs. Surprising detail is a near universal property of getting up close and personal with reality. [...] You might think the fiddly detailiness of things is limited to human centric domains, and that physics itself is simple and elegant. That's true in some sense - the physical laws themselves tend to be quite simple - but the manifestation of those laws is often complex and counterintuitive.

Another way to see that noticing the right details is hard, is that different people end up noticing different details. [...] I kept arguing because I thought I was right. I felt really annoyed with him and he was annoyed with me. [...] If we had been able to get these points across, we could have come to consensus. Drawing a diagram was probably a good idea, but computing the angle was probably not. Instead we stayed annoyed at each other for the next 3 hours.

Before you've noticed important details they are, of course, basically invisible. It's hard to put your attention on them because you don't even know what you're looking for. But after you see them they quickly become so integrated into your intuitive models of the world that they become essentially transparent. [...] This means it's really easy to get stuck. Stuck in your current way of seeing and thinking about things. Frames are made out of the details that seem important to you. The important details you haven't noticed are invisible to you, and the details you have noticed seem completely obvious and you see right through them. This all makes makes it difficult to imagine how you could be missing something important.

“what could convince you you were wrong?” you'll likely get back an answer like “if it turned out all the data on my side was faked” or some other extremely strong requirement for evidence rather than “I would start doubting if I noticed numerous important mistakes in the details my side's data and my colleagues didn't want to talk about it”. [...] The direction for improvement is clear: seek detail you would not normally notice about the world.

🐜 20160819 What do aliens look like? The clue is in evolution - Matthew Wills on The Conversation

Why not giant intelligent “insects”?

Insects are by far the most species rich group on Earth: why shouldn't aliens look more like them? Unfortunately, having your skeleton on the outside makes growth difficult, and entails periodic shedding and regrowth. On Earth-like planets, all but relatively small terrestrial animals with external skeletons would collapse under their own weight during moulting, and some critical size may be necessary for suitably complex brains.

💭 20150218 A Dent in the Universe - Venkatesh Rao on Ribbonfarm

At higher levels of the Maslow hierarchy, imagination is a survival skill. At the apex, where self-actualization is the primary concern, lack of imagination means death. Metaphoric death followed by literal death of the sort that tortured artists achieve through suicide. Less sensitive souls, such as earnest political philosophers and technically brilliant but unimaginative mathematicians, seem to end up clinically insane and institutionalized. Or as ranting homeless psychotics.

Choosing to navigate non-deterministic challenges with imagination is a way to deal with self-actualization before it becomes a problem. Equally, choosing a non-imaginative path even when an imaginative path opens up is a symptom of the natural fear of self-actualization. The fear is based on the unconscious (and correct) belief that awakening dormant needs might kill you, and the (incorrect) assumption that not doing so will ensure that they remain asleep indefinitely.

Even the least narcissistic types, willing or even eager to have their individuality be subsumed into an undifferentiated collective, cannot solve the problem of self-actualization through imitation. Navigating the darkness that is the challenge of self-actualization is something you have to ultimately do alone. Collective ayahuasca ceremonies can only help you along so far.

The problem that makes you hit the ceiling of the esteem stage [...] When the mask and the daemon are not integrated, your visible behavior becomes a battleground between the two. When the mask wins, the daemon loses some form and sinks a little deeper into the subconscious. When the daemon wins, you get something between an inappropriate outburst and a psychotic break. [...] The only way out is to integrate the mask and the daemon in a non-zero-sum way. This is self-actualization and it takes imagination.

Dealing with your shadow is a necessary prelude to self-actualization, but it can turn into a massive yak-shaving introspection exercise that then turns into an addiction if you don't level up. I call it shaving the shadowyak. [...] You have to deal with your shadow just enough to turn it into a friendly daemon that you can then begin integrating with your mask.

I'll offer a definition: imagination is the ability to create unpredictable new meaning while generating more freedom than you consume.

The experience of being imaginative is simply the experience of being alive to possibilities, in an open-ended way. The experience of seeing many possible meanings and futures in any given fragment of external reality (and not just the ones your shadow has chosen to inhabit).

Unlike creativity, imagination is an appreciative skill with an external locus, rather than an instrumental capacity with an internal locus. To notice a pattern in current events that could serve as a premise for a movie is imagination. To be able to develop that premise into an actual screenplay with compelling characters, fresh dialog and an engrossing plot is creativity. You feed creativity by making things. You feed imagination by being curious about things beyond your own shadow.

If only you find relief in the creation, it is projection. If only people very similar to you find relief in the creation, it is still projection. If surprising people find surprising sorts of meaning in the creation, it is self-actualization.

🖼 20131120 Life is a Picture, But You Live in a Pixel - Tim Urban on Wait but Why

👀 20090521 This is Water: Kenyon College commencement speech by David Foster Wallace

if you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I'd ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your scepticism about the value of the totally obvious.

the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to [grocery] shop [after work in a crowded supermarket].

But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she's not usually like this. Maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. [...] But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it.
This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship [...] is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:
“This is water.”
“This is water.”
It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out.

👥 20081021 Big Thinking: Plato and the Republic of Your Soul - Levi Asher on Lit Kicks

Theory: the book is intended as a work of psychology rather than politics.

Plato's Republic presents a model for the ideal human soul as a city-state ruled by a truly wise, loving and attentive “philosopher king”. The concept of the “philosopher king” has been much quoted as Plato's prescription for good government, but in fact the actual text develops the idea only as a metaphor, and never states whether or not Plato or Socrates believe such a state to be possible or desirable in the real world. The concept of the “Philosopher King” describes Plato's (and Socrates's) prescription for being a good person, not being a good government.

The other four less perfect types of government Plato (via Socrates) describes in this extended metaphor are also... personality types.

The double level of meaning — everything relates to both the city and the soul — renders the allegories murky at times, and much of Plato's usually brisk and humorous style gets lost in the dense depths. For newcomers to Plato, I'd recommend instead the Gorgias, the Phaedo, the Meno or the three short works that narrate Socrates' death: Apology, Crito and Phaedo.

🧠 20021228 Cartoon Epistemology - Steven Lehar

Part I: Something Very Strange!

But then how come things in the distance look smaller? Perspective is something that happens in your eye, not out in the world!

Well, take a look at this. See the two sides of this street? They are straight and parallel as far as the eye can see
So?
But LOOK! Those straight parallel sides also MEET AT A POINT! RIGHT THERE! Can you SEE it?
Well they LOOK like they meet at a point. But they don't really!
And if you turn around and look behind you, they meet at a point back there too!
So? I don't get it.
So this street that we are standing on is shaped like the rind of a melon slice with two curved sides that meet at a point at either end. And those end points are at eye level, even though the street is under our feet.

But it only looks that way. It's an illusion. We know that the world isn't really warped like that.

Yes but HOW do we “know”? We “know” by using a warped reference scale to judge the objective size of things in the warped subjective world.

I don't know if I see anything warped at all! Looks perfectly straight to me!

take a look at what happens when you walk down the road. Things from far away expand outwards and get bigger and bigger until you pass them, and then they shrink back down again to a tiny little dot before they disappear altogether!
Hmmm, I suppose it is a bit like some kind of bubble.

Now look- you stay here and let me take a few paces. See? now my world is the biggest here where I stand, but your world is biggest over there where you stand.

we each have our own private bubble, and we can never see into anyone else's bubble.

whatever happened to the real world that we know exists independent of our experience of it? Where did it go? Does it not even exist? Is everything just a hallucination or lucid dream?
Of course it exists! Otherwise there would be nothing to keep the picture in your bubble synchronized with the picture in mine.

You cannot see the external world directly. You can only see it through your private conscious experience of it. So this world you see around you is the picture in your brain. In other words beyond the dome of the sky above, and beyond the solid earth underfoot, is the inner surface of your true physical skull.

Part II: There is nothing strange at all!

And as the cortex lights up electrically, you see the world around you.
Is the electrical activity in the cortex shaped like a street with houses under a domed sky?
No! Neurons chatter away in the brain in a pattern that is nothing like the shape of the world you see.

Part III: It's all in your head!

Motor control is tele-motive, like a virtual-reality body glove, electronically coupled to a remote android body that automatically replicates its posture.

Except in perception that android body is not remote, but surrounding, like a body glove suspended in a control room which is located inside the head of the giant android body that it controls.

And projected into that control room is a volumetric colored replica of the surrounding environment constructed on the basis of sensory input.

As the controller cavorts about in this synthetic reality, the larger android body cavorts in the external world, giving the controller the impression that he is interacting with the external world directly…

🙏🏼 19960313 Pythagoras: The Cult of Personality and the Mystical Power of Numbers - Danny Hakim on the Washington Post

[Mnesarchus and Parthenis] consulted the Pythian oracle. She told the young couple they would have a son who would change the world. Mnesarchus promptly renamed his wife Pythias, and the lovers dutifully followed the seer's instructions to visit Phoenicia, in what now is Syria, for the baby's birth. They named him Pythagoras

Not until Pythagoras turned 60 did he begin to settle down, and his thoughts on aging were not those of the typical senior citizen: the great man saw life in four stages. "Twenty years a boy, 20 years a youth, 20 years a young man and 20 years an old man."

Historians disagree about what he did [in Croton, a city in southern Italy inhabited mostly by Greeks], but there is general agreement that Pythagoras combined radiant charisma with a shaman's magnetic charm. He was a teacher of many things, an uptown mystic in a backwater town. Crotonians flocked to bask in his glamour and soak up his wisdom. Pythagoras also had a "golden thigh," according to many ancient writers, who soberly reported this curious characteristic as if the man's leg literally were made of the metal. This led Crotonians to what they considered a natural conclusion: Pythagoras was either the god Apollo or the son of Apollo. There was no one the great man wouldn't teach -- children, the poor, city elders. To all, he disseminated his beliefs on faith, diet and morality. He even spoke to women, whom he treated as equals, atypical behavior for a man in those days.

With such flourishes, Pythagoras spread his doctrine of strict vegetarianism. According to legends, he had long performed these odd, magical feats. [...] His good fortune continued in Croton whose citizens had built him a school and a temple honoring his patron god, Apollo.

The faithful were divided into two ranks -- disciples who lived in a commune, sharing all possessions, and a larger group called "Acousmatics," whose dedication was less consuming. The disciples lived faithfully in step with their guru. Like Pythagoras, they ate lightly, taking neither meat nor fish. They slept sparingly, drank no alcohol, insisted on monogamy. They never ate beans because Pythagoras taught that men's souls were inside the beans. They never traveled the high road, never touched white roosters. They "received from {Pythagoras} laws," Iamblichus says, "as if they were divine precepts, without which they did nothing."

This was an age in which old, stable social orders and their trusted religions were breaking down. Society was in ferment. Many people were seeking new values and updated moral guideposts. Pythagoras's cult had a lot in common with Orphic cults sweeping Greece. These were named for Orpheus, the tragic mythological lover. Orphics preached and practiced a potpourri of science, mysticism and monkish self-control. Angry Greek men and women were seeking the same salvation through Orphics and Pythagoras's cult that today's malcontents seek in such modern movements as militias and new religions. Life in that time, according J.B. Bury in his History of Greece, was not like that of the good old days. Gone were the secure, nuclear households of Homer's age three centuries earlier. In a tumultuous era of increasing political democracy, which many saw as promoting mob rule and social debauchery, new cults such as the Pythagoreans and Orphics offered new creeds by which to live, preaching temperance, communal living and oligarchy, government by an enlightened few. Many people in Pythagoras's day were drawn by hushed whispers about life after death in some kind of nether world, a concept that reached Greeks from Egyptian and Eastern cultures. Secrecy and mystical traditions were part of the cults' appeal. It gave them an air of enlightenment and revolution. Each group had its own spin. Orphics emphasized transmigration of souls after death into new bodies. Cults dedicated to the god Dionysius preferred frenzied channeling rituals.

To Pythagoras, numbers were divine, the primary elements of all existence. Individual numbers had magical powers. Numbers, he said, are "the cause of gods and demons." Pythagoras started counting with the number 3. One and 2 he considered building blocks for all other numbers, not numbers themselves. "Opportunity was 7," modern scholar Ward Rutherford writes in his account of the Pythagoreans' linkage of numbers with even the most abstract notions. "Justice is 4, masculinity an odd number, femininity an even." Two embodied the female principle, 3 the male and so marriage was 5. Odd as such thinking may seem today, Pythagoreans developed key concepts that influenced development of modern science. One, for example, was that nature, or reality, at its deepest level is mathematical. "All is number," Pythagoras taught, using a formulation surprisingly close to views expressed by Albert Einstein and others: God is a mathematician. But Pythagoreans went a bit further. They claimed that their numerical mysticism could lead to spiritual purification, ultimately uniting souls of individuals with the divine.

Pythagoras established one of the world's first laboratories, where he tested acoustics by hammering bells of different weights and measuring the pitch of tones they produced. He discovered that musical pitch is related to vibration in string and varies with the string's length. He found musical harmony results from waves in vibrating strings that are precise multiples of one another -- one wave in the vibrating string being exactly twice or three times the length of another with which it harmonizes. He measured the stars and plotted an Earth-centered solar system. In fact, he argued that movements of stars and planets produced a form of musical harmony beyond human comprehension -- the source of the expression "the music of the spheres." But the Pythagoreans did not share their knowledge. Secrecy was maintained with fervor, including knowledge of various geometric forms considered to have divine properties.

الخاتمة:

Like Chicago, Croton soon became a one-star town. Like Michael Jordan, Pythagoras had become omnipotent. He probably was above direct involvement in political frays, but many in his cult were not. As Bury wrote, his adherents turned the order into "an instrument of political power." [...] When Telis, the Sybarite dictator, demanded return of refugees who had fled to Croton, many Crotonians wanted to comply. They had suffered in recent conflicts with other city-states and were not confident about their power. But Pythagoras was defiant and rallied Croton. His disciple, Milo the wrestler, raised an army and attacked Sybaris. Though outnumbered, Milo's troops crushed Sybaris so completely that it virtually disappeared. Suddenly, Croton was a major power in the region. Yet even in victory, bitter dissension remained. Lingering problems with cults festered across the Greek world.

Problems for Pythagoras came to a head after he had been in Croton about 20 years. A nobleman named Cylon asked to join the Pythagoreans, but he had a reputation as a partier, so Pythagoras balked. Spurned, Cylon rallied the population against Pythagoras and ambushed him at Milo's house. In the clash, the house was burned, and most local Pythagoreans were killed. The Pythagorean school, though, did not fade.

The demise of Pythagoras has never been clear. Diogenes Laertius reports that he escaped the fire at Milo's, only to come to a bean field, sacred ground. When he refused to cross it, pursuers from Croton caught him and slit his throat. Other reports say he escaped to Metapontum, a Greek-Italian city-state, and died there shortly afterward. Some reports place him last in Delos, consoling a dying teacher. Sightings of Pythagoras, Elvis-like, were reported for years.