— Pablo Neruda tr Stephen Mitchell

‘All know that the drop merges into the ocean,
but few know that the ocean merges into the drop.’

– Kabir  (1398-1448)

Aram Khachaturian, born this day in 1903 to a peasant family in Armenia,untrained in music until adulthood, was regarded in his lifetime as a peer of his contemporaries Shostakovich and Prokofiev.  He was a communist, which is to say he shunned heady music for visceral appeal. 

Listen to the Allegro from his Trio for clarinet, violin, and piano

High Flight

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air. . . .

Up, up the long, delirious burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or ever eagle flew —
And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

— John Gillespie Magee, born this day in 1922

Eclogue

Mark Slouka, writing for the July issue of Harper’s, describes the cowbird egg that appears each year in the phoebe’s nest in the eaves of his summer home.  The mother feeds the huge cowbird chick, and her own babies starve.

One year I carried the cowbird’s egg into the woods and threw it against the trunk of a tree, where it made a dark, wet spot.  Another year I didn’t notice the egg until after it had hatched.  Unable to watch the nestlings starve, I took the intruder out of the nest and then, feeling like a fool, tried to feed it chopped worms and minced bits of large-mouth bass with a straw.  It died—to spite me, I think—sitting hunched up in a corner of the shoebox like a bitter old man in an ill-fitting suit.  A third year, shamefully, I killed the thing outright like a miniature chicken, though the distress of the phoebes over its disappearance touched my heart.  After that I let things alone...

...far off, I can hear something whispering that this compulsion to do, to intrude ourselves, to improve on what is—even when wholly well-intentioned, particularly when wholly well-intentioned—is the source of all our troubles.  Could it be that one of our most essential, even admirable human traits constitutes a richly ironic sin, a sin for which we, in the fullness of time, will be punished? Could it be that the pendulum, having swung over the course of the centuries from humility to hubris in the face of nature’s mystery, has reached the end of its arc?

...

I’ll confess it straight out: intelligent design is a notion, a myth—all right, a theology—I’ve always been attracted to...Not that Toto might reveal to us at long last the benevolent, white-haired wizard behind the curtain, but something... subtler: that we could glimpse the wisdom behind it all, sense, even if momentarily, the pattern in the carpet.  How glorious it would be to feel the key turn, to be able to enter the culture of things...to grasp the intent and the glory, the slow fire of life, behind them...

...

And suddenly I’m there—on the border of acceptance.  Of deference.  Perhaps even of wisdom.  On this side of the line is everything eternal, the vast tide of life breathing in and out, endlessly.  Beyond it—marked by a running stream, a stand of trees, a thousand miles of wire—is the territory of love.  And I’ll step across it every time.

Multiple personalities, one solution

It is sometimes said that the four greatest Portuguese poets of modern times are Fernando Pessoa. The statement is possible since Pessoa, whose name means ‘person’ in Portuguese, had three alter egos who wrote in styles completely different from his own. In fact Pessoa wrote under dozens of names, but Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos were – their creator claimed – full-fledged individuals who wrote things that he himself would never or could never write. He dubbed them ‘heteronyms’ rather than pseudonyms, since they were not false names but “other names”, belonging to distinct literary personalities. Not only were their styles different; they thought differently, they had different religious and political views, different aesthetic sensibilities, different social temperaments. And each produced a large body of poetry. Álvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis also signed dozens of pages of prose.

Fernando Pessoa was born 121 years ago today.

Bloomsday

Bosh! Stephen said rudely. A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals to discovery.

— James Joyce

A zest, an edge, an ecstasy

To hunger and not have, yét hope ón for, to storm and strive and
Be at every assault fresh foiled, worse flung, deeper disappointed,
The turmoil and the torment, it has, I swear, a sweetness,
Keeps a kind of joy in it, a zest, an edge, an ecstasy,
Next after sweet success.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

25,000 years before the Pyramids

...in the shadow of the snow-topped Pyrenees that separate what is now southern France from northern Spain, flourished the first and most enduring of all human civilisations, a vibrant, unified, coherent culture, transmitted from generation to generation for an astonishing twenty-five thousand years...

[Cro Magnon peoples] had fire to warm themselves and animal furs for clothing, sewn together with the aid of ivory needles and held in place by exquisite ivory buttons.  They lived in communities of several hundred spread out in separate dwelling places, and with a total population of probably little more than twenty thousand.  They danced, as we know from the swinging breasts of an exquisite thirty-thousand-year-old statuette of a naked woman, and played music, fashioning drums from mammoth bones, clicking castanets from jawbones and flutes from the hollow bones of birds...They wore jewellery and beads made from a few highly prized materials — certain types of seashells and animal teeth — which they traded over large distances...While their predecessors’ stone tools had scarcely changed in a million years, the Cro Magnons prodigiously extended their sources of food supply by inventing both the spear-thrower and the harpoon.  They invented oil lamps to illuminate the interiors of their caves, the drill that could put an eye in a needle, and rope to bind their tents together.

from Why Us by James Le Fanu

Pictured to the right: the ‘Dame of Brassempouy’, the first human portrait, carved in ivory, 35,000 years ago, unearthed in 1895.

Is my brain a computer?  Am I my brain?

Artificial intelligence research inspired a great deal of excitement and expectation in the 1980s.  Then it turned out that the things that are hard for humans (solving differential equations, optimizing a route through the city) are manageable tasks for a computer; but things that are easy for humans (recognizing three-dimensional objects from 2D images; understanding a children’s story) are so hard for computers that they have posed stumbling blocks for AI.  Then there the larger issues of intuition, integration of information, learning, analogies, inventing new hypotheses to try — these require wisdom and experience for humans, and we have no idea as yet how to program computers do accomplish these things.

Will computers be programmed to emulate abilities of a human individual to range freely in the world at large?  And if so, can such computers be said to have minds?  souls? 

Skeptical article by Namit Arora
Why Minds are Not Like Computers, by Ari Schulman

Contrary view from Ray Kurzweil at Kurzweil AI, who thinks that AI will take off exponentially when computers become better at writing programs than people are.

Age of Intelligent Machines, by Mitchell Waldrop

“Not everything is unsayable in words, only the living truth.”
— Eugene Ionesco

For the graduate

There is invisible writing on the back of the diploma you will receive, and in case you didn’t bring lemon juice to decode it, I can tell you what it says: You are Brilliant, and the Earth is Hiring. The earth couldn’t afford to send recruiters or limos to your school. It sent you rain, sunsets, ripe cherries, night blooming jasmine, and that unbelievably cute person you are dating. Take the hint. And here’s the deal: Forget that this task of planet-saving is not possible before the due date. Don’t be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done.

– Paul Hawken (2009 Commencement Address at U of Portland)

Dance and revolution

“The idealists and visionaries, foolish enough to throw caution to the winds and express their ardor and faith in some supreme deed, have advanced mankind and have enriched the world.”

— Emma Goldman, visionary idealist, passionate, impulsive, whimsical and violent in turns, lived this creed not for herself alone but for working people everywhere.

“If I can’t dance - I don’t want to be part of your revolution”

140 years ago today, Emma Gloldman was born in a Lithuanian ghetto.

The Heaven of Animals