PCAPPC

"My daddy taught to never do anything without a purpose." I've met people like that, though none quite so honest or self-aware. Your daddy was right, so far or it goes, but the purpose should never interfere with the opportunities for discovery, and the plan should never preempt spontaneity. Purposes get you out of the house and plans keep you moving when you're stuck. But the goal can blind you to the journey, and the plan can make you deaf to good fortune and hostile to coincidence. In the 60's and 70's, I rarely saw anyone in the mountains who wasn't clearly stating their purpose for being there. There'd be a fishing rod or rifle prominently displayed outside their backpack, and they'd always ask about their prospects for success up trail. The worst were the mountaineers. They'd pass silently with only a disdainful glance at my gear. I once almost bought an ice ax, just to deflect their derision. The first question that occurs to most A...

The Whole Earth Catalog, which anticipated the internet, took as its inspiration Bucky Fuller's "Spaceship Earth" and the first real photograph of the whole earth, taken from Apollo 8 by the first astronauts to orbit the Moon. We did great things then and assumed ourselves virtuous. But Fuller rode through those ambitions and prolific decades like a precocious child who asked too many questions. And though his intent was to accelerate progress, he made us stop. And think. His impatience was our conscience; his ambitions were our inhibitions; his "comprehensive anticipatory design science" was our resistance to its opposite: the realization of the ideal; the exclusive, apprehensive, prescriptive, and domesticating ideologies of power. Though Fuller wasn't an idealist, he invoked the concept of God and even prayed in a manner he associated with the purpose of prayer. He didn't believe in a God independent of and outside the universe, but he did accept ...

The question is always ahead of the answer, because the question presupposes the fact. Answers tell us nothing but what the question had already anticipated. The inquisitor is to be blamed if a negative answer leads them nowhere. Every question should anticipate every answer, which is to say that no answer should ever be dismissed. The question might not be understood, by either the interrogator or by the interrogated. If so, refine the question, expand, explain. To articulate a relevant question requires that the scholar first be educated by the curious. There are rote answers to rote questions, and there is curiosity that disturbs the serenity of ideologues. The latter requires careful diplomacy and, especially, compassion. We all were once confirmed to one state or another, and we all owe ourselves to the compassion of an inquisitor, the sympathy of an interrogator. Ask and receive. It was never know and get. It's all in the asking, the humble inquisitiveness, curiosity without...

It's the 50th anniversary of one of the great coming-of-age songs: "Sitting on the dock of the Bay watching my time slip away." But for me, it was Tom Traubert's Blues by Tom Waits, and the line, "No one speaks English and everything's broken, and my Stacy's are soaking wet." If I was a few years older I might have separated myself from my feelings like Bob Dylan when he asked, "How does it feel to be on your own, like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone?" There was also Cat Stevens: "I keep on wondering if sleep too long, will I always wake up the same, or so? And if I make it to the waterside, will I even find me a boat, or so?" There was Catcher in the Rye before popular music got serious. And there was Danny Boy before literature acknowledged that generations were coming of age in America, and we were all doing it alone. For most of us, there was no apprenticeship, no ceremony, no mentors. There was onl...

I wrote a nice sentence this morning. The rest of the essay wasn't blog-worthy, but I think the sentence stands alone: "We, this nexus of conceit, conceive and create the universe with every breath, every egocentric blink."

The books in Wuthering Heights (Joseph's and those in the Linton's library) represent the civilized world, and civilization is defined by the perverse piety of Joseph, and the meek, feckless morality of the Lintons. Joseph, in his stubborn dissatisfaction with the world, is the distillation of the Earnshaws' morality, the family that took in an orphan (Heathcliff) that the civilized world (represented by the Lintons) had abandoned. Nelly, the housekeeper (not a nursemaid) who would oversee the last days of both families, was aligned with neither of them. She both loved and despised everyone equally. Her meddling was the meddling of an author with her characters, and her aim was to celebrate their willfulness, encourage and to chastise it, and, finally, to to see it stilled in the calm of surrender and the finality of death. Lockwood immersed himself in her story, and even fancied himself its hero. In the end, he slipped away through the back door rather than risk being dis...

There will be long term effects. His tear ducts will stop working. The lens of his left eye will develop cataracts. The hair on the top of his head will turn gray. And the cancer (which my dog, Clarence, has been diagnosed with) will likely return. This is the age of bear skins and stone knives, and medicine is a branch of the military. We preserve and protect life with shields and weapons because we observe nature as a battleground and evolution as an arms race. We see what our metaphors enable us to see, and what we see is fear. Fear made the turtle's shell and the snake's venom. Fear made fins and wings, teeth and claws, and fear made rage as well as the reactions to it: flight, submissiveness, and group identity. When we look at nature, we see ourselves, because that is how we see. We know the world only as well as we know ourselves, and today we know ourselves as selfish genes in a war which will be won by the most fit. Some of us are asking what the victors of this ...