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  • The Narrative Fallacy

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samhain                                                             Thanksgiving Moon

    Narrative fallacy.  I read about it first last night in a book on Amazon.com called “The Everything Store.”  Jeff Bezos refers to it as a construct he read in the book, “The Black Swan.”  It struck me as very post modern.

    Here’s how I understand it.  The narrative fallacy occurs when we use our logical, cause and effect seeking mental habits to place often chaotic events in a series that we can understand.  This means leaving out details, rearranging troublesome sequences, condensing complex interactions.  We make a story out of the data available to us.

    I haven’t read the Black Swan but I imagine this is how Black Swans (big problems that seem to come out of nowhere) slip under the perceptions of people trying to evaluate risks.

    This squares with an especially nettlesome idea in current neuroscience (the author may have gotten it from that source) that suggests our self is a narrative fallacy.  That is, our self is a story we construct out of certain pieces of our life, knitting this into the fabric and leaving that out.  In this view the self is not solid and unchanging, it’s not even relatively solid but changing slowly over time.  No, the self is fluid from beginning to end, a long long novel with ourselves in a starring role, but the script keeps getting handed to us, marked up with changes.

    This partly comes from the plasticity of memory and the proven unreliability of human memory.  We now know eye witnesses, once the gold standard of detective fiction and fact, are the least likely to portray events accurately.  Not because the eye witnesses lie, but because our capacity to remember events as they happened is poor.  Emotions skew them, bias skews them, our senses feed us less than reliable data.  We’re a walking hodge podge of experiences.

    (sarah fishburn)

    The narrative fallacy neatly explains the role of story.  As Bill Schmidt’s Tom Clancy quote says, “Fiction is not like reality.  Fiction has to make sense.”  A key role of fiction is to reassure us of the intelligibility of the world.  The world is not, in fact, intelligible.  There’s just too much going on.  We have to edit our experience to have any hope of using it to our advantage.

    Why is it post modern?  Because post modernism (I’m not convinced this is a very good term.) insists on the unreliability of any narrative. [think about this idea in relation to the photograph below of a Traditional Catholic service in Kitchener, Ontario] As a direct corollary of this, though, there is the role of agency, the role of narrative creator.  That gives all of us a key role in constructing the future we want.  We can claim neither fundamentals from so-called foundational documents or ideas, nor can we rely on history as other than story; but, we can rely on the necessity of our role in creating a new story, one constructed in a way that seems to us true, just and fair.  Even beautiful.  Knowing that none of these categories are more than markers for working or not working.


    Commentary on Religion Faith and Spirituality Humanities Literature Memories MOOCS Myth and Story Writing

  • The Weight of the Inert

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samhain                                                                      Thanksgiving Moon

    I finished the fourth and last writing assignment for ModPo.  I’m attaching it because it was fun, a riff on the Chance poetics of John Cage, Jackson Mac Low, and Bernadette Mayer (pic).

    Next week we finish up and my 3 months excursion into the modern and the post modern through Coursera will be at an end.  The gardening season has come to an end.  And Holiseason is just beginning.

    Over the next weeks and months I plan to consolidate my learning both in poetry and the post modern.  As I’ve said before, I want to include these concepts in reimagining my faith.

    BTW:  Some of you have expressed interest in the MOOCs.  Here are the two I’ve worked with and can recommend:  Coursera and EdX.

     

    The Weight of the Inert

    Version I

    “5 Before the sea and the sky that hangs over all the lands and

    was one of the faces of the whole of nature in the world,

    I have spoken of the chaos, the amount of raw indigestaque

    and nothing but an inert and heaped up in the weight of the same

    not well joined the seeds of discord of things.

    10, supplying light to the world, no one has as yet the Titan,

    not renew the waxing moon horns,

    or hanging in surrounding air

    balanced by its own weight, or long arms

    edge of the lands stretching out her arms;

    15 and that the air, land, sea, and there, and sky.”

     

    Version 2

    5 and and which covers

    One look in the whole world,

    the said, the amount of raw

    and only if the weight of the inert

    things do not go well.

    10 Nothing in the world,

    neither growing Phoebe

    or in the surrounding region

    their own weights, and not long

    15 and that the air, land, sea, and there, and sky.

     

    Since I’m currently engaged in translating Ovid’s Metamorphoses, I performed the following operation. First, I copied a Latin section of Book I: 5-15 from Perseus, a classics aides website. I took that section and put it into google translate. I then went through the Latin and eliminated all words with the letter a and ran it again through google translator. The result is version 2.

    I retained the first version here so you could see that the translation was far from smooth and contained some chance operations on its own. In that sense version 2 is more than 1 step away from the Latin version of number 1 since it introduces the still clunky results of the google translation algorithm into the altered text.

    Version 2 surprised me. It makes almost as much sense, if not a bit more, than Version 1, not in the Latin, of course, but in the English machine translation.

    I hear a surprised boy saying, “And, and which covers one look in the whole world.” Another voice, perhaps a chorus replies, “The said, the amount of raw and only if the weight of the inert.” Another, deeper voice, an adult male weary with experience says, “Things do not go well.”

    The boy again, chastened now, “Nothing in the world, neither growing Phoebe or in the surrounding region…”

    And finally a resonant female voice, mature and wise, “Their own weights, and not long and that the air, land, sea, and there, and sky.”

    All this on a stage bare except for the actors, a broken Greek column and a small tripod holding a basin in which a bright fire burns.

    A fluxus moment, perhaps performed on an off-Broadway sidewalk, the stage improvised with concrete blocks and plywood.   The air is cold, midnight of the Winter Solstice, and a flier announcing the performance reads, “Saturnalian Words. The voice of Sol Invictus.”

    This has a Harry Haller, magic theater resonance for me. The whole thing could be a performance in one of the side stages, feeding the Steppenwolf in all of us.

    OK, I know I’ve gone pretty far afield with this, taking it from chance to dialogue and from dialogue to theater and then positioning the theater in Hesse’s imagined dramatic space. But that very journey speaks of seed text and deterministic method, that somehow flensing an ancient text, then using a very contemporary technology to alter it, can create haunting, yes, I’ll say it, meaning. Meaning created in that most artistic of ways, with the caesura as important as the content.

    What did that one look over the whole world see? And why does a rejoinder to it reference the raw and the inert? The next line seems very apt in a Kafkaesque, Hesseian way: “Things do not go well.” How could they?

    Finally the last two spoken lines speak of loss and seem to refer back to that one look over the whole world which saw what? “The air, land, sea, and there, and sky.”


    Latin MOOCS Poetry Translating Metamorphoses

  • The Wall

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samhain                                                              New (Thanksgiving) Moon

    Hit a mental wall yesterday.  Could. Not. Do. One more MOOC or Latin related thing. Brain was not interested.  In the AM  we completed the last of the garden chores for the season and I went downstairs to work on Ovid.  Nope.  Then turned on ModPo and, for the first time since both MOOCs started I did not complete a week’s work on time.  So this week I have to finish week 9 and do all of Week 10.

    Doable because I no longer have Modern and Post Modern, but I don’t like to be behind.  I’ll catch up today or tomorrow.  At the same the new Latin learning style Greg recommended is, again, doable, but it takes more time.  For now.  The combination of the ending of Modern/Post Modern, the assessments due in ModPo, the home work Kate and I did to get ready for the Samhain bonfire and the bonfire itself, coupled with the changed Latin working style short circuited me.  Or threw an internal G.F.I.

    Then, there is, too, the G.D. time switch.  I’m a naked, blanket, no prisoners opponent of messing with time.  Leave it on standard time and damn the consequences.

    As I write this, I realize I’m not much further along today.  Need some more rest.  On the other hand, feeling tired means I’ve been active and that’s how I want to be.

    There is, though, one more flaw in this ointment.  I started my low fiber diet yesterday, clear liquids starting at 11:45 pm tonight.  Then that fun couple of hours with a Powerade Miralax punch.  Those of you over 50 almost certainly know this routine.

    As I read the rules for this procedure, it reminded me of ascetics who would undergo elaborate rites of purification before entering the temple to commune with their gods.  In this case the god will appear in white armed with a long, skinny camera.  He, not me, will be going deep inside myself, gaining self-knowledge for me and recording it with a camera. It’s better than meditation! Gastroenterologist be with me now and in the time of my procedure.  So help me Galen.

     

     


    Aging Health Latin MOOCS Third Phase

  • Changes Are Coming

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Fall                                                                     Samhain Moon

    With Modern/Post Modern in its last week and Modpo with only three weeks to go, I feel like the end of the quarter or semester is in sight.  Since it will roughly co-ordinate with Samhain, this means a distinct change in my daily life.  The garden is almost put to bed and will be by the end of this week as well.  The bees, too, will get their cardboard outer sleeve, the moisture absorbing top board and corks in the lower two entrances, plus the entrance reducer.

    This year part of that outdoor energy will get focused in the garage which can use a major cleaning, rearranging.  It’s gotten cluttered and we could use it for more if we eliminate a few things like the five stall dog crate and feeding platform.

    Writing Loki’s Children and keeping up with the Latin will occupy the bulk of the time.  I’ll huddle downstairs with the green gas stove burning, my Zojirushi kicking out tea temperature water and visions of old Rome and Ragnarok.


    Garden Latin MOOCS Our Land and Home Poetry Translating Metamorphoses Writing

  • Two Good Movies

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Fall                                                                      Samhain Moon

    The wood got split.  The Latin trounced me.  Two essays on pragmatism, one by Richard IMAG1083Rorty and one by Cornel West, put philosophy into the day and the next to last essay in ModPo just went into cyber space.  It’s below, if you’re interested*.  The assignment was a few posts back.

    Saw two good movies tonight, too.  Once Were Warriors is a difficult movie to watch since it shows domestic violence in as raw a way as I’ve seen.  About Maori’s living in contemporary New Zealand Warriors has a long tragic arc which only lifts near the end and then to recognize the role of tradition in a tribal people.  Most of it is grim and much of the grimness comes from self-loathing generated by rootlessness, abandonment of the past for a present with no cultural handles.  It’s definitely worth seeing.  The funeral of Grace had me in tears.

    Then a longer, unusual Hollywood movie, the Place Beyond the Pines.  This Ryan Gosling/Bradley Cooper movies has a surprise narrative arc as a major character dies halfway through the movie.  This is a movie about consequences, too, like Warriors, but here the past is not so cultural, it’s personal and it skips a generation before it comes to ahead.  I liked the longer plot line, an unusual choice in a mainstream Hollywood movie.  An actual adult movie.  Also worth seeing.

    *All That’s Left Is Letters

    The title “Why I Am Not A Painter” answers the existential why of the poem’s second line before the poem itself ever starts. O’Hara is not a painter because he writes poetry. For example, here’s one titled “Why I Am Not A Painter.” The poem is his work as the painting hung in the gallery is Goldberg’s. Thus, O’Hara is a poet and Goldberg a painter.

    He thinks he would rather be a painter, but he says, “I am not. Well,” This is, I guess, a soft end-stop, a sort of pause here and think construction which suggests a wry answer to the question. He is not well, at least not well enough to be a painter.

    The two long stanzas provide an alternative narrative to the usual description of the creative process and in so doing give an insider’s look into the difference between painters and poets.

    “Mike Goldberg is starting a painting”, this line in the continuous present, puts us with Goldberg and O’Hara until in the third to last line the painting is finished. What has happened? O’Hara dropped in, had a drink, noticed the painting had the word SARDINES in it. He leaves, comes back, leaves, comes back. Then he returns and it’s finished.

    O’Hara asks, “Where’s SARDINES?” In what I read as a plaintive or mock plaintive note, he notes, “All that’s left is just letters,” “It was too much,” the painter says.

    In the alternative narrative of a painter painting, we get no description of the painting itself save for the word SARDINE and then its absence in the final work. Even one word was too much.

    So, having shown us a painter at work, O’Hara says, “But me?” The poet. What does he do? Well, ironically, he thinks of a color: orange. He writes a line, then a whole page of words, not lines. Like SARDINE this is at the beginning of the creative process. As with Goldberg, O’Hara lets days go by, then he says, “It is even in prose, I am a real poet.” I don’t understand this line except perhaps as irony meaning something like, I’m a real poet so even prose is poetry.

    The twist comes at the end and like a magician there is a big reveal. When he names his twelve poems, he calls them ORANGES in spite of having not mentioned orange in any of them.  When he sees Goldberg’s painting in a gallery, it is named SARDINES.

    Painter and poet are alike in what they leave out, but different in that with Goldberg “all that’s left is just letters.” O’Hara, on the other hand, has words. That’s the key difference between the two, when their work is done, O’Hara has words and the painter only letters.

     


    Cinema and Television Humanities Latin MOOCS Poetry

  • A Skull Expanding Moment

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Fall                                                                           Samhain Moon

    Can you hear that streeetcchhhing sound?  It’s my 20th century, 2nd millennium mind trying to shoehorn in some new ideas.  Not only the New York School poets, for whom Allison gave some appreciated homework help (locating the 5 spot and some info on O’Hara and Larry Rivers), but this afternoon I’ve finished the reading on Unbending Gender and another one on reflexivity*.

    We’ve entered the realm in both these courses I most looked forward to, the section on post-modernism.  I’ve never been able to get straight in my head what post-modernism is, or is supposed to be.  I had the same trouble with dew point for a long time so I think there is hope.

    Reflexivity is a key aspect of modern art as I now understand it and modern poetry, too.   The poem and the art work both are works of art and commentaries (self-reflective) on the act of art-making.  This is clear when painting turned away from realism and toward cubism and abstraction, collapsing perspective into 2-d, the act of painting itself commenting on the acts involved in producing the very painting in view.

    A Pollock action painting is clearly 2-d, makes no attempt at 3-d perspective and the action of dripping the paint on is clearly evident.  In commenting on this point Michael Roth, teacher of the Modern/Post Modern class, made an interesting comment, referencing someone else:  The surface in these paintings, though bold, are fragile.  I understood this immediately, though I don’t know whether I could explain it.

    At some point along here I’m going to synthesize my understanding of post-modernism. To see if I can put it out there clearly.  (that may not be very post-modern though)

    *wiki  Reflexivity refers to circular relationships between cause and effect. A reflexive relationship is bidirectional with both the cause and the effect affecting one another in a situation that does not render both functions causes and effects. In sociology, reflexivity therefore comes to mean an act of self-reference where examination or action “bends back on”, refers to, and affects the entity instigating the action or examination.

    To this extent it commonly refers to the capacity of an agent to recognize forces of socialization and alter their place in the social structure. A low level of reflexivity would result in an individual shaped largely by their environment (or ‘society’). A high level of social reflexivity would be defined by an individual shaping their own norms, tastes, politics, desires, and so on. This is similar to the notion ofautonomy.


    Art and Culture Humanities MOOCS Poetry

  • Anco Impari.

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Fall                                                               Samhain Moon
    T. S. Eliot       Little Gidding V

    “We shall not cease from exploration
    And the end of all our exploring
    Will be to arrive where we started
    And know the place for the first time.”

    The hurry of last week has receded and today is an outdoor day, raspberries and fertilizer. It’s chilly out there, but physical labor adds its own heat.

    The end is in sight for both MOOCs, Modern/Post Modern with only two more weeks and ModPo with four.  Like the course I took last year on Greek Myth both of these have been excellent.  The interactive discussion forums and the video lectures in small, accessible chunks work well for the at home classroom.  The reading in all three has been challenging, definitely college and post-grad level material.  Did I mention that they’re free?

    The Great Course’s cd and dvd classes, taught by professors of proven teaching ability, are excellent, too.  The lectures in these courses are longer and in more depth, but I have not found the spur to do the reading as I have in the MOOC’s.  That’s me, of course.  And, there is no interaction at all.  An advantage is that you can do them over any time frame and in multiple venues.  The MOOCs require a computer screen.  These are not free.

    Though I am at heart an auto-didact and can develop my own reading plans, I appreciate these compressed experiences where an expert in a field alerts you to current issues and literature.  They’re a quicker way in to a broad foundation in a discipline and for an overview of what might have additional interest.

    Over the years I’ve pursued in particular the history of ideas, ancient history:  Rome, Egypt, China, mythology, philosophy and literature.  In literature I’ve tended to focus on the classics and on the classical tradition.  These broad areas have fascinated me for a long time.  I plan to challenge myself over the fallow time with calculus.  Kate’s promised time as my tutor.

    I suppose I could gamble or drink or run naked through the streets, but, hey.  Each to his own?  Right?


    Aging Humanities Latin MOOCS Third Phase US History World History

  • Enlightenment’s Dark Side

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Fall                                                                                  Samhain Moon

    It was wet and chill, but the red and gold fruit warmed me as it slid off.  The raspberry canes grabbed at me as I moved among them as if wanting me to stay awhile longer, to chat or linger.  Once in a while I threw an over ripe berry over the fence to Rigel who watched my progress with head moving up and down, patient, waiting.

    Before the berry picking I spent a couple of hours reading 34 pages, the introductory chapter to Adorno and Horkheimer’s, Dialectic of Enlightenment.  As this MOOC moves toward the end, we come closer to the current time and to thinkers with whom I’m familiar not through academics but through the politics of the 1960’s.  Adorno and Horkheimer are part of the Frankfurt School philosophers, most of whom emigrated to the US during WW II.  I was most familiar with the work of their colleague Herbert Marcuse, but I have come to know the work of Jurgen Habermas, too.

    This is dense material and the argument is provocative, far from obvious.  In essence Adorno and Horkheimer argue that the enlightenment has become an instrument of oppression.  Some characterize the enlightenment as a movement designed to make the earth a home for humanity.  Instead of moving toward freedom and liberation the focus on repeatable natural laws and the tools of technology enabled control and domination, both of the planet and citizens of nation-states.  I’ll do better with this at another time, but this is heart of it.

     

     


    Art and Culture Humanities MOOCS Politics Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

  • God is the zocalo of Western religious life.

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Fall                                                                     Samhain Moon

     

    Last night I dreamed of a place where reality could be reconfigured only by imagining.  Though I don’t remember many specifics, I do remember that at the close of the dream I wondered if the same process could put us in different historical eras, not just different places in current time.

    This led, after waking, to a continuation of the dream space to the matter of the modern and post-modern, much on my mind these days thanks to the two MOOCs I’m taking. Having read Wittgenstein on language games from his Philosophical Investigations and his attendant critique of the really real as inaccessible at best since words do not hook onto reality, only other words (a paraphrase), somehow the Zocalo came to mind.

    Kate and I visited Mexico City in the 1993.  It impressed me then that at the very center of the Federal District, with the National Cathedral on one side and the National Palace on the other was a vast empty space, the zocalo.   The idea of a country with a vast open square at the very heart of its national culture appealed and appeals to me.

    Mexicans fill the zocalo often.  On September 15th at 11 pm, the President comes out on a balcony of the National Palace and delivers a grito, a cry that remembers the “grito de Delores” or the cry of Mexican independence first heard in the small town of Delores.  At other times the military parades through the zocalo.  Recently it has been filled with striking teachers trying to turn back education reform.  Each spring equinox Mexico’s ethnic groups, la raza, fill the zocalo with a celebration through which they assert their critical importance to the nation as a whole.

    With Wittgenstein in the background and in particular his emphasis that meaning is use, that is, we learn the meaning of our language from the contexts in which we use it, the zocalo and God suddenly merged.  God is the zocalo of Western religious life.

    What do I mean?  God is the empty square at the heart of Western religious and political culture.  Over the course of two thousand years various groups from Judaism to Christianity to Muslims and many, many diverse splinters of all these groups have gathered in the square to give their grito.  At the time they fill the square they occupy the center of the culture’s awareness. (Note:  this is not at all, to the contrary in fact, a truth claim about what they say there.)

    This same square also receives those who would fill it with alternative metaphysical or anti-metaphysical ideas.  Nietzsche, God is dead.  The square was empty and continues to be empty.  Nature is god.  The pantheists.  Even those who would entertain the world of many gods, contemporary polytheists like Wiccans and Astruans, have to enter the God/zocalo to make their proclamations over against this central Western idea.

    This means that God is, for the group occupying the God/zocalo, what they say God is. That is, the way they use the concept of God in the square is what God is to them.  Use gives meaning.  Context gives meaning.

    How is this helpful?  It helps me understand that faith, that word I’ve been trying to reimagine over the last couple of years, is not about a transcendental claim at all, but rather is a pledge to walk into the God/zocalo with a particular group and, while there, to abide by their understanding.  Faith is an initiatory passage into culture, not a passageway to the really real.  Said another way faith is agreement with claims about the really real made by a particular group when they inhabit the God/zocalo.

    As long as you remain within that group, their language will be useful to you as a shared agreement about what spreads outward from the zocalo.  In Mexico City it is Mexico and Mexicanness.  In the Presbyterian occupation of the zocalo it is the presbyterian form of church government, John Calvin, local presbyteries and congregations, the Book of Order, ordination exams, elders, presbytery meetings, General Assemblies.

     

     


    Commentary on Religion Faith and Spirituality Humanities MOOCS Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

  • TGIF

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Fall                                                                     New (Samhain) Moon

    Rain washing away the drought, ushering in cooler, more fall like weather.  Gray skies and a general chill in the air.  Familiar to anyone from a temperate latitude.  I like it.

    Busy day today.  Up early and out in the garden in the cool before dawn, working with my hands spreading fertilizer, raking it in to the top couple of inches of soil.  Back inside to write my 2nd essay for ModPo, this on a William Carlos Williams poem, identifying its imagist qualities.  After that, a nap.

    Greg and I took my creaky Latin back onto the track.  I pumped the handle hard, but the little car moved pretty slow.  We set some goals per two week period, 60 verses per through next May.  If I can go faster, I will.

    Immediately after Latin over to Kyoto Sushi, an all you can eat Japanese restaurant in Maple Grove just off Weaver Lake Road.  Bill and I had lunch and he passed some bio-till to me along with some reading material.  As old guys sometimes do, we also discussed hearing aids.

    Back home for a second nap.  Back up and two lectures on Emerson, Self-Reliance and Experience.  Emerson as a proto-Nietzsche and Baudelaire influence as well as a post-Kantian precursor to the modernist critiques of the early twentieth century.  Whew.  That confused me, too.  Basically, he emphasizes active personal experience, moving forward into the future, letting the past be the past and your self be its Self.

    Workout.  OK. Time for TV.


    Aging Asia Friends Latin MOOCS