Manzotti is what they call a radical externalist: for him consciousness is not safely confined within a brain whose neurons select and store information received from a separate world, appropriating, segmenting, and manipulating various forms of input. Instead, he offers a model he calls Spread Mind: consciousness is a process shared between various otherwise distinct processes which, for convenience’s sake we have separated out and stabilized in the words subject and object. Language, or at least our modern language, thus encourages a false account of experience.
Camping in bear country
too much august not enough snow:
Our worries, we confided around the campfire, are long and keeping. No matter where we are, they stay with us. But when we camp, everything is so much bigger, we don’t think beyond the fire ring. Up here it was easy to fall silent. Sweet, really, to have an empty mind.
Human “thingliness”
What I’ve always loved about the notion of the ten thousand things is that we ourselves are included in their number. Human beings, the Zhuangzi says, ‘are but one item’ amongst the countless things of the world. We are not separated out from the world. We are not a separate creation. I find this restoring of human existence to the thingness of things—this restitution of our status as things in the world, in the same way that cats and telephone poles and supernovae are things—a huge relief after centuries of philosophical labour that sought to demonstrate that we are set apart from other things.
Must-see blogging: the Artlog Exhibition of Maquettes
Welcome to the first exhibition at the Artlog. It evolved out of the interest of regular visitors in my practice of making articulated paper maquettes for use as compositional aids. A few of them felt encouraged to produce maquettes of their own, and thereafter everything just blossomed. Some contributors have submitted a single maquette, and others many.
This is simply an amazing online exhibition, now complete with the addition of Part 5. The above link takes you to all five posts in reverse chronological order.
Todd Davis on National Poetry Month
And as far as cruelty goes, I think T.S. Eliot was being a bit overly dramatic when he suggested that these 30 greening days in the fourth month of the year were the cruelest. I can think of many other months that offer far more by way of cruelty.
Perhaps as a Midwesterner transplanted to England, Eliot never had the opportunity to walk deep into a northern forest in the first days of March—snows slowly pulling their tongues back into the earth’s mouth—to see winterkill huddled beneath hemlock boughs: the carcasses of deer withered on January’s barren fruit; the corpses of porcupines who weren’t fast enough to evade the brutal teeth of fisher; or even the rare bear who trudged too soon from slumber and found nothing but the empty taste of ashes in its belly.
By April, at least here in central Pennsylvania, the entire ridge-side is burgundy with the tiny blossoms of sugar and red maples. The coltsfoot has already discarded its yellow-fringed flower, and May apple is unfurling the glossy umbrella that will hide its fruit in June and July.
Character recognition
It’s getting harder to prove you’re not a robot
to the computer. You can robot-proof
your website by warping the text like wrought
iron, twisting it. The troubled youths
of the internet have robot brains. They want
to sell you pills to enhance your desire
or suffocate your appetite.
The new aesthetic
What is eaten changes places with that which eats.
Look into the whale’s eye. Each day she becomes
a new thing, resurrected from dead stars.
See also “The New Aesthetic Needs to Get Weirder” (h/t: Rob Horning). Um, yeah. Whatever, guys.
Return of the Mari Lywd
Today, all uninvited, the beast conjured from skull and sheet and ribbons, that haunted my father and through him came to haunt me, arrived not by night in the dead of winter, as it once did with him, but in the back of a car on a bright, sunny morning. And not to do battle this time, but stepping out of the distant past to tread a stately pavane with me under the holly tree in our orchard. Jack barked and proffered his frisbee for play. The rooks called and collared doves fluttered softly about their nests. The circle has closed, at last.
Silverfish
An individual silverfish can live as long as two to eight years. Think about that. If you moved in the last few years, there might be silverfish in your house that have lived there longer than you have. Fortunately, they’re not that prolific; a female may lay fewer than 100 eggs in her lifetime. And a healthy household population of earwigs, spiders and house centipedes will also help keep their numbers down.
Abdominal teeth
The bulb throwing its dim light down the steps like grey fur.
Misread “abominable teeth” as “abdominal teeth.”