because poetry.

there's a scene in John Green's latest book, Turtles All The Way Down, where two teenagers sit next to an outdoor in-ground pool and the young man's simple bits of poetry, spoken off-the-cuff under the stars, seem to successfully unseat the young woman's (the protagonist's) spiraling, paralyzing anxiety.

it was a very lovely scene. and it made me think back to a headline I'd seen just a day or so earlier: "How Doctors Use Poetry."

upon first clicking that link to that headline, I read as far down as these few lines:

"...reciting poetry engages the primary reward circuitry in the brain, called the mesolimbic pathway. So does music—but, the researchers found, poetry elicited a unique response. While the mechanism is unclear, it’s been suggested that poetic, musical, and other nonpharmacologic adjuvant therapies can reduce pain..."

and then, a week or so later, I finally came back to read the whole thing. and eventually look up the cognitive neuroscience study the author references. I wanted to blog about this. because poetry.

because the idea of communication beyond the 'restricted' language of 'science' is interesting. because feelings and power and pathos and transformation feel important.

perhaps something about this time of year makes poetry feel especially necessary. seasons changing. colder, darker times pressing in upon us. stresses of the semester intensifying...

I often think I should read and savor more poetry more regularly. but sometimes it doesn't seem accessible or convenient. making space for poems isn't always easy.

our lovely local poets here at NSU have offered me an excuse for savoring plenty of poetry lately though. they're participating in a month-long poetry marathon to support a small indie non-profit literary press. one poem every day, for almost all of October. I like it. maybe there's something about knowing that poems have been written under a time constraint that makes them especially delicious and interesting.

almost all of these poems evoke some kind of emotion. some ask more patience of me than others. I like the ones that make me feel pried open, or guided dot by dot around a gallery of newness, or plunged into a deep ocean.

all the poems of the 30/30 poetry-fest are on one webpage, which makes it difficult to send you to the ones I like the most. you'll have to search a little bit for them. some of my favourites so far:

• A Study in Time and Space / by Rebecca Macijeski
• God owns a carwash in Iowa / by Ally Schwam
• Two Heads / by Karen Greenbaum-Maya
• Camelot’s Redemption / by Chad W. Lutz
• If I could make this easy / by Jen Stewart Fueston

and there are still 15 more days of poems to be written! if you're into it, you can donate to the press and incentivize our lovely local poets this month, here and/or here.

more poetries, previously:

• Emerson
• my littlest sister  
• Whitman
• Cummings, twice
• Kay
• Rilke 

also, all of this poetical literary mashup film by Yulin Huang is very cool.

actually mushrooms seem pretty charismatic to me

on Tuesday last week, Dr. Michael Salvo gave a talk sponsored by our Purdue chapter of the Rhetoric Society of America. it was about place and animals and all the interactions among human and non-human that make the world what it is, what it will be.

a high (very high) percentage of Dr. Salvo's slides were photographs of puffins. and that is why this ornithologist's photograph instantly reminded me of the talk.

To study the ultraviolet properties of the puffins bill, we have had to design something to protect their eyes from the light.

These are our prototype auk 'sunglasses', designed at @designdotgold. #ornithology pic.twitter.com/LMCvdl3sv3

— Jamie (@JamieDunning) March 29, 2018

the whole idea of designing sunglasses for a puffin so you can study it without damaging its pudgy little puffin body also fits with some of the talk's themes of conservation and properly caring about the non-human. worrying about a puffin's eyesight is a nice thing to do. considerate. ethical.

and practical, too. you don't want the puffins you are studying to get damaged or die. that would mess up your studying, I imagine.

but some might say that a few blinded, damaged puffins sacrificed in the name of science is probably worth it for what we could learn that might change the world. who knows. but as long as it isn't so much work to design sunglasses for your puffin research participants, it seems more worth it to do that.


related:

George Lakoff's FrameLab podcast makes an argument for calling them human survival issues, rather than environmental issues.

I want to read this book about mushrooms. mushrooms are beautiful.

who and when?

various friends and strangers have been recommending Einstein's Dreams to me for what seems a very long time, but may actually have only been one year. it looks like I added it to my 'to-read' list in June of last year. I finished it Tuesday evening. the whole book is like the most delightful vacation you ever found yourself enjoying. new places and sights like postcards, bite size and almost (but not really, because there is the next place and the next) over too soon. two of its chapters attached themselves most stickily to my brain, particularly because of the people they remind me of.

each section (other than the interludes about Einstein himself) begins with a date. they're all short and easy and blatantly thought-provoking.

3 May 1905 presents us first with the line "Consider a world in which cause and effect are erratic."

anyone who has listened over the past six months to my mopey confusion concerning feelings and their causes can probably see why I smiled so readily at this chapter. it reminds me of me. and while the completely untamable chaos it describes may not make the happiest or most comfortable of stories, such a universe would certainly be interesting, wouldn't it? there would always be something new and unexpected. or maybe we would not be able to be properly interested, exactly. maybe it would be too horrifying, too unsettling, to not know how your actions might affect the future.

or maybe we wouldn't treat the world very differently at all. connections would be found, or forced. superstition would paint patterns for us between all the broken bits of occurrence. we would infer clear causes no matter how randomly events might proceed. part of me suspects that we do this already. how do we know there is any thoroughly consistent order in what we seem to accept as our reality? the complexity of causality (emotional, biological, chemical, or of whichever system) will always be beyond us, but we will pretend to understand it anyway. maybe.

I especially love the closing trio of sentences at the end of the not-quite-four-page dream of 3 May 1905:

"It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity. It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance giving has only one meaning, each touch has no past or no future, each kiss is a kiss of immediacy."

such narrowly pinned-down yet utterly uncontextualized spontaneity might be a thing I dream about, too. to have moments of immediate, crystal clear sincerity? to create words of perfect, timeless meaning? yes please.

the other section I felt especially drawn to was 9 June 1905, which presents for the reader an immortal world. "Suppose that people live forever," we are instructed. this is just one of dozens of dreams of versions of time. in another, people live for one very long day. in another, they live backwards from age to infancy. in this one of 9 June, where people live forever, there are two kinds of people: the Laters, in no hurry at all, and the Nows, who waste no time doing whatever they feel like doing or learning or saying or changing or working on. I wonder which kind I would be.

the person this chapter reminds me of often says that having endless life would take away the value of everything we do or have or are. he finds immortality a terrifying and awful prospect. it's because we will all expire someday (hopefully not soon, but someday) that our choices now mean anything to us.

we don't get to choose any of Einstein's dreams to live in. here, time for us works a certain way, at least so far. life doesn't last forever, so our fears and dreams and goals and mistakes all have to fit within a certain unknown chunk of time. finding value in that limitation makes sense, right? limits are possibilities. the Nows would probably say so. just because there are infinite tomorrows doesn't mean you should leave today empty. if time doesn't give you a deadline, give yourself one.

and the Laters... they might also agree. with limitless time, possibilities get lost, or shrink into imperceptible specks. how is anyone to find motivation in such endlessness? we need to draw lines around stuff and create order, it seems. but, the Laters might be quick to point out, limits are also responsibilities. they create pressure. as mortals we must choose carefully, for this moment is one of only so many. our impending deaths and the impending deaths of everyone else force us to consider plans, causes, effects, futures and costs. waste no time. you only get so much.

you can fail. you probably will. someday you will run out of everything.

ultimate connectedness

it's Thanksgiving week. I am still in Texas. I am swimming around in thick puddles of academic craziness. research. grading. phd applications. in between all the meaningless panicking, I have a million things to be grateful for.

to start with (and perhaps to end with, since it is quite late at the moment), I shall quote my new friend/colleague Kristin (she has a blog, too, like all the cool people), who posted the following on facebook the other week:

"I'm thankful to be a teacher, which is ultimately the opportunity to be a lifelong student."

yes.

that is why I just want to stay here in academia forever and learn stuff. sharing knowledge (through conversation or teaching or writing or whatever) is what life is all about. and there are so many interesting questions to ask.

during a bit of rambly exploratory research the other night, I came across this blogpost about literacies, which included this video about 'education and why we're alive and stuff', which was made by an author named John Green as part of of an interesting videoblogging project he and his brother (Hank Green, who is making this other videoblogging project) began five years ago.

and Mr. Green's vlog about education and why we're alive and how we make sense of the universe with literature and with math and with each other reminded me of this old blogpost of mine, in which I muse thoughtfully about first my family, and then also the differences between the humanities and the sciences.

gratitude. thankfulness. sharing. why we're alive and stuff.

yes.

variable infinities and stuff

so I just found out my baby sister (look: she and her husband have a blog), in whose company there is always much silliness to be enjoyed, has been finishing up an undergraduate thesis about stars. how cool is that?

and even cooler is the fact that I get to proof the thing for her. mm, my favourite thing to do. and in the process I may learn a few bits about astrophysics. or something.

{ photo borrowed from this kind soul on flickr. }

compared to some families, ours isn't the most tightly knit group. perhaps it's my own fault. me, the wandering reclusive one, and perhaps the rest of them keep in touch better. I doubt it though. my guess is that we all keep in touch tolerably with mum, and the rest of us only talk when there is some news or a need. like all the times I call my genius brother when I have questions about computers or programming.

how long has my sister been working on this thesis? I have no idea. probably a long time--it's nearly 40 pages long. I might sort of remember hearing about this observatory once. but a thesis? do I find it strange (unfair?) that she, the baby sister, has written an actual, legitimate thesis at a little school in Idaho while I, the graduate student, will not dream of doing any such thing for many years, if ever at all? that's the difference between the humanities and the sciences, I guess. science is all about research. hard facts and numbers and complicated equipment.

it's not that fields in the humanities don't include research. it's just not as overtly recognizable (or never was before, to me) as the testing-things-in-a-lab kind, I guess. the complicated equipment of an english major's research might not be anything at all like the night sky or a telescope. it might be a the cultural implications of the circulation records of a small library in eighteenth-century britain, instead. a little more micro than this variable stars business, but still part of helping us all better understand our universe, I think.

it's good for your brain

this is where I'm going.

and here are some reasons why.

happy weekend.

my eyes vs. infinity

I've been reading about math.

previously I've mentioned how difficult it can be to talk about a given book with people who haven't read it. I think it's different with non-fiction. it's far less subjective, and so what there is to be said about it is more easily said.

it's rare you'll find me in the non-fiction section without some specific project in mind, without precisely scribbled coordinates on a scrap of paper in my hand, but this time, so it happened. I was waiting for the printer, wandering in that maze of Dewey decimals, sans purpose, sans map. I came away with Ian Stewart's Why Beauty is Truth. it has a pretty blue butterfly on the cover.

to my little sister who is studying physics, I say: read this book. you will probably recognize more than I did all the fancy theories and theorists dancing through it.

what else do I have to say? I am full of flimsy little dreams of what it would be like to be a mathematician. between this lovely book, all the Seed magazine articles I've been chewing on thismorning, reruns of Numb3rs, and half a dozen other semi-enlightening distractions, I wonder if I'll ever be able to focus on writing. writing is what I really really most want to do, right? hmm.

it's all about symmetry. balance. transformation and consistency and logical patterns. a lot of crazy math had to be concocted before we could get to where we understood so much about the universe. Stewart ties up his review of mathematical history with the observation that even seemingly pointless excursions into the realms of theoretical science, when looked at again and again from varying perspectives, may yield wonderful possibilities for discovering more and more about the world we live in. it's the counterpoint between the loftiness of theory and the weightiness of practicality. it's all those gaps...

and reading so many stories of often under-appreciated brilliance makes me feel much better about my own seemingly pointless wonderings about the way things are. you never know where such questions will take you. even if nobody (including yourself) thinks your idea is very cool, in another hundred years it might turn out to be.

I should probably spend more time among those non-fiction shelves.

{incidentally--and it took the author's most blatant of hints (on page 176, when he mentions his friend Terry Pratchett) before I realized this--Ian Stewart co-authored The Science of Discworld, which I uncharacteristically spent my last scrap of British money on, at a bookshop in the Gatwick international airport. why don't airports have libraries in them? }

short sweet iterations

sometimes not so short or sweet, but it made a nice-sounding title.

yesterday a few of my colleagues and i participated in a focus group for one of the grad students here who is studying workplace-simulated learning environments. we talked about the way real life has been mirrored in the upper-levels academia to which we as students have ascended thus far. subjects included those of collaboration, accountability, problem-solving/designing, usability, awareness, and iteration.

this last bit became most interesting to me. we were asked about the cycles we've seen in the coursework we've been doing. taking a deep deep look at things, i was able to see it:

we approach the problem. we evaluate it. we make plans, present solutions, possibilities, and we work towards achieving those solutions. we come up against obstacles, limitations. we evaluate those new problems, and our plans change to accomodate what we learn. and we keep going.

a little more deep thought led me to see the same pattern in everything. we come to this life, we see things through a one-way set of eyes, we carry billions of expectations with us. and then we meet other people. new situations. and all of those things sometimes prove our own preconcieved notions wrong, so we adapt. we grow and change and re-evaluate ourselves and our lives.

Wilson Bateman, a friend who was in the group, responded: "It's just like the scientific method." and i agreed, yes, it is!

i kept thinking about that idea all of yesterday. we make plans. we want things. we do things. and we make mistakes. how do we know that they're mistakes? the world proves it to us. guilt. pain. horror. etc. and we either re-evaluate and change or we don't get any further.

someday i think i'll write more about this--the pride cycle and the scientific method. it's pretty cool how similar the two things are.