Dasein and the magic lantern

La Jetée is one of the greatest films ever made. The film critic A O Scott does a good short critical introduction here.


Related post: Day dreams

'Once upon a time, there was a beautiful horse from Lascaux'

How to reconcile [the refined art of the mid to late Paleolithic] with the brutal practices of prehistoric hunters? How to consent to the arrow piercing the flesh of an animal, an imaginary murder committed by the artist? Before the revolution, hunting tribes from Siberia lived in conditions similar to those of the 'reindeer' era. Lot-Falk in Les rites de chasse chez les peuples siberiens writes: 'A hunter treated an animal as a creature at least equal to himself. Noting that an animal must hunt [sic] like himself, in order to live, man thought it had the same level of social organization. Man's superiority was manifest in the field of technology through his use of tools. In the sphere of magic, the animal was attributed with equal powers. Its physical strength, swiftness and perfected senses gave the animal a superiority highly praised by hunters. In the spiritual realm animals were credited with even greater virtues -- a close contact with the divine and with the forces of nature, which they embodied.' So far, we understand. The abyss of paleo-psychology begins with a bond between the killer and his victim: 'The death of the animal depends, to some extent, on the animal itself; it must consent to be killed by entering into a relationship with its murderer. That is why the hunter cares for the animal and tries to establish a close union. If the reindeer does not love its hunter, it will not bow to its death. Thus, our original sin and power are hypocritical. Only insatiable, murderous love explains the charm of the Lascaux bestiary.

-- from Barbarian in the Garden by Zbigniew Herbert (1962) quoted by Graeme Gibson


Related post: A bestiary of 25,000 years

Chickens in heaven

Manufacturing #17: Deda Chicken Processing Plant, Dehui City, Jilin Province, China (2005) by Edward Burtynsky.

Days of the locust

The name Dubai derives from Al Daba, a locust which consumed everything in its path, said Johann Hari back in April.

Beings animalculous

I have been searching for some time for this picture:

Monster Soup by William Heath (1795 - 1840)

Heath, satirizing the appalling production of London water companies in the 1820s or 30s (?), uses a line from Milton in jest:

Gorgons and Hydra’s, and Chimera’s dire.

It's from Book 2 of Paradise Lost. The original context is splendid:

...through many a dark and drearie Vaile
They pass’d, and many a Region dolorous,
O’re many a Frozen, many a Fierie Alpe,
Rocks, Caves, Lakes, Fens, Bogs, Dens, and shades of death,
A Universe of death, which God by curse
Created evil, for evil only good,
Where all life dies, death lives, and nature breeds,
Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things,
Abominable, inutterable, and worse
Then Fables yet have feign’d, or fear conceiv’d,
Gorgons and Hydra’s, and Chimera’s dire.

In-dividual

We are embedded in the mental world of others just as we are embedded in the physical world. What we are currently doing and thinking is molded by whomever we are interacting with. But this is not how we experience ourselves. We experience ourselves as agents with minds of our own. This is the final illusion created by our brains.

-- Chris Frith

image: from a model of water flow on ocean surface

48-eyed tentacle love

Cubozoa, or box jellyfish, such as these two Copula sivickisi, are the only jellyfish that copulate. They are also unique in having eight camera type eyes, eight slit-shaped eyes and eight lensless pit eyes, all feeding into a simple nervous circuit without a brain. They are active swimmers and engage in eloborate courting rituals.

Life, a new manual?

Rats who build the labyrinth from which they will escape

is how Raymond Queneau described the practitioners of Oulipo, notes Ben Schott.

Oulipo derives from pataphysics, which has been defined as an approach that considers things in terms of their potentiality: what they can be instead of what they are. A foundational text is Raymond Queneau's sonnet-making 'machine', which creates a hundred thousand billion new poems from just ten originals. [1]

Oulipo imposes constraints on language in order to discover new things, and/or - as in George Perec's La Disparition -- to search for what has been lost.

The Canadian poet Christian Bök says that in writing Eunoia [2] he came to the conclusion that censorship of language is probably impossible:

Language is a very robust life form that's capable, like a weed, of finding a way to survive and thrive even under the most hostile environments.

Life itself is constrained by many things, including "the central dogma of molecular biology" which is, broadly, that DNA > RNA > protein. Scientists are now trying to reprogramme the code through the invention and synthetic evolution of new orthogonal translational components.

From the point of view of synthetic biology some old 'constraints' of life are to be broken.


Footnotes

[1] An online version here. "The work you are holding in your hands represents, itself alone, a quantity of text far greater than everything man has written since the invention of writing," says François Le Lionnais.

[2] Bök makes this Greek word the title of his book. Eunoia is, he says, "the state of mind you have to be in in order to make a friend". In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle uses the term to refer to the goodwill arising from spousal love. In modern English it is also used to mean "beautiful thinking" and as a medical term for sanity.

Beyond ignorance

In his opening remarks for the first conference in Egypt on the work of Charles Darwin, Ismail Sergaldin, the director of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, cited the words of the 13th-century physician Ibn al-Nafis:

When hearing something unusual, do not pre-emptively reject it, for that would be folly. Indeed, horrible things may be true, and familiar and praised things may prove to be lies. Truth is truth unto itself, not because people say it is. [1]

It was an astute choice, perhaps, but al-Nafis's wisdom seems to have escaped this young man:

“I am not against the idea of evolution completely,” said Amr Zeydah, 23, a zoology major at Alexandria University. “I accept the idea partially.”

Despite his major, Mr. Zeydah has never studied Darwin, and before the conference knew little about the theory of evolution. He accepted the Islamic account of creation, that God formed Adam from dirt and infused him with a soul.

But after taking in the discussion, he said he had worked out a way to reconcile the two: that God created life, which then evolved to suit its environment. “God created Adam at 15 meters tall,” he said, quoting what he said was a Hadith, or saying, of the Prophet Muhammad. “So evolution comes in because we are obviously not that height now.”

Footnote

[1] An early version of nullus in verba, perhaps. Evolutionary theory, properly understood, is extremely beautiful. The ugliness resides in the minds of those who fail to understand.

Extrahuman

The preface to Contours of climate justice (pdf) includes a note written in 1951 by Dag Hammarskjöld which, say the authors, show with particular clarity his deep bonds with the wilderness. What mattered for Hammarskjöld was the:

…extrahuman in the experience of the greatness of Nature. This does not allow itself to be reduced to an expression of our human reactions, nor can we share in it by expressing them. Unless we each find a way to chime in as one note in the organic whole, we shall only observe ourselves observing the interplay of its thousand components in a harmony outside our experience of it as harmony.

I find that last sentence confusing, but the main drift of the passage is probably on target.

Out-evolving extinction

...where no previous capacity exists, evolving a brand new trait can be a slow and haphazard affair.

If [as experiments with bacteria indicate] most organisms have to wait 31,000 generations to evolve a new trait [that allows them to thrive in radically different circumstances] — they will probably go extinct first. Worse, many natural populations are shrinking fast, further reducing their evolutionary potential. In short, we can expect that — if the environment continues to change as rapidly as it is at the moment — many creatures will fail to meet their evolve-by dates.

This is interesting, but how far can one make an analogy between micro and macro-organisms? It's one thing for bacteria to evolve to consume altogether different nutrients -- say methane rather than sugars. But multi-cellular organisms are, I guess, incapable evolving such a change. Hares and lions will never switch to eating, say, sulphur. Their best chance is if adverse anthropogenic pressures are reduced.

'The goddess must have blood'

In the main event, 250 appointed residents with traditional kukri knives began their task of decapitating more than 10,000 buffalo in a dusty enclosure guarded by high walls and armed police.

Frightened calves galloped around in vain as the men, wearing red bandanas and armbands, pursued them and chopped off their heads.

A right-handed snail-snake

Snail asymmetry has driven the evolution of a unique asymmetry in snakes [and], as Darwin would have predicted, the snakes also appear to be driving snail evolution.

-- Sean B. Carroll reports on findings by Takahiro Asami, Masaki Hoso and Michio Hori.

Enypniastes, a sea cucumber

from WHO via BBC. Hat tip: MP.

Koala barely

According to the Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd, [Sam the Koala] was the subject of widespread comment at the G20 summit in London in April this year, and he issued a personal tribute to this "symbol of hope" when Sam died six months later. "It's tragic that Sam the koala is no longer with us," Rudd said, just restraining himself from decreeing a state funeral.

-- from Koala Wars by Gideon Haigh

From a Cretaceous bestiary

Kaprosuchus saharicus is one of five 100 million year old fossilized "monstrous and surprisingly diverse" relatives of the crocodile recently found in Niger and Morocco. [1] The 6-meter-long animal had an armoured snout for ramming its prey and three sets of tusks for ripping flesh.

Science magazine comments that "each of the five ancient animals could have answered a casting call for Star Trek". But Kaprosuchus would have resonated with the medieval and ancient imagination too, combining as it does attributes we associate with a dog, a boar, a crocodile and a dragon.

P.S. 23 Nov: the crocs have been given nicknames. The biggest is SuperCroc. PancakeCroc had an impressively flat head. BoarCroc (Kaprosuchus saharicus) had fierce-looking fangs and an armored snout for ramming. DogCroc had a fleshy nose like a dog and was limber enough to gallop. DuckCroc had broad, overhanging snout resembling a duckbill. And RatCroc had a pair of buckteeth in the lower jaw that were used to dig for food.

'The beast itself'

Daniel White's Mandlebulb

Bird poems

Tim Dee and Simon Armitage choose ten.

I like this by Basho:

My eyes following
until the bird was lost at sea
found a small island

Ancient baby

We don't yet have sight of "the coelacanth's mating ritual" that Andrew McNeillie hopes to see but we do have sight of a baby.

'The music of knapping'

For hundreds of thousands of years we have made stone tools: people sitting together under the trees, chipping and tapping and knapping their flint, their obsidian, their jasper. And their multiple rhythms, together with the sound of cicadas, and birdsong, would have been musical.

-- from Time in Stone by Emily Young.