Author: Walter

Here is the link. Here because this weblog is also my bookmarks. I have kept bookmarks for years but they tend to get lost when I change OSs or machines. And this weblog can be Googled, and thus keywords will return this page of philosophical, psychological, essays. I note that Robert D. Romanyshyn is on the board and that Jonathan Moreno is a contributor.

Last night that moon came along,
drunk, dropping clothes in the street.
“Get up,” I told my heart, “Give the soul a glass of wine.
The moment has come to join the nightingale in the garden,
to taste sugar with the soul-parrot.”

www.rumi.org.uk

Heaven Retains Within Its Sphere Half of All Bodies and Maladies [Paracelsus] Very clear on literalism.

I love this paragraph, with its interesting word epistrophé:

Each time an astrological consultation can return a characteristic to its divine character, polish a problem so it shines in a different light, reveal the God in the disease, let the client see clearly for a moment that other heavenly half, the astrologer is performing an epistrophé, returning a mess in the human to a myth in the Gods.

I get this from dictionary.com:

epistrophe

\E*pis”tro*phe\, n. [L., from Gr. ? a turning toward, return, fr. ? to turn toward; ‘epi` upon, to + ? to turn.] (Rhet.) A figure in which successive clauses end with the same word or affirmation; e. g., “Are they Hebrews? so am I. Are they Israelites? so am I.” –2 Cor. xi. 22.

Source: Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, © 1996, 1998 MICRA, Inc.

But it is much more than a rhetorical device. Hillman links this process to Neoplatonism and ta’wil in Persian mysticism. See also: Epistrophe

Found this from the Pacifica site. I like the essay a lot. James Hillman does what he does so well that it is a work of art in its own right. Some of the luddite comes through, but that is a welcome antidote to crass technological excess. More speed less haste. He seems to decry both. Here is an idea I am entertaining right now: Speed makes cyberspace visible. A subscription to a Journal was to be in a virtual community, a cyberspace, but the speed was too slow for us to see that, now in hindsight we can.

Here we must distinguish the moment of arrested movement from an identification with the arrest itself, as if beauty must stand still. But beauty, like caution, is not meant to stand still. The saying is not “Don’t leap,” but “Look before you leap.” Beauty means only for us to arrest for a moment the senseless insensitive forward thrust, in order to open the senses by inviting the aesthetic response. Then, as the arresting moment flees, the principle of precaution can incorporate into its innovative explorations an aesthetic awareness, insisting that any plan or project does not neglect the demand that beauty makes, or the deleterious effects of ugliness.

Here is an extrodinary weblog. There I could spend months on this site! I will.

transcript

Useful Tips. Here is my summary

1. Purpose
2. Often
3. Tight
4. Friends
5. Enemies
6. Story
7. Speakout
8. Sexy
9. Archive
10. Relax!

Good little article by:

Mark Bernstein

Edge: IS LIFE ANALOG OR DIGITAL?

One of my favorite books is Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition” by Ed Regis. The book is a collection of stories about weird ideas and weird people. The transhuman condition is an idea suggested by Hans Moravec. It is the way you live when your memories and mental processes are down-loaded from your brain into a computer. The wiring system of the computer is a substitute for the axons and synapses of the brain. You can then use the computer as a back-up, to keep your personality going in case your brain gets smashed in a car accident, or in case your brain develops Alzheimer’s. After your old brain is gone, you might decide to upload yourself into a new brain, or you might decide to cut your losses and live happily as a transhuman in the computer. The transhumans won’t have to worry about keeping warm. They can adjust their temperature to fit their surroundings. If the computer is made of silicon, the transhuman condition is silicon-based life. Silicon-based life is a possible form for life in a cold universe to adopt, whether or not it happens to begin with water-based creatures like us made of flesh and blood.

Test.
Later: Well that worked fine! I might do that more often.