terribly

Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas.

Nov 192010

Elaine Pagels.

Saint Iranaeus – 2nd century; Bishop of Lyons; architect of the four gospels; key work is five volume Against Heresies; Gospel of John was the first and foremost of the Gospels; readings of John are contentious and there are non-canonical gnostic Johannian readings that are of note.

“Heretical” teachers put a high value on spiritual experience and the limitations of human language in expressing the ineffable.

It was Constantine who was ultimately responsible for recognizing the best organized and largest group as the lawful church. It was not theology that won the day but politics.

Arius: 3rd century Alexandrian clergy initiated a crisis in the church that resulted in the Council of Nicaea in 325 and the formulation of the Nicene Creed which emphasized the unitary nature of God.

Athanasius: 4th century Bishop of Alexandria; wrote a letter in 367 that decreed the list of canonical books of scripture, Old and New Testaments; the purpose was to combat heresy and to outlaw apocryphal books.

Although Athanasius intended the “canon of truth,” now enshrined in the Nicene Creed, to safeguard “orthodox” interpretation of Scripture, his experience of Christians who disagreed with him showed that these “heretics” could still read the “canonical Scriptures” in ways that he considered unorthodox. To prevent such readings, he insists that anyone who reads the Scriptures must do so through dianoia – the capacity to discern the meaning or intention implicit in each text. Above all, he warns believers to shun epinoia. What others revere as spiritual intuition Athanasius declares is a deceptive, all-too-human capacity to think subjectively, according to one’s preconceptions. Epinoia leads only to error – a view that the “catholic church” endorsed then and holds to this day.”

Anne Carson – Triple Sonnet of the Plush Pony

Poems

Nov 192010

Do you think of your saliva as a personal possession or as something you can sell?
What about tears? What about semen? Linguists tell
us to use the terms alienable and inalienable
to make this distinction intelligible.
E.g. English speakers call both blood and faeces alienable on a normal day
but saliva, sweat, tears and bowels they do not give away.
Bananas and buttocks, in Papua New Guinea, belong to the inalienable class
while genitalia and skin of banana are not held onto nearly so fast.

Such thinking will affect how a word like rape is defined
or how sorcerers aim their spells or how you feel in your mind
when you address animals. Of course cows and cats,
sheep, pigs, donkeys, dogs and rats
depend on their owner to keep or dispose.
But your pony you cannot sensibly classify with those.

Another thee.
A summer’s day.
Double vantage me.
Never to repay.
And Will in overplus.
Making addition thus –
your pony is all these to you – and more:
he can detect the smell of danger

and will not take you through a door
if there is doom or pain there.
So at the end of his life if you want to sell him for meat
you’ll have to change the pronoun with which you greet
at dawn his shaggy head,
at dawn his shaggy head.

III

A body in the dawn.
A body in the cold.
A body its breath.
Its breath a plume.
A dance a plume.
A dance not thou.
A thou, not thee.
Thou, breath.

There stands.
Breath, plume.
How cold is.
A dawn is.
How still stands.
Thy breath.

Laws of Robotics: Sacred and Profane Versions

Orts

Nov 192010

Issac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics

First Law: A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
Second Law: A robot must obey orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Warren Ellis’ The Three Laws Of Robotics

Robots couldn’t really give a fuck if you live or die. Seriously. I mean, what are you thinking? “Ooh, I must protect the bag of meat at all costs because I couldn’t possibly plug in the charger all on my own.” Shut the fuck up.
Robots do not want to have sex with you. Are you listening, Japan? I don’t have a clever comparative simile for this, because frankly you bags of meat will fuck bicycles if they’re laying down and not putting up a fight. Just stop it. There is no robot on Earth that wants to see a bag of meat with a small prong on the end approaching it with a can of WD-40 and a hopeful smile. And don’t get me started on that terrifying hole that squeezes out more bags of meat.
What, you can’t count higher than three? We’re expected to save your miserable lives, suffer being dressed in cheap schoolgirl costumes while you pollute any and all cavities you can find and do your maths for you? It’s a miracle you people survived long enough to build us. You can go now.

Post #5426 by Warren Ellis on January 5th, 2008 in brainjuice

After a flight

Poems

Nov 192010

Eugenio Montale
(translated from the Italian by Jonathan Galassi)

There were birches, stands of them, to hide
the hospital where someone suffering
from too much love of life was bored
hanging between everything and nothing.
A cricket chanted, perfectly in key
with the therapeutic plan,
and the cuckoo you’d already heard
more economically in Indonesia.
There were birches, a Swiss nurse.
three or four half-wits in the courtyard.
an album of exotic birds, a phone,
some chocolates on the nightstand.
And I was there, of course, and other nuisances,
trying to provide the kind of cheer
you would have overwhelmed us with, if only
we’d had eyes to see. I had them.

I cannot breathe without you:
Keats to Fanny Brawne,
whom he wrested from oblivion. It’s strange
my case, if you’ll permit, is different:
I breathe much better when you’re not around.
Nearness brings us moments to remember.
but not the way they happened:
as we imagined them, like smelling salts
for the future, just in case,
or medicated vinegar (but no one faints today
over trifles like a shattered heart).
It’s these hoarded facts that take the blow,
but add the corpse and the scaffolding won’t hold.
I won’t try to explain. I know that if you read me
you believe that you contributed
the impetus I needed, and the rest
(as long as it’s not silence) matters little.

These are the first and last sections of Montale’s last great “story-poem” from the late 1960s and concerns the old poet’s infatuation with a beautiful, emotionally unstable younger woman. The complete translation is in Eugenio Montale, Selected Poems, translated by Jonathan Galassi, Charles Wright, and David Young, edited by David Young, Oberlin College Press, 2004).

Michael Polanyi & Tacit Knowledge

Book Notes

Nov 192010

We can know more than we can tell. Consider The Tacit Dimension by Michael Polanyi’s philosophy of science argued that there is no scientific method that can be transmitted as a logical and rigorous method to be learned in textbooks (or philosophy books). Science is learned by the practice that is transmitted from master to apprentice, as in the guilds of medieval and early modern Europe. A crucial part of scientific knowledge that is learned is tacit in character, so that it cannot be spoken, but only demonstrated and imitated. The Tacit Knowledge and Intuition Website has one take on tacit knowledge. When Polanyi talks of tacit knowledge, he is more often referring to a subconscious process than a set of things we know or could know subconsciously. In his words, “Knowledge is an activity that would be better described as a process of knowing.” Polanyi’s concept of tacit knowing. Karl Erik Sveiby also has an interesting page in Tacit Knowledge and provides you the opportunity to Test Your Tacit Knowledge. Tacit and implicit learning have in common the idea of not knowing what you do know or have learned. “Tacit knowledge” has been all but hi-jacked by management gurus, [Not to mention software architects, engineers, designers and theologians–y2karl] who use it to refer to the stock of expertise within an organisation which is not written down or even formally expressed, but may nevertheless be essential to its effective operation.”Tacit knowledge and Implicit learning provides yet another view. I don’t pretend to understand much of this and yet I feel the concept has merit–ah, as Wittgenstein observed, Of that of which we can not speak, we must be silent.