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Lucretius on Clouds

Poems

Nov 192010

Derek Mahon

(De Rerum Natura 6, 451-523)

Clouds take shape in the blue sky and gather
where flying bodies get tangled up together;
tiny clouds are borne along by breezes
till the moment when a stronger current rises.
Hills, for instance: the higher up the peak
the more industriously they seem to smoke;
wind blows these wisps on to the mountain tops
while they are still vague, evanescent strips
and there, heaped up in greater quantity,
they reveal themselves as a visible entity
trailing from snowy summits into the ether,
the empyrean spaces torn by wind and weather.
Steam rises from the sea, as becomes clear
when clothes on the shore absorb the salty air;
particles rise from rivers and wet slopes
while the sky, weighing upon them, packs them tight
and weaves them closely like a linen sheet.
Some come from space, as I’ve explained before,
their number infinite, their source obscure,
and these can travel at the speed of light.
No wonder the storm clouds, so fast and thick,
darkening fields and sea, slide up so quick
since from the blow-holes of the outer spheres,
as a our own windpipes. our glands and pores
the elements come and go, mysterious and opaque,
through ducts and channels, roois and corridors
as if in a house of opening, closing doors.
As for the rain clouds, how they come to grow
and fall as rain on the drinking earth below –
a multitude of life-germs, water semen, floats
with cloud stuff and secretions of all sorts,
both swollen up, the fat clouds and whatever
solution is in the clouds themselves, cloud-water,
as our own bodies grow with the serum, gism,
sweat, whatever fluid is in the organism;
also they draw up brine with streaming sieves
when wind drives the clouds over the waves,
hoisting it from the surface in dripping fleeces
(same thing with bogs and other soggy places).
When all these water-sources come together
clouds discharge their excess moisture either
by ganging up in a bunch to crush each other
till tears flow; or else, blown thin by winds
and sun-struck, they give off drizzling rains
as wax held to a brazier melts and runs.
Sometimes the two things coincide, of course,
the violent pushing and the rushing wind-force,
and then you get a cloudburst which persists
with clouds upon clouds, tempests upon tempests
pouring out of the heavens, soaking the smoky air
while the earth breathesbhack in bubbles everywhere.

Soren Kierkegaard

Orts

Nov 192010

The Rotation Method

The whole secret lies in arbitrariness. People usually think it easy to be arbitrary, but it requires much study to succeed in being arbitrary so as not to lose oneself in it, but so as to derive satisfaction from it. One does not enjoy the immediate, but something quite different which he can arbitrarily control. You go to see the middle of a play, you read the third part of a hook. By this means you insure yourself a very different kind of enjoyment from that which the author has been so kind as to plan for you. You enjoy something entirely accidental; you consider the whole of existence from this standpoint; let its reality be stranded thereon. I will cite an example. There was a man whose chatter certain circumstances made it necessary for me to listen to. At every opportunity he was ready with a little philosophical lecture, a very tiresome harangue. Almost in despair, I suddenly discovered that he perspired copiously when talking. I saw the pearls of sweat gather on his brow, unite to form a stream, glide down his nose, and hang at the extreme point of his nose in a drop-shaped body. From the moment of making this discovery, all was changed. I even took pleasure in inciting him to begin his philosophical instruction, merely to observe.

The poet Baggesen says somewhere of someone that he was doubtless a good man, but that there was one insuperable objection against him, that there was no word that rhymed with his name. It is extremely wholesome thus to let the realities of life split upon an arbitrary interest. You transform something accidental into the absolute, and, as such, into the object of your admiration. This has an excellent effect, especially when one is excited. This method is an excellent stimulus for many persons. You look at everything in life from the standpoint of a wager, and so forth. The more rigidly consistent you are in holding fast to your arbitrariness, the more amusing the ensuing combinations will be. The degree of consistency shows whether you are an artist or a bungler; for to a certain extent all men do the same. The eye with which you look at reality, must constantly be changed. The painter Tischbein sought to idealize every human being into an animal. His method has the fault of being too serious, in that it endeavors to discover a real resemblance.

Theognis of Megara

Poems

Nov 192010

667-682
If I had money, Simonides, as I have had in time past,
I could without embarrassment consort with the great.
But as it is, I know a man, and he passes me by. Dumb
stand I, for poverty, though I know as much as the rest
even now. So it is. We are swept with the wind, white sails lost
out from the Melian Sea, on into the gloom of the night.
The men are unwilling to bail any more. The sea washes over
the bulwarks on either side, and barely and in distress
we keep afloat. But some are at work. They have put down the noble
helmsman, who know his business well, and kept a good watch.
All discipline is gone, and they plunder the cargo at random,
nor is there any fair division made for the lot.
The base hands and the porters control, the great are beneath them.
I am afraid. I think the sea will swallow our ship.
Let this be my secret cipher addressed to the nobles;
but even the base man, if he is clever, can see what it means.

699-718
For the multitude of mankind there is only one virtue:
Money. And there was no good found in anything else,
not if you had the resource of Sisyphos, Aiolos’ son,
who by the crafty guile in his mind came up out of Hades
and flattered the Queen of the Dead into letting him go,
Persephone, who dim’s men’s mind with the water of Lethe;
and to this day no other man has made such an escape,
once the darkness of death has closed in a vapor about him,
once he has taken his way to the shadowy place of the dead
and gone on through the black gates which shut the protesting
souls of dead men in and will not let them go free;
yet Sisyphos was a hero who came back even from that place
into the light of the sun through the resource in his mind;
not if you could be false and make falsehood look like honesty,
not if you had fair speech like Nestor the almost-divine,
not if in the speed of your feet you outran the flying
Harpies or the North Wind’s two sons in the storm of their feet.
None of these; but all men must understand when I tell them:
Money, and nothing but Money, holds all the power in the world.

Translated by Richard Lattimore in Greek Lyrics.

Fragments on Persian History

Orts

Nov 192010

Two titles to note:

Pierre Briant. From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire. Eisenbrauns: 2002) ISBN 1575060310.

Josef Wiesenhofer. Ancient Persian From 550 BC to 650 AD. (Tauris: 2001) ISBN 1850439990.

Review in TLS 2003-07-10 by James Davidson, “Versailles With Panthers”.

On Briant: “his book should be not only required reading for classicists, but also of great interest for students of later monarchical systems, from Britain to Mughal India.”

On Wiesenhofer: “highly readable”

Xenophon’s account of Cyrus’ invasion of Babylon resonates. He knows that his troops are fearful of fighting in the city because the people will go up onto the roofs and fire down on them. Cyrus encourages his troops not to worry since they have plenty of pinewood for torches and will burn down the city – making the rooftops unpalatable places upon which to resist the troops entry into the city. The city was handed over to Cyrus without a fight. To help keep the peace, Cyrus order that all Babylonians had to give up their arms and that wherever weapons were found in a house, the inhabitants were to be put to death.

“Statues are like chess pieces in the ancient Near East, full of power and significance, always being kidnapped, rescued and triumphantly returned.”

The role of the “paradise” gardens in Persian (pre-Islam) is notable since it was later adopted into Islamic culture and theology as well. Tree loving was particularly important since trees were well established images of royal authority in the Near East. Kings were the powers that made the deserts bloom. Paradise means power in the simplest semiotic. The King was seen as a kind of “gardener”. Needless to say, when revolts or invasions took place, one of the first things that was done was to attack the trees and gardens – the symbols of authority.

Briant insists on a view of the Persian polity as one of “imperial consistency and provincial variety. “The peculiar genius of the Achaemenid Empire lay, he suggests, in the balance between cultural diversity and political unity, putting the former at the service of the latter… what kept the whole thing together was a dynastic pact with a thin but enduring layer of socio-ethnic imperial aristocrats, essentially Persian, though not nationalistic, and able to integrate with provincial elites through marriage… The balance between unity and diversity seems also to be bound up with the personal nature of the Empire and the mechanisms of gift-exchange, in the construction of power as superior dignity and subjection as obligation.

Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality

Tech Notes

Nov 192010

“A persistent theme among people writing about the social aspects of weblogging is to note (and usually lament) the rise of an A-list, a small set of webloggers who account for a majority of the traffic in the weblog world. This complaint follows a common pattern we’ve seen with MUDs, BBSes, and online communities like Echo and the WELL. A new social system starts, and seems delightfully free of the elitism and cliquishness of the existing systems. Then, as the new system grows, problems of scale set in. Not everyone can participate in every conversation. Not everyone gets to be heard. Some core group seems more connected than the rest of us, and so on.

Prior to recent theoretical work on social networks, the usual explanations invoked individual behaviors: some members of the community had sold out, the spirit of the early days was being diluted by the newcomers, et cetera. We now know that these explanations are wrong, or at least beside the point. What matters is this: Diversity plus freedom of choice creates inequality, and the greater the diversity, the more extreme the inequality.

In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or income), even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome. This has nothing to do with moral weakness, selling out, or any other psychological explanation. The very act of choosing, spread widely enough and freely enough, creates a power law distribution.

Power law distributions, the shape that has spawned a number of catch-phrases like the 80/20 Rule and the Winner-Take-All Society, are finally being understood clearly enough to be useful. For much of the last century, investigators have been finding power law distributions in human systems. The economist Vilfredo Pareto observed that wealth follows a ‘predictable imbalance’, with 20% of the population holding 80% of the wealth. The linguist George Zipf observed that word frequency falls in a power law pattern, with a small number of high frequency words (I, of, the), a moderate number of common words (book, cat cup), and a huge number of low frequency words (peripatetic, hypognathous). Jacob Nielsen observed power law distributions in web site page views, and so on. […] The shape of […] several hundred blogs ranked by number of inbound links, is roughly a power law distribution. Of the 433 listed blogs, the top two sites accounted for fully 5% of the inbound links between them. The top dozen (less than 3% of the total) accounted for 20% of the inbound links, and the top 50 blogs (not quite 12%) accounted for 50% of such links.”