The site of the soul is the verb, not the subject. We, as passers-by, drift briefly through the predicate. And it ensouls us as we go.
When deciding, we are decisioned. When passing, we are passed by “to pass.” When writing, we are written by “to write.” No souls but predicates inhabit us, actors as we go. We are these and they are we, foragers in a grammar that enacts us.
Black Leotard Front – Casual Friday
This track changed my life a little last night.
Gertrude Stein, Matisse, Written in Paris, early 1911, Recorded in New York, Winter 1934-35.
In the light of Lucy shines a new insight of paleo-hamartiology. We were brought down not by Eve but by crazed and weaponized primates. To adapt from de Voragine, Lucy is said of light, and light is blood in beholding. The nature of slaughter is such, she is vicious in beholding, she spreadeth over all without Iying down, she passeth in going right without crooking by right long line; and it is without dilation of tarrying.
“It is profound. We can now picture Lucy walking around the east African landscape with a stone tool in her hand scavenging and butchering meat,” said colleague Shannon McPheron.
“Ape With a Knife Changes Human History,” Newser, August 12, 2010
Scientists have discovered evidence of the use of stone tools to eat meat 3.4 million years ago – 800,000 years earlier than previously thought. The find means that our first ancestor to use tools was not Homo “the handy man” Hablis but Australopithecus afarensis, the half ape, half human, nicknamed “Lucy” when her skeleton was found in 1976.
“Hail Lucy! – the new Queen of the Stone Age,” The Telegraph, August 11, 2010
A Summer of Climate Calamities
Today in scary reality:
Deadly mudslides in China, devastating floods in Pakistan, record-breaking heat and raging wildfires in Russia: it all adds up to a season of extremes. With global temperatures rising, is the worst yet to come?
As posted by newsweek
Home is a moon. It orbits while we stab down here.
All those direct objects of verbs about striving
What I like most about this is the sense that the entire conventional notion of a “core” is subject to revision, not as unmoving, but at its own core, a dynamism.
Once the world is seen as a set of cycles rather than of things it is easier to imagine interesting ways for them to mesh like cogs…
Sufficient, perhaps, just to stop and think how strange it is that the inner core, imperviously locked away since the creation of the world, may yet be added to the long list of other solid-looking things, such as the Himalayas and the Atlantic Ocean and the planet itself, that are in some ways better understood not as places, but as processes.
“The unsolid Earth,” The Economist, August 5, 2010
It’s also just fantastically written.
I suppose that’s what you get for reducing writing to “content” in the first place.
“There’s a new kind of clutter littering Web pages. It’s not just the obnoxious ‘Refinance your mortgage’ ads plastered atop and alongside articles. It’s also not just the animated nonsense that floats by as you’re trying to read. It’s the article itself.”
— Richard Ziade on the increasingly prevalent disposable content, as posted by marco
