Hello, I've started a project to read 52 books in a year and do an art project on each one. Each book will be chosen using a random number/letter generator to get a general dewy decimal number/last name then the book will be chosen from among those.
My first number was 506.1, which was General Science Societies, unfortunately the .1 was too specific and no library books were available under it, so I went up to 506 where books were available. So my first book will be Seeing Further edited by Bill Bryson.
—a lesson to only this small strip of terrain, regarding the immortality of the butterfly
Then an image turned up. I had gotten out to gaze at an undulating sea of white poppies. I had never seen white poppies before. A gentle wind arose, causing single flower petals to tremble and come loose, sailing like feathers to the ground, revealing upon landing slender purple veins running across the white. The flower petals quickly shrank and shortly after their descent already resembled peeled skin. Yet the subject of my image was not the field of poppies, but a spot right beside it, where there ran a narrow unsurfaced road that held the remains of a puddle in the midst of all that parchedness and dustiness. An elongated strip of wet extended alongside a tyre furrow, and there, on the cast-off soil, which was just barely damp and already crusty in places, countless white butterflies had assembled, alighting and rising and hovering in the air above the residual wetness, all the while following a recondite rhythm in convened adherence to a law that could not be captured in words, but which later promised an incomprehensible yet mollifying order in the photograph, which showed nothing of the surrounding vastness or even the ribbon of horizon which had meanwhile turned nearly a uniform dark blue—a lesson to only this small strip of terrain, regarding the immortality of the butterfly.
— Esther Kindy, Seeing Further. (Translator: Caroline Schmidt) (New York Review Books, November 12, 2024)
This book nearly killed me, I think. I admit it's my fault for seeing Bill Bryson's name and thinking it was going to be a breezy, handheld read. As soon as I noticed it was EDITED by Bill Bryson I started to feel a cold sweat. What had I gotten myself into? Sure enough his essay was a walk in the park like I expected the whole book to be at first. Then things changed and got denser and lighter and heavier and just all over the map. I think Neal Stephenson's technicality made me cry a little.
The premise of the book is that it's a series of essays somehow relating to the Royal Society- one of the ultimate bodies of science for the last 200 years. The various essays are with varying degrees of effort and success tied to the subject. Toward the back one doesn't even try to tie itself to the society, though it could have. The topics include things like the Royal Society's reaction to the ballooning craze "ballomania" of the 1780s, Leibniz's theories that seem prescient, Swift's parody of the Royal Society being the basis for B movie mad scientists, Global Warming, and finally the president of the Royal Society warning people how foolish people have looked in the past making predictions about the future and how he won't do that and then doing that.
SHOULD YOU READ THIS BOOK?
Well, I wouldn't call it necessary reading, but some of the essays are pretty good if you cherry-pick. I don't think the entire book will please many people, but there are enough varying parts if you have an interest in science (science history, science future, string theory, etc) at least one of the essays should be interesting.
ART PROJECT:
I decided to go light and silly for the first one and the noses of the portraits of the founders struck me somehow, thus this.
Science was just coming into being in the age of Swift. Now it's fully formed, but we're still afraid of it. Partly we fear its Moreau-like coldness, a coldness that is in fact real, for science as such does not have emotions or a system of morality built into it, any more than a toaster does. It's a tool - a tool for actualising what we desire and defending against what we fear - and like any other tool, it can be used for good or ill
Margaret Atwood in an essay collected in Seeing Further: The story of Science, Discovery, and the Genius of the Royal Society. Margaret Atwood discussed the roots of science fiction portrayal of scientists with a particular focus on Gllliver’s Travels by Johnathan Swift.
In one of my tutorials it came up that I should look into other levels of 'seeing' I found this really interesting article, after googling 'levels of seeing'.
"Withdraw from attachment of the object, withdraw from thought.
The physical eye, mental eye ,the eye of G-d.
G-d created conscious and conscious created the physical eye.
Close your eye and picture the star of bethlehem, you see there is no need for the physical eye to see it, so the further you withdraw
the wider your sight. Spirit led to mind ,mind led to the physical world. G-d gave shape to mind, you with your mind create your world.
He has inspirited mankind with his spiritual properties.
Through the descent into mental and physical a curtain has pulled up and the purest of light has been separated. The world becomes smaller because you learn more of the world, years ago Africa was a country so far away, but now through television etc, it has come closer. Remember as a child the house or garden you played in, it was big because there was so much to discover but now when you see it again it looks so much smaller then you remember.
Lets say you were to hide yourself then, in your eyes there were so many places you could hide, now it has become so much smaller because you know most of the places, so as you know more it becomes smaller(aside of the fact that you too have grown)
It sounds like a contradiction does it not?
But think of G-d being in everything and everything being in G-D.
And think of withdrawing into yourselves first from attachment then from thinking, as you get closer to spirit you will become able to see more, a singularity and at the same time everything.
Being conscious in spirit does not mean mind is not there, it just means mind has become a tool, unlike the false I that has attached itself to it, it being the judge(r).
14-08-2007
Moshiya De broek"
Interesting to say you can see with your eyes shut.
