patriciadaintre

An idea for a future project occurred to me as I read of the ‘Dominion over Nature’ (Chapter 7 of ‘The Death of Nature’), in this case, the control of a woman’s mobility - economically and perhaps, physically - by the clothing laws in England of the 16th and early 17th centuries.

Clothing - primarily practical? (For instance, a wool scarf, not as pretty as a silk scarf, but serving a purpose.) The idea: to create, curate, and educate. A show or series of talks on fashion. A bit of history - 16th century European laws and women’s traditions. What are the women of BC creating in the 21st century? What are they designing, photographing, sewing, weaving, knitting?

“I feel very strongly about putting questions; it partakes too much of the style of the day of judgment. You start a question, and it’s like starting a stone…away the stone goes, starting others; and presently some bland old bird (the last you would have thought of) is knocked on the head in his own back garden…” (Mr. Enfield in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 42-43)

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
William Butler Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’; 1920

“The only gain of civilisation for mankind is the greater capacity for finding enjoyment in bloodshed.” (The Underground Man; 67)

Henry Jekyll would agree. “My reason wavered, but it did not fail me utterly. I have more than once observed that, in my second character [of Edward Hyde], my faculties seemed sharpened to a point and my spirits more tensely elastic;…where Jekyll perhaps might have succumbed, Hyde rose to the importance of the moment.” (119)

Henry again: “I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man.” (104) Dostoevsky’s Underground Man: “…the opposite elements [were] craving some outlet in me…how they sickened me!” (Part I, 51) Henry Jekyll thought the double nature was within the individual. He failed to see that the duality of reality is the transient and the eternal - transient in all creatures, eternal at the summit of existence. (The Bhagavad Gita; XV, 16) A passionate determination to experience lucidity resulting in dark inertia.

The True Spirit (Krishna, from The Bhagavad Gita): “Without pride or delusion, the fault of attachment overcome, intent on the self within, their desires extinguished, freed from the dualities, from joy and suffering, undeluded men reach that realm beyond change.” (XV, 5) Perhaps there is not duality within, innate, other than what we create ourselves.

The Underground Man developed an “…inertia that was a direct result of the laws of [an] over-acute consciousness.” (53-54) What does your awareness of suffering lead to? “Suffering is the sole origin of consciousness.” (76) The Underground Man again: “To begin to act you must first have your mind completely at ease and no trace of doubt left in it.” (62)

Bartolome de Las Casas would probably argue for an individual’s freedom to choose, even if the result was suffering (of self). He argues that unbelievers are not actually subject to the Church and quotes St. Thomas: “This potency [of the church] is based on…the freedom of the will.” (60)

Las Casas’ ruler is a benevolent ruler: “…no pagan can be punished by the Church - for a superstition, no matter how abominable, or a crime, no matter how serious, as long as he commits it precisely within the borders…of his own belief.” (97)

Plato’s Timaeus: “We must in my opinion begin by distinguishing between that which always is and never becomes from that which is always becoming but never is. The one is apprehensible by intelligence with the aid of reasoning, being eternally the same,…” (40)

William Paley (Natural Theology): “This is the scale by which we ascend to all the knowledge of our Creator which we possess, so far as it depends upon the phaenomena, or the works of nature.” (27)

Timaeus: “…[T]he other is the object of opinion and irrational sensation, coming to be and ceasing to be, but never fully real.” (40)

William James (The Will to Believe): “…our indomitable desire to cast the world into a more rational shape in our minds than the shape into which it is thrown there by the crude order of experience.” (147)

Antonio Damasio (Descartes’ Error): “The soul breathes through the body, and suffering, whether it starts in the skin or in a mental image, happens in the flesh (xxi). If there had been no body, there would have been no brain. From an evolutionary perspective, it is not the other way around.” (90)

Timaeus: “Intelligence is impossible without soul, [and so] in fashioning the universe he [God] implanted reason in soul and soul in body, and so ensured that his work should be by nature highest and best.” (42)

Paley: “It is not necessary that a machine be perfect, in order to shew with what design it was made, still less necessary…whether it were made with any design at all.” (

Timaeus: “If the world is beautiful and its maker good, clearly he had his eye on the eternal;…[and] that being so, it must have been constructed on the pattern of what is apprehensible by reason and understanding and eternally unchanging;” (41)

Paley: “There cannot be design without a designer…[A]rrangement, disposition of parts, subserviency of means to an end, relation of instruments to an use, imply the presence of intelligence and mind.” (12)

James: “The world must not be regarded as a machine whose final purpose is the making real of any outward good, but rather as a contrivance for deepening the theoretic consciousness of what goodness and evil in their intrinsic natures are.” (165)

Paley: “Neither the [plant] nor the [hen] bears that sort of relation to what proceeds from them, which a joiner does to the chair which he makes….Her will cannot alter it, or change a single feather of the chick.” (33)

Damasio: “As far as one can tell, then, many structural specifics are determined by genes, but another large number can be determined only by the activity of the living organism itself, as it develops and continuously changes throughout its life span.” (109)

James: “…sometimes we are free and sometimes we are not.” (149)

Damasio: “This range of functional balance [of the body when experiencing an emotion] should not be seen as static; it is a continuous succession of…changes within upper and lower limits, in constant motion.” (135)

Timaeus: “…when the stream of growth and nourishment flows less strongly, the soul’s orbits take advantage of the calm and as time passes steady down in their proper courses…and render their possessor rational.” (61)

Damasio: “Diseases of the brain are seen as tragedies visited on people who cannot be blamed for their condition, while diseases of the mind…are seen as social inconveniences for which sufferers have much to answer.:” (40)

James: “Determinism…virtually defines the universe as a place in which what ought to be is impossible…as an organism whose constitution is afflicted with an incurable taint, an irremediable flaw.” (162)

Henry Jekyll: “…I have been made to learn that the doom and burthen of our life is bound for ever on man’s shoulders, and when the attempt is made to cast it off, it but returns upon us with more unfamiliar and more awful pressure.” (105)

Damasio: “We do not know, and it is improbable that we will ever know, what “absolute” reality is like.” (97)

Paley: “The consciousness of knowing little, need not beget a distrust of that which he does know.” (10)

This is a story I wrote for children in June, 2006. Try to picture it with illustrations, preferably drawn by the young ones.
Occasionally, I feel this way myself.

This story is about a little girl who lived in a very big world.
One day she decided she would rather be a speck.
“Today I am just a small speck, nothing more,” she said as she climbed into bed.
“The world outside my room will go on. It doesn’t need me today.”
And the world did go on. Dogs barked outside her window. People laughed and talked.
Planes flew in the sky. Cars and buses drove down the street.
“A speck has no worries,” she thought. “No fears, no failures, no past. A speck is just a speck.”
“Where has she gone?” asked her friends. “Has she gone out of town? Is she still here?”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll be back tomorrow. But for today, I am just a small speck.”
“Look,” said her family. “There’s something on her bed.”
Someone went to bruch it off. Another person said, “Just leave it there. It’s just a speck.”
As promised, in bed the next day was a little girl who lived in a very big world.

Dr. Edgar Mitchell of the Apollo 14 mission to the Moon spoke with ascent editor Sarah Truman for ascent magazine, issue 30 (summer 2006). They spoke of, among other things:

the materialist worldview vs idealist interpretation;
quantum science: entanglement, coherence, resonance, and non-locality;
the quantum hologram;
remote information in the etheric field;
intuitive perceptions;
the evolutionary mind; and,
sustainability.

I recommend this article: http://ascentmagazine.com/articles.aspx?articleID=195&page=read&subpage=past&issueID=30

Canadian artist Janet Cardiff speaks of what she believes is a “talented viewer,” someone who is more aware of their surroundings and able to experience a deeper connection to the art. “…they have synchronistic happenings…Other people don’t have this experience - but I think that it’s somehow like the idea what we create our reality and that some people are able to create more synchronicity than others. There’s an openness that happens…”, (Ascent; issue 30, p. 45):

http://ascentmagazine.com/articles.aspx?articleID=197&page=read&subpage=past&issueID=30

Questions such as these have vexed me for years and led to a political paralysis that began when I was in my mid-twenties and would last until very recently. Vacillation between wanting to believe in the moral certainty of evil and virtue tempered with the doubt in this simplicity gave way to an acceptance that there is much I will probably never understand or even decide upon. This keeps me from committing to any particular faith (as of yet) but it hasn’t stopped me from being political. (Truth be told, it is those few areas in which I feel most strongly where I act with the most force to my opinion.) Don’t any of you feel compelled to act to change things for the better?

I don’t enforce my politics which may be one of the reasons why I’m quite comfortable taking action on a regular basis. One action by one person is to me similar to exercising one vote. I’m pragmatic enough to realize that change comes slowly, very slowly or even too slowly to help some - aren’t you lucky you have an apartment to sleep in tonight - and this understanding keeps me determined to affect change, each day, in a small way. Keep chippin’ away at that wall…(Guess you can tell to which generation I belong.)

“Nothing is less in our power than our heart, which is more apt to command than to obey.” (Heloise, in the Fifth Letter, 105)

Antonio Damasio writes of somatic markers - gut feelings that interfere with our reasoning toward a solution to a problem. They signal potentially negative courses of action, allowing us to ‘reject, immediately,…and thus make you choose among other alternatives.’ (Descartes Error, 173) But, even to the reasoning mind, doesn’t the outright rejection of some options sound hasty? Wouldn’t it be better to cultivate a habit of ranking options quickly rather than instantly discarding some? Less efficient, but not less accurate (unless there is a need for immediate action, say, a police officer or soldier in the midst of conflict). Perhaps too efficient a thought process if a quick decision is not necessary.
Imagine a different scenario: you are to hire an employee and have before you a large number of resumes to consider. After a quick perusal, do you discard some resumes outright or do you organize them according to usefulness: most promising resumes at the top of the stack (or in a separate stack)? Depends on how much time you have allocated to make this particular decision. What do you lose by rejecting some potential employees?
I can’t help but take this to a political level, imagining policy-makers making decisions that will most certainly effect members of the population in profound ways. Efficient reasoning which includes the step of immediate rejection allows us to ignore certain groups that may only have the stigma of a negative perception, such as the mentally ill or the criminal or the chronically unemployed. This might be how we create the ‘lepers’ of the 21st century.

Abelard: “For the weak to bear the same burdens as the strong…is at odds with the principle of discretion.” (Abelard and Heloise: The Letters and Other Writings, 232)

*Damasio’s description of human feeling being a continuous process, a “monitoring,…what your body is doing while thoughts about specific contents roll by…” (145) makes me think of Plato’s description of the contents of the ‘reality becoming’ - the earth, fire, water, and void - involved in “constant process of movement and separation.” (The Timaeus, 72)

Updated April 3, 2008: But Damasio has succeeded in showing that we humans are more like the God that Descartes imagined, in possession of an integrated intellect and body (the separation of which is an ‘imperfect arrangement.’ (Discourse on Method, 27))

Steve, it’s just about a woman in love.

“…to enjoy the present moment, and what is past will be over and done with.” (4 May 1771)

Werther may have been destined to a tortured end; he had determined at the young age of 23 that “…the only thing that makes a Man’s life on earth essential and necessary is love.” (15 August 1771) He is a keen observer of children, honest and spontaneous in their expression of emotion and realizes that “…the source of Man’s contentment [could] become the source of his misery.” (18 August) He almost certainly sees ahead his own fate if he cannot obtain the one thing necessary to him: love from Lotte.

Werther is a Hamlet, less a player in the flux - for Hamlet his situation external and Werther internal - than a puppet. Werther is less resentful but angry none the less. When first acquainted with Lotte and Albert he is a passionate indeterminist who insists that each can choose from a variety of options of actions and feelings (8 August); his friend Wilhelm interjects eighteen months later as narrator that Werther remained determined “…to quit the world” (14 December 1772) Werther could not accept that his chosen beloved, Lotte, would not accept his love, their self-determined course of action. The deep and turbulent torrent of feeling pushes relentlessly against the gently landscaped bank. This monstrous force of his human Nature either will not or cannot ablate and overflows the channels dug by cool, respectable gentlemen, drowning their “…summerhouses, tulip beds, and cabbage patches.”

“And then, confined as he may be, he none the less still preserves in his heart the sweet sensation of freedom, and the knowledge that he can quit this prison whenever he wishes.” (22 May 1771)

And so, on December 21, his blood pours forth like genius. Werther was determined to test his human capacity at his heart’s very threshold; did he succeed or did he fail?

Is it simply a case of Werther (and Hamlet) not being a man of action, as described in The Bhagavad Gita? Destined to be born with too much - what? The lucidity that sees clearly the essential, all-encompassing truth in the totality of Nature and humanity? The passion of great effort that seeks to fulfill its own desires? Or the dark inertia: “knowledge that clings to a single thing as if it were the whole, limited, lacking a sense of reality,” (The Eighteenth Teaching, 22)

Krishna (to Werther): “The joy that is passionate at first seems like ambrosia when the senses encounter sense objects, but in the end it is like poison.” (3
Werther (in response): “Better to do one’s own duty imperfectly than to do another man’s well;” (47)

(I read Werther as Wilhelm and the editor did; neither of us present.) So, was Werther truly indeterminist or was he struggling against the fate he had already accepted as his?