Category: Brain

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March Dust: W.S Merwin And The Precariousness of What We Haven’t Done.

The end of March juggles winter and spring, often choosing both.  Ice and melting ice, snow and melting snow, bare branches and first blooms, and over all blue, blue sky and marshmallow clouds.  W.S. Merwin’s poem, “It Is March” from The Lice muses on appearances and disappearances, revealings and vanishings. It Is March It is … Continue reading March Dust: W.S Merwin And The Precariousness of What We Haven’t Done.

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Heraclitus On Smoke; Hervé Smoking.

Take a study of natural forces, add a healthy pour of figurative language and delicious fragments from the natural philosophers from the eighth and seventh centuries BCE throughout the Aegean, especially in the Greek letters of Heraclitus. Consider, Fragment 7: εἰ πάντα τὰπάντα καπνὸς γένοιτο, ῥῖνες ἂν διαγνοῖεν. Transliterated into our alphabet, and we read: … Continue reading Heraclitus On Smoke; Hervé Smoking.

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Banquet World: “These Violent Delights Have Violent Ends.”

In the HBO series Westworld, androids also known as “hosts” struggle to achieve the most fundamentally unique experience of the human species, consciousness and all its attendant wakefulness and awareness, or so we’d like to think about ourselves, but hosts like Dolores Abernathy and Maeve Millay become alert to themselves and the world around them, distinctly … Continue reading Banquet World: “These Violent Delights Have Violent Ends.”

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Prolegomena To Any Future Ragù.

I read Immanuel Kant’s Prolegomena To Any Future Metaphysics after spending many years with Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Anne Carson, Gabriel García Márquez, and Virginia Woolf which means I understand Kant’s metaphysics through those authors, through The Metamorphosis, The Circular Ruins, Autobiography of Red, One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Waves.   My … Continue reading Prolegomena To Any Future Ragù.

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Brains and Balls.

To cook, to eat, to kill.  An animal’s life taken, body split open, applied to fire and torn between teeth.  What are the aesthetic and ethics?  Dan Barber argues that good taste necessitates sustainable farming to table.  Tayyib and Halal mean the animal has been raised in a “good” environment–think ethically sourced and sustainable–and then … Continue reading Brains and Balls.