Books 📚

• Finished Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent_🐉 (🥰)

Some pics of Essex estuary-scapes surfaced here serendipitously and I loved looking at them! And thinking about lady scientists and palaeontology. And dragons - the year of the Dragon is being rung in next new moon. 🌑 To add to TBR pile (people rave about this book!) 🔗 The Peregrine, JA Baker … also set in Essex.

• Finished Andrea Berba’s The Luminous Republic (Whoa!)
• Started Panos Karnezis’ The Convent

Browsing at the Library on a cold, dark January afternoon I came across Siddharta Mukherjee’s Song of the Cell and was instantly drawn in, reading poetry intertwined with biology and thinking about microscopes and telescopes and how all we who are alive now get to see that has never before been seen . . .

Notes & Quotes 💬

[Timothy] Steele includes poetry among the prerequisites of a good, sustainable life, here:

“What is most essential to human life and to its continuance remains a love of nature, an enthusiasm for justice, a readiness of good humor, a spontaneous susceptibility to beauty and joy, an interest in our past, a hope for our future, and above all, a desire that others should have the opportunity and encouragement to share these qualities. An art of measured speech nourishes these qualities in a way no other pursuit can.”

I was stimulated by Adam Robbert’s post reflecting on the impoverishment of excessive availability (& reproducibility) of print, nowadays. It called to mind Emma Donoghue’s Haven a book I recently read and enjoyed very much. In it, for the first time, the physicality of ancient texts and their reproduction was described in a way that really connected for me and made the venture of book-making feel amazing and revelatory. What a commitment! What an investment. The ecosystemic participation in the making, the costs and the values - I felt it in a new, animated sort of a way … And I look around my desk where at least 15 books sit piled around me . . .

Robberts notes how writing over and over again over a lifetime is a spiritual exercise:

a repetitive practice of precise attention to detail and linguistic choreography, a type of lectio divina stamped outwards onto the very material production of a text and the logos it expresses, which then folded back onto the shape of the soul who crafted it.

This is the scholarship of ritual repetition and philosophical invocation.

He links this to Byung-Chul Han’s The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present From whom, the following:

Today, many forms of repetition, such as learning by heart, are scorned on account of the supposed stifling of creativity and innovation they involve. The expression ‘to learn something by heart,’ like the French apprendre par coeur, tells us that apparently only repetition reaches the heart. . . .

Repetition stabilizes and deepens attention.

On the Wonders of the Handwritten over the Copy-Paste reflex enabled by keyboard-screen technologies, this:

The text can grow mute with such ease of reproduction. … literary recomposition is a crucial askēsis of its own—a transformative exercise of self-overcoming and transformation—one that cannot be bypassed by digital or print reproduction, however beneficial these tools may be otherwise.

I enjoyed Dan Wang’s long letter and found the section on Chinese linguistic creativity particularly entertaining.

Also, from Dan:

The “secure transport of light” is one of my favorite phrases. It refers to both to optic cables (which make modern communications possible) and semiconductors (which make modern electronics possible). We can thank Alexander Graham Bell for allowing us to speak from one side of the Atlantic ocean to the other, through coils of sunbeams under the seas. Isn’t that a wonderful image?

It is a wonderful image … noosphere x flaring forth

I’ve known of John Cobb’s name via interests in Ecological Civilisation and perhaps I was dipping into Isabel Stengers’ work on Alfred North Whitehead one morning recently when I happened on Cobb’s wikipedia page, here. I see he was born in Japan, just up the drag from the home base. 🤩 I liked these bits particularly on ‘mutually assured transformation’ . . .

John Cobb writes: … it is the mission of Christianity to become a universal faith in the sense of taking into itself the alien truths that others have realized. This is no mere matter of addition. It is instead a matter of creative transformation. An untransformed Christianity, that is, a Christianity limited to its own parochial traditions, cannot fulfill its mission of realizing the universal meaning of Jesus Christ.

… Cobb does not conceive of dialogue as useful primarily to convert or be converted, but rather as useful in order to transform both parties mutually, allowing for a broadening of ideas and a reimagining of each faith in order that they might better face the challenges of the modern world

Podcasts 🫛

• Casper ter Kuile Interviews Elizabeth Oldfield, The Nearness. A rich convo, just over 30 minutes, with a trove of sparkles within that lit my candle.
• Emmanuel Vaughn-Lee interviews Joanna Macy, Emergence Magazine. This one from the archives, also just over 30 minutes. Connecting the dots … wise old women, recognised. Connects with The Nearness on wise old women & inclusive, transformational leadership and listening.
• Tom Power interviews Anne Michaels on Q. I liked this and found myself thinking, listening to Michaels’ giggle, of Marilynne Robinson’s … sweet, musical and self-deprecating, both. I love that these women of substance are free in this way.

Poetry 💘

Timothy Steele, The Library

Anne Michaels, the wet earth

Jack Gilbert, Failing and Flying

Questions & Open Tabs 🔖

Alan Watts, of whom it is said was seldom less than ‘fully alive’ (aspirational! 🏄🏻‍♀️) … a podcast called Being in the way and an essay

Noticing Something New 🎁

🆕 How it is that, despite all (looking @ you 😒 Climate Change), the East Asian 72 seasons more or less match what’s going on around us? This past week MAJOR COLD! 🥶🥶🥶