To Remain True

… discoloration is accompanied by a change in the scent of the flower.

This is from Insects and Flowers: The Biology of a Partnership by Friedrich G. Barth (1991):

… For the bee, ultraviolet is especially attractive and blue-green, least so. Day-flying butterflies find little attraction in greenish blue to blue-green models, and some species fly spontaneously most often to red and purple. … For bumblebees, colors in the blue-violet-purple region are particularly effective stimuli.

… All this imaginative diversity in the color, shape, and scent of flowers is the method by which the individual species keep themselves distinct from one another. Each combination is special in the true sense of the word, and causes the food-seeking insects to remain true to the particular species as long as possible, carrying the right pollen to the right stigma in an energy-conserving and reliable way. Herein lies the great difference from the random nature of wind pollination.

Once pollination has occurred, however, the special signal of the species becomes an encumbrance. Usually pollination is followed by rapid fading of the flowers. When bumblebees collect food from horse-chestnut trees, they can often be seen to avoid the older flowers. The yellow nectar guide on the upper petals of the young flowers gradually becomes discolored, turning first orange and eventually carmine. Only in the yellow and initial orange phases does the flower secrete nectar.

[line break added] Bees and bumblebees rapidly learn the difference. Success teaches them to associate food with yellow, which they can readily distinguish from carmine. The advantage: greater economy in the work of collecting. The corresponding advantage to the chestnut: more frequent visits to — and hence pollination of — the younger flowers. Incidentally, the discoloration is accompanied by a change in the scent of the flower.

My most recent previous post from Barth’s book is here.

-Julie

The Patterns of the Entrails

… You can clearly “see” the cold …

This is from ‘Human Technology Relations’ found in The Critical Ihde, edited by Robert Rosenberg (2023):

… when I read Plato, Plato’s “world” is made present. But this presence is a hermeneutic presence. Not only does it occur through reading but is takes its shape in the interpretative context of my language abilities.

… Imagine sitting inside on a cold day. You look out the window and notice that the snow is blowing, but you are toasty warm in front of the fire. You can clearly “see” the cold in Merleau-Ponty’s pregnant sense of perception — but you do not actually feel it.

… you might also see the thermometer nailed to the grape arbor post and read that it is 28°F. You would now “know” how cold it was, but you still would not feel it. To retain the full sense of an embodiment relation, there must also be retained some isomorphism with the felt sense of the cold — in this case, tactile — that one would get through face-to-face experience.

… In the Three Mile Island incident, the nuclear power system was observed only through instrumentation. Part of the delay that caused a near meltdown was misreading of the instruments. There was no face-to-face, independent access to the pile or to much of the machinery involved, nor could there be.

… note the various “reading” techniques employed in shamanism. The reading of animal entrails, of thrown bones, of bodily markers — all are hermeneutic techniques. The patterns of the entrails, bones, or whatever are taken to refer to some state of affairs, instrumentally or textually.

… The sometimes socially contextless emphasis of Western medicine upon a presumably “mechanical” body may overlook precisely the context which the shaman so clearly recognizes. The entire gestalt is different and differently focused, but in both cases there are examples of hermeneutic relations.

My most recent previous post from Ihde’s book is here.

-Julie

Grown Beyond All Measure

… you can’t retrace your steps for the better …

This is from Anger, Mercy, Revenge by Lucius Annaeus Seneca, translated by Robert A. Kaster and Martha C. Nussbaum (2010):

… The wish to rage about should cease before there ceases to be cause for rage. Otherwise, just as trees that have been pruned send forth the most branches, and many kinds of plants are cut back so that they’ll sprout more thickly, so a king’s cruelty swells his enemy’s ranks by destroying them: for every one who’s killed, there are parents and children and kinsmen and friends to take his place.

… The tyrant is caught in a vicious cycle: given that he’s hated because he’s feared, he wants to be feared because he’s hated. And so he has recourse to that loathsome verse which has ruined many — “let them hate, provided they fear” —though he’s unaware of the ravening fury that arises when hatred has grown beyond all measure.

… For among all of cruelty’s other bad features, this is surely the worst: you can’t retrace your steps for the better but have got to keep at it, using fresh crimes to ward off the consequences of your old ones.

My most recent previous post from Seneca’s book is here.

-Julie

But Those Times Are Past

… There were times when Leibnitzes with their heads buried in monstrous wigs could compose Theodicies …

This is from ‘Is Life Worth Living?’ found in William James: Writings 1878-1899 (1992):

… [For] Every phenomenon that we would praise there exists cheek by jowl with some contrary phenomenon that cancels all its religious effect upon the mind.

[line break added] Beauty and hideousness, love and cruelty, life and death keep house together in indissoluble partnership; and there gradually steals over us, instead of the old warm notion of a man-loving Deity, that of an awful power that neither hates nor loves, but rolls all things together meaninglessly to a common doom.

… There were times when Leibnitzes with their heads buried in monstrous wigs could compose Theodicies, and when stall-fed officials of an established church could prove by the valves in the heart and the round ligament of the hip-joint the existence of a “Moral and Intelligent Contriver of the World.”

[line break added] But those times are past; and we of the nineteenth century, with our evolutionary theories and our mechanical philosophies, already know nature too impartially and too well to worship unreservedly any God of whose character she can be an adequate expression.

My most recent previous post from James’s book is here.

-Julie

In the Innermost

… we are surrounded by other bodies …

This is from Crowds: The Stadium as a Ritual of Intensity by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (2021):

… We belong to a crowd with our bodies and become in it a part of a relationship to other bodies — a relationship which does not have anything to do with common interests, or with solidarity, or with consensus, but only with bodies.

… No one can move freely in a mass, nor in the standing bleachers, where the bodies almost touch each other without it being a matter of touch at all. No one speaks unnecessarily; everyone focuses exclusively on the playing field, open for whatever unexpected event might happen there. We are alone with our concentration in a mass, yet we presume that our individual reaction to the events of the game will be accompanied by thousands of analogous reactions.

… Being in a crowd means, finally, to be inside in two respects: firstly, because we are surrounded by other bodies, and secondly because of our nearness to the playing field, in the innermost center of the stadium.

My most recent previous post from Gumbrecht’s book is here.

-Julie

A Connector of Things

“… What I am going to do is draw your attention to this sequence of things.”

This is from Sonic Flux: Sound, Art, and Metaphysics by Christopher Cox (2018):

… the peculiar uncanniness of audio recording (the voice of a dead friend, recordings of the wind from 1935) testifies to a difference: audio recording extracts a sonorous surface from a segment of the past and gives it an untimely existence.

… the boundaries between the roles of “composer,” performer,” and “recording engineer” have become increasingly blurred.

… “Neither the artist nor the remixer is the ‘creator’ in the traditional sense,” notes the producer Kevin Martin. “It’s more the case that both the artist and the remixer act as ‘filters’ for a sort of cultural flow.” Martin’s assessment is echoed by the producer Brian Eno, who notes that “an artist is now much more seen as a connector of things, a person who scans the enormous field of possible places for artistic attention and says What I am going to do is draw your attention to this sequence of things.”

My most recent previous post from Cox’s book is here.

-Julie

What We Cannot Do

… “The environment” does not exist to be saved.

This is from The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment by Richard Lewontin (2000, 1998):

… the environment is constantly changing so that adaptation to yesterday’s environment does not improve the chance of survival tomorrow.

… The constructionist view is that the world is changing because the organisms are changing. The Red Queen’s running only makes the problem worse.

… There is an immediate political consequence of the appreciation that there are no environments without organisms. The growing environmentalist movement to prevent alterations in the natural world that will be, at best, unpleasant and, at worst, catastrophic for human existence cannot proceed rationally under the false slogan “Save the Environment.” “The environment” does not exist to be saved.

[line break added] The world inhabited by living organisms is constantly being changed and reconstructed by activities of all of those organisms, not just by human activity. Neither can the movement proceed under the banner of “Stop Extinctions!” Of all species that have ever existed, 99.9 percent are extinct, and all species that currently exist will one day be extinct.

… What we can do is to try to affect the rate of extinction and direction of environmental change in such a way as to make a decent life for human beings possible. What we cannot do is to keep things as they are.

My most recent previous post from Lewontin’s book is here.

-Julie

The Mouth Opening

… The fly can employ its labella …

This is from Insects and Flowers: The Biology of a Partnership by Friedrich G. Barth (1991):

… In the middle is the tongue (glossa). This is covered with long hairs and has a spoon-shaped end. With the tongue the bee reaches the nectar and licks it up, very like a cat licking milk.

[line break added] This is what happens: the nectar rises in the narrow spaces between the hairs of the extended tongue by capillary action, a passive process. Then the bee pulls its tongue back into the actual suction tube formed by the other four elements of the proboscis, which are grouped around the tongue.

… This suction tube is joined by an airtight connection to a pump in the head, which allows the fluid that has risen passively between the tongue hairs and between the tongue and the tube wall to be actively pumped higher.

… The mosquitoes and flies present us with [another] variant of proboscis construction…. There are no less than three tubes, one within the next. The innermost is the actual food-sucking tube. Outside it is the saliva tube through which saliva flows out to dissolve food such as the coffee drinker’s sugar cube or to prevent coagulation of the host’s blood where the mosquito has bitten.

[line break added] These two tubes are enclosed by a third. The comparative anatomy of the mouthparts has revealed that the feeding tube is a modification of the labrum (an “upper lip” above the mandibles), whereas the saliva tube is an elongation of the pharynx, and the third tube is formed by the labium.

… The fly labellum is covered with sense organs which provide information about the food — its mechanical consistency and in particular its chemical composition. About two hundred and fifty long hairs are especially conspicuous. All of them are innervated; they tell the fly, for example, how concentrated is the nectar into which it has just dipped its proboscis.

On the inner surfaces of the labella, around the mouth opening, are little teeth. These are used to scrape pollen out of a flower and by grating movements they can break down large food particles. And that is not all. The fly can employ its labella in quite different ways. Depending on how they are spread apart, they can filter fluid food, soak it up with the tube system described above, or assist direct sucking through the mouth opening.

My most recent previous post from Barth’s book is here.

-Julie

The Enabling Background

… The “image size” of galaxy or amoeba is the same.

This is from ‘Human Technology Relations’ found in The Critical Ihde, edited by Robert Rosenberg (2023):

… my seeing without instrumentation is a full bodily seeing — I see not just with my eyes but with my whole body in a unified sensory experience of things.

… But the optical instrument cannot so easily transform the entire sensory gestalt. The focal sense that is magnified through the instrument is monodimensioned.

… the telephone in use falls into an auditory embodiment relation. If the technology is good, I hear you through the telephone and the apparatus “withdraws” into the enabling background.

… This telephonic distance is different both from immediate face-to-face encounters and from visual or geographical distance as normally taken. Its distance is a mediated distance with its own identifiable significations.

… All lenses and optical technologies of the sort being described bring what is to be seen into a normal bodily space and distance. Both the macroscopic and the microscopic appear within the same near-distance. The “image size” of galaxy or amoeba is the same.

My most recent previous post from Ihde’s book is here.

-Julie

Our Own Brief Life

… Why not rather cause all others to love you while you live, and miss you when you’ve gone?

This is from Anger, Mercy, Revenge by Lucius Annaeus Seneca, translated by Robert A. Kaster and Martha C. Nussbaum (2010):

… Each person should say to himself and to the other: what good does it do to proclaim our feuds, as though we were born to live forever, and to waste the very brief time of life that we have? What good does it do to take the days we could spend on honorable pleasure and devote them instead to another’s anguished torment?

… Why not rather take stock of our own brief life and make sure it’s peaceful for yourself and everyone else? Why not rather cause all others to love you while you live, and miss you when you’ve gone?

… Bear with it a bit and — lo and behold — here’s death to make you equals.

My most recent previous post from Seneca’s book is here.

-Julie