Gather Their Meanings

… the perceptual sensitivity that enables him to discern, and continually to respond to, those subtle variations in the environment …

This is from The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill by Tim Ingold (2000, 2022):

… If, however, as the relational model implies, the source of cultural knowledge lies not in the heads of predecessors but in the world that they point out to you — if, that is, one learns by discovery while following in the path of an ancestor — then words, too, must gather their meanings from the contexts in which they are uttered.

[line break added] Moving together along a trail or encamped at a particular place, companions draw each other’s attention, through speech and gesture, to salient features of their shared environment. Every word, spoken in context, condenses a history of past usage into a focus that illuminates some aspect of the world. Words, in this sense, are instruments of perception much as tools are instruments of action.

[line break added] Both conduct a skilled and sensuous engagement with the environment that is sharpened and enriched through previous experience. The clumsiness of the novice in handling unfamiliar tools is matched, as every anthropological fieldworker knows, only by his incomprehension of spoken words.

[line break added] What the novice lacks, however, and the knowledgeable hand possesses, is not a scheme of conceptual representations for organizing the data of experience but rather the perceptual sensitivity that enables him to discern, and continually to respond to, those subtle variations in the environment whose detection is essential to the accomplishment of ongoing activity.

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

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Within a Few Seconds

“… falls upon any intruder touching the nest tree without hesitation or mercy.”

This is from Insect Ecology: Behavior, Populations and Communities by P.W. Price, R.F. Denno, M.D. Eubanks, D.L. Finke, and I. Kaplan (2011):

… Plants can selectively encourage the survival of enemies by providing domatia, morphological structures that insects use as refuge or housing. This allows enemies to live directly on or in the plant, a critical advantage in facilitating prey suppression. Speed is of paramount importance in defending plants from herbivores: if enemies arrive several days or more after herbivores initiate feeding, it may be too late.

… As eloquently described by Hõlldobler and Wilson: “Further evidence of coevolution is provided by the legendary ferocity of the guest ants. The vast majority of Pseudomyrmex species not occupying domatia are timid and flee even when their nest is broken apart. In sharp contrast, P. triplarinus, an obligate resident of Triplaris americana, falls upon any intruder touching the nest tree without hesitation or mercy.

[line break added] “To be stung by several of these ants within a few seconds is a shocking experience — you pull back at once. Or conversely, if you want to locate Triplaris quickly in an Amazonian forest, shake one sapling after another until one produces a swarm of the stinging ants.”

My most recent previous post from this book is here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

The Slow Gliding

… It’s what they call “slipping” and sometimes it’s as ghastly as drowning.

This is from The Assembly Line by Robert Linhart, translated by Margaret Crosland (1978; 1981):

… each man has a well-defined area for the operations he has to make, although the boundaries are invisible: as soon as a car enters a man’s territory, he takes down his blowtorch, grabs his soldering iron, takes his hammer or his file, and gets to work.

[line break added] A few knocks, a few sparks, then the soldering’s done and the car’s already on its way out of the three or four yards of this position. And the next car’s already coming into the work area. And the worker starts again. Sometimes, if he’s been working fast, he has a few seconds’ respite before a new car arrives: either he takes advantage of it to breathe for a moment, or else he intensifies his effort and “goes up the line” so that he can gain a little time, in other words, he works further ahead, outside his normal area, together with the worker at the preceding position.

[line break added] And after an hour or two he’s amassed the incredible capital of two or three minutes in hand, that he’ll use up smoking a cigarette, looking on like some comfortable man of means as his car moves past already soldered, keeping his hands in his pockets while the others are working. Short-lived happiness: the next car’s already there: he’ll have to work on it at his usual position this time, and the race begins again, in the hope of another peaceful cigarette.

[line break added] If, on the other hand, the worker’s too slow, he “slips back,” that is, he finds himself carried progressively beyond his position, going on with his work when the next laborer has already begun his. Then he has to push on fast, trying to catch up. And the slow gliding of the cars, which seems to me so near to not moving at all, looks as relentless as a rushing torrent which you can’t manage to dam up: eighteen inches, three feet, thirty seconds …

… It’s what they call “slipping” and sometimes it’s as ghastly as drowning.

My previous post from Linhart’s book is here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

The Traffic of Thought

… in either mystery or enigma … something must die in order for something new to live.

This is from ‘Secret Wisdom and Self-Effacement: The Spiritual in the Modern Age’ by David Morgan (1996):

… My sense of order is jumbled, my status called into question, whatever I took to be certain may be thrown into doubt. This experience of the liminal may be configured as transcendence or as transformation.

[line break added] The two should not be confused. Transcendence posits a mystery present in the work of art as the encounter with a metaphysical order beyond or hidden within the ordinary sensuous world. Transformation, on the other hand, confronts enigma in the work, the disturbing sense that the world is not right.

… In the case of the transcendent, the mystery is what promises to unveil itself in the wake of the apocalyptic passing of reality. With the enigma, the self faces its limit, envisions the end of worlds in order to escape their tyranny. Transformation means the rupture of the ordinary domains and patterns of authority, the dense cityscape of doxa that conduct the traffic of thought.

[line break added] Transformation portends the possibility of an alternative self and social order, while enigma preserves a radical open-endedness, vigorously resists perfection in the sense of ontological completion or metaphysical resolution. But in either mystery or enigma, transcendence or transformation, something must die in order for something new to live.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Into the More

… our full self is the whole field …

This is from ‘A Pluralistic Universe’ found in William James: Writings 1902-1910 (1987):

… Every smallest state of consciousness, concretely taken, overflows its own definition.

[line break added] Only concepts are self-identical; only ‘reason’ deals with closed equations; nature is but a name for excess; every point in her opens out and runs into the more; and the only question, with reference to any point we may be considering, is how far into the rest of nature we may have to go in order to get entirely beyond its overflow.

[line break added] In the pulse of inner life immediately present now in each of us is a little past, a little future, a little awareness of our own body, of each other’s persons, of these sublimities we are trying to talk about, of the earth’s geography and the direction of history, of truth and error, of good and bad, and of who knows how much more? Feeling, however dimly and subconsciously, all these things, your pulse of inner life is continuous with them, belongs to them and they to it.

… What we conceptually identify ourselves with and say we are thinking of at any time is the center; but our full self is the whole field, with all those indefinitely radiating subconscious possibilities of increase that we can only feel without conceiving and can hardly begin to analyze.

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

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Good Socks

… she knits socks for all of them …

This is from ‘Mobile Knitting’ by Sadie Plant, found in Information is Alive (2003):

I know an old Swiss woman who has knitted socks for 80 years. She is the current matriarch of a family that has been rooted in the same Swiss canton for countless generations.

[line break added] Marriages have always been made locally; family members have rarely traveled far. Now she has 15 grown-up grandchildren. Ten of them have settled with foreigners and several live abroad. Her family — so Swiss, white, and Protestant for so long — now extends across three continents and includes Hungarians, Romanians, Russians, Italians, English, Jamaicans, Koreans, Somalis and Canadians.

[line break added] In one jump, this monocultural family has become multinational, multiracial, multi-faith. There are Buddhists, Catholics, a Muslim; African and Asian great-grandchildren. It took her a while to get used to it, this sudden distribution of her close-knit, close-by family. But now she knits socks for all of them, even parceling them up to send to her in-laws in Africa or the Americas. They are good socks …

My most recent previous post from this book is here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

The Fallen

… it still awakens in us longings for what we can no longer believe in, but wish we could.

This is from ‘Resisting the Ninth’ in Text & Act: Essays on Music and Performance by Richard Taruskin (1995):

… Solitary, vast, awe-inspiring, the Ninth reminds everyone of a mountain. It makes us uncomfortable.

[line break added] “We live in the valley of the Ninth Symphony — that we cannot help,” says Joseph Kerman. Why the resignation? Why should we wish it otherwise? Because of the finale, of course, and the impossible problem of tone it has created, especially for us in the fallen twentieth century.

… Not only have artists of our time once again rejected intimations of the sublime as the proper role of art — for a Ned Rorem, the “grand style” already implies a “piece of junk”; his expression is a pleonasm — but we have our problems with demagogues who preach to us about the brotherhood of man. We have been too badly burned by those who have promised Elysium and given us Gulags and gas chambers.

… For those who cannot reject it outright, deflecting attention from “meaning” to “structure” has been the primary means of resisting the Ninth.

… To resist the resistance, to make peace with this score on its own terms, may not be possible in our time. It would signal recovery of an optimism that our century’s wars, upheavals, atrocities, and holocausts — and the despairing attendant cynicism that has from the beginning undergirded the modern movement — may have precluded once and for all.

[line break added] Yet the fact that we continue to insult and distort Beethoven’s gigantic affirmation shows that it is still under our skins, that it still troubles the conscience of trivial artists like Ned Rorem, that it still awakens in us longings for what we can no longer believe in, but wish we could. We are still in the valley of the Ninth.

And so there’s hope.

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

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

However Erratic and Circuitous

… in this education of attention, nothing, strictly speaking, is ‘handed down’ at all.

This is from The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill by Tim Ingold (2000, 2022):

… It is from their emplacement in the world that people draw not just their perceptual orientations but the very substance of their being. Conversely, through their actions, they contribute to the substantive make-up of others.

[line break added] Such contributions are given and received throughout life, in the context of a person’s ongoing relationships with human and non-human components of the environment. Thus, far from having their constitution specified in advance, as the genealogical model implies, persons undergo histories of continuous change and development. In a word, they grow.

… while each person is at the center of their own field of perception and action, the position of this center is not fixed but moves relative to others. As it does so, it lays a trail. Every trail, however erratic and circuitous, is a kind of life-line, a trajectory of growth.

… One shares in the process of knowing, rather than taking on board a pre-established body of knowledge. Indeed, in this education of attention, nothing, strictly speaking, is ‘handed down’ at all. The growth and development of the person, in short, is to be understood relationally as a movement along a way of life, conceived not as the enactment of a corpus of rules and principles (or a ‘culture’) received from predecessors, but as the negotiation of a path through the world.

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

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Nectary-mediated Recruitment

… the benefit must be sufficiently strong to offset costs …

This is from Insect Ecology: Behavior, Populations and Communities by P.W. Price, R.F. Denno, M.D. Eubanks, D.L. Finke, and I. Kaplan (2011):

… Extrafloral nectaries are similar to floral nectaries, except rather than enclosed within the corolla they are strategically positioned on leaves (usually the petiole or mid-rib), stems, bracts and fruits.

[line break added] Structurally, extrafloral nectaries are small openings in the plant surface, typically one to several millimeters in diameter, but sometimes larger, that exude nectar consisting primarily of simple sugars such as sucrose, glucose and fructose. While not all plants possess extrafloral nectaries — they are totally absent from gymnosperms — the trait is widely distributed across flowering plants …

… Numerous factors dictate whether extrafloral nectaries lead to a net beneficial impact on plants and the strength of this effect, including, for instance, the species identity and aggression level of ants patrolling the plant.

[line break added] Another reason for conditional outcomes is that the benefit must be sufficiently strong to offset costs of enemy attraction. In the case of ants, nectary-mediated recruitment can reduce plant reproductive output by deterring pollinators, or induce ants to attack other, potentially more effective predators and parasitoids, indirectly benefiting herbivores.

… In spite of the overwhelming evidence and widespread acceptance of a defensive function, other explanations have been put forth to explain the evolution of extrafloral nectaries. Koptur (2005) reviewed these alternative hypotheses, which include:

(1) Plant physiological waste product – nectaries excrete excess carbohydrates, which may occur if nitrogen or other nutrients are highly limiting.
(2) Distracting ants from flowers – if ants harvest floral nectar then pollination services may suffer, therefore nectaries discourage ants from flower plundering by offering an alternative sugar source.
(3) Distracting ants from hemipterans – similar to the second hypothesis, nectaries lure ants from honeydew-producing hemipterans and thus prevent them from inducing outbreaks of aphids and other such herbivores.

My most recent previous post from this book is here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

I Look

… The operations themselves seem to be carried out with a kind of resigned monotony …

This is from The Assembly Line by Robert Linhart, translated by Margaret Crosland (1978; 1981):

“Show him, Mouland,”

The man in the white overalls (he’s the foreman, called Gravier, as they’ll tell me later) leaves me standing and goes off busily toward his glass-walled cage.

I look at the laborer who is working. I look at the shop floor. I look at the assembly line. No one speaks to me. Mouland takes no notice of me. The foreman has gone. So I observe at random: Mouland, the Citroën 2 CV car bodies passing in front of us, and the other laborers.

The assembly line isn’t as I’d imagined it. I’d visualized a series of clear-cut stops and starts in front of each work position: with each car moving a few yards, stopping, the worker doing his job, the car starting again, another one stopping, the same operation being carried out again, etc. I saw the whole thing taking place rapidly — with those “diabolical rhythms” mentioned in the leaflets. The assembly line: the words themselves conjured up a jerky, rapid flow of movement.

The first impression, on the contrary, is one of a slow but continuous movement by all the cars. The operations themselves seem to be carried out with a kind of resigned monotony, but without the speed I expected. It’s like a long, gray-green, gliding movement, and after a time it gives off a feeling of somnolence, interrupted by sounds, bumps, flashes of light, all repeated one after the other, but with regularity.

[line break added] The formless music of the line, the gliding movement of the unclad gray steel bodies, the routine movements: I can feel myself being gradually enveloped and anesthetized. Time stands still.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/