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Ode to Man
Tho’ many are the terrors,
not one more terrible than man goes.
This one beyond the grizzled sea
in winter storming to the south
He crosses, all-engulfed,
cutting through, up from under swells.
& of the gods She the Eldest, Earth
un-withering, un-toiling, is worn down,
As the Twisting Plough’s year
into Twisting Plough’s year,
Through the breeding of horse, he turns.
& the lighthearted race of birds
all-snaring he drives them
& savage beasts, their clan, & of the sea,
marine in kind
With tightly-wound meshes spun
from all-seeing is Man.
Yet too, he masters by means of pastoral
beast, mountain-trodding,
The unruly-maned horse holding fast,
‘round the neck yoked,
& the mountain’s
ceaseless bull.
& the voice & wind-fast thought
& the passion for civic ways
He has taught, so from crag’s poor court
from under the ether’s hard-tossed arrows
To flee, this all-crossing one. Blocked, he comes
upon nothing so fated.
From Hades alone escape he’ll not bring.
Tho’ from sickness impossible
Flight he has pondered.
A skilled one, devising of arts beyond hope,
Holding at times an evil,
But then to the noble he crawls,
honoring the laws of the Earth, &
Of gods the oath so just,
high-citied.
Citiless is the one who with the un-beautiful
dwells, boldly in grace.
Never for me a hearth-mate
may he have been, never equal in mind
He who offers this.
Ode to Man
A BwO is made in such a way that it can be occupied, populated only by intensities. Only intensities pass and circulate. Still, the BwO is not a scene, a place, or even a support upon which something comes to pass. It has nothing to do with phantasy, there is nothing to interpret. The BwO causes intensities to pass; it produces and distributes them in a spatium that is itself intensive, lacking extension. It is not space, nor is it in space; it is matter that occupies space to a given degree—to the degree corresponding to
the intensities produced. It is nonstratified, unformed, intense matter, the matrix of intensity, intensity = 0; but there is nothing negative about that zero, there are no negative or opposite intensities. Matter equals energy. Production of the real as an intensive magnitude starting at zero. That is why we treat the BwO as the full egg before the extension of the organism and the organization of the organs, before the formation of the strata; as the intense egg defined by axes and vectors, gradients and thresholds, by dynamic tendencies involving energy transformation and kinematic movements involving group displacement, by migrations: all independent
of accessory forms because the organs appear and function here only as pure intensities. The organ changes when it crosses a threshold, when it
changes gradient. "No organ is constant as regards either function or position, . . . sex organs sprout anywhere,... rectums open, defecate and close, . . . the entire organism changes color and consistency in split-second adjustments." The tantric egg. After all, is not Spinoza's Ethics the great book of the BwO?
Ode to Man
But human power is extremely limited, and is infinitely surpassed by the power of external causes; we have not, therefore, an absolute power of shaping to our use those things which are without us. Nevertheless, we shall bear with an equal mind all that happens to us in contravention to the claims of our own advantage, so long as we are conscious, that we have done our duty, and that the power which we possess is not sufficient to enable us to protect ourselves completely; remembering that we are a part of universal nature, and that we follow her order. If we have a clear and distinct understanding of this, that part of our nature which is defined by intelligence, in other words the better part of ourselves, will assuredly acquiesce in what befalls us, and in such acquiescence will endeavour to persist. For, in so far as we are intelligent beings, we cannot desire anything save that which is necessary, nor yield absolute acquiescence to anything, save to that which is true: wherefore, in so far as we have a right understanding of these things, the endeavour of the better part of ourselves is in harmony with the order of nature as a whole.
Frames /sing 
Stengers quotes this famous phrase in Power and Invention (p.41).
Also it comes up in Prigogine’s ‘The End of Certainty’ (p.165).
At the end of his life Einstein seems to have changed his mind.
When Godel presented E with a cosmology in which it was poss. to return to one’s own past (taking seriously E’s statement that time was an illusion), E was not enthusiastic – he did not believe he could ‘telegraph back to his own past.’
He even added that this imposs should lead physicists to reconsider the problem of irreversibility. In hte Besso quote irreversibility is nothing but an illusion…
Of course, you can have your cake and eat it – postmortality and irreversibility. ‘Death is a biological fact: personal existence is not.’ (Crocco).
Honestly Paul, and I am not familiar with the dynamics of the quote in context, but I see no “returning” to your past or telegraphing in it? Where do you read this?
Or as I read it in Spinoza’s terms, when you die you do not “go” anywhere, or return back to anything. All of your “information” simply is preserved in the “phase space” in which it occurred (if you want to put it that way). In Lanza’s version, all the actualities are simply “still” happening, so to speak, in some fashion or another.
you’re right, E initially sees time as an ‘illusion’ – he denies irreversibility in physics – but later he questions this (it’s E that ultimately questions the illusion of time).
But as you say it makes no diff to postmortality which doesn’t exist in ‘the coursing of time’ (neither does mortality). We live inside the ‘intransformativity of the physical instant. Our memories are simultanaeous. But that would be for another time.
‘The basic fact of contemporary hylozoism is thus that persons appear as finitudes of full ontic consistency, causally interacting through a window between the situated, transformable situations, and an unlocatable or non-situable realm of intransformativity from where causation is exerted and, because of that, this intervalically instantaneous actuality transforms.
Strangely, this might be what Plato, even if heavily conditioned by the Pythagoric-Parmenidean worldview, obscurely intuited when dictating for what became Timaeus 90a that persons are plants, not earthly, but rather celestial: fytòn ouk éggeion allà ouránion.
They have inverted roots, not inside the soil, but rather as if their ontic sustenance would come from the mane, our hair thus staying the closest to the firmament or tópos ouránion.
But Plato could never have seriously dreamt of locating such a celestial realm of ideas – one that is the firmamental, as an unyielding and securely established firmament productive of this “underworld” or everyday realm detected by means of the senses – inside the instant situation of a nature that vacates itself outside instantaneous actuality.’ Crocco.
“But Plato could never have seriously dreamt of locating such a celestial realm of ideas…inside the instant situation of a nature that vacates itself outside instantaneous actuality.”
Kvond: I’m unsure of this. Or, I’m unsure of what one means by “vacates itself” and “inside the instant”. Instead, and Plato would agree I think, the instant actuality comes out of the “Chora” and the Chora is into that which all is rooted. This seems to be Einstein’s Spinozism as well.
have to go now! but vacates itself means that there is nothing else but each instant then another – no past or future for nature. Inside the instant means that the instant is in fact an ‘interval’ – it is not instantaneous…..it has a certain ‘thickness’. The planck instant – inside of which time does not course.
Sure. But nothing of this precludes reference to the entirity of these relations, in short, the Platonic Chora.
I don’t claim to fully understand it, but just skimmed James Bradley’s Whitehead article at http://www.senselab.ca/inflexions/volume_3/node_i2/Inflexions_Bradley.pdf (thanks to Paul for the INFLEXIONS link on your latest thread !) and Bradley’s article seems to offer a Whiteheadian explanation of “no past or future” while denying any “entirety of relations”?
(I’m sure you’re not planning to pull an Alexei when you say “this blog is going to go through a bit of a change… may be a mere diminishment” ?)
Thanks for that. I may work myself towards it, but I”m not thrilled with Whitehead’s solution, and, as you might guess, prefer Spinoza’s totalizing monism which I suspect many people mis-read…
As for the diminishment of the blog, I certainly will never delete it as Alexei chose, but I’ve tired quite a bit of blogo-dialogue that circulates in general, for what it is worth. I’ve got to take a trip to Thailand in January and some of Feb, so once it goes dark, it might remain so. I’m hunting for an aesthetic solution, a way for the blog to feed itself, along other lines, but we’ll see.
I really want to be one of the students einstein, because I love physics and I idolized eisntein the grandeur and genius