Arts and Minds

Reading Eudora Welty

My library, wedged into cardboard boxes since a flood in the studio nearly a year ago, is at last released onto new shelves. Each book was acquired to answer, at a moment of question or desire, a need to telescopically reach beyond my own vision or understanding. Despite being carefully grouped and labeled in boxes they had become mysterious and weighty, not merely heavy. They stacked up like obligations that waited silently for more comfort, order restored, fresher air, light and freedom. And the relief of a reader.

In two days with an assistant who loves books they were released and placed in stacks. I have never been able to scan a conventional bookcase, as in the stacks of a library or bookstore without neck-twisting that made me have to leave unsatisfied. My bookstore and library ventures have never been leisurely browses but are either a dyslexic, efficient and purposeful mission, or a quick impulsive raid. So my own shelves carry their books flat, with the text on their spines arrayed so I can read them. Each shelf is a paragraph of ideas. Each book is an individual treasure. I have abandoned those I would not lend out or read again except for reference texts. In this small library their spines and my own are untwisted.

Touching and remembering these books whose contents have nourished my mind, the information having passed from their pages into my brain’s cells, was a neural re-gathering, a reunion of associations. Now that I am old enough to forget even my own thoughts unless typed-down immediately (I am intentionally filling magnetic memory as a prosthesis that will support failed biological memory later) there is more surprise and delight in the sight of an old familiar but forgotten book-cover, or the handwritten note of an author.

Books must be categorized but ideas should not. Neither books nor ideas fit easily into classifications, they merge into each other suggestively, breaking through the bookends. A book on child development is also a book about the sensory world of the classroom and it’s physical environment, but that may only be one of it’s syncretic connections to many other books. The whole library, mine, yours and worldwide, is a single networking of human ideas present and past, a record of what we are and who we are likely to become again. We do not know it’s whole value unless we keep re-reading.

Everybody Is Doing Something About The Weather

I’m sure you have heard folks quip that “everybody complains about the weather, but no one does anything about it”. Well, that folkstory, like so many comforting old crackerbarrel ‘wisdoms’ is cold comfort these days. It will be hot, rainy, mudsliding, flooding, desertified, and dust stormy discomfort from now on into the future. The truth is that while we have been helplessly complaining about the weather, we have all been actively doing something to it. We have ruined it. And we have ruined the climate at the large physical scale and long time-scale along with it. Time for the global-warming deniers to get off the crackerbarrel. We have less than ten years to reverse the damage we are doing.

ALEX, Scientific Pioneer

Saturday, September 8, 2007

ALEX died yesterday, he was 31 years old and had lived the most extraordinary life of any bird on the planet. He was the first avian intellectual pioneer, and certainly the first avian to have made intellectual contributions to science. He was also an imp with a sense of humor that bordered on the ironic and mocking. Meeting ALEX was like meeting a little smart alien that fell from between the pages of a science fiction novel.

ALEX received his name from Dr. Irene Pepperberg (see the left column under THINKERS, on this blog) when as an ordinary uneducated one year old African Gray Parrot (Psittacus erithacus) he was purchased from a pet dealer to become a research subject in 1977. ALEX is an acronym for Avian Language Experiment. Irene at that time was beginning her work as a cognitive scientist and had the idea that because of this species celebrated language-learning abilities, working with a bird might prove to be a direct way of investigating cognition and learning in an animal model.