Nathaniel Clark

…for many inves­tiga­tive pur­poses, chil­dren are eas­ily enough replaced by rats…

Yet this alchemy was so pow­er­ful that once he mas­saged that elas­tic between his lit­tle thumb and fore­fin­ger, all was for­ever lost.

Things don’t always go the way you plan. In fact, some­times plan­ning is the least sig­nif­i­cant com­po­nent in your life. Surely if you were some god-like crea­ture design­ing frogs over the mil­lenia, you’d work in leap­ing and land­ing as a sort of cou­pled unit — fig­ur­ing that the con­clu­sion is at least as nec­es­sary as the ini­ti­a­tion (after all, it’s a sort of safety issue, no?). A recent study of an ancient-lineage frog species (fam­ily Leiopel­mati­dae) reveals that it isn’t quite that simple:

“Unlike their more grace­ful cousins, the prim­i­tive frogs kept their back legs straight out after they jumped. So they don’t land on their feet. Instead, they do an ungainly belly flop, and then strug­gle to get to their feet and jump again.”

So it seems that there is more to it, then. If I think about it more, I can imag­ine that per­haps the neuro-muscular neces­si­ties are not lin­early action-based… per­haps even that the abil­ity (vision, mus­cu­la­ture, nerve end­ings) to land is lay­ered atop the abil­ity to leap (think, more pow­er­ful legs that can push are likely to be able to cush­ion an impact); and/or that the abil­ity to leap has a dis­tinct sur­vival advan­tage over the abil­ity to land (on its own) and would be selected for, and assem­bled in that evolution-type way, prior to any land­ing gear.

Inter­est­ing in its own right; but it brings to mind a per­sonal expe­ri­ence which I am now forced to re-evaluate:

Sev­eral years ago, on my first ski trip, Iryna took con­trol and began to instruct me, for our first trip down the moun­tain. On our way to the lift, we cov­ered bal­ance, shuf­fling, and even how to ascend the hill with that side­ways ski-crawl. Being a rel­a­tive neo­phyte, I absorbed and didn’t think much beyond what she was teaching.

It wasn’t until we were com­ing close to the top of the moun­tain– while still on the lift — that I real­ized I didn’t really know how to ‘stop’. That is, I had no clue how to brake, decel­er­ate, pre­vent for­ward motion, etc. I men­tioned this to Iryna, and she tried to describe how it was done, but I was lost, and the top was approach­ing too fast. Sadly, when we got there, I was gen­tly pushed into a slid­ing carom-shot into the poor child in front of me (he wasn’t pro­fi­cient either, but that’s no rea­son to send a 200+ pound bearded man on a collision-course with him). I clipped him from behind, vainly try­ing to throw myself side­ways but only suc­ceed­ing in nail­ing him in the back of the legs and send­ing us into a tan­gled knot, directly in the path of skiers exit­ing the lift.

The awk­ward man­i­fes­ta­tion isn’t quite the point, how­ever. Rather, I think now that Iryna was unwit­tingly (or not so unwit­tingly– she’s a very clever girl) reca­pit­u­lat­ing ontogeny by arm­ing me with mobil­ity before any type of decel­er­a­tion, and much like the above-mentioned frogs I chose a type of belly-flop as my only recourse to stopping.

(Via Sci­en­tific Amer­i­can.)

An inter­est­ing set of thoughts, com­ing up at exactly the right time as I start to chide myself about not fol­low­ing through with all my vast plans for music, for life …

Before I get into it, here’s the arti­cle:
The Willpower Para­dox from Sci­en­tific Amer­i­can, July 2010

I might expand this later, but the oper­a­tive ideas include:

1. the ‘before me’ would accom­plish less by self-direction, more by exploration.
2. The neg­a­tive of this was: things could end up half-assed, if I didn’t push to con­clu­sion; and also, I took a lot of direc­tion from exte­rior sources (espe­cially insis­tent peo­ple and con­structed, fan­tas­ti­cal mod­els (like, ‘rock star’)).
3. The ‘recent me’ has been try­ing the oppo­site — exten­sive plan­ning, self-imposed dead­lines, revi­sion­ing, etc. (which has been frus­trat­ing and dis­ap­point­ing, and leads to inner rebel­lions thru the cracks).
4. The ‘recent-recent me’ has been ques­tion­ing this, and now (per­haps because I opened up myself to dis­cov­ery) a flood of infor­ma­tion and stim­uli has swept in to help (like this article).

Now — the arti­cle isn’t con­clu­sive. In fact, the exper­i­ment is a bit nar­row, and some com­menters point out some ques­tions that I think are relevant…

But I still get fired up at the poten­tial con­fir­ma­tion– and to wrap it up, I might talk about “Night Ski­ing” and how much we know by guessing.

I just have to post my lat­est horo­scope from Free Will Astrology

Here’s the really good news: CIA direc­tor Leon Panetta says there are fewer than 100 Al-Qaeda com­bat­ants in Afghanistan. Here’s the utterly con­fus­ing news: The U.S has over 94,000 highly trained human beings in Afghanistan whose express pur­pose is to destroy Al-Qaeda. I bring this up as a prod to get you to ques­tion your own allot­ment of mar­tial force, Gem­ini. You def­i­nitely need to make sure you have a lav­ish reserve of fight­ing spirit primed to serve your high­est goals. Just make sure, please, that it’s pointed in the right direction

I am lik­ing today.

Despite being tired, there’s a dark, pow­er­ful push that lingers behind the cur­tains. That’s the best way to describe it, the best I can think of: imag­ine, if you will, a slowly brew­ing storm-cloud, a thunderhead-to-be, full of force, slowly becom­ing some­thing ter­ri­ble, inex­orable, natural.

The ‘por­ten­tous storm’ feel­ing is helped, no doubt, by the grey, wet sky and the chill expectancy that swirls around my naked toes. With the song ‘Closer’ by Kings of Leon puls­ing with dark, torn, sex­ual sob­bing out of my speak­ers, the moment crests to a per­fect, pre­cise point, and I look out the back win­dow to see the august sil­hou­ette of our res­i­dent hawk on top of the tele­phone pole.

I think it is obvi­ous that good things are on their way, just about to break into the sur­face of today.

…[R]ather than cre­at­ing immutable, unchang­ing spaces that define a par­tic­u­lar expe­ri­ence, they sug­gest inhab­i­tant and struc­ture can—and should—mutually influ­ence each other. -Ethan Mar­cotte

So, a fine repast of words to break the fast of a colder night, fol­low­ing on the heels of the dark cof­fee of morn­ing. Echoes of some of the ecsta­tic ver­biage I myself have employed back in the vision­ary days of music and art. It’s a nice part­ner to the well­spring of moti­va­tion I feel this morn­ing, com­ing as I am out of a cloy­ing blan­ket of ill­ness. Things never look so clear, and hands are never so pur­pose­ful, as on the morn­ing after. So fit­ting to catch an affir­ma­tion on a day such as this:

This is my liv­ing faith, an active faith, a faith of verbs: to ques­tion, explore, exper­i­ment, expe­ri­ence, walk, run, dance, play, eat, love, learn, dare, taste, touch, smell, lis­ten, argue, speak, write, read, draw, pro­voke, emote, scream, sin, repent, cry, kneel, pray, bow, rise, stand, look, laugh, cajole, cre­ate, con­front, con­found, walk back, walk for­ward, cir­cle, hide, and seek. To seek: to embrace the ques­tions, be wary of answers.
- Terry Tem­pest Williams

Now, to dive into the com­putur­gi­cal world of ‘code’, where every word itself is an action, not trans­mit­ting so much as instruct­ing. More later.

Step­ping into a world of typog­ra­phy and orga­ni­za­tion, these have been the nodes of inter­est lately:

http://data.worldbank.org/
http://www.thenewhumanism.org/
http://www.npr.org/

Such to the dead might appear the world of liv­ing — charged with infor­ma­tion, with mean­ing, yet some­how always just, ter­ri­bly, beyond that fate­ful limen where any lamp of com­pre­hen­sion might beam forth
–Thomas Pyn­chon, Against The Day