Except for science fiction, I suppose.
No apology was desired – my mistake, I shouldn’t have opened the thread to begin with. Since I did, I had a desire to throw good time and effort after bad.
Hie thee to some Heidegger. I think you’d thoroughly enjoy it.
Yeah, but still, listening to you guys is how I learn. the same way I learned to fix cars. By the time I know a tenth of what you know I’ll be in my grave. I guess my point is I accept my place in the world. I’m too old to learn a new career.
Eesh, don’t include me in there. There are people on the boards far smarter and more knowledgeable than me, and Diogenes is one of them. I’m usually just too stupid to know when to shut up.
Besides, I can’t even drive, let alone repair cars. And looking for a job has taught me that i’d be better off with some of your skills.
I disagree. Ours (USA) is a democracy and it is the responsibility of each of us to influence public policy. There are dangerous years ahead and the nation and the world needs the thinking of all of the ctizens. We have developed a technology with which we can very easily and very quickly blot out our civilization and if we do not do it that way we are likely to do it by consuming or polluting the planet so severly as to make it uninhabitable.
Well I see that you have the desire to rise above your rank and file to become a great thinker. I wish you the best of luck in youe endeavors. Me, I know my place and when your car breaks down on the way to the Colliseum or wherever it is that the smart people congregate, give me a call. I’ll make sure it gets fixed up so you’ll have a ride home. Most humbly yours, OM.
Cliff Clavin read lots of non-fiction. Frasier Crane was certainly a lover of literature. If I had to choose between a world filled with Clavins or Cranes, I will have no second thoughts in saying I can do without the US Postal Service.
Which suggests you are an older fellow—no small pity, as one may find in university quads across the continent a certain species of coed who will devour, dewy-eyed and without the least hesitation or scrutiny, precisely the brand of nebulous sagesse you seem to enjoy displaying. They trend toward dull-wittedness, but the Lord (in his infinite wisdom) saw fit to make breast size correlate inversely to IQ, at least in most of the literature I’ve come across.
Still, there may be hope. Dye your remaining hair black, learn to play “American Pie” on a cheap steel-string, take up clove smoking, and some damaged-goods sex might be in your future. (Remember to always hold your book so The Will to Power is clearly visible as you slice through the unenlightened crowd.)
One thing I’ve learned, is that each of us knows a bunch of stuff no one else does, and no one (since Leonardo, at least) knows everything. While it is good for all of us to keep learning, it is far better to be proud of what you do know and not be upset about what you don’t. Since none of us knows more than a tiny fraction of the world’s knowledge, worrying about that is a recipe for an ulcer. I know more useless crap than most people, but it’s still almost nothing. Compared to the knowledge out there, you and I and anyone else around here are pretty much the same.
Voyager, I like you so much I think I’m going to have to put you in my will. My compass has your name engraved on it anyway and just a line of poetry:
It’s from Walt Whitman.
My husband said that it should have been: “You are here: X.”
Essays and textbooks and even poems have been written on the subject of what a poem is. I can give you some clues, but I can’t really answer your question anymore than I could describe what falling in love feels like to someone who has never loved. If you can find a copy of John Ciardi’s A Poem Should Not Mean But Be, it is worth reading for the person who wants to grasp the difference between poetry and prose.
The title of the book comes from the poem “Ars Poetica” by Archibald MacLeish. It’s brief. See if you like it. Don’t try to analyze this one. It does have the imagery you mentioned, I think.
Maybe there is a level that is beyond knowing and beyond understanding. You mentioned that living in the unknowing can be good. (I hope I’m not misquoting you.) What would this place be? Being? What do you think? And, by the way, where do feelings come in?
I agree with the poem “Ars Poetica.” I think that poetry falls into the same group as those works of art which don’t have meaning; they just are. Here’s one that I found just for you. It’s called Big Cornfield. I think it has some things in common with poetry. It’s more intense, more concise than reality.
Here is a brief and thoughtful blog about art, including poetry. It’s called “Mystery and Message.” It’s written from one of the many Christian points-of-view. It’s not too preachy though. It won’t hurt much. Honest. But you know how we love that word mystery!
And poetry is written in a different style from prose, yet there are many styles of prose and many styles of poetry. And there are passages of prose which are as evocative of imagery as many pieces of poetry. One of my absolute favorites is “The Fog” by Ray Bradbury. It is a piece of science fiction that hits my feelings as few short stories do.
I seem to have wandered around quite a bit and I still haven’t told you what poetry is. Don’t get too caught up in definitions and meanings. Be playful with words. Let them be “gentle on your mind” as the old song says. Nobody is going to get you with a peach tree limb even if you never like any poem at all.
I will close with what is sometimes claimed to be the world’s shortest poem.
I do not recall the living in the unknown remark that you attribute to me. Perhaps I was remarking about the difference between knowing and understanding.
I do want to respond to your question regarding feelings.
“It is through feelings, which are inwardly directed and private, that emotions, which are outwardly directed and public, begin their impact on the mind; but the full and lasting impact of feelings requires consciousness, because only along with the advent of a sense of self do feelings become known to the individual having them.”
First, there is emotion, then comes feeling, then comes consciousness of feeling. There is no evidence that we are conscious of all our feelings, in fact evidence indicates that we are not conscious of all feelings.
Antonio Damasio, Distinguished Professor and Head of the Department of Neurology at the University of Iowa College of Medicine, testifies in his book “The Feelings of What Happens” that the biological process of feelings begins with a ‘state of emotion’, which can be triggered unconsciously and is followed by ‘a state of feeling’, which can be presented nonconsciously; this nonconscious state can then become ‘a state of feeling made conscious’.
Human emotion and feeling pivot on consciousness; this fact has not been generally recognized prior to Damasio’s research. Emotion has probably evolved long before consciousness and surfaces in many of us when caused by inducers we often do not recognize consciously.
The powerful contrast between emotion and feeling is used by the author in his search for a comprehension of consciousness. It is a neurological fact, states the author, that when consciousness is suspended then emotion is likewise usually suspended. This observed human characteristic led Damasio to suspect that even though emotion and consciousness are different phenomenon that there must be an important connection between the two.
Damasio proposes “that the term feeling should be reserve for the private, mental experience of an emotion, while the term emotion should be used to designate the collection of responses, many of which are publicly observable.” This means that while we can observe our own private feelings we cannot observe these same feelings in others.
Empirical evidence indicates that we need not be conscious of emotional inducers nor can we control emotions willfully. We can, however, control the entertainment of an emotional inducer even though we cannot control the emotion induced.
I was raised as a Catholic and taught by the nuns that “impure thoughts” were a sin only if we “entertained’ bad thoughts after an inducer caused an emotion that we felt, i.e. God would not punish us for the first impure thought but He would punish us for dwelling upon the impure thought. If that is not sufficient verification of the theory derived from Damasio’s empirical evidence, what is?
In a typical emotion, parts of the brain sends forth messages to other parts of the body, some of these messages travel via the blood stream and some via the body’s nerve system. These neural and chemical messages results in a global change in the organism. The brain itself is just as radically changed. But, before the brain becomes conscious of this matter, before the emotion becomes known, two additional steps must occur. The first is feeling, i.e. an imaging of the bodily changes, followed by a ‘core consciousness’ to the entire set of phenomena. “Knowing an emotion—feeling a feeling—only occurs at this point.”
What coberst said originally was this:
I don’t think that is the same as saying that we evolved into human beings who had no abstract thinking intact – only that we evolved from creatures that did not think abstractly.
Maybe that’s true. Now you may disagree with me, but I tend to think that the most memorable and meaningful learning comes from literature. (I admit that I’m biased.)
If that is your position, then why do you put quotation marks around insight as if the concept really isn’t an insight?
Not everybody works for Halliburton Inc. What about those who provide a service? – judges, educators, nurses, funeral directors, desk clerks, scientists, police officers?
If you are content as you are, then that’s swell. Just don’t tell yourself the “too old” lie. “Colonel Sanders” didn’t start Kentucky Fried Chicken until he retired. I think Grandma Moses was in her ninties when she started painting. I have a friend who has just put the finishing touches on a book about her father who was an artist. She turned 89 on Sunday. (Yes, publication is in the works.) Another friend of mine has published her first two novels to good reviews since she retired from the school system. Another friend two years away from full retirement has begun taking seminary courses. All three are women. Are you guys going to surrender?
Goodness, coberst! You surely do think and type quickly.
I think that I understand what you were saying about feelings and emotions in your post. I don’t know that I’ve ever distinguished between the meanings of feeling and emotions before, but giving the origin of the word emotion, what you say makes good sense.
I don’t have any disagreement with Damasio either. I’m not usually this easy to please.
I’ve been very open at SDMB about my background. I wasn’t very much in touch with my feelings until I moved away from home. I thought I was a nice, pleasant girl. But when a psychologist told me that I was a very hostile young woman, it made me so mad that I almost hit him. Oh, dear. The monster had escaped.
And I stayed a very angry person in general until I was able to direct my anger in the appropriate direction. It’s amazing how empowering that can be. I was well into my fifties before I could finally cut the emotional strings that had been attached to the eighteen year old me. I’m a different person now.
It makes sense that you can’t control the emotion once it has taken root. That’s why burying feelings is so bad for people. It is physically harmful. But the nuns knew that you could make choices about what to dwell on at the beginning.
You’ve explained it well.
That is not how I read what he was saying (there was a bit more than what you quoted). Repeatedly he said things like ‘We are creatures who have evolved without abstract thinking’ and ‘We are animals who have evolved by comprehending images and abstract thinking is new and to comprehend our anstractions we must create images’.
Abstract thinking is new to our species? I don’t think so. Even if we go back to creatures we evolved from you’d need to go back quite a while before you have to start speculating on whether or not they were able to think in abstract ways.
YMMV, but I think he is saying that humans have only recently begun this new abstract thinking thingy…and that we can’t understand our ancestors (I assume thats the word he was going for there) unless we turn off our newly won abstract button and create images (whatever that means). YMMV.
Not sure who this was aimed at. If me, this was pretty much the first points I was making in this thread. The OP never really addressed those points, instead went off on a tangent about how our ancestors didn’t think in abstract terms…or something.
Because it’s really NOT much of an insight. Or if it was an insight it was one that humans figured out long before writing came about. Let me turn it around…do you suppose the concept of humans using tools to supplement or augment their own abilities is a deep concept that we are only now beginning to grasp? Seems pretty obvious that our technology has ALWAYS been an extension of our body, a way to augment or supplement our capabilities. And I can recall reading several quite ancient sources discussing this in various ways. Obviously I don’t have access to prehistoric sources, but the fact that grave goods included tools seems a pretty fair indication to me that they at least grasped the significance of taking their technology with them to help in the afterlife…that this technology was an extension of what made them the people they were.
Again, YMMV of course.
-XT
Well, thank you. That’s one of the nicest things anyone has said in nearly 10 k posts.
I think we used Ciardi’s book when I took creative writing. By nature I’m a literalist, and prefer Clarke to Bradbury. I like clear descriptions of fantastic things. But that’s purely how I’m wired. I see literal prose as a path from point A to point B, where being unclear gets you lost. Poetry has fewer steps, and it allows you to take several branches at each crossroads. Prose is great for getting to Grandma’s house, but poetry lets you explore the woods.
Or, as Tom Petty sang on the first Travelling Willburys CD
She wrote a long letter
On a short piece of paper
*