Darwin ain’t your nanny

…so don’t expect him to hold your hand while you mouth the words you’re trying to read out of his tome. If he feels like quoting somebody in French and you don’t know the difference between salut and adieu, well, tant pis pour toi!

"Gratiolet opens his preface with the aphorism, 'Il est dangereux dans les sciences de conclure trop vite.' I fear he must have forgotten this sound maxim by the time he had reached the discussion of the differences between men and apes, in the body of his work."

But seriously, he quotes various people in the original French, some of it important and thorough technical information, and he never translates a word for the reader. Just assumes you can read it or will work it out if you care. The picture is the fourth instance, at least, in Descent of Man, and it’s by far the shortest and simplest quote. The first of the book proper (there’s one in the introduction, too) appears on page four of my edition and reads as follows:

“It is notorious that man is constructed on the same general type or model as other mammals. … Vulpian remarks: Les différences feelles qui existent entre l’encéphale de l’homme et celui des singes supérieurs, sont biens minimes. Il ne faut pas se faire d’illusions à cet égard. L’homme est bien plus près des singes anthropomorphes par les caractères anatomiques de son cerveau que ceux-ci ne le sout non-seulement des autres mammifères, mais même de certains quadrumanes, des guenons et des macaques. But it would be superfluous here to give further details…”

I speak a little French, but I’m missing a bit of this, too — I think feelles, at any rate, is antiquated language if it’s not a typo. The gist of the long quote is that the differences between the human brain and that of the anthropomorphous apes is very small, much smaller than the differences between the higher and lower primates. The author quoted says we should not delude ourselves about this. (Side note: sad, isn’t it, that some still insist on deluding themselves about such things more than 140 years after Darwin was quoting somebody else who already had said this.)

The handwritten quote in the image says that it’s dangerous, in the sciences, to make hasty conclusions. Same’s true outside of science, of course–first lesson of philosophy, for one.

Once

This is the last one from the binder of last summer. Most of it, anyway.

Once I was a poet. Once I was a painter, an artist, a potter. Once I was a singer-soloist-soprano. An actress, once, an activist. Once religious, once atheist. Once I refused to take a picture with my brothers on a mountain, for fear of the edge and of them. Once I was a pianist, once I played flute. Once, for ever so brief a time, I studied violin. Once I was a ten-year-old programmer. Once I was a Sleuth. Twice I was Big Bird, once a dragonslayer. Once I was kissed by a kindergarten classmate. Once I thought I’d believe anything for a boy. Once I was a fool. (Maybe I still am.) Once I climbed three pitches on slick rock in West Virginia. Once I hiked seventeen miles in two days, two miles up in the middle of November. Once I was an outside defender. Once I backpacked for three days in Kentucky. Once I rode a horse in the New Zealand countryside. Once I was the smartest girl in the class. Once I invented a written code. Once I was many things.

Want

This is another entry I found in the binder from last summer; I think these must’ve been from July, because they’re in there with my letter to Congresspeople about the JWST, and I wasn’t using the binder otherwise. (Yes, my mind is such that I have to figure out when I wrote an undated journal entry. ) The “you,” once again, is just imaginary. I’ve always liked writing in the second person.

Ich will viel. I want a lot. Je veux… Je veux beaucoup. Beaucoup de temps, beaucoup des choses, beaucoup. I want to walk on air. I want to breathe physics and dance mathematics. I want to stay up all night watching the stars alone, surrounded by the echoes of everyone who has watched them before. I want to do something new. I want to see something that none of them did. I want to do something that would interest the greatest minds that knew this Earth. Is that so much in the end?

…

Don’t touch me now. I don’t know what I want. I don’t know who you are. Are you the one who will wake me from my slumber? My thoughts are lost and full of fog. Help me find them. Don’t let me lose them again–hold them safe with you. They slip through the walls of my mind too easily when you are near. Perhaps they like you better.

I want my self back now. I seem to have forgotten it a thousand miles from here, if it was not all a dream. I miss the girl with the glimmering eye and the camera in her hand. I miss the girl who could be anything. If you see her, please tell her for me: Become something now, girl, before you become nothing.

I want a lot. I want pretty things, shiny things, strong things, bonodorous things. I want an arm linked with mine, a hand around my shoulder, a mischievous grin. I want knowledge. I want to know what makes the world tick and the knowledge to make it tick in better time. I want answers so that I can find new questions.

And I want someone else who wants those questions, too. “So many are alive who–” So many have forgotten how to say “why?” So many have forgotten the joy of a surprise, of an answer that holds more mysteries than the question it replies. I want someone who will search with me for questions.

I want one who can lose his world to a piece of paper. I want his imagination to be the vessel that carries him to Valinor, to Ivalice and Anuskaya. But I want him to come back nearly whole. I want him to see the difference and similarity both among these worlds. I want him to remember that this one is his home, clutch his wonder tight to his heart and see such beauty here that he needs no magic, elves, or fairies to make him stay. I want this of everyone. Je veux ceci pour tout le monde. Ich will dies.

…

If I ask you why the sky is blue
don’t just tell me that the sunlight bounces off the air
do not quench my curiosity
rather ask me why the sunset’s red.

No Girl

I don’t exactly keep a paper journal, but well, I sort of do. I have a few different notebooks in use at any time–and sometimes a binder of loose-leaf paper too–and I’ll write in whichever one is at hand when my hand wants to put lines down in ink instead of pixels. I found this in a binder; I must’ve written it last June or July, though not actually for or about anyone I know (which is not uncommon in my writing). And though I don’t really write poetry anymore, sometimes still I can’t hold back the unnecessary line breaks.

 So you think it’s a girl’s heart you’ve got to win?
Then I must be no girl, because my heart is not enough.
Love is not enough.
If you think you can buy my love
with a necklace, rings, or finery, then lover, you’re a fool.
If you think you’ll make me happy
with answers for my every question, with a problem
solved without a doubt,
then boy, you are the problem.
If you think you’ll warm me with a gentle touch
or with sweet whispers in my ear,
then listen carefully to me.

I don’t care about your charms or baubles.
I don’t want your pretty words.
I don’t want favors or agreement –
I want your brutal honesty. I want your mind
and I want you to want mine.
To have that you must win me over
not with gifts,
not with promises,
not with answers,
but with questions.
You must offer me a new mystery
that we can explore.

Colorful quote spiral

I got a new notebook and new pens. The pens are Stabilo 88 fineliners (which I got because, while I loved my Staedtlers a few years ago, the Stabilos were cheaper for more colors ). The notebook is a Whitelines hard-bound squared (graph-paper) notebook in the A5 size. On which note, I love the way the ‘A#’ sizes work–the number is the number of times the ‘full size’ sheet has been halved; and A5 is about 5-7/8″ by 8-1/4″ — perfect size for a journal. And, true to name, the lines making up the grid are white (on gray paper) instead of black. They kind of melt away where there’s a chunk of writing.

Anyway, this is the first thing I did with it. Each color change indicates a new quote. The quotes are from Carl Sagan, Rainer Maria Rilke, Jalal ad-Dīn Rumi, Franz Kafka, Mary Oliver, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Douglas Adams, Stuart Kauffman (via Melanie Mitchell), Daniel Levitin, Alan Lightman, & Simon Garfield.  Sagan, Rilke, and Rumi appear multiple times. At the risk of making a tiresomely long post (sorry?), here are the quotes strung together, so you needn’t spin your head around to see them. I’ll alternate between gray and olive text to help differentiate the quotes.

When we think well, we feel good. Understanding is a kind of ecstasy. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. It’s not too late to open your depths by plunging into them and drink in the life that reveals itself quietly there. Let everything happen to you – beauty and terror. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don’t go back to sleep. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting, over and over announcing your place in the family of things. The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together. We are all connected: to each other biologically, to the Earth chemically, to the rest of the universe atomically. The cosmos is also within us. We are made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself. I believe our future depends powerfully on how well we understand this cosmos, in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky. I’d take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day. The cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths, of exquisite interrelationships, of the awesome machinery of nature. Life exists at the edge of chaos. Consider that at a very early age, babies are thought to be synesthetic, to be unable to differentiate the input from the different senses, and to experience life and the world as a sort of psychedelic union of everything sensory. Babies may see the number five as red, taste cheddar cheese in D-flat, and smell roses in triangles. The bird does not twitter or chirp but instead gives out a continuous drawn-out song. When hundreds sing in unison, the sound is an unbroken chorus, with the effect on the hearing like that of a waterfall on the sight, a multitude of tiny droplets combining to make one sweeping flow. This is the best thing about the ampersand–its energy, its refusal to sit still. It is almost impossible to look at one and not think about its shape, or to draw one and not think about liberation. Come, come, whoever you are. Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving–it doesn’t matter, ours is not a caravan of despair. But that shadow has been serving you! What hurts you blesses you. Darkness is your candle. Your boundaries are your quest. You must ask for what you really want. Don’t go back to sleep. Come, even if you have broken your vow a hundred times, come, come again, come.