"Leisure is the basis of culture" (Josef Pieper)

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Digital photography experiments

"...symbol of a symbol, image of an image..." (H. Broch). 16 Feb 97. Picture of a print I made of a 35mm photograph I took (ca. 1984), of a 19th century photograph of part of the wall of the "Forbidden City" (Peking), which at the time was on display at The Museum of Modern Art. [Click here to see another "picture of a picture".]

Seeing is believing.... Here are the first pictures. I am now able to download pictures to the computer, and have an AC adapter so that the camera does not consume AA batteries at an exasperating rate. (An alternative to digital cameras is to process 35mm film as a Photo CD; See examples: Katonah Museum, Sebastapol, CA: September morning light, and House in symmetrical repose -- but Kodak stopped making Photo CDs in late 2000, so now only inferior Picture CDs are available.)

My Maine Coon cats and their lifeworld

• Jethra. 15 year old, 15 (now reduced by age to about 12...) pound mackerel color spayed female, rescued, as a kitten, from the New London Humane Society. Jethra appreciates her good fortune, which is the lasting imprint of infantile adversity ended before "failure to thrive" sets in (see, e.g., Sandor Ferenczi's essay: "The Unwelcome Child and His Death Instinct" (1929), in: Final Contributions to the Problems and Methods of Psychoanalysis): It produces depth of character, while irremediably compromising gracefulness of spirit.

  Sadly, since at least summer of 1997, Jethra's kidneys began to fail. Her condition suddenly worsened in the last week of 1998: among other things, she more or less stopped eating, and her weight went down to 9 lbs. The vet explained the lack of eating was due to mouth sores brought on by the kidney failure, which made eating painful. He took blood tests which showed Jethra's kidney function was even worse than he had guessed, and he said there was little hope of improvement. We decided, therefore, to "put Jethra to sleep" (on New Year's Eve, 31 December 1998). She seemed ready to go, lying limply on the vet's examining table, already seeming to have given up her connection with the world of sensory life even before the vet injected the anesthetic. Jethra was a good cat, and we feel her loss even more than we might have anticipated.

• Abiko. 12 year old, 11 pound fawned gray spayed female, with lynx tips on her ears, purchased from a breeder who raises the cats "underfoot" with much loving attention. Abiko exemplifies the unselfconscious self-confidence that comes from such an ideal kittenhood (viz. Frederick LeBoyer's Birth Without Violence, and Lloyd deMauss's History of Childhood for human analogy). June 1999 update: When Jethra died, Abiko became depressed. Then, 3 months later, when we got new Misu kitten (see below), Abiko has become chronically angry, frequently hypervigilant, and perhaps paranoid. She growls when she sees Misu, or even thinks Misu might be nearby. She attacks Misu without provocation. Abiko even growls when we just pick her [Abiko] up to pet her, etc. (We have put Abiko on the antidepressant Elavil.) Abiko seems to wish Misu would go away, even though Misu is Abiko's only kitty company, and Misu seems to like Abiko. March 2004 update: Ever since our baby daughter, Mimi, came into the house, Abiko has loved Mimi very much. This has made Abiko a much less unhappy cat, although she still dislikes Misu, and stiffens and growls if I (BMcC) pick her [Abiko] up, etc. Please click here to see pictures of, and read more about Abiko.

• Misu. On March 31, 1999, we got a new, 12 week old kitten. We've named her: "Misu", after the Italian dessert: "tiramisu", which apparently means: "pick me up" (due to the little boost the expresso in it gives you) -- Misu is thus our little: "pick me up!" cat. Misu is Abiko's half sister: same mother, different father. Misu is very trusting, adventurous, playful.... (At age 4 years, Misu weighs 13 pudgy pounds.) Please click here to see my best pictures of Misu.

You can take a pictorial tour of my cats, by following the "ring" of pages marked with the Japanese Kanji symbol for cat (above); please clicking the cat kanji on each page to go to the next.... As long as we're talking about felinity/felicity, I invite you also to check out a well done WEB site devoted to George Herriman's Krazy Kat comics, and my page about Japanese cartoon cat: Doraemon.

Philosophical reflections on communication, technology and society, etc.

(I wish I could share this material with John Wild (1900-74)[fn.98], who, as a philosophy Professor at Yale in the 1960s, was my small but real link to the community of phenomenological and existential philosophers.) My hope is to transform the mentality of the people who develop technology, from narrow calculating intelligence to the kind of responsible wisdom which, mythically, characterized the builders of the Tower of Babel, and, in our own recent history, was instantiated by the Master Printers of the Renaissance (see Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, Arnold Gehlen's Man in the Age of Technology, Joseph Weizenbaum's Computer Power and Human Reason: From judgment to calculation, Samual Florman's The Existential Pleasures of Engineering...).

From April 1980, throughout the next several years, I wrote and many times revised a document in which I attempted to develop and express my thoughts about technology and technical work. I have made this text, The Gift From The Machine, available here, without further revision, even though, if I were to redo it now, I would certainly change some things. (Note that it is all in a single HTML file, to facilitate hyperlinking the footnotes, many of which are themselves "mini-essays"; the file is fairly large, ca. 150k.)

Citations of material which has been meaningful to me

• Hermann Broch's works. It was in reading The Sleepwalkers, ca. 1972, that I first came to see why (and how) words might deserve to exist.... Subsequently, I had the good fortune to know Broch's son, and, in that way, to have had a very small but nonetheless real personal connection to the cultural world of Broch, Musil, Canetti, Freud et al. See my: H.F. Broch de Rothermann page.

• Hannah Arendt's book: The Human Condition. Here I find much valuable for elucidating the possibilities of a good form of life centered in leisured dialog, contrasted with ways contemporary society, with its economic orientation, falls short, and, more to the point: betrays this potential and prevents our enjoying it.

• Werner Herzog's film The Mystery of Kasper Hauser ("Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle"), which expresses, in Kasper's efforts at cultural self-formation, the aspiration to humane and intelligible culture that has characterized the best, although, misfortunately, not most of Western civilization. (Item: A minister asks Kasper if he believes in God; Kasper replies that he needs to learn to read and write better before he can deal with such questions; the minister responds that Kasper has his priorities reversed, and that he should believe before he can understand. To hear Kasper retell a dream, on his deathbed, Click here.)

• Réalités magazine (1950s thru 1979?). A large format, glossy fashion and culture periodical. I seem to recall their motto was: "An intimacy to share." I seem to remember first having seen the magazine in my Prep School's library. It was one of the few intimations of hope there, that a world worth living in might be possible (...both "intimacy" and "sharing" were alien to that male-only competitive "honor code" place).

• Edmund Husserl's "Vienna Lecture": Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity (1935), which voices commitment to the idea of a universalizing, self-accountable human(e)ity, even while the lights are going out, due, e.g., to Nazism and Stalinism, in Husserl's time, and laissez-faire economic, ecological and egological devolution in ours....

• Joseph Needham's description, in Vol. 3 of "Science and Civilization in China", of the reception of the Jesuit missionaries by the Chinese in the 17th Century:

  1. The Jesuits' intention was to convert the Chinese to The True Faith: Christianity, and they offered Galilean natural science as an example of the fringe benefits of adopting Jesus Christ as one's Savior.

  2. The Chinese, on the other hand, saw through the Christianity as just another ethnic belief system like the many they already tolerated in their kingdom. But they recognized Galilean natural science as something genuinely new, because it was valid for anybody who made the effort to understand it, not just for people who happened to have been childreared to believe it (like, e.g., Yin and Yang...).

  3. The "moral" I draw from this story is: Whereas the idea of Universal Culture arose in the West, it is not anything specifically (=ethnically) "Western".

  4. This great treasure is something the West rarely appreciates (vide Needham's Jesuits!), and therefore hardly deserves.

  5. We, however, can identify ourselves with this idea of cultural productions that are valid for everyone, rather than with the folkways of Western culture which constitute the ethnicity we happen to have been born into instead of having been born Muslims or Toltecs or Whatevers. (All these ethnic forms of life are aptly called "human nature" because they evolved willy-nilly, i.e., "naturally", instead of being constructed in persons' self-accountable endeavors of social planning: they are merely natural, in no way honorific forms of human being.)

  6. By thus cultivating Universal Culture: subjecting everything that happens to exist (even its G-d if it has one...) to our ever more acute critical judgment and meliorative action, we can transform "the West" from just one more parochial "ethnicity", with its peculiar naive pre-judices (things believed before we critically judge them and which consequently can be good only by "good luck"), into an exemplar of a world the goodness of which would be ever more securely founded, and which therefore would deserve to be called, honorifically: a city.

• "The world of the shining prince" (Genji). I spent some time in Japan (during 1983-85), and, for much longer, have been fond of certain aspects of Japanese culture. See, e.g., Heinrich Engel's The Japanese House: A tradition for contemporary architecture, Soetsu Yanagi's The Unknown Craftsman, temple gardens (Daisen-in, Ise...), bizen ware pottery, the cartoon cat Doraemon, the Heian court society of The Tale of Genji and The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, in which men (males) were judged on their poetic rather than their agonistic (martial, entrepreneurial, etc.) abilities:

  "When the first Westerners set foot in Japan in the sixteenth century, they found a country in many ways as strange... as the moon, yet which at the same time had certain remarkably familiar features.... [A] land divided into great feudal baronies... dominated by military men who for over a century had kept the islands in a state of almost perpetual warfare.... [A] well-established Church... contending with the secular authorities for riches and power.... And whenever they entered a large Japanese town one of the first sights to greet them would be the execution grounds... which no doubt served to reassure them, like Candide and his companions, that at least in one respect this was a civilized country.

  "No such comforting tokens would have welcomed the visitor from the courts of King Harold... who had been wafted to the other end of the planet and deposited in the city of Heian, the capital of Japan in [Genji's] time [ca. 950CE]. He would have been confronted with a world totally different from anything he knew, a world which was many centuries in advance of his own and which in customs, beliefs, and social organization was more alien than anything that Gulliver discovered in his travels....

  "For us who inhabit a planet which, at least so far as communications are concerned, has become a single unit, it requires a real effort of imagination to picture a state of affairs in which men in most parts of the world linger in a state of cultural obscurity, absorbed almost entirely in the brute struggle for survival and power, while here and there, often on widely separated points of the globe, civilizations shine or flicker like ships' lights on a dark ocean...." (Ivan Morris, The World of the Shining Prince, pp. 11-12)

E-mail me your thoughts.

Go to more thoughts. Go to shorter thoughts (McLuhanesque probes). Go to dreams. Go to reflections on myth. What I believe ("The net").  [View intro!]   Go to thoughts and images not otherwise classified. Go to (my) aphorisms for a human[e] world. Go to (other people's) quotes I like.

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