An Indefinite Condition

“Even when traders get things ‘right,’ markets can hardly be expected to oscillate with the precision of sine waves. Prices and spreads vary with the uncertain progress of companies, governments, and even civilizations. They are no more certain than the societies whose economic activity they reflect. Dice are predictable down to the decimal point; Russia is not; how traders will respond to Russia is less predictable still. Unlike dice, markets are subject not merely to risk, an arithmetic concept, but also to the broader uncertainty that shadows the future generally. Unfortunately, uncertainty, as opposed to risk, is an indefinite condition, one that does not conform to numerical straitjackets.” (Lowenstein, pg. 235)

The Produce Aisle

The problem working here
Is how quickly things lose
What little value they have
Even the best goes bad, eventually.

The stacks of apples on display
Like books on a scholar’s shelf
All the incomplete world
Reduced to reliable facts of name and price.

Only those who’ve worked here know:
Truth is a perishable fruit
Drawn from the harvest of another generation.

The Way That Worlds are Made

This is the way that worlds are made
The perturbation of empty space
A sudden roughness
Collapsing gases
Exploding solar masses
Dwarf stars and red giants
The thin air of dead stars
The heavy elements of supernovas
Cosmic dust, the ices of space
The raw material of planets
Rotating fields that form spheres
The solar wind that sweeps the ice away
Near a star, rocks and heavy elements
Towards the edge, ices and gas
The separation of densities
Dense planets with stratified densities
A great iron catastrophe
A magnetic field
Collisions
The plates on the face of the Earth
The drift of continents
The water from comets
The energy that rips continents apart
The magnetic record of stones
Ridges and trenches
Heat driven convection cells in plastic layers
Mountains formed by collisions
Floating worlds
The tremors of creation
Beyond the sense of mortal tongues
The Star-Child sings.

A Kind of Reason

Emotions are a kind of reason.

Driven by Adaptability

"From a "selfish gene" perspective, competitiveness and greed need no particular explanation beyond the obvious - I'll do whatever I can to get my genes into the next generation, even if that means stomping on all the little people on my way to the top. But if helping others by being selfless and altruistic decreases the chances of getting my genes into the next generation, why would I do it? The short answer is that it is a myth that evolution is driven by selfishness; it is, in fact, driven by adaptability, and in a social primate species like ours, more often than not the most adaptable thing you can do to survive and reproduce is to be cooperative and altruistic." (Shermer, pg. 125)

An Old Friend

Death is an old friend we try to ignore.

Imagining Other Worlds

"There is nothing better than imagining other worlds," he said, "to forget the painful one we live in. At least so I thought then. I hadn't yet realized that, imagining other worlds, you end up changing this one." (Eco, pg. 99)

The Mandate of Heaven

天命

A Sense of Justice

"The notion that bad individuals should not be allowed to prosper does not exist in most species, yet it has been crucial to human evolution. It permits collaboration and has thus done as much as language and culture to allow human civilisation to flourish and people to dominate the planet.

A sense of justice argues that people should be free to keep the fruits of their labours, but also that the over-mighty rich need to be cut down from time to time and the poor occasionally exalted. It damns the murderer while recognising that, sometimes, even murder is justified. The perverted bargain with justice which Tosca makes is the heart of the opera’s tragedy. A sense of justice, then, reins in people’s other Darwinian instincts and curbs their excesses. For human nature has evolved to be both good and bad—and it is evolution that allows human nature to know the difference."

The Economist, December 18th, 2008

Tormented by the Muses

"You see," he said, "great poets are not always diarrhoic, sometimes they're styptic, and those are the greater ones. You must seem tormented by the Muses, able to distill only one couplet every now and then." (Eco, pg. 82)

Sailors and Theologians

"You don't have to be in a place in order to know everything about it," Abdul replied. "Otherwise sailors would be more learned than theologians." (Eco, pg. 77)

Come Dance With Me

Come dance with me when flowers bloom
And scent the air like French perfume
Through open windows in each room
And ripeness bids us both, “Consume.”

Come dance with me on evenings fair
I’ll bring you Chinese silks to wear
We’ll dance so close, the crowd will stare
As pleasure stirs the summer air.

Come dance with me in harvest time
Until the clocks of midnight chime
We’ll drink our tea with Persian lime
And bathe in silver light sublime.

Come dance with me in winters cold
I’ll bring you chests of Spanish gold
From towns where kings are bought and sold
And men grow rich before they’re old.

Come dance with me and wear my ring
Through all the seasons life will bring
Do not resist, lest love take wing
Release your gown. Undo the string.

Come dance with me and share my fate
Two happy hearts in happy state
Let’s lie beneath the garden gate
And there enjoy our joint estate.

Come dance with me, forget our trouble
Although the world’s reduced to rubble,
Foundations vanish like a bubble,
And fire consumes the barren stubble.

Dinner at the Rainbow Room

In the Sumerian hours of evening
Waiting on a main course of miso glaze Chilean sea bass
And petit filet mignon perigourdine sauce,
Drinking an unusual Italian merlot -- because California wines give me a headache --
With fine, soft tannins and hints of French and Slovenian oak
It is hard to imagine that light jazz does not fill all the rooms to the horizon.

This high above the streets and the subtle needs of other men
The buildings of New York stand like illuminated punch cards,
Like dominoes of some strange and monumental numerology.

The white light becomes yellow in the distance
Like bright seeds scattered in fields of black earth
It is impossible to believe that somewhere
Among the light and dark spaces of labor and repose
Someone is unhappy
Someone is suffering
Someone is dead.

Is it the elevation that makes such beliefs possible?
No wonder men climb mountains to find answers,
Make their sacrifices and consume their sacred meals.
In another age, I would say it was the voice of gods.
Now, I know it is a finely crafted conceit that apprehends things
That finds a message in a landscape of binary code
Between grilled pepper shrimp and vanilla cream meringue cake.

A Triune Nature

A hypothesis...

Human nature is triune; it is three distinct natures in one.

1. Unbridled self-interest, "the law of the jungle;" the organism's will to survive and reproduce; culturally suppressed as original sin or an inherently evil nature; long thought a threat to preserving the social order; a zero-sum operator; moral anarchy;  politics of plunder; the predator or the parasite; slavery or serfdom of others

2. Unbridled altruism; a social adaptation to enhance the survival of the group at the expense of the individual; culturally reinforced as a duty owed to a superior or as a submission to a supernatural will; lives of the saints; long thought necessary for preserving social order; zero-sum operator; moral community; politics of family and close friends; emotional capital; love

3. Rational self-interest; a social adaptation to enhance both the survival of the group and the life of the individual; recognition of individual rights and property; peaceful competition and cooperation; does not preserve social order; rather, it results in an adaptive social order viewed as chaotic by some and self-serving by others; non-zero operator; moral order; politics of general welfare; symbiosis

A triune nature equips humans to adapt to a wide variety of environments and social structures, but leaves us with a perpetual motive tension that we articulate as competing and at times irreconcilable moral codes.

This is no mere hierararchy of needs. All three natures exist and are operative simultaneously. Each, alone, is a complete operating system for human action, but each is equally complete with the others. Sexual jealousy is no different from professional jealousy. 

The paradox of human nature is that it is not additive: one equals three and three equals one. 

Human nature is not judged in terms of its content; rather, we judge the content as best we can by its visible results.