Sewers of Babel : kerinth

Link leads to an article in The Philosopher's Magazine about the void of thankfulness in a world dissatisified with religious rationale and secular creation myths like evolution and progress. The author, Ronald Aronson, argues that gratitude is an essential feeling for those who want to avoid the absurd paradox of a meaningless, personal, existential world, and must find some meaning for the human mind to be satisfied.
Instead of relying on the language of story-myths and father-figure-deities for this meaning, Aronson tries to entwine human beings in the great dependency of human existence that culminates within each individual being:

But there is an alternative to thanking God on the one hand and seeing the universe as a “cosmic lottery” or as absurd on the other.
[...] we have much to learn by abandoning the interpersonal model of gratitude and thinking not of God and other people's intentions but of our gratitude to larger and impersonal forces. The moment we do, [Robert Solomon] correctly notes, one of the first experiences we confront is our dependence. It is as if we live in a profound series of dependencies that dominate our existence but which, outside of religion, we more and more manage to hide from ourselves: dependence on the cosmos, the sun, nature, past generations of people, and human society. Living without God, we should for the first time become intensely clear about all that we do, in fact, rely on.

Thus Aronson sets the stage for his own narrative of dependency, realized in a walk down a clear trail dependent on the earth and water and sun and gravity etc, in clothes made worldwide, burning calories from food produced by disparate nations, participating in a philosophic tradition more than two millenia old. But what exactly does this gratitude produce in the one giving thanks?

Gratitude, when it is clear-eyed, acknowledges some part of the fullness of our dependency. It is called “giving thanks”. If we try to do this and speak fulsomely, without the various evasions to which we have been accustomed, what will we say?

Indeed, what will we say? More to the point, what will we do? It seems that gratitude is a way of participating in consciousness that does not require the absolute authority of the self and its limits (or gods and theirs). Although there is no exact formula for secular gratitude put forward by the article, there is this snippet at the end that hints at this definition of gratitude.

One's map of dependence stretches in every possible direction and across every possible plane, but it is always real and it is always concrete. And it sketches the paths for one's gratitude. It tells, after all, the story of our connections with the world and the universe, and it gives us a core of obligations and a core of meaning. To give thanks is to honour this.

Only by expanding my sense of causality - including prayer-like reverence towards all that provides for me - can I truly feel responsibility for what I myself enact in this little life. Or so it might be summed up. Any problem I might have with this could be traced back to its innate complexity and endlessness - where does thankfulness stop? Do we thank all levels of impersonal forces, like electrons and quasars and white dwarfs? Does our thankfulness include all people through time for their simple existence? Are those not serving me directly still deserving of thanks? We are competing for oxygen!
However, I think the author probably means this essay as a method of integrating a healthy humility into a life without its traditional outlets. The world would be better with more empathy, more realization of the interconnected nature of things. Gratitude as a doctrine, however? We would become eternally-hymning poets and after everyone starved no one would be thankful:

O last human,
choking on the words
"blessed be"
for lack of lettuce leaf
and clean water.

The making of composite photographs in Victorian times also resulted from the technical deficiencies of the materials available. Landscape photographers would find that it was possible to have the land or the sky properly exposed, but not both, so the practice of taking two exposures and combining them in the darkroom became common. These days we have developed graduated filters to overcome the problem, but out of these early combination prints, photomontage, as we now know it, emerged.

Soon to come - a section on the modern Photoshop era. Perhaps fark.com will one day be history.

A six-page comic strip by Chester Brown titled My Mom was a Schizophrenic. A good musing about the nature of codified sanity, slanted towards acceptance/understanding before aggressive treatment. A quote from the author:

I think we have to have a greater acceptance of aberrant behaviour, as long as they aren't doing something strictly illegal, and if they're doing something illegal, then we should deal with them on that basis, on that level. But if people are just acting strange, I think we have to have a greater understanding and acceptance of that. We're not very accepting of people who act strangely.

• No island is a man.
• Stones and hurt may break my words, but sticks will never bone me.

More after the link. Don't throw the bathwater out with the baby.
[via mefi]

Latrinalia was originally a website that collected user-submitted photos of quotes and drawings from waterclosets everywhere. Now with a more tame name (It's All in the Head) the collection is being issued in print form. While it does seem on the surface like a humorous curio, there is some philosophical benefit to being in a quiet porcelain room that no one possesses and many frequent.

I am not quite sure of Jupiter's importance in the discussion, but the moon railing against its significant planet (sygplan) is a classic example of the dependent party slurring against the dominant. Gives us all hope. There must be more than this Earth with its paltry resources and fouled facilities. Kinda like a rundown bathroom at a Citgo (out of everything but diesel) - let us press onward to find a recently built Racetrac!

© Frank Fournier

Twelve-year-old Omayra Sanchez trapped in the debris caused by the eruption of Nevado del Ruíz volcano. After sixty hours she eventually lost consciousness and died.

This is the 1985 winner of the World Press Photo "photo of the year," linked at this title. Most of the winning photos are similarly intense displays of the human struggle, across all the inhabited world. It can be good to view these single frames from others' fear, horror, or supremest gentleness if we can take it constructively. As an anonymous wikipedia contributor calls it,

During her agony, she sent inspirational messages of hope to her friends and relatives, including her surviving mother who had been in Bogotá at the time of the disaster, and today she is seen as standing as an example of courage in a hopeless situation.

It does make one feel at the same time more serious about the great purposes and less about our present congestion. But with that feeling I am only tenpercent done.

There will be no life
if we can only dream of death,
and if we dream to escape death
there will be no life.
There will be no light
at the end of the dark depth,
yet if there were no dark depth
there would be no light -
just a faint haze before all sight
stopped.

Edit: Now available an audio file produced by braineel