v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

CherryStonesMemory

Vallejo Nocturno -2005

Wealth of Vocabulary

Francesco Bonavita writes about the potential extinction of languages in Newropeans.org  article We are what we speak:

The lower the number of speakers the less are the probabilities for a language to continue to exist. Indeed, the rate of extinction occurring among human languages appears to be greater than the extinction of birds and mammals. There is a strong correlation between the survival rate of living species whose biodiversity is well-maintained, and language diversity in its ability to resist extinction. Sutherland shows that the extinction of rare languages suffers its worst fate when the diversity of speakers is significantly reduced.

Our linguistic heritage, which accounts for who we are as a people appears to be seriously threatened. The question that must then be asked is what can be done to preserve an intrinsic part of our legacy? According to Daniel M. Abrams and Steven H. Strogatz, professors of linguistics at Cornell University, the survival of the less commonly spoken languages, according to this study, is contingent upon public intervention. Languages like Welsh, Scottish Gaelic and Quechua, one of the oldest indigenous languages in the Americas, to mention just a few, may survive, in part, thanks to government policies designed to stem the further dissolution of these precious tongues. The French Canadian experiment, which has been in existence for sometime, is probably one of the most well publicized cases where government intervention has worked effectively. When bilingualism was first imposed, at least with respect to mandating dual language signs in French and English in all facets of Canadian public life, skeptics derided the plan and warned about the consequences of polarizing people. Fortunately, this fear has been abated and there are plenty of indications, on the surface at least, that Canadians have become tolerant of one another, respecting diversity and the right of self-expression.

Dematerialized bodies

From CTheory.Net Arthur Kroker on Deleuze and Guatarri mediations:

The romantic mysticism of Spinoza's ethics, with its seduction of becoming, is the panic principle which makes Deleuze and Guattari's thought possible. Materialism in the new age, therefore, is all about panic doublings: the flight from the body with organs to the digital dreams of becoming speed, becoming slowness; and the fantastic valorization of the virtual self by the fear of falling back into corporeality, into the body with (dying) organs. The doubling, then, of a future of delusional desire and a past of fear as the "blink" at the disappearing centre of new age materialism. The language of panic doubling, therefore, recapitulates at a higher level of abstraction and generality the more classical discourse of liberalism. It is a political discourse of panic materialism which is not that dissimilar from the Lockean fear of death, and which motivated in turn its own search for the first of all the virtual selves: the bourgeois subject of the pursuit of happiness, property rights, and the avoidance of death. This time we are not present at the birth of the bourgeois subject, however, but in the more melancholy era of Locke, the bourgeois subject, of modernist doubling all in ruins. Yet, from the ruins of the bourgeois subject there stirs again in Deleuze and Guattari's thought the first timid motions of an old siren-call - the reconstitution of the dynamic will to will of the post-bourgeois subject, the virtual subject, on the basis of the liquid doubling of fear (of immanence) and desire (of transcendence). What is this but the triumphant reassertion of the ideolect of the post-liberal subject, all the more persuasive for its transgressionary appeal? Consequently, a materialist theory that only works to confirm what it thought it was finally rupturing: that is, the idea of the impossibility of the materialist subject except as an optical afterimage of the hippie monism of romantic mysticism. What Nietzsche once described as the vicious "prejudices" which obscure the nihilism within.

Power Outage

From Jon at Groundglass

Father Fire

Nova Scotia 1990's-Vallejo Nocturno Copyright 2005

Fundamental Forces

Dr. Michio Kaku, the recent author of Parallel Worlds and the Henry Semat Professorship in Theoretical Physics at the City College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, wrote the following in an article at KurzweilAI.net entitled Parallel Universes, the Matrix, and superintelligence :

There's another theory, however, called decoherence, or many worlds, which believes that the Universe simply splits each time, so that we live in a world where the cat is alive, but there's an equal world where the cat is dead. In that world, they have people, they react normally, they think that their world is the only world, but in that world, the cat is dead. And, in fact, we exist simultaneously with that world.

This means that there's probably a Universe where you were never born, but everything else is the same. Or perhaps your mother had extra brothers and sisters for you, in which case your family is much larger. Now, this can be compared to sitting in a room, listening to radio. When you listen to radio, you hear many frequencies. They exist simultaneously all around you in the room. However, your radio is only tuned to one frequency. In the same way, in your living room, there is the wavewave  function of aliens from outer space. There is the wave function of the Roman Empire, because it never fell, 1500 years ago.

All of this coexists inside your living room. However, just like you can only tune into one radio channel, you can only tune into one reality channel, and that is the channel that you exist in. So, in some sense it is true that we coexist with all possible universes. The catch is, we cannot communicate with them, we cannot enter these universes.

However, I personally believe that at some point in the future, that may be our only salvation. The latest cosmological data indicates that the Universe is accelerating, not slowing down, which means the Universe will eventually hit a Big Freeze, trillions of years from now, when temperatures are so low that it will be impossible to have any intelligent being survive.

When the Universe dies, there's one and only one way to survive in a freezing Universe, and that is to leave the Universe. In evolution, there is a law of biology that says if the environment becomes hostile, either you adapt, you leave, or you die.

When the Universe freezes and temperatures reach near absolute zero, you cannot adapt. The laws of thermodynamics are quite rigid on this question. Either you will die, or you will leave. This means, of course, that we have to create machines that will allow us to enter eleven-dimensional hyperspace. This is still quite speculative,    but String theory, in some sense, may be our only salvation. For advanced civilizations in outer space, either we leave or we die.

                                                                

One of seven poems by Grzegorz Wróblewski

From A Step at a Time translator David Mcduff's blog, here is one poem by Polish poet Grzegorz Wróblewski:

THE NORTHERN ROUTE

1.
Love is only an illusion. Nature makes us aware all the time.
A skeleton of a rather small mammal. Why did it have to be exactly
you? (It used to be a wonderful specimen one day.) I know you don’t like
stuffed animals. Vulpes? Trees are slowly vanishing.

2.
And it is love after all! To survive, one has to take care of it.
But you won’t leave me alone here, will you? Do you know that foxes have
vertical pupils? Eyes are an abyss of greatness and smallness. (Your
unceasing self-confidence...)

3.
I don’t mean survival, I mean loneliness.
He was a weaker specimen and that’s why he was eliminated.
But is it still love? Would you also make love to me
in different circumstances? Be realistic at last.

4.
Your summary view on the whole is out of place here.
And cover this awful skeleton with soil.

Andre Breton Poem

Hans Bellmer La poupee (1936)

less time

Less time than it takes to say it, less tears than it takes to die; I've taken account of everything, there you have it. I've made a census of the stones, they are as numerous as my fingers and some others; I've distributed some pamphlets to the plants, but not all were willing to accpet them. I've kept company with music for a second only and now I no longer know what to think of suicide, for if I ever want to part from myself, the exit is on this side and, I add mischievously, the entrance, the re-entrance is on the other. You see what you still have to do. Hours, grief, I don't keep a reasonable account of them; I'm alone, I look out of the window; there is no passerby, or rather no one passes (underline passes). You don't know this man? It's Mr. Same. May I introduce Madam Madam? And their children. Then I turn back on my steps, my steps turn back too, but I don't know exactly what they turn back on. I consult a schedule; the names of the towns have been replaced by the names of people who have been quite close to me. Shall I go to A, return to B, change at X? Yes, of course I'll change at X. Provided I don't miss the connection with boredom! There we are: boredom, beautiful parallels, ah! how beautiful the parallels are under God's perpendicular.  

Music, please

Foto by John Vanderslice
In these tough times, some of us, me-let's say, have reverted to less controversial things like art and the weather. Why? Perhaps to recoup and sharpen the mind. Or just a change of pace, after all it does get monotonous to point out the obvious. So on a lighter note, Joanna Newsom, whose recent 2004 CD The Milk-Eyed Mender has struck a curious chord has a revealing interview at The Wire exposing her influences. Her singing style, harp playing, and compositions have a tender uniqueness all of their own. Needless to say, when I was listening recently to a young Flamenco female singer, it reminded me of the unorthodox stylings of Miss Newsome. Both have soul and intelligence. Here's the interview and if you do have an opportunity, get her CD:

How did the Neil Young thing come about?

Joanna:  His manager came to a show that I played in LA, and saw me and liked the music, and asked me to play with Neil! 

So you opened for him?

Joanna: Yeah! It was at the Berkeley Community Theater. Jonathan Richman also played. It was pretty incredible. I had met him a number of times because he used to live in Nevada City. Meeting Neil Young was mind blowing, he's so incredible. He's always been probably my favorite songwriter of all time, I was so star struck, I just love him. Meeting him kind of made me forget how big the show was. Meeting him was such a huge thing for me, and he was so sweet and so gracious, and so kind. It sort of made me forget there were 3500 people out there, because I was so full of delight from actually getting to talk to Neil Young.

How has playing live changed?  Are you more comfortable now?

Joanna: I do feel a little more comfortable now, than at the beginning. I don't think it's been a huge change, but I do feel a little more comfortable, it's not quite so scary. I'm a little more... the composition of the audience has changed a little too, in terms of how many people in the audience know me, and know my music and that sort of thing. That sort of changes the feeling on stage, of course it's a little less terrifying if I know there are people there that are pulling for me, and excited to hear me, and I'm not just singing to a bunch of people who have no idea what to expect. I've been playing a few new songs, but I've hardly had time to work on any. After this upcoming European tour I'm finally going to get a break of a few months, and I can work a little bit more.

Do people talk to you after the shows?

Joanna: Plenty of people come up to me who don't know who I am, especially on the ISB tour. People ask me about the harp all the time. It's mostly the same questions over and over again.

How many strings does it have?

Joanna: 46, mine has. You tune it string by string with a little tuning key, the pegs are sort of shaped, they have angles on them and you slip a key over them and turn them. I have to do it every time I play and it takes about half an hour. It depends whether I'm opening or headlining, I have to do it pretty soon before I play, so on nights when I'm headlining I have to check the tuning before I go on, and that takes about 10 minutes.

Continue reading the interview at The Wire

The Soul of Large Cities

From Javier Marias The Man of Feeling (El hombre sentimental) short and sentient work about an opera singer:

My profession often obliges me to lead a very solitary life in the great capitals of the world, and four years ago, Madrid, the city in which I spent much of my childhood and much of my adolescence, was no exception. Indeed, after a long period without visiting it, few cities I have been to on my numerous trips abroad have seemed sadder or more solitary. More even than English cities, which are the worst in the world, the most miserable and the most hostile; more even than those of east Germany, which are so disciplined and so deadened that to walk down the street whistling has a cataclysmic effect; more even than those of Switzerland, which are at least clean and quiet and give free rein to the imagination precisely because they say nothing.

Madrid, on the other hand, seems in ahurry to say everything, as if it were aware that the only way it can win over the traveler is through unchecked noise and vehemence. It does not, therefore, allow for any long-term expectations, any reticence or reserve, nor does it allow the visitor (not to mention the perpetually harrassed resident) the smallest imaginative or imaginary hope that anything more might exist-hidden, unexpressed, omitted or merely contingent-than what is brazenly offered to him as soon as he steps out along its dirty, suffocating streets. Madrid is rustic and talkative and lacks all mystery, and there is nothing so sad or so solitary as a city with no apparent enigma or even the appearance of an enigma, there is nothing so dissuasive, nothing so oppressive to a vistor.

Translated by Margaret Jull Costa