principleofplenitude

[principleofplenitude]

"I didn't die. I swung about like a vervet monkey on a liana. It was fun—or such a relief that it felt like fun. But decades on, it turns out that I've discovered an even greater thrill and more pervasive satisfaction than ever higher falls or even the certainty of God; I simply walk away from the complete person I could have and live thrillingly with the vertiginous knowledge of all the opportunities I have turned down to make me the curtailed person I am today."

—Jenny Diski, from "On Falling" in On Trying to Keep Still (2006)

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I lived in the first century of world wars. Most mornings I would be more or less insane, The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories, The news would pour out of various devices Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen. I would call my friends on other devices; They would be more or less mad for similar reasons. Slowly I would get to pen and paper, Make my poems for others unseen and unborn. In the day I would be reminded of those men and women, Brave, setting up signals across vast distances, Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values. As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened, We would try to imagine them, try to find each other, To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other, Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves, To let go the means, to wake. I lived in the first century of these wars. —Muriel Rukeyser

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So what’s going on? If these studies are accurate, stimulant medications don’t do much to improve cognitive ability or academic performance. And yet millions of young Americans (and their parents) feel that the pills are essential to their success in school. Why? One possible explanation can be found in the work of Martha Farah, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania. In one study, she and a colleague, Irena Ilieva, recruited 46 young adults, gave half of them a dose of Adderall and half a placebo and then had them perform 13 different cognitive tests. The ones who took the medication didn’t do better on any of the tests than the ones who took the placebo, but when the researchers asked the subjects to evaluate their performance on the assessments, the ones who took Adderall believed they had done better. They felt more confident, even if their actual abilities didn’t improve. Farah directed me to the work of Scott Vrecko, a sociologist who conducted a series of interviews with students at an American university who used stimulant medication without a prescription. He wrote that the students he interviewed would often “frame the functional benefits of stimulants in cognitive-sounding terms.” But when he dug a little deeper, he found that the students tended to talk about their attention struggles, and the benefits they experienced with medication, in emotional terms rather than intellectual ones. Without the pills, they said, they just didn’t feel interested in the assignments they were supposed to be doing. They didn’t feel motivated. It all seemed pointless. —"Have we been thinking about ADHD all wrong?" from New York Times

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I do remember, though, that when I read Sontag for the first time, just like the first time I read Hannah Arendt, Emily Dickinson, and Pascal, I kept having those sudden, subtle, and possibly microchemical raptures—little lights flickering deep inside the brain tissue—that some people experience when they finally find words for a very simple and yet till then utterly unspeakable feeling. When someone else's words enter your consciousness like that, they become small conceptual light-marks. They're not necessarily illuminating. A match struck alight in a dark hallway, the lit tip of a cigarette smoked in bed at midnight, embers in a dying chimney: none of these things has enough light of its own to reveal anything. Neither do anyone's words. But sometimes a little light can make you aware of the dark, unknown space that surrounds it, of the enormous ignorance that envelops everything we think we know. And that recognition and coming to terms with darkness is more valuable than all the factual knowledge we may ever accumulate." —Valeria Luiselli, from The Lost Children Archive (2019)

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A man may not be able to understand how love governed everything int he large building we lived in; not even the men who lived with us noticed. They thought love was a brief fairytale for their companions, a brief passion necessary for a woman to secure the right to be mistress of her own house, have children, and dedicate her entire life to the problem of shopping and the kitchen. Yes, they actually believed that the smell of food, a heavy shopping bag hanging from her arm, hours of patient mending and standing over children with the rod could replace the romantic love that had led to their meeting. They knew so little of women they believed that this was really their life's plan, its ideal. "She's frigid," they'd confide to their friends with a sigh. "She does nothing but keep house and look after the children." And, with these facile conclusions, they refused to acknowledge a problem for which they accepted no obligation or responsibility. All they would have had to do was listen to women's private discussions, which they broke off when men came around, the way children do when their parents approach, or look at the books on the nightstands in bedrooms where one or two babies were often sleeping with them; or notice how women opened the windows after supper, sighing quietly. "They're tired," they'd say, not bothering to question why they were tired. They might go as far as thinking, "They're women," but not a single one asked himself what being a woman meant. And none of them grasped that behind every gesture, every bit of self-denial, all of that feminine bravery was a secret desire for love." —Alba de Céspedes, from Her Side of the Story (1949)

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I didn't know what she was alluding to, and I looked at her with surprise and fear. Yet, for the first time, I felt what many other mothers tell me they feel and which I had never felt: the desire to transfer their whole life into the life of their children, even their hopes. And maybe precisely in the ones who are different from us, in whom we don't recognize ourselves. "See if you can understand," I murmured. "I think it's too late for me." —Alba de Céspedes, from Forbidden Notebook (1952)

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I often complain that I have too many things to do, that I’m the family servant, the household slave—that I never have a moment to read a book, for example. That’s all true, but in a certain sense that servitude has also become my strength, the halo of my martyrdom. So on those rare occasions when I happen to take a nap for half an hour before Michele and the children return for dinner, or when I take a walk, gazing in the shop windows on the way home from the office, I never confess it. I’m afraid that if I admitted I’d enjoyed even a short rest of some diversion, I would lose the reputation I have of dedicating every second of my time to the family. [...] Years ago I was invited by a friend to spend a week in a country house in Tuscany. I was very tired when I left, because I had arranged things so that Michele and the children would be entirely taken care of during my absence and, on returning, I found endless chores that had accumulated during my brief vacation. And yet, later that year, if I ever mentioned that I was tired, they all reminded me that I had been on vacation and surely my body must have benefitted from it. No one seemed to understand that a week of vacation in August couldn’t keep me from being tired in October. [...] And yet tranquility for me originates precisely in the tiredness I feel when I lie in bed at night. There I find a sort of happiness in which I feel peaceful and fall asleep. I have to recognize that, perhaps, the determination with which I protect myself from any possibility of rest is the fear of losing this single source of happiness, which is tiredness.

—Alba de Céspedes, from Forbidden Notebook (1952)

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If one saves a butterfly, has one saved the world? Rabbi says: If one saves one butterfly, even with long wings, one butterfly that has fallen into water, it may be said: “He has saved the whole world.” If one saves a motley moth, is it the same? Rabbi: It is valid. If one saves a dirty monkey from a flame, for example, it is as the saying is: He or she has saved the whole world. It is valid for all creatures, and not more so for the creatures who know how to recite the blessings. It is always valid, even on the Sabbath. It is said: The creatures of the sky are owned by no one, like the land. If one saves the Book from being destroyed, is it also saving a world? Rabbi: God forbid, yes, saving the book from the fire, saving the book or books from the fire, is known to be comparable. He who saves a book and he who writes a holy book, it should be said: They have saved the whole world like a book. If one saves a rose, one rose, from the garden of your dead Teacher, is it still appropriate to think: She has saved the world. The Rabbi was silent and seemed troubled. He replied: If the house of the great teacher is in ruins, and the garden is a scandal, and one saves one rose from his garden it is said even of one rose: It is like saving the world. It is also said the rose will grow as large as the world. —David Shapiro, "Song for Chaim"

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Out of your whole life give but a moment!  All of your life that has gone before,  All to come after it, —so you ignore,  So you make perfect the present,—condense,  In a rapture of rage, for perfection’s endowment,  Thought and feeling and soul and sense— Merged in a moment which gives me at last  You around me for once, you beneath me, above me— Me—sure that despite of time future, time past,— This tick of our life-time’s one moment you love me!  How long such suspension may linger? Ah, Sweet— The moment eternal—just that and no more— When ecstasy’s utmost we clutch at the core, While cheeks burn, arms open, eyes shut and lips meet!  —Robert Browning, "Now"

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Every day I want to speak with you. And every day something more important calls for my attention – the drugstore, the beauty products, the luggage I need to buy for the trip. Even now I can hardly sit here among the falling piles of paper and clothing, the garbage trucks outside already screeching and banging. The mystics say you are as close as my own breath. Why do I flee from you? My days and nights pour through me like complaints and become a story I forgot to tell. Help me. Even as I write these words I am planning to rise from the chair as soon as I finish this sentence. —Marie Howe, "Prayer"

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What do we call this desire to be desired? The milkweed’s impenitent bow to the monarch or starlight. The heart’s timpani at a sundress, a thigh, a braided anklet. A kind word escaping the cocktail glass. An olive in brine. Name it beauty and chase will become our watchword. Call it love and the sun will kneel. Say happiness and “Do I deserve this?” follows, rapturous, like a sparrow pecking the ground. Instead of wisdom, why not wish for the owl’s heart at night, seeing in the dark more than a meal, but a place to sing. Don’t imagine a dirge for the eaten. Conjure an exhale instead: the hoot of being alive. Name it whatever you like. —Steven Leyaa, "Limerence"

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In 1955 the collective, calling itself The Forum, published the alleged aliens’ answers as The Urantia Book, a two-thousand-page litany of revelations ranging from cosmology to the life of Jesus. Forty years later, on the other side of the personal computing revolution, a woman named Kristen Maaherra started distributing the sacred text on floppy disks. She gave them away: she wasn’t trying to make a profit, only to spread the good news. Before long the Urantia Foundation—a group Sadler’s followers had established to safeguard and promote the revelations of the Book—caught wind of Maaherra’s activities, and it took a dim view of the unauthorized distribution of the text whose sales provided the movement’s main source of funds. In short order the foundation filed a lawsuit for copyright infringement. Maaherra freely admitted she had copied The Urantia Book verbatim and defended her actions with a curious legal argument. Authorship, she contended, was something only humans could possess; since the papers were a direct transcription of the infallible revelations of an ensemble of celestial beings, the notions of authorship and copyright didn’t apply. The case reached the Ninth Circuit court of appeals, which ruled against her. Without questioning the extraterrestrial origins of the book’s revelations—both parties agreed about that, after all—the judges ruled that the utterances had been mediated by human beings before they reached print, constituting just enough of a human element to trigger authorship protections under the relevant copyright statute. The prompt engineers who compiled The Urantia Book may have set a legal precedent for copyright in AI-generated works; Urantia Foundation v. Maaherra has already been cited in early AI cases in the United States. The legal battles over AI currently playing out—and the large number still to come—may profoundly impact the balance of wealth and power in countless democracies in the decades ahead.

—"To Whom Does the World Belong?" from Boston Review

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I was out last night, the very picture of a sneak, dark and hunched-over, breaking and entering again. Why do I do it? And why, when I can afford serious residences, do I keep to this one room? Perhaps if I had not lost track of the difference between the real and the ideal it would never have happened. I hide here almost entirely now. When I go out, when I creep into those silent houses, I steal newspapers. An armload, no more than I can carry comfortably. Sometimes they are already tied up on the side porch or by the kitchen stove. Nobody misses them. They think each other or the maid has carried them out to the street. They say there is something intractable out there, the Law, the Right to Privacy, the World. In the days when my obsession was only a wound-up toy, squeaking and jabbering in my chest, I could have believed them. I sit by the window today (There is very little space left now, though I have left corridors wide enough to walk through so I won't lose touch) holding my latest on my lap, handling them, fondling them, taking in every column. They are becoming more and more precious. My delusion grows and spreads. Lately it seems to me as I read of murders, wars, bankruptcies, jackpot winnings, the news is written in that perfect style of someone speaking to the one who knows and loves him. Long before they miss me, I think, the room will be perfectly solid. When they break in the door and, unsurprised, hardened to the most bizarre vagaries, begin to carry out my treasure, death's what they'll look for underneath it all, those fluent, muscled, imaginative men, sweating in their innocent coveralls. But I will be out in broad daylight by then, answering, having accepted utterly the heart's conditions. Tell them I wish them well, always, that I've been happy. —Mona van Duyn, "The Miser"

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I will tell you why she rarely ventured from her house.  It happened like this: One day she took the train to Boston, made her way to the darkened room, put her name down in cursive script and waited her turn.  When they read her name aloud she made her way to the stage straightened the papers in her hands — pages and envelopes, the backs of grocery bills, she closed her eyes for a minute, took a breath,  and began.  From her mouth perfect words exploded, intact formulas of light and darkness. She dared to rhyme with words like cochineal and described the skies like diadem.  Obscurely worded incantations filled the room with an alchemy that made the very molecules quake. The solitary words she handled in her upstairs room with keen precision came rumbling out to make the electric lights flicker. 40 members of the audience  were treated for hypertension. 20 year old dark haired beauties found their heads had turned a Moses White. Her second poem erased the memory of every cellphone in the nightclub, and by the fourth line of the sixth verse the grandmother in the upstairs apartment  had been cured of her rheumatism.  The papers reported the power outages.  The area hospitals taxed their emergency generators and sirens were heard to wail through the night. Quietly she made her way to the exit, walked to the terminal and rode back to Amherst.  She never left her room again and never read such syllables aloud.  —Dan Vera, "Emily Dickinson at the Poetry Slam"

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Gratitude isn’t obviously a concept capable of generating such perplexities. But it has hidden depths. Manela is among the philosophers who believe that the single word “gratitude” actually refers to two ideas, which may or may not be related. The first is “prepositional” gratitude—gratitude to someone for something. You might be grateful to a lifeguard for saving you from drowning, for instance, or to your friend for watching your dog while you’re away. The second is “propositional” gratitude—a more general gratitude for the fact that things are the way they are. Perhaps you’re grateful for the weather on your wedding day, or grateful to be alive after a cancer scare. When you arrive at your Airbnb to find a decorative sign that says “gratitude,” the sign is probably invoking the second type of gratitude. You’re not being reminded to be grateful to the owner of the Airbnb for bestowing upon you the boon of a tidy apartment; you’re being told to be grateful for a wondrous world filled with Airbnbs. —"Why is gratitude so difficult?" from the New Yorker