#A.R. Wallace

[winterfable]

Science and the unconscious

In the preceding chapters C. G. Jung and some of his associates have tried to make clear the role played by the symbol-creating function in man’s unconscious psyche and to point out some fields of application in this newly discovered area of life. We are still far from understanding the unconscious or the archetypes — those dynamic nuclei of the psyche — in all their implications. All we can see now is that the archetypes have an enormous impact on the individual, forming his emotions and his ethical and mental outlook, influencing his relationships with others, and thus affecting his whole destiny. We can also see that the arrangement of archetypal symbols follows a pattern of wholeness in the individual, and that an appropriate understanding of the symbols can have a healing effect. And we can see that the archetypes can act as creative or destructive forces in our mind: creative when they inspire new ideas, destructive when these same ideas stiffen into conscious prejudices that inhibit further discoveries.

Jung has shown in his chapter how subtle and differentiated all attempts at interpretation must be, in order not to weaken the specific individual and cultural values of archetypal ideas and symbols by leveling them out- - i.e. by giving them a stereotyped, intellectually formulated meaning. Jung himself dedicated his entire life to such investigations and interpretative work; naturally this book sketches only an infinitesimal part of his vast contribution to this new field of psychological discovery. He was a pioneer and remained fully aware that an enormous number of further questions remained unanswered and call for further investigation. This is why his concepts and hypotheses are conceived on as wide a basis as possible (without making them too vague and all-embracing) and why his views form a so-called “open system” that does not close the door against possible new discoveries.

To Jung, his concepts were mere tools or heuristic hypotheses that might help us to explore the vast new area of reality opened up by the discovery of the unconscious— a discovery that has not merely widened our whole view of the world but has in fact doubled it. We must always ask now whether a mental phenomenon is conscious or unconscious and, also, whether a “real” outer phenomenon is perceived by conscious or unconscious means.

The powerful forces of the unconscious most certainly appear not only in clinical material but also in the mythological, religious, artistic, and all the other cultural activities by which man expresses himself. Obviously, if all men have common inherited patterns of emotional and mental behavior (which Jung called the archetypes), it is only to be expected that we shall find their products (symbolic fantasies, thoughts, and actions) in practically every field of human activity.

Important modern investigations of many of these fields have been deeply influenced by Jung’s work. For instance, this influence can be seen in the study of literature, in such books as J. B. Priestley’s Literature and Western Man, Gottfried Diener’s Fausts Weg zu Helena, or James Kirsch’s Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Similarly, Jungian psychology has contributed to the study of art, as in the writings of Herbert Read or of Aniela Jaffe, Erich Neumann’s examination of Henry Moore, or Michael Tippett’s studies in music. Arnold Toynbee’s work on history and Paul Radin’s on anthropology have benefited from Jung’s teachings, as have the contributions to sinology made by Richard Wilhelm, Enwin Rousselle, and Manfred Porkert.

Of course, this does not mean that the special features of art and literature (including their interpretations) can be understood only from their archetypal foundation. These fields all have their own laws of activity; like all really creative achievements, they cannot ultimately be rationally explained. But within their areas of action one can recognize the archetypal patterns as a dynamic background activity. And one can often decipher in them (as in dreams) the message of some seemingly purposive, evolutionary tendency of the unconscious.

The fruitfulness of Jung’s ideas is more immediately understandable within the area of the cultural activities of man: Obviously, if the archetypes determine our mental behavior, they must appear in all these fields. But, unexpectedly, Jung’s concepts have also opened up new ways of looking at things in the realm of the natural sciences as well—for instance, in biology.

The physicist Wolfgang Pauli has pointed out that, due to new discoveries, our idea of the evolution of life requires a revision that might take into account an area of interrelation between the unconscious psyche and biological processes. Until recently it was assumed that the mutation of species happened at random and that a selection took place by means of which the “meaningful,” well-adapted varieties survived, and the others disappeared. But modern evolutionists have pointed out that the selections of such mutations by pure chance would have taken much longer than the known age of our planet allows.

Jung’s concept of synchronicity may be helpful here, for it could throw light upon the occurrence of certain rare “border-phenomena,” or exceptional events; thus it might explain how “meaningful” adaptations and mutations could happen in less time than that required by entirely random mutations. Today we know of many instances in which meaningful “chance” events have occurred when an archetype is activated. For example, the history of science contains many cases of simultaneous invention or discovery. One of the most famous of such cases involved Darwin and his theory of the origin of species: Darwin had developed the theory in a lengthy essay, and in 1844 was busy expanding this into a major treatise.

While he was at work on this project he received a manuscript from a young biologist, unknown to Darwin, named A. R. Wallace. The manuscript was a shorter but otherwise parallel exposition of Darwin’s theory. At the time Wallace was in the Molucca Islands of the Malay Archipelago. He knew of Darwin as a naturalist, but had not the slightest idea of the kind of theoretical work on which Darwin was at the time engaged.

In each case a creative scientist had independently arrived at a hypothesis that was to change the entire development of the science. And each had initially conceived of the hypothesis in an intuitive “flash” (later backed up by documentary evidence). The archetypes thus seem to appear as the agents, so to speak, of a creatio continua. (What Jung calls synchronistic events are in fact something like “acts of creation in time.”)

Similar “meaningful coincidences” can be said to occur when there is a vital necessity for an individual to know about, say, a relative’s death, or some lost possession. In a great many cases such information has been revealed by means of extrasensory perception. This seems to suggest that abnormal random phenomena may occur when a vital need or urge is aroused; and this in turn might explain why a species of animals, under great pressure or in great need, could produce “meaningful” (but acausal) changes in its outer material structure.

But the most promising field for future studies seems (as Jung saw it) to have unexpectedly opened up in connection with the complex field of microphysics. At first sight, it seems most unlikely that we should find a relationship between psychology and microphysics. The interrelation of these sciences is worth some explanation.

The most obvious aspect of such a connection lies in the fact that most of the basic concepts of physics (such as space, time, matter, energy, continuum or field, particle, etc.) were originally intuitive, semi-mythological, archetypal ideas of the old Greek philosophers — ideas that then slowly evolved and became more accurate and that today are mainly expressed in abstract mathematical terms. The idea of a particle, for instance, was formulated by the fourth-century B.C. Greek philosopher Leucippus and his pupil Democritus, who called it the “atom” i.e. the “indivisible unit.” Though the atom has not proved indivisible, we still conceive matter ultimately as consisting of waves and particles (or discontinuous “quanta”).

The idea of energy, and its relationship to force and movement, was also formulated by early Greek thinkers, and was developed by Stoic philosophers. They postulated the existence of a sort of life-giving “tension” (tonos), which supports and moves all things. This is obviously a semi-mythological germ of our modern concept of energy.

Even comparatively modern scientists and thinkers have relied on half-mythological, archetypal images when building up new concepts. In the 17th century, for instance, the absolute validity of the law of causality seemed “proved” to Rene Descartes “by the fact that God is immutable in His decisions and actions.” And the great German astronomer Johannes Kepler asserted that there are not more and not less than three dimensions of space on account of the Trinity.

These are just two examples among many that show how even our modern and basic scientific concepts remained for a long time linked with archetypal ideas that originally came from the unconscious. They do not necessarily express “objective” facts (or at least we cannot prove that they ultimately do) but spring from innate mental tendencies in man — tendencies that induce him to find “satisfactory” rational explanatory connections between the various outer and inner facts with which he has to deal. When examining nature and the universe, instead of looking for and finding objective qualities, “man encounters himself,” in the phrase of the physicist Werner Heisenberg.

Because of the implications of this point of view, Wolfgang Pauli and other scientists have begun to study the role of archetypal symbolism in the realm of scientific concepts. Pauli believed that we should parallel our investigation of outer objects with a psychological investigation of the inner origin of our scientific concepts. (This investigation might shed new light on a far-reaching concept to be introduced later in this chapter - the concept of a “one-ness” between the physical and psychological spheres, quantitative and qualitative aspects of reality).

Besides this rather obvious link between the psychology of the unconscious and physics, there, are other even more fascinating connections. Jung (working closely with Pauli) discovered that analytical psychology has been forced by investigations in its own field to create concepts that turned out later to be strikingly similar to those created by the physicists when confronted with microphysical phenomena. One of the most important among the physicists’ concepts is Niels Bohr’s idea of complementarity.

Modern microphysics has discovered that one can describe light only by means of two logically opposed but complementary concepts: The ideas of particle and wave. In grossly simplified terms, it might be said that under certain experimental conditions light manifests itself as if it were composed of particles; under others, as if it were a wave. Also, it was discovered that we can accurately observe either the position or the velocity of a subatomic particle - but not both at once. The observer must choose his experimental set-up, but by doing so he excludes (or rather must “sacrifice”) some other possible setup and its results. Furthermore, the measuring apparatus has to be included in the description of events because it has a decisive but uncontrollable influence upon the experimental set-up.

Pauli says: “The science of microphysics, on account of the basic ‘complementary’ situation, is faced with the impossibility of eliminating the effects of the observer by determinable correctives and has therefore to abandon in principle any objective understanding of physical phenomena. Where classical physics still saw ‘determined causal natural laws of nature’ we now look only for ‘statistical laws’ with ‘primary possibilities’.”

In other words, in microphysics the observer interferes with the experiment in a way that cannot be measured and that therefore cannot be eliminated. No natural laws can be formulated, saying “such-and-such will happen in every case.” All the microphysicist can say is “such-and-such is, according to statistical probability, likely to happen.” This naturally represents a tremendous problem for our classical physical thinking. It requires a consideration, in a scientific experiment, of the mental outlook of the participant-observer: It could thus be said that scientists can no longer hope to describe any aspects of outer objects in a completely “objective” manner.

Most modern physicists have accepted the fact that the role played by the conscious ideas of an observer in every microphysical experiment cannot be eliminated; but they have not concerned themselves with the possibility that the total psychological condition (both conscious and unconscious) of the observer might play a role as well. As Pauli points out, however, we have at least no a priori reasons for rejecting this possibility. But we must look at this as a still unanswered and an unexplored problem.

Bohr’s idea of complementarity is especially interesting to jungian psychologists, for Jung saw that the relationship between the conscious and unconscious mind also forms a complementary pair of opposites. Each new content that comes up from the unconscious is altered in its basic nature by being partly integrated into the conscious mind of the observer. Even dream contents (if noticed at all are in that way semi-conscious. And each enlargement of the observer’s consciousness caused by dream interpretation has again an immeasurable repercussion and influence on the unconscious. Thus the unconscious can only be approximately described (like the particles of microphysics) by paradoxical concepts. What it really is “in itself” we shall never know, just as we shall never know this about matter.

To take the parallels between psychology and microphysics even further: What Jung calls the archetypes (or patterns of emotional and mental behavior in man) could just as well be called, to use Pauli’s term, “primary possibilities” of psychic reactions. As has been stressed in this book, there are no laws governing the specific form in which an archetype might appear. There are only “tendencies” (see p. 67) that, again, enable us to say only that such-and-such is likely to happen in certain psychological situations.

As the American psychologist William James once pointed out, the idea of an unconscious could itself be compared to the “field” concept in physics. We might say that, just as in a magnetic field the particles entering into it appear in a certain order, psychological contents also appear in an ordered way within that psychic area which we call the unconscious. If we call something “rational” or “meaningful” in our conscious mind, and accept it as a satisfactory “explanation” of things, it is probably due to the fact that our conscious explanation is in harmony with some preconscious constellation of contents in our unconscious.

In other words, our conscious representations are sometimes ordered (or arranged in a pattern) before they have become conscious to us. The 19th-century German mathematician Karl Friedrich Gauss gives an example of an experience of such an unconscious order of ideas: He says that he found a certain rule in the theory of numbers “not by painstaking research, but by the Grace of God, so to speak. The riddle solved itself as lightning strikes, and I myself could not tell or show the connection between what I knew before, what I last used to experiment with, and what produced the final success.” The French scientist Henri Poincare is even more explicit about this phenomenon; he describes how during a sleepless night he actually watched his mathematical representations colliding in him until some of them “found a more stable connection. One feels as if one could watch one’s own unconscious at work, the unconscious activity partially becoming manifest to consciousness without losing its own character. At such moments one has an intuition of the difference between the mechanisms of the two egos.”

As a final example of parallel developments in microphysics and. psychology, we can consider Jung’s concept of meaning. Where before men looked for causal (i.e. rational) explanations of phenomena, Jung introduced the idea of looking for the meaning (or, perhaps we could say, the “purpose”). That is, rather than ask why something happened (i.e. what caused it), Jung asked: What did it happen for? This same tendency appears in physics: Many modern physicists are now looking more for “connections” in nature than for causal laws (determinism).

Pauli expected that the idea of the unconscious would spread beyond the “narrow frame of therapeutic use” and would influence all natural sciences that deal with general life phenomena. Since Pauli suggested this development he has been echoed by some physicists who are concerned with the new science of cybernetics— the comparative study of the “control” system formed by the brain and nervous system and such mechanical or electronic information and control systems as computers. In short, as the modern French scientist Oliver Costa de Beauregard has put it, science and psychology should in future “enter into an active dialogue.”

The unexpected parallelisms of ideas in psychology and physics suggest, as Jung pointed out, a possible ultimate one-ness of both fields of reality that physics and psychology study—i.e. a psychophysical one-ness of all life phenomena. Jung was even convinced that what he calls the unconscious somehow links up with the structure of inorganic matter—a link to which the problem of so-called “psychosomatic” illness seems to point. The concept of a Unitarian idea of reality (which has been followed up by Pauli and Erich Neumann) was called by Jung the unus mundus (the one world, within which matter and psyche arc not yet discriminated or separately actualized). He paved the way toward such a Unitarian point of view by pointing out that an archetype shows a “psychoid” (i.e. not purely psychic but almost material) aspect when it appears within a synchronistic event — for such an event is in effect a meaningful arrangement of inner psychic, and outer facts.

In other words, the archetypes not only fit into outer situations (as animal patterns of behavior fit into their surrounding nature); at bottom they tend to become manifest in a synchronistic “arrangement” that includes both matter and psyche. But these statements are just hints at some directions in which the investigation of life phenomena might proceed. Jung felt that we should first learn a great deal more about the interrelation of these two areas (matter and psyche) before rushing into too many abstract speculations about it.

The field that Jung himself felt would be most fruitful for further investigations was the study of our basic mathematical axiomata—which Pauli calls “primary mathematical intuitions,” and among which he especially mentions the ideas of an infinite series of numbers in arithmetic, or of a continuum in geometry, etc. As the German-born author Hannah Arendt has said, “with the rise of modernity, mathematics do not simply enlarge their content or reach out into the infinite to become applicable to the immensity of an infinite and infinitely growing, expanding universe, but cease to be concerned with appearance at all. They are no longer the beginnings of philosophy, or the ‘science’ of Being in its true appearance, but become instead the science of the structure of the human mind.” (A Jungian would at once add the question: Which mind? The conscious or the unconscious mind?)

As we have seen with reference to the experiences of Gauss arid Poincare, the mathematicians also discovered the fact that our representations are “ordered” before we become aware of them. B. L. van der Waerden, who cites many examples of essential mathematical insights arising from the unconscious, concludes: “...the unconscious is not only able to associate and combine, but even to judge. The judgment of the unconscious is an intuitive one, but it is under favorable circumstances completely sure.”

Among the many mathematical primary intuitions, or a priori ideas, the “natural numbers” seem psychologically the most interesting. Not only do they serve our conscious everyday measuring and counting operations; they have for centuries been the only existing means for “reading” the meaning of such ancient forms of divination as astrology, numerology, geomancy, etc.—all of which are based on arithmetical computation and all of which have been investigated by Jung in terms of his theory of synchronicity. Furthermore, the natural numbers — viewed from a psychological angle — must certainly be archetypal representations, for we are forced to think about them in certain definite ways. Nobody, for instance, can deny that 2 is the only existing even primary number, even if he has never thought about it consciously before. In other words, numbers are not concepts consciously invented by men for purposes of calculation: They are spontaneous and autonomous products of the unconscious — as are other archetypal symbols.

But the natural numbers are also qualities adherent to outer objects: We can assert and count that there are two stones here or three trees there. Even if we strip outer objects of all such qualities as color, temperature, size, etc., there still remains their “many-ness” or special multiplicity. Yet these same numbers are also just as indisputably parts of our own mental set-up — abstract concepts that we can study without looking at outer objects. Numbers thus appear to be a tangible connection between the spheres of matter and psyche. According to hints dropped by Jung, it is here that the most fruitful field of further investigation might be found.

I mention these rather difficult concepts briefly in order to show that, to me, Jung’s ideas do not form a “doctrine” but are the beginning of a new outlook that will continue to evolve and expand. I hope they will give the reader a glimpse into what seems to me to have been essential to and typical of Jung’s scientific attitude. He was always searching, with unusual freedom from conventional prejudices, and at the same time with great modesty and accuracy, to understand the phenomenon of life. He did not go further into the ideas mentioned above, because he felt that he had not yet enough facts in hand to say anything relevant about them—just as he generally waited several years before publishing his new insights, checking them again and again in the meantime, and himself raising every possible doubt about them.

Therefore, what might at first sight strike the reader as a certain vagueness in his ideas comes in fact from this scientific attitude of intellectual modesty -an attitude that does not exclude (by rash, superficial pseudo-explanations and oversimplifications) new possible discoveries, and that respects the complexity of the phenomenon of life. For this phenomenon was always an exciting mystery to Jung. It was never, as it is for people with closed minds, an “explained” reality about which it can be assumed that we know everything.

Creative ideas, in my opinion, show their value in that, like keys, they help to “unlock” hitherto unintelligible connections of facts and thus enable man to penetrate deeper into the mystery of life. I am convinced that Jung’s ideas can serve in this way to find and interpret new facts in many fields of science (and also of everyday life), simultaneously leading the individual to a more balanced, more ethical, and wider conscious outlook. If the reader should feel stimulated to work further on the investigation and assimilation of the unconscious— which always begins by working on oneself — the purpose of this introductory book would be fulfilled.

--Marie-Louise Von Franz en "Man and his Symbols"

[doriangray1789]

Genel olarak hayatın ortaya çıkışı ve özel olarak da canlılığın çeşitlenip gelişerek insanlığın ortaya çıkışı hep bir merak konusu olarak varlığını sürdürmüştür. Ama bu merakı gidermeye dönük ileri sürülen görüşlerin çoğu, içinde bulunulan dönemin egemen sınıflarının çıkarlarına uygun nitelikte olmuştur. Her olağan döneme hâkim olan düşünceler o dönemin egemen sınıflarının düşünceleridir. Hâkim düşüncelere ters düşecek fikirler ya baskı altında tutulur ya da sessizlik fesadı ile geçiştirilir. Canlılığın gelişim sürecini materyalist bir tarzda ortaya koyan ve yaratılış efsanesini çöp tenekesine gönderen evrim teorisi ise her ikisinden de nasibini almıştır.

Evrim düşüncesi on dokuzuncu yüzyılın başlarında yoğun olarak tartışılıyor; çoğunluk tarafından kabul edilmese de büyük doğa bilimcileri tarafından benimseniyordu. Ancak tam anlamıyla maddeci bir tarzda ele alınmıyordu. Hatta yaratılış düşüncesinin savunucuları bile canlıların sürekli gelişimini Tanrının bir kusursuzluğu olarak ele alıp evrim düşüncesini kabul edebiliyorlardı. Çünkü bu ilk dönem evrimci fikirlerin ortaya konuluş biçimi idealizme açık kapı bırakıyordu. Evrim düşüncesi, ancak Darwin’in çalışmaları sonucunda diyalektik materyalist anlayışın doğruluğunu kanıtlayan veriler sunar bir hale geldi. Darwin’in türlerin sabitliğine olan inancı Beagle gemisindeki beş yıllık gözlemlerinin ardından yıkıldı ve 1838’de canlı türlerinin değişimine dair evrimci fikirlerini oluşturmaya başladı. Ne var ki Darwin bu gözlemlerinin ve çalışmalarının sonucunu ancak 1859’da, yani aradan tam 21 yıl geçtikten sonra, benzer sonuçlara ulaşan A.R. Wallace kendisinden önce davranmasın diye, Türlerin Kökeni adlı eserinde yayınlayabildi. Darwin’in kuramını bu kadar geç yayınlamasının nedeni, sonuca ulaşabilmesi için bu kadar zamana ihtiyaç duyması değil, idealist düşüncelerin hâkim olduğu bilim dünyasından gelecek tepkilerden çekinmesiydi. Bu dönemde aklın, yani düşüncelerin beynin ürününden başka bir şey olmadığını söyleyen maddeci felsefeyi savunmak büyük cesaret gerektiriyordu.

Darwin’in teorisini geliştirmesinde esinlendiği kaynaklardan biri de, Malthus’un nüfus teorisidir. Malthus’a göre insan nüfusu geometrik olarak (katlanarak) artıyorken geçim araçları aritmetik oranda (toplanarak) artar: “Nüfus artışı, besin artışından daha fazla ve ekilebilir toprak alanları sınırlı olduğuna göre, nüfus artışı besin artışını geçecektir. Ancak; tabii engeller (açlık, afetler...) ile doğum kontrolü ve evlenme yaşının geciktirilmesi gibi durumlar gerçekleşirse, nüfus artışı besin artışının gerisinde kalır.” Darwin buradan hareketle, “canlılar hayatta kalabilecek yavru sayısından daha fazla sayıda yavru yapıyorsa bunlardan ancak bulundukları ortama daha iyi uyum sağlayanlar hayatta kalabilir” fikrinden, doğal seçilim fikrini türetti. Ancak onun Malthus’un sakatlıklar içeren düşüncesinden esinlenmiş olması, doğadaki yaşam savaşımının özünü değiştirmez. Nitekim Engels evrim teorisinin diyalektik yanını görmek istemeyen kesimleri eleştirir:

Gerçekte, yaşama savaşımı fikrinin kökenini Malthus’ta aramak gerektiğini söylemek, Darwin’in aklına bile gelmez. O yalnızca kendi yaşama savaşımı teorisinin, hayvan ve bitki dünyasının tümüne uygulanmış Malthus teorisi olduğunu söyler.

[tasteponder]

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[mightystargazer]

Another year gone, another readinglist done!

W. Michael Gear Outpost

W. Michael Gear Abandoned

Angela Carter The Bloody Chamber

Sue Burke Semiosis

Rob Dircks Don't Touch the Blue Stuff!

Laurie Forest the iron flower

Joseph Nassise urban Enemies: a collection

Ezekiel Boone The Mansion

Richtel, Matt Dead on Arrival

Wilkie Martin Inspector Hobbes and the Blood

Wilkie Martin Inspector Hobbes and The Curse

Wilkie Martin Inspector Hobbes & The Gold Digger

Wilkie Martin Inspector Hobbes and The Bones

A. American Home Coming

Adam J. Wright Lost Soul

Adam J. Wright Buried Memory

Adam J. Wright Dark Magic

Adam J. Wright Dead Ground

Adam J. Wright Shadow Land

Robert Bevan Critical Failures VI

Darynda Jones Grave on the Right

Darynda Jones Grave on the Left

Darynda Jones Third Grave Dead Ahead

Darynda Jones Grave Beneath My Feet

Darynda Jones Grave Past the Light

Darynda Jones Grave on the Edge

Darynda Jones Grave and No Body

Darynda Jones Grave After Dark

Darynda Jones Brighter Than the Sun

Darynda Jones Dirt on Ninth Grave

Darynda Jones The Curse of Tenth Grave

Darynda Jones Eleventh Grave in Moonlight

Dan Simmons The Terror

Warren Fahy Fragment

Tim McBain The Scattered and the Dead

Scott Thomas Kill Creek

Kurt Anderson Resurrection Pass

Larry Correia Son of the Black Sword

Larry Correia House of Assassins

Chuck Wendig Blackbird

Chuck Wendig Mockingbird

Chuck Wendig The Cormerant

Chuck Wendig Thunderbird

Karen Thompson Walker The Dreamers

Hank Green An Absolutely Remarkable Thing

C.T. Phipps The Tournament of Supervillainy 5

Peter Clines 14

Peter Clines The Fold

Peter Clines Dead Moon

Sean Schubert Infection

Sean Schubert Containment

Sean Schubert Mitigation

Sean Schubert Resolution

James Marshall Smith Hybrid

Mark Tufo Demon Wars

Alan Dean Foster Interlopers

Anthony Melchiorri The Tide

Anthony Melchiorri Breakwater

Anthony Melchiorri Salvage

Anthony Melchiorri Deadrise

Anthony Melchiorri Iron Wind

Anthony Melchiorri Dead Ashore

Anthony Melchiorri Ghost Fleet

Anthony Melchiorri Devil to Pay

Scott Medbury Heel Week

Scott Medbury On The Run

Scott Medbury Cold Comfort

Scott Medbury Rude Shock

Terry Pratchett/Neil Gaiman Good omens

Barry J. Hutchison The Sidekicks Initiative

Catherynne M. Valente The Refrigerator Monologues

Ike Hamill Super Apex

J.H. Moncrieff Monsters in Our Wake

John Connolly The Underbury Witches

Jonathan Maberry Dead of Night

Lydia Kang Quackery

Tomi Adeyemi Children of Blood and Bone

Thomas Morris The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth

John A.Keel The Complete Guide To Mysterious Beings

Ted Dekker ADAM

Richard K. Morgan Altered Carbon

Ransom Riggs A Map of Days

Kevin Hearne Death & Honey

Benjamin Wallace Boom box 1

Benjamin Wallace Boom box  2

Benjamin Wallace Boom box  3

Benjamin Wallace Revenge of the Apocalypse

Victor LaValle The Changeling

Rick Chesler Sawfish

Nathan Barnes The Reaper Virus

Michael brent Collings The Deep

Bill Heavey If You Didn't Bring Jerky, What Did I Just Eat

Bill Heavey It's Only Slow Food Until You Try to Eat It

Bill Heavey Should the Tent Be Burning Like That

Jenny Lawson Let's Pretend This Never Happened

Mark Tufo The Spirit Clearing

Ambrose Ibsen Asylum

Ambrose Ibsen Forest

Ambrose Ibsen The Occupant

Stephen King The Man in the Black Suit

Sam Sykes The City Stained Red

Peter Meredith The Queen Unthroned

Peter Meredith The Queen Enslaved

Nicholas Sansbury Smith Extinction Red Line

Nicholas Sansbury Smith Extinction Horizon

Nicholas Sansbury Smith Extinction Edge

Nicholas Sansbury Smith Extinction Age

Nicholas Sansbury Smith Extinction Evolution

Nicholas Sansbury Smith Extinction End

Nicholas Sansbury Smith Extinction Aftermath

Nicholas Sansbury Smith Extinction Lost

Nicholas Sansbury Smith Extinction War

Nicholas Sansbury Smith Missions from the Extinction Cycle

Drew Hayes Super Powereds Year 4

Dean Koontz Odd Thomas

Patrick F McManus Kerplunk! Stories

Mark Wayne McGinnis The Simpleton

Mark Wayne McGinnis The Simpleton Quest

John Connolly A Book of Bones

Drew Hayes Corpies

Nathan Ballingrud Wounds

Michael Todd Torn Asunder

Michael Todd Killing Is My Business

Michael Todd And Business Is Good

Marty Ross The Darkwater Bride

Richard Porter Top Gear Epic Failures 50 Great Motoring Cock-Ups

Parker Peevyhouse The Echo Room

P. K. Hawkins Shark Infested Waters

M. R. James The Conception of Terror Tales

Broad Reach Publishing I, Zombie

Bobby Hall Supermarket

Terry Pratchett Night Watch

Patrick F McManus Never Sniff a Gift Fish

Michael Talbot The Bog

Michael Edelson Seed

Matthew Scott Hansen The Shadowkiller

Jonathan Maberry Ghost Road Blues

Jonathan Maberry Dead Man's Song

Jonathan Maberry Bad Moon Rising

Jonathan Maberry Property Condemned

Jonathan Maberry Darkness on the Edge of Town

Chris Angus Flypaper

Dean Koontz The Night Window

John P. Logsdon Platoon F Big Ass Bundle

Robert Tomoguchi The Scribbled Victims

Richard MacLean Smith Unexplained

Mark Edwards The Retreat

Dennis E. Taylor Outland

Bobby Adair Freedom's Siege

Bobby Adair Freedom's Fire

Bobby Adair Freedom's Fury

Bobby Adair Freedom's Fray

Bobby Adair Freedom's Fist

Bobby Adair Freedom's Fall

Bobby Adair Freedom's Fate

William Gibson Alien III

Terry Brooks Running with the Demon

Steven Campbell Hard Luck Hank

Neal Stephenson Reamde

Neal Stephenson Fall, or Dodge in Hell

J.F. Holmes Irregular Scout Team One

Michael Stephen Fuchs Odyssey

Kameron Hurley The Light Brigade

TTC History of Ancient Egypt

Justin Cronin The Passage

Justin Cronin The Twelve

Justin Cronin The City of Mirrors

J.N. Chaney Orion Colony

J.N. Chaney Orion Uncharted

J.N. Chaney Orion Awakened

Christopher Dowell The Adventures of Badass Mike

Barry J. Hutchison Sentienced to Death

Adam Savage Every Tool's a Hammer

Rob Dircks Gigi Make Paradox

Eric Rickstad What Remains of Her

Robert Bevan 6d6

L. L. Akers Fight like a Man

L. L. Akers Shoot Like a Girl

L. L. Akers Run Like the Wind

Jonathan Mayberry Broken Lands

Alexander C. Kane Andrea Vernon and the Superhero-Industrial Complex

A.R. Shaw The China Pandemic

A.R. Shaw The Cascade Preppers

A.R. Shaw The Last Infidels mp3

A.R. Shaw The Malefic Nation

A.R. Shaw The Bitter Earth

Jim C. Hines Terminal Uprising

Mark Tufo Dog Days of War

Rick Gualtieri Get Bent!

Brian Keene Darkness on the Edge of Town

Christopher Moore Practical Demonkeeping

Christopher Moore The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove

Christopher Moore The Stupidest Angel

Chuck Wendig Wanderers

John Connolly Conquest

John Connolly Empire

John Connolly Dominion

C. J. Tudor The Taking of Annie Thorne

Wellington, David The Last Astronaut

S. Bennett A Womans Journey with the Worlds Worst Behaved Dog

Levi Black Red Right Hand

Levi Black Black Goat Blues

Eoin Colfer Artemis Fowl

Eoin Colfer The Arctic Incident

Eoin Colfer The Eternity Code

Eoin Colfer The Opal Deception

Eoin Colfer The Lost Colony

Eoin Colfer The Time Paradox

Eoin Colfer The Atlantis Complex

Eoin Colfer The Last Guardian

Ambrose Ibsen Transmission

Daniel Green End Time

Daniel Green The Breaking

Daniel Green The Rising

Patrick F McManus The Bear in the Attic

Mark Tufo Encounters

Mark Tufo Reckoning

Mark Tufo Conquest

Mark Tufo From the Ashes

Mark Tufo Into the Fire

Mark Tufo Victory's Defeat

Mark Tufo Defeat's Victory

Brett Battles Mine

Caitlin Starling the luminous dead

Craig A. Falconer Not Alone

Craig A. Falconer Second Contact

Craig A. Falconer The Final Call

Gardner Dozois Down These Strange Streets

Greig Beck Primordia

Kevin  Hearne Kill the Farm Boy

Kevin  Hearne No Country for Old Gnomes

Kathleen Meyer How to Shit in the Woods

Joe Hill NOS4A2

Drew Hayes The Case of the Damaged Detective

Simon Haynes Robot vs Dragons

Nora Roberts Blood Brothers

Nora Roberts The Hollows

Nora Roberts The Pagan Stone

Peter F. Hamilton The Reality Dysfunction

Paul Tremblay The Cabin at the End of the World

Gerry Griffiths Down from Beast Mountain

Eoin Colfer The Reluctant Assassin

Eoin Colfer The Hangman's Revolution

Eoin Colfer The Forever Man

C A Fletcher A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World

N.C. Reed Odd Billy Todd

Stephen King The Shining

Stephen King Doctor Sleep

Richard J. Dewhurst The Ancient Giants Who Ruled America

Laird Barron The Croning

Keith C. Blackmore The Troll Hunter

J.L. McPherson The Gorge

Erin Bowman Contagion

Erin Bowman Immunity

Stephen King The Institute

Douglas Adams Starship Titanic

Lee Murray Into the Mist

Lee Mountford The Mark

Keith C. Blackmore White Sands, Red Steel

Joe Hill The Fireman

Barry J. Hutchison The Hunt for Reduk Topa

Greig Beck Return to the Lost World

Greig Beck The Lost World

Ted Dekker Obsessed

James D. Prescott Extinction Code

James D. Prescott Extinction Countdown

James D. Prescott Extinction Crisis

James D. Prescott Missions from the Extinction Cycle 2

Dean Koontz Strange Highways

Mira Grant Rolling in the Deep

Mira Grant Into the Drowning Deep

Luke Romyn Ash

Thomas Olde Heuvelt Hex

Jeremiah Knight Hunger

Jeremiah Knight Feast

T. Kingfisher The Twisted Ones

Patrick F McManus The Horse in My Garage

Jeff Strand Wolf Hunt

Jeff Strand Wolf Hunt 2

Annie Wilder Trucker Ghost Stories

Kathryn Croft The Girl with No Past

Larry Correia Monster Hunter International

Larry Correia Vendetta

Larry Correia Alpha

Larry Correia Legion

Larry Correia Nemesis

Larry Correia Siege

Larry Correia Guardian

Nicholas Sansbury Smith Extinction Inferno

Jack Townsend Tales from the Gas Station

Dean R Koontz Phantoms

Scott Sigler Blood Is Red

Stephen Chbosky Imaginary Friend

Larry Correia Grunge

Larry Correia Sinners

Larry Correia Saints

Larry Correia The Monster Hunter Files

Dean Koontz Innocence

Hugh Howey Half Way Home

Shaun Hamill A Cosmology of Monsters

Cameron Milan Zombie Slayer!!

Charles Soule The Oracle Year

Christopher Moore Practical Demonkeeping

Christopher Moore The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove

Christopher Moore The Stupidest Ange

Iain Rob Wright Sea Sick

Iain Rob Wright Ravage

Iain Rob Wright Savage

Keith C. Blackmore 131 Days

Keith C. Blackmore House of Pain

Keith C. Blackmore Spikes and Edges

Keith C. Blackmore About the Blood

Keith C. Blackmore To Thunderous Applause

Kevin Hearne The Princess Beard

Adrian Tchaikovsky Walking to Aldebaran

Cixin Liu Supernova Era

Dave Pedneau Night, Winter, and Death

Dean Koontz Nameless

Jack Hunt As We Fall

Jack Hunt As We Break

Katherine Arden Small Spaces

Katherine Arden Dead Voices

Larry Correia #1 in Customer Service

Myke Cole The Armored Saint

Myke Cole The Sacred Throne

Myke Cole The Killing Light

C. T. Phipps The Future of Supervillainy

Charlie Huston The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death

T.W. Piperbrook St. Matthews

T.W. Piperbrook Onset

T.W. Piperbrook Crossroads

T.W. Piperbrook Wasteland

Paul Tremblay Disappearance at Devil’s Rock

Ferrett Steinmetz The Sol Majestic

Grady Hendrix Horrorstör

Mark Tufo The Perfect Betrayal

William Goldman The Princess Bride

Joseph John The Eighth Day

Stephen King Gwendy's Button Box

Richard Chizmar Gwendy's Magic Feather

Ronald Malfi Snow

Robert Bevan Critical Failures VII

Mark Tufo Winter's Rising

Mark Tufo Cedar's Conflict

Mark Tufo The Edge of Deceit

Michael McBride Unidentified

Scott Sigler Infected

Scott Sigler Contagious

Prescott, James D The Genesis Conspiracy

Michael Crichton Andromeda Strain

Michael Crichton The Andromeda Evolution

Melanie Golding Little Darlings

Iain Rob Wright Escape!

Ambrose Ibsen Midnight in a Perfect World

Scott Baron Bad Luck Charlie

Scott Baron Space Pirate Charlie

Scott Baron The Dragon Mage

[oneweekoneband]

King’s X - Talk To You (from Faith Hope Love 1990)

Before we go any further, I should clear something up. King’s X did not invent grunge.

No matter what Jeff Ament said on MTV that one time. (Which, if you can find a direct source for that quote, you’re one up on me.) No matter how cool dUg was to Mike Inez after that ‘89 Reseda show. Yes, King’s X reached drop-D nirvana before most of the Seattle bands, but I have it on good authority that King Buzzo hipped Kim Thayil to drop-D in ‘86, the same year of Ty’s epiphany, so at best Ty is A.R. Wallace to their Darwin. Soundgarden’s first drop-D on record was “Nothing to Say” in ‘87, the year before Planet dropped, and it was as slow and sludgy and ugly as “Pleiades” was clean and arranged. And anyway, drop-D was but one tool in the grunge tool kit, along with opiods and trying to out-drawl Cher circa “Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves.”

King’s X fans have nevertheless clung to this bit of Ament apocrypha. This is less because Ament’s eyes crinkle with penetrating wisdom tempered by perpetual mischief (although they do), and more because King’s X should have been huge but never was. King’s X’s dirty little secret is that it tried desperately to be huge, and failed. Chastened by this near-miss, fans and band members alike cling to praise and lore like scraps from the music biz table.

The album meant to bring forth this hugeness was Faith Hope Love, which in retrospect seems hilarious. It was a Christian prog-metal concept album about 1 Corinthians chapter 13. Any word of that description might forestall the possibility of Billboard hititude, especially the “Christian” -- Amy Grant’s crossover smash Heart In Motion was still a year away, and Michael W. Smith was only starting to blaze a trail that led to vice. 

The strange thing was, FHL almost did the trick. “It’s Love” went top 10 on the Mainstream Rock chart, trapped like Elon Musk’s faithful shareholders between Tesla and Bad Company. The band scored a song on the Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey soundtrack -- which, OK, you scoff, but that sucker turned a profit and a good review from none less than Roger fuckin’ Ebert. The band was one crossover hit away from becoming, if not Pearl Jam, at least Queensryche.

The deep cut “Talk to You” demonstrates, in three riffs, how you might connect the dots from King’s X to the northwestern sasquatch scene, especially Soundgarden. The opening drop-D-for-beginners riff lumbers like “Nothing to Say.” Turning on a dime, King’s X anticipates two riffs from Badmotorfinger: the speedy squiggles of “Rusty Cage” and the full band jackhammer of “Jesus Christ Pose,” with everyone accenting their notes so weirdly you can’t believe Jerry held it all together. Everyone brings their vocal game -- dUg with his mid-song scene-stealer “IIIIIIIIIII got the blues this morning,” one of the top five marginal radnesses in the band’s catalog, and the whole group “ahhhh”-ing like the men’s chorus in New Order’s “Blue Monday.”

Trivia time! Soundgarden, of course, did not stop at drop-D. They swiftly went to drop-C and beyond, which is some real 7-Minute Abs shit. But Thayil and Chris Cornell did all sorts of other unspeakable things to their tuning pegs, which backs up my theory that, while the two bands’ trips might be cladistically related, one did not beget the other.

[morebedsidebooks]

Aux livres de chevet […] Aux livres de chevet, livres de l’art serein, Obermann et Genlis, Ver-vert et le Lutrin, Blasé de nouveauté grisâtre et saugrenue, J’espère, la vieillesse étant enfin venue, Ajouter le Traité du Docteur Venetti. Je saurai, revenu du public abêti, Goûter le charme ancien des dessins nécessaires. Écrivain et graveur ont doré les misères Sexuelles : et c’est, n’est-ce pas, cordial : D R  VENETTI, Traité de l’Amour conjugal. To the bedside books […] To the bedside books, books of serene art, Obermann, and Genlis, Ver-Vert and the Lutrin, Bored with insipid strange novelties, I hope, old age having come at last, To add the Treatise of Dr. Venetti. Disillusioned with the dull public, I will be able To enjoy the old charm of indispensable drawings. Writer and Engraver have gilded the sexual. Miseries, and that is heartening, is it not: D R  VENETTI, Treatise on Conjugal Love. F. COPPÉE. A.R.

—Arthur Rimbaud, Album Zutique (1871-1872?), English translation by Wallace Fowlie

[arwallace]

New Writeblr ✏️

Hello everyone! My name is Alexi, but I go by the pen name A.R Wallace. I’ve been stalking this community for a while (wow that sounded so stalkerish— I apologize) and have finally gotten the courage to make a new tumblr just so I can truly engage.

I am currently working on two novels which are part of the same series (if you’re really interested in what I mean by that please message me and I’d be more than happy to go into detail). I keep finding myself giving up and scrapping the original concept but I’ve finally found one that will hopefully stick and I would love for this community to help me finish them.

I will be sharing excerpts of both of my novels, some things about my OC’s, writing tips I stumble across as well as prompts (which I may also complete myself and share), and of course the occasional Marvel gifset because I often find inspiration from these and also they make me laugh.

I really want to be able to connect with other writers on here, so please reblog/like and I will follow back!

[timetolearnoclock]

Rub your eyes

“A bird to make you rub your eyes -- Wallace’s Standard-wing. A.R. Wallace, the bird’s discoverer, observed that it differs “most remarkably from every other”. He found it in the Moluccas, isolated by water from the other Paradise Birds. The four white plumes can be lowered at will.”

February 1950

Quote taken from original text included with the image in the magazine

[swipestream]

An Excerpt from DO WE NEED GOD TO BE GOOD?

In addition to science fiction and fantasy, Castalia House also publishes thought-provoking non-fiction. Here is an excerpt from anthropologist Dr. Hallpike’s conclusive demolition of evolutionary psychology, among other things, DO WE NEED GOD TO BE GOOD?

‘Evolutionary psychologists’, who claim that our human abilities and traits are very specific adaptations to the problems of pre-historic life on the savannah in East Africa, have not faced up to the fact that we know virtually nothing about what this life involved, about the social relations and organisation of our ancestors in those remote epochs, and still less about their mental capacities. If we are going to use the theory of natural selection to explain the characteristics of any species, it is obviously essential to have a detailed knowledge of their behaviour in relation to their environment. In the case of a social species it is particularly important to observe the relations between individuals, and modern studies of chimpanzees and gorillas are obvious examples of how this should be done.

But while it is reasonable to assume that our ancestors in this remote period lived in very small groups of gatherers and scavenger/hunters, and to deduce from this that we must have been an innately sociable species for a very long time, and that some of the well-established gender differences seem to be adaptations to this way of life, it is difficult to be sure about much else. Normal science proceeds from the known to the unknown, but evolutionary psychology tries to do it the other way round.

Language is central to human culture, but we do not even know when our ancestors were first able to utter sentences like ‘Shall we go hunting tomorrow?’, and it is quite possible that they only achieved this level of linguistic ability well within the last 100,000 years or so. But without language there would have been no way of referring to the future or the past, no means of conveying information, no group planning, no way of communicating group norms and ideas of sharing and cheating, and no discussion of technology and other problems of survival. We cannot even imagine what a pre-linguistic human society might have been like. It cannot be sufficiently emphasized, therefore, that our profound ignorance about early humans is quite incompatible with any informed discussion of possible adaptations.

Even in the case of the earliest Homo sapiens sapiens from around 200,000 years ago we do not know what sort of things they might have said to each other, (or if they could have said much at all), what made them laugh, or even if they laughed, what they quarrelled about or how they organised sharing within the group. Nor do we have any idea when they first had personal names, or when they could form the ideas of ‘grandfather’, or ‘mother’s brother’, or when they developed the idea of some sort of official union between adult men and women, or if they exchanged women between bands, or how hunting co-operation was organized, or what sort of leadership existed. Nor do we know when humans first had ideas of magic and symbolism, gods, ghosts, and spirits, or when or why they first performed religious rituals and disposed of the dead in a more than merely physical manner.

Ignoring these drastic limitations on our knowledge has meant that many so-called ‘adaptive explanations’ are merely pseudo-scientific ‘Just So Stories’, often made up without any anthropological knowledge, that have increasingly brought evolutionary psychology into disrepute. For example, it has been claimed (in the Proceedings of the Royal Society no less) that more than a million years ago, early humans lost their body hair because it was full of nasty parasites, and potential mates therefore preferred partners with the least amount of hair so that it was eliminated by sexual selection. Instead of body hair, humans took to wearing clothes: ‘clothes, unlike fur, can be changed and cleaned’. We know nothing whatsoever about the sexual preferences of our ancestors a million years ago, but at least we know they could not possibly have had clothes, because these have only been around for a few thousand years since the introduction of farming and weaving. Another example of an adaptive theory, recently published in New Scientist , is obviously based on the author’s experience of living in London rather than on any anthropological knowledge about hunter-gatherers. ‘The first, and most ancient function of manners is to solve the problem of how to be social without getting sick [from other people’s germs].’ No it isn’t. If there was a ‘first and most ancient function of manners’ it would have been to reduce social friction among small groups of people who have to live and get along with one another, and a hunter-gatherer band was, in any case, the environment where one had the least chance in human history of catching a disease from someone else.

Some years previously, New Scientist also published an evolutionary explanation of nightmares: ‘In the ancestral environment human life was short and full of threats’, so that ‘A dream-production mechanism that tends to select threatening events, and to simulate them over and over again in various combinations, would have been valuable for the development of threat-avoiding skills’. Since most people wake up screaming when the threat comes, however, nightmares seem a most unpromising educational tool. And as I write, yet another evolutionary knee-slapper has appeared, in Biological Reviews, this time maintaining that men’s faces and jaws are more robust than women’s because for millions of years men have engaged in fist fights. The problem here is that we know from anthropological studies that hunter-gatherers are not recorded as engaging in fist fights but in physical conflicts typically use weapons like clubs, spears, or rocks because they are so much more effective than trying to use one’s bare hands. Boxing as such is a skill that has to be deliberately taught and is only found in a small minority of societies which makes it extremely unlikely that it was an important form of human combat for millions of years.

The second problem is that if our ancestors were so closely adapted to the environment of prehistoric East Africa, this should be able to tell us a great deal about their subsequent behaviour, especially during the last 10,000 years of maximal social and cultural change. For example, we would expect humans, in their expansion all over the globe, to have chosen environments with a discernible resemblance to the savannah of East Africa, and to have avoided those that differed markedly from it, like rain-forests, deserts, the Arctic, islands in the Pacific Ocean, and high mountain ranges. We would also expect them, after millions of years of simple, egalitarian hunter-gatherer existence in small groups, to have been strongly resistant to the formation of large-scale, highly stratified societies, and again to have had great difficulty in mastering mathematics, science, and modern electronic technology, just to mention a few glaring examples of major cultural change.

Yet we know very well that in these and innumerable other respects, human habitats, social organisation, culture, technology and modes of thought have diverged in wildly different ways from the simple model of Man in his prehistoric environment, so that evolutionary psychology has no predictive value at all in these essential respects. This alone makes it very unlikely that human abilities and dispositions were ever closely adapted to particular ancestral conditions. ‘Among the multitude of animals which scamper, fly, burrow and swim around us, man is the only one who is not locked into his environment. His imagination, his reason, his emotional subtlety and toughness, make it possible for him not to accept the environment but to change it.’

Thirdly, Man’s extraordinary intellectual abilities, in particular, raise the problem that in Darwinian theory biological adaptations can only be to existing circumstances, never to those that might be encountered in the future. We did not acquire our mathematical abilities, for example, so that thousands of years later we could be good with computers. This fundamental point about human abilities was first made by A.R. Wallace, Darwin’s co-formulator of the theory of natural selection, who had extensive first-hand acquaintance with hunter-gatherers of the Amazon and south-east Asia. He noted that on the one hand their mode of life made only very limited intellectual demands on them, and did not require abstract concepts of number and geometry, space, time, music, and advanced ethical principles, yet as individuals they were potentially capable of mastering the highly demanding cognitive skills of modern industrial civilisation if they were given the chance to acquire them. Since, as noted, natural selection can only produce traits that are adapted to existing, and not future, conditions, it ‘could only have endowed savage man with a brain a little superior to that of an ape, where he actually possesses one little inferior to that of a philosopher’.

This is particularly obvious in the case of mathematics, where even today many simple cultures, especially hunter-gatherers but including some shifting cultivators may only have words for single, pair, and many. The Tauade of Papua New Guinea with whom I lived were like this, and indeed, the hunter-gatherer Piraha of South America are described as having no number words at all, not even the grammatical distinction between singular and plural. We can get a good idea why this should be so from the example of a Cree hunter from eastern Canada: he was asked in a court case involving land how many rivers there were in his hunting territory, and did not know:

The hunter knew every river in his territory individually and therefore had no need to know how many there were. Indeed, he would know each stretch of each river as an individual thing and therefore had no need to know in numerical terms how long the rivers were. The point of the story is that we count things when we are ignorant of their individual identity—this can arise when we don’t have enough experience of the objects, when there are too many of them to know individually, or when they are all the same, none of which conditions obtain very often for a hunter. If he has several knives they will be known individually by their different sizes, shapes, and specialized uses. If he has several pairs of moccasins they will be worn to different degrees, having been made at different times, and may be of different materials and design.

What needs to be emphasised here, therefore, is that our hunter-gatherer ancestors could easily have survived without the need for verbal numerals or for any counting at all, and that consequently there could have been no selective pressure for arithmetical skills to evolve in the specific conditions of the Pleistocene of East Africa. As we all know, mathematics has only flowered in the last few centuries, and among a tiny minority of people, far too brief a time-span for natural selection to have had the least effect. The mathematician Keith Devlin very reasonably concludes: ‘Whatever features of our brain enable (some of) us to do mathematics must have been present long before we had any mathematics. Those crucial features, therefore, must have evolved to fulfil some other purpose’(my emphasis). Because we have no idea what that ‘other purpose’ might have been we are obviously not going to discover the origin of the mathematical features of the human brain from anything we suppose our ancestors might have been doing in pre-history.

Mathematics is only one particularly glaring example of a whole range of advanced human thought in logic, philosophy, and science, of a type known as ‘formal operations’, which has only emerged in literate civilisations, and is never found among hunter-gatherers. This general type of thought must therefore be the result, like mathematics, of the brain using its faculties in novel ways, which therefore cannot be traced back to African prehistory.

An Excerpt from DO WE NEED GOD TO BE GOOD? published first on https://medium.com/@ReloadedPCGames

[mamcollection]

What Sold—and for How Much—in Art Basel 2020 Virtual Art Fair

David Zwirner

Balloon Venus Lespugue (Red) Jeff Koons $8 million

Hauser and Wirth 

The Press of Democracy, 2020 Mark Bradford $5,000,000

Painting Mixed media on canvas 287.0 x 359.4 (cm)113.0 x 141.5 (inch) 

‘The Press of Democracy’ (2020) features a loose urban grid in bright blue, with organic golds, browns, and blacks radiating from the center, evoking the release of mounting pressure caused by the suppression of kinetic energy. Using his signature techniques of layering paper, rope, and other materials onto canvas and processing the surface to reveal complex intersections between layers of meaning, Mark Bradford’s most recent work examines a world undone by crisis. Named after a chapter from ‘Gotham’, Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace’s monumental history of New York City, ‘The Press of Democracy’ considers the unspooling of generations of established power structures. Bradford makes a case for the animating power of abstract painting at a moment when everything seems up for grabs.

--

Gladstone Gallery

Untitled, 1982 Keith Haring $4.75 million

Painting Enamel and dayglo on metal 230.0 x 184.0 (cm)90.6 x 72.4 (inch) Provenance: The Keith Haring Foundation, New York

Throughout his career, Keith Haring (b. 1958, Reading, Pennsylvania) used his signature artistic vocabulary to become a spokesperson for his generation, responding to many of the urgent social and political issues that defined his lifetime. Beginning with his first works in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Haring developed a universal language comprised of iconographic motifs – including barking dogs and dancing figures – that remained accessible and recognizable to a global audience. 

The painting ‘Untitled’ (1982) is an iconic representation of how Haring employed these motifs to create an exuberant composition that speak to both formal expertise and brilliance in conveying social messages. Here, his use of day-glo paint captures the vibrant energy of his age, one shaped in part by a popular underground club culture, street art , and Neo-Expressionist painting. As an artist, Haring provided a unique take on universal concepts such as birth, death, love, and war, ultimately creating an oeuvre that remains as relevant today as it was during his lifetime.

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David Zwirner

Untitled (Blot), 2015 Kerry James Marshall $3 million (to an American museum)

Painting Acrylic on PVC panel 213.7 x 303.5 (cm)84.1 x 119.5 (inch)

Experience Kerry James Marshall's Untitled (Blot) in depth and explore Basel Online: 15 Rooms on David Zwirner Online → Engaged in an ongoing dialogue with six centuries of representational painting, Kerry James Marshall (b. 1955) has deftly reinterpreted and updated its tropes, compositions, and styles. At the center of his prodigious oeuvre, which also includes drawings and sculpture, is the critical recognition of the conditions of invisibility so long ascribed to black figures in the Western pictorial tradition. For his Blots series, Marshall utilizes the language of abstraction to suggest alternative ways in which black experiences are formally manifested in painting. Like his more familiar figurative images, the artist’s Blots invite viewers to consider what, and whom, the history of abstraction has obscured.

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Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art, New York

The Nineties (1980) Ed Ruscha $2.4 million

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Anthony Meier Fine Arts, San Francisco

Untitled (87-33) (1987) Donald Judd $1.85 million

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White Cube

Komplementär bräunlich (2012) Georg Baselitz $1.66 million:

Baselitz cites as an influence Italian abstract painter Lucio Fontana, who made his images by slicing or digging into monochromatic fields of colour to reveal black voids behind the picture plane: “I wanted an apparition, something that appears out of the depth”.

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Hauser and Wirth

The Fragile (2007) Louise Bourgeois $1.5 million

Diagonal Evolution (2020) George Condo $1.4 million

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Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac

Elke in Frankreich II (2019) Georg Baselitz $1.35 million

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Luhring Augustine, New York

Untitled (1990) Glenn Ligon $1.2 million

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Xavier Hufkens, Brussels

White Snow Cake (2017) Paul McCarthy $1.2 million

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Galerie Max Hetzler

Intervals 6, 2019 Bridget Riley  $1.2 million

Painting oil on linen 271.0 x 181.0 (cm)106.7 x 71.3 (inch)

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Hauser and Wirth

Untitled, 1972  Ed Clark $1.2 million

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David Zwirner

Pastel (1991) Joan Mitchell > $1 million

Work on Paper

City, 1928 - 1936 Josef Albers $1 million

Painting Tempera on Masonite in artist's frame 56.2 x 109.9 (cm)22.1 x 43.3 (inch)

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Almine Rech, Brussels

The Dreamer (2008) George Condo $950,000–1 million

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Skarstedt

Ralf III (Remix), 2005 Georg Baselitz $900,000

Painting oil on canvas 300.0 x 250.0 (cm)118.1 x 98.4 (inch)

'Ralf III (Remix)' belongs to Georg Baselitz’s acclaimed Remix series, a self-referential body of work that the artist began in the autumn of 2005, in which he revisits and re-interprets subjects from earlier decades of his practice. Addressing his own personal history through the lens of retrospection, the Remix series confronts how perceptions evolve and transform over time, especially within the context of Germany’s dark and troubled past which so persistently reveals itself in Baselitz’s work. Often enlarged and rapidly painted, the spontaneity with which the works in the series are executed gives rise to mnemonic flashes of things in the past, present, and future. Extreme transformations of the their muted, more ponderous forerunners, this particular work makes reference to Baselitz’s Ralf series painted in 1965. 'Ralf-kopf' pre-dates Baselitz’s inverted pictures by four years and sits within a seminal body of work that would form the basis of Baselitz’s artistic investigations that still continue today. The character Ralf is an imaginary depiction of fellow neo-expressionist painter A.R. Penck (real name Ralf Winkler) who is depicted once again in the present work, held in a moment of isolated introspection. Baselitz would paint three versions of Ralf in 1965, one of which now resides in the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

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Galerie Max Hetzler

The Flaming Fields, 2020 Walton Ford $850,000

Painting watercolour, gouache and ink on paper 212.1 x 151.8 (cm)83.5 x 59.8 (inch)

VAT, where applicable, is not included in the asking price.

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Hauser and Wirth

$850,000: Lee Lozano, No Title (ca. 1964) $730,000, $619,000: Günther Förg, Untitled (2007)

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David Zwirner

Im Turm, 2019 Neo Rauch $500,000

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Levy Gorvy

Mother, 2020 Dan Colen $500,000

Painting Oil on canvas 149.9 x 383.5 (cm)59.0 x 151.0 (inch)

“I have a natural inclination towards using nostalgia as a creative prompt. I have always been interested in the power of cliché. But I still feel very connected to the idea that an artwork must be a reflection of my most individual self and an expression of my most intimate feelings. And so these Mother paintings allow me to explore that tension between the deeply personal and the universal.” —Dan Colen

Dan Colen began his Mother series in 2013, using stills from animated Disney films as source imagery and translating their compositions into traditional oil-on-canvas paintings.

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Lisson Gallery

Listening to the Poets, 2020 Stanley Whitney $450,000

Painting Oil on linen 243.8 x 304.8 (cm) 96.0 x 120.0 (inch)

“I don’t worry about what the color does. If it feels right, if it sits right... To me, it’s all about how things feel. I never know what the colors are going to be... I’m trying to open up space, for people to wander.” — Stanley Whitney

Discussing color entails abstraction; any color represents much more than its literal color, and the discussion is abstract especially when the paintings aren’t representational.

The effects of color call up many responses: visceral, physical, neurological, instinctive, impulsive, adjectives that require others to satisfy or elucidate usage. I can say: the eye communicates with the brain, so that we see. The brain receives signals and creates, constructs, or pieces together an image. It’s involuntary activity, as are sensations, which have no organic basis.

“I don’t know what color does,” Whitney tells me, and says he doesn’t have a theory of color. His art engages with and is about that question, actively playing and working with perception, involuntary responses as well as voluntary ones. Knowing something about painting will usually charge a viewer’s relationship to a painting, and bring other meanings to it.

– Lynne Tillman, Afternoon Paintings, Lisson Gallery catalogue, 2020

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Stephen Friedman Gallery

Happiness Beyond Paradise, 2020 Luiz Zerbini $400,000-450,000

Acrylic on canvas300 x 600cm (118 1/8 x 236 1/4in)

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Hauser and Wirth

Still Life, 2020 Nicolas Party $250,000

Source: Ocula, ArtnetNews

[dorakssid]

SOLOING in Sulawesi, wanna hang out? Part 1.

A kedves családom egészen sokáig kétségek közt hagyott azt illetően, hogy akkor december végén látogatnak-e meg, és trópusi karácsonyt tartunk, vagy csak később jönnek és akkor nélkülözni fognak idén a konyhából, a töltött káposzta mellől. Ez azt is jelentette, hogy az elhatározásomat, hogy ha ők nem jönnek, akkor én szépen elindulok még egy kicsit jobban világgá, időnként megtörték azzal, hogy ja, amúgy lehet hogy mégis Balira megyünk közösen. Ez a lelkesedésemnek, meg az izgulásomnak nem igazán tett jót, és újra meg újra határozottan ki kellett jelentenem magamnak, hogy akkor csinálok egy ilyen hátizsákos egyedül utazós túrát, ami amúgy jóval könnyebb, mint maga az elhatározás. És utólag rájöttem arra is, hogy utaztam már egyedül helyekre, de azokat valamiért nem ugyanígy éltem meg.

Van egy csoport Facebookon, Female Solo Traveler Network, ahol mindenféle korosztályból jövő nők osztják meg a történeteiket, hogy miért, hogyan és hová utaztak egyedül. Vannak olyan tagok is, akik még bátorságot gyűjtenek meg ölteteket, de az biztos, hogy a minden poszt tele van unalmas klisékkel. Cserébe mindegyik kap több ezer szivecskét, nem is csak lájkot. És énis szivecskézni szoktam. Mert olyan igaz és igazi a legtöbb dolog, amit megfogalmaznak és tényleg kedves és támogató mindenki, látszik az is, hogy sokaknak rettentő sok bátorságot ad, amit ott látnak és olvasnak.

Szóval nem én voltam ez első a világtörténelemben aki erre szánta magát, de azért maga az elhatározás egy kicsit talán mégis ijesztő volt. Egészen az első repjegy megvételéig, után már teljesen gördülékenyen meg praktikusan történtek az előkészületek.

Innen - onnan összegereblyéztem infokat meg tippeket és végül megszületett a terv. Korábban jöttem rá arra is, hogy ha van terv, akkor simán eltérek tőle és csinálok egy csomó mást, vagy mást is, mintha terv sem lenne, hanem csak úgy elindulnék a vakvilágba. Szóval úgy nézett ki, hogy elrepülök Jáváról egy másik szigetre, Celebeszre, amit itt Sulawesinek hívnak. Valamiért ez a Celebesz nekem tök régtől megvan, nem különösebben infók, csak a sziget neve. Szerintem a kávés macska miatt, akinek az ürülékből kikapirgálják a kávét, majd nagyon gazdag emberek nagyon sok pénzt fizetnek, hogy azt ihassák. Cibetmacska néven fut (köszi Google!).

Rémlett még valami vonal is, ami ehhez a szigethez közel húzódik és lelkes tizensok éves NatGeo fogyasztóként olvastam róla. Ez a képzeletbeli vonal, a Wallace vonal, aminek egy szakasza Borneó és Celebesz között húzódik és elválasztja egymástól az ázsiai és ausztrál faunaterületeket. A.R. Wallace figyelt fel arra, hogy az ausztrál és a dél-kelet ázsiai emlősök egészen eltérőek, ugyanis a dél-kelet ázsiaiak jóval fejlettebbek. Elképzelése szerinte az ázsiai nagymajmok azt követően kezdtek fejlődni, hogy az ausztrál földrész levált a kontinensről, kiszorítva így azokat az emlősöket, akik Ausztráliában fenn tudtak maradni. Celebesz pont a Wallace vonal mentén fekszik, úgyhogy egy ilyen határeset sziget, Ázsiához tartozik, az állatvilága mégsem a jellemző ázsiai, sok olyan állat is akad, amiknek inkább Ausztráliában lenne a helye. Elég nagy szerencséjük van, hogy ezen a köztes szigeten rekedtek és nem égnek meg éppen teljesen…

Mondjuk állatvilág szempontjából nem voltam túl jó felfedező, mert sok-sok halacskán meg fura bogáron kívül állatot sokat nem láttam. Ó de, kecskéket a kikötő városokban pálmafák alatt ellenni. Elég vicces. Bár a kecskék pont semennyire nem relevánsak a Wallace vonal szempontjából.

Kettő fő állomásom volt ezen a nagyon fura alakú szigeten, a közép Celebeszen lévő Tana Toraja, ahol a helyiek máig követik az elég szokatlan, meg elég creepy temetkezési szokásaikat. A másik pedig a nagyon durván nehezen megközelíthető cserébe csodaszép Togean szigetek és az ott lévő pici falvak, ahol a bajo nép, a „vizicigányok” élnek.

Vicces módon azzal kezdtem a tripet, hogy a jakartai reptéren kettő darab fél pár zoknit sikerült elhagynom, fogalmam sincs hogyan, de legalább az egyik hosszú szárú a másik meg rövid, hogy még együtt se lehessen hordani az elárvult darabokat, ráadásul egy darab házimanót sem tartok, akiket fel lehetne szabadítani velük, nem hogy kettőt.

Szokatlan volt az is hogy, a repcsi úton csak két ember készített velem szelfit, pedig alkalomhoz illően öltöztem fel, mivel már nagyon fel voltam készülve hogy jósok ismeretlen ember instastoryjában fogok szerepelni. Csak remélni tudom, hogy azért titokban fotózgattam az emberek és nem ment kárba az outfitem.

A Togean szigetek, a Celebesz északi részén található, jó nagy C betű alakú földnyelv kellős közepén vannak, ez a terület a búvárok egyik fő indonéziai állomása, mert nagyon izgi és változatos és csodaszép a vízi világa. Ennek ellenére még minding aránylag kevesen jönnek ide, mivel tényleg nem könnyű úticél. 

Az anyukámnak épp a napokban mertem elmondani, hogy amúgy tök lázasan meg megfázva indultam el, mert korábban úgy gondoltam, hogy az esős évszakban nem kell nekem rendesen felöltözni, tökre adom én a nyári esőt. Hát az nem olyan, mint a kellemes, otthoni nyáresti eső. Bőrig áztat és nem áll el órákig és jól megbetegszik tőle az ember.  Így a szép szigetekre való eljutáshoz, a 14 órás, borzalmasan fülledt komp úton, az új Harry Styles albumot kb. negyedszer hallgatva, számolgattam az Algopirinemet, hogy ha beveszek x-et hogy túléljem a kompot, akkor mennyi marad még, hogy vállalható állapotban maradjak a szigeteken is.  Bonyolult egyenlet volt.

A szigeteken egyszerűen annyi történt, ami elvárható egy nagyon menő, nagyon trópusi szigettől. Semmi. És az ilyen semmi a legjobb. Csend, víz, nap, halacskák, könyvek, kedves, fura, random emberek, kismadarak, meg pillangók, tisztán látszó csillagok, állítólag delfinek reggelenként, de őket sajnos sorra sikerült átaludnom, meg néha jósok eső is. Ó és nem volt internet. Nem volt könnyű belehelyezkedni ekkora kényelembe és semmit tevésbe, de a durva az, hogy otthagyni még sokkal nehezebb volt.

A szigetek elengedését az sem könnyítette meg, hogy a hullámok hangja után, a következő éjjel, a homsetayem közvetlen közelében lévő három darab mecset három különböző imára hívása, egy karaoke klub és szerintem körülbelül négy millió kakas közös produkciójára próbáltam meg elaludni, sikertelenül természetesen.

Ezután következett 24 óra kellemes Indonéz elektro pop zene, nagyonsok, nagyonkanyargós kilométer, egy csomó útszéli kajálda egyébként tök fincsi kajákkal, és a remény hogy egyszer az életben még eljutok Tana Torajaba anélkül, hogy kitépném a magnót a kocsiból és kivágnám az ablakon.

A következő részből az is kiderül, hogy ez sikerül-e.

[hulusan]

Film Club: ‘The Animated Life of A.R. Wallace’

By NATALIE PROULX Why does history remember some and not others? Published: April 11, 2019 at 04:30AM from NYT The Learning Network https://nyti.ms/2Uvt5Zr

[izayoi1242]

Film Club: ‘The Animated Life of A.R. Wallace’

By NATALIE PROULX Why does history remember some and not others? Published: April 11, 2019 at 09:00AM from NYT The Learning Network https://nyti.ms/2Uvt5Zr via IFTTT

[topnewsfromtheworld]

Film Club: ‘The Animated Life of A.R. Wallace’

By NATALIE PROULX Why does history remember some and not others? Published: April 11, 2019 at 01:00AM from NYT The Learning Network https://nyti.ms/2Uvt5Zr

[brandonraykirk]

Chapmanville News 03.26.1929

Community news for #Chapmanville #LoganCounty #WV (1929) #Appalachia #history #genealogy #ChurchofChrist

An unknown correspondent from Chapmanville in Logan County, West Virginia, offered the following items, which the Logan Banner printed on March 26, 1929:

At a called meeting of the members of the Church of Christ of Chapmanville Friday night the church as reorganized. New officers, who will assume their duties at once, were chosen as follows: Elders—O.C. Winters, Al Chafin and W.A. McCloud, for…

[kgenius23]

Just Pinned to Interesting, Serendipitous; You don't wanna miss this!: The Animated Life of A.R. Wallace (Director's Cut) http://ift.tt/2j49fjJ