Balancing Science and Poetry

Dougald realises how his work these days has come to orbit around the future and discovers he’s accidentally became a futurist

Ed shares his journey to accidental, reluctant, futurism

Then Dougald introduces this week’s instruction is ‘See Double!’

Ed talks about Double Vision or Diplopia - the simultaneous perception of two images of a single object that may be displaced horizontally, vertically, diagonally - both vertically and horizontally and how its often voluntary.

Ed references Thundercats ‘Sword of Omens’! ‘Give me sight beyond sight!’ (a first for the podcast) and the 2002 movie ‘Double Vision’ about a serial killer who impregnates victims with a black fungus that causes hallucinations, compelling them to kill themselves (don’t do these kind of shrooms!)...based on a Taoist belief that to become a ‘Xian’ (enlightened immortal) one must endure the 5 sufferings…

Frigid Hell, Fire Hell, Disembowelment Hell, Heart-Extracting Hell, and Tongue-Removal Hell

Diplopia can also be one of the first signs of a systemic disease, particularly to a muscular or neurological process, and it may disrupt a person's balance, movement, or reading abilities. Is our double vision a systemic disease?!

Erasmus derived proverb ‘In the kingdom of the blind the one eyed man is King’ 

Ed talks about one-eyed Norse God Odin and his exchange of an eye for knowledge and wisdom, and he huge symbolism around perception

Dougald quotes from William Blake:

Now I a fourfold vision see

And a fourfold vision is given to me;

Tis fourfold in my supreme delight

And threefold in soft Beulahs night

And twofold Always. May God us keep

From Single vision and Newtons sleep!

And the layered account of consciousness, described well by Philip Pullman

Dougald describes the warning in the poem against a flat rationalism, an approach to the world which Blake clearly identifies with the emergence of what we think of as modern science, the figure of Isaac Newton – and the point is not to deny that the ways of seeing we associate with science have a place – it’s that to allow this way of seeing to represent the full truth of the world is dangerous and mistaken

Ed mentions Merlin Sheldrake’s work in ‘Do Shrooms’ which echoes the same point

Dougald quotes what John Berger said of Jay Griffiths – ‘Reality is such that both language and imagination have to exaggerate, in order to confront it truly’ and tells a great story of Jay at the first Dark Mountain festival

Ed talks about the dual tension between different strains of what, for want of a better word, we might call activism, and how the behaviour change versus system change battle still rages

Dougald brings in economic historian Karl Polanyi and his ideas of ‘disembedding’ and ‘the double movement’ and how ‘laissez-faire was planned’ The Great Transformation

How do we not feel like fools, for believing that there’s any possibility of things turning out differently?

And the answer is perhaps the double movement – to say, it’s possible that we have at least two trajectories) that coexist, that are moving in quite different directions, and it’s not that one of them is real and the other isn’t, it’s that there’s no way of seeing from here how the interaction between them turns out or which turns out to be the more significant

‘Seeing double’, being able to attend to very different possibilities unfolding and coexisting over time, without the reality of one trajectory having to eclipse the other – it’s a way of holding things open, retaining the possibility of surprise

Ed talks about the MDGs, SDGs, Good Life Goals and Inner Development Goals: https://www.innerdevelopmentgoals.org/, Matthew Taylor’s Reformism vs Radicalism hypothesis is another of these false binaries, misleading polarities and how a former senior Futerra colleague attacked him for his involvement with XR, saying Extinction Rebellion wasn’t very ‘on brand’

Dougald touches on Hospicing Modernity and a social cartography https://decolonialfutures.net/mapping-decolonization/ that maps out Soft Reform, Radical Reform and Beyond Reform.

Ed talks about ‘insultancy’ and concludes with a verse from Robert Frost - Two Tramps In Mud Time

But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For heaven and the future’s sakes.

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