Dilettantery

"The goal of science and the arts and of education for the next generation must be to decipher not the genetic but the perceptual code. In a global information environment, the old pattern of education in answer-finding is of no avail: one is surrounded by answers, millions of them, moving and mutating at electric speed. Survival and control will depend on the ability to probe and to question in the proper way and place. As the information that constitutes the environment is perpetually in flux, so the need is not for fixed concepts but rather for the ancient skill of reading that book, for navigating through an ever uncharted and unchartable milieu." -Marshall and Eric Mcluhan, Laws of Media (1988) "The human mind is naturally inclined by the senses to see itself externally in the body, and only with great difficulty does it come to attend to itself by means of reflection. This axiom gives us the universal principle of etymology in all languages: words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies to express the things of the mind and spirit." -Giambattista Vico, Scienza Nuova, 1725 sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/rj2mc5/127_mcluhans_later_life_three_of_the_four_laws_of/?

“In this electric age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness...we can translate more and more of ourselves into other forms of expression that exceed ourselves.” -Marshall Mcluhan "This is a marvel of the universe: To fling a thought across a stretch of sky— Some weighty message, or a yearning cry, It matters not; the elements rehearse Man's urgent utterance, and his words traverse The spacious heav'ns like homing birds that fly Unswervingly, until, upreached on high, A quickened hand plucks off the message terse. Toward this man moved since first with whetted stone He carved strange symbols on the cavern wall, And proudly turned unto his watching mate. Through this in travail do his offspring groan Toward an ideal's love-frought, imperious call That bids the spheres become articulate." -"Wireless," by Josephine Peabody (1910) Sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/p3l81o/126_the_electronic_age_part_1_a_brief_history_of/?

"Then there is electricity! — the demon, the angel, the mighty physical power, the all-pervading intelligence...Is it a fact—or have I dreamt it—that by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence: or shall we say it is itself a thought, nothing but thought, and no longer the substance which we dreamed it." -"The House of the Seven Gables," Nathaniel Hawthorne (1851) “When everything is connected to everything else, for better or for worse, everything matters.” Bruce Mau, Massive Change "One might have thought of sight, but who could think Of what it sees, for all the ill it sees? Speech found the ear, for all the evil sound, But the dark italics it could not propound, And out of what one sees and hears and out Of what one feels, who could have thought to make So many selves, so many sensuous worlds, As if the air, the mid-day air, was swarming With the metaphysical changes that occur Merely in living as and where we live." -“Esthétique du Mal," by Wallace Stevens (1944) Sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/p3kou2/125_the_electronic_age_part_1_a_brief_history_of/?

"Man is himself, is man, only at the surface. Lift the skin, dissect: here begin the machines. It is then you lose yourself in an inexplicable substance, something alien to everything you know, and which is nonetheless the essential." -Paul Valéry, Notebook B “‘The monsters we create by way of an advanced technological civilization are ourselves as we cannot hope to see ourselves—incomplete, blind, blighted, and, most of all, self destructive.’” -Joyce Carol Oates  Dead body: https://i.imgur.com/Uzosq0j.jpg Corpse: https://i.imgur.com/gGmJo1b.png “Spectator, specimen, spectacle belong together. They are, so to speak, the codes of a technological civilization, the signatures, as it were, of self, body, world. When the self becomes a spectator and the body a specimen, the world becomes a spectacular place.” -Romanyshyn Sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/p3k0et/124_windows_and_the_body_part_2_the_anatomical/?

“They sang as they lifted the children into the ship. They sang old space chanteys and helped the children up the ladder one at a time and into the hands of the sisters. They sang heartily to dispel the fright of the little ones. When the horizon erupted, the singing stopped. They passed the last child up into the ship.  The horizon came alive with flashes as the monks mounted the ladder. The horizon became a red glow. A distant cloudbank was born where no cloud had been. The monks on the ladder looked away from the flashes. When the flashes were gone, they looked back.  The visage of Lucifer mushroomed into hideousness above the cloudbank, rising slowly like some titan climbing to its feet after ages of imprisonment in the Earth. Someone barked an order. The monks began climbing again. Soon they were all inside the ship.  The last monk, upon entering, paused in the lock. He stood up in the open hatchway and took off his sandals. ‘Sic transit Mundus,’ he murmured, looking back at the glow. He slapped the soles of his sandals together, beating the dust out of them. The glow was engulfing a third of the heavens. He scratched his beard, took one last look at the ocean, then stepped back and closed the hatch.  There came a blur, a glare of light, a high thin whirring sound, and the starship thrust itself heavenward.” -A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter Miller “Linear perspective is a celebration of the eye of distance, a created convention which not only extends and elaborates the natural power of vision to survey things from afar, but also elevates that power into a method, a way of knowing, which has defined for us the world with which we are so readily familiar. It is the transformation of the eye into a technology and a redefinition of the world to suit the eye, a world of maps and charts, blueprints and diagrams, the world in which we are, among other things, silent readers of the printed word and users of the camera, the world, finally, in which we have all become astronauts.” -Robert Romanyshyn ‘Space capsules built for zero gravity, astronomical equipment for demarcating so-called black holes, atom smashers which prove the existence of anti-matter—these are the end products of the discovered vanishing point.’ -Samuel Edgerton Linear perspective ‘made possible scale drawings, maps, charts, graphs, and diagrams—those means of exact representation without which modern science and technology would be impossible.’ -Helen Gardner ‘Many reasons are assigned for the mechanization of life and industry during the nineteenth century, but the mathematical development of perspective was absolutely prerequisite to it.’ -William Ivins Jr Sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/opyhn6/123_windows_and_the_body_part_1_homo_punto_di/?

"May God us keep From Single vision & Newtons sleep." -William Blake "When a man has seen a [linear perspective] picture for the first time, his book education has begun." -Robert Laws (1851–1934) "My main argument was that a photograph could not be looked at for a long time. Have you noticed that? You can’t look at most photos for more than, say, thirty seconds. It has nothing to do with the subject matter. I first noticed this with erotic photographs, trying to find them lively: you can’t. Life is precisely what they don’t have—or rather, time, lived time. All you can do with most ordinary photographs is stare at them—they stare back, blankly—and presently your concentration begins to fade. They stare you down. I mean, photography is all right if you don’t mind looking at the world from the point of view of a paralyzed cyclops—for a split second. But that’s not what it’s like to live in the world, or to convey the experience of living in the world." -David Hockney "The anguish of the third dimension is given its first verbal manifestation in poetic history in King Lear. Shakespeare seems to have missed due recognition for having in King Lear made the first, and so far as I know, the only piece of verbal three dimensional perspective in any literature. It is not again until Milton's Paradise Lost (II, 11. 1 -5) that a fixed visual point of view is deliberately provided for the reader...The arbitrary selection of a single static position creates a pictorial space with vanishing point. This space can be filled in bit by bit, and is quite different from non-pictorial space in which each thing simply resonates or modulates its own space in visually two-dimensional form. Now the unique piece of three-dimensional verbal art which appears in King Lear is in Act IV, scene vi. Edgar is at pains to persuade the blinded Gloucester to believe the illusion that they are at the edge of a steep cliff: 'Edgar. . . . Hark, do you hear the sea?  Gloucester. No, truly. Edgar. Why then, your other senses grow imperfect By your eyes' anguish... . Come on, sir; here's the place. Stand still. How fearful And dizzy 'tis to cast one's eyes so low!' ...Far from being a normal mode of human vision, three dimensional perspective is a conventionally acquired mode of seeing, as much acquired as is the means of recognizing the letters of the alphabet, or of following chronological narrative. That it was an acquired illusion Shakespeare helps us to see by his comments on the other senses in relation to sight. Gloucester is ripe for illusion because he has suddenly lost his sight. His power of visualization is now quite separate from his other senses. And it is the sense of sight in deliberate isolation from the other senses that confers on man the illusion of the third dimension, as Shakespeare makes explicit here. There is also the need to fix the gaze: 'Come on, sir; here's the place. Stand still. How fearful  And dizzy 'tis to cast one's eyes so low!  The crows and choughs that wing the midway air  Show scarce so gross as beetles. Halfway down  Hangs one that gathers sampire—dreadful trade!  Methinks he seems no bigger than his head.  The fishermen that walk upon the beach,  Appear like mice; and yond tall anchoring bark, Diminish'd to her cock; her cock, a buoy  Almost too small for sight. The murmuring surge,  That on th' unnumb'red idle pebbles chafes,  Cannot be heard so high. I'll look no more, Lest my brain turn, and the deficient sight  Topple down headlong.' -Marshall Mcluhan, Gutenberg Galaxy Sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/nvsg5u/122_the_four_dimensions_of_reality_and_the_two/?

"The Waorani [people]...were not peacefully contacted until 1958, though their homeland is scarcely 150 kms from Quito, the national capital of Ecuador and a city settled for well over 400 years. In 1957, five missionaries attempted to contact the Waorani and made a critical mistake. They dropped from the air eight-by-ten glossy black-and-white photographs of themselves in what we would describe as friendly gestures, forgetting that the people of the forest had never seen anything two-dimensional in their lives. The Waorani picked up the prints from the forest floor and looked behind the faces to try to find the figure. Seeing nothing, they concluded that these were calling cards from the devil, and when the missionaries arrived they promptly speared them to death." -Wade Davis, The Wayfinders Sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/nkmd27/121_the_four_dimensions_of_reality_and_the_two/?

"The evolution from evocation to narrative in seal and pottery decoration denotes different cognitive skills—preliterate topsy-turvy glyptic compositions and repetitious pottery paintings were apprehended globally, but literate linear compositions were 'read’ analytically. Art, a unique mirror of culture, reflects the schism that separates preliterate from literate societies. Glyptic and pottery art illustrate with remarkable clarity how the preliterate Near Eastern societies perceived the world circularly and all-inclusively, while literate cultures viewed it analytically and sequentially.” -Denise Schmandt-Besserat Sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/nhy2cw/120_the_four_dimensions_of_reality_and_the_two/?

“From paleolithic times to the present, all painters have been challenged by a fundamental problem: how to express the four dimensions of experience on a two-dimensional surface.” -Edward Wachtel "According to Andrea Stone: In Maya thought caves were a conduit into the bowels of the earth, a dangerous but supernaturally charged realm, often referred to as the 'underworld' in current literature or by the Quiché term, Xibalda. Herein dwelt the ancestors, rain gods, various 'owners' of the earth, culture heroes, nefarious death demons, animal and wind spirits. The Maya made pilgrimages to caves to propitiate these beings … post-contact sources tell us that cave ceremonies usually concerned rain and other agricultural interests, hunting, ancestor worship, renewal/New Year rites and other calendrically-timed ceremonies, and petitions for various personal needs (e.g., health problems). Caves were also used by brujos (witches) to cast spells." -Jean Clottes "Caves are evocative underground constructions, which take humans away from the natural light and control or transform their visions of reality. This is the context in which caves have a powerful ritual role in early societies, a role that underlies contexts as widely distributed as the power of the rites of passage of transegalitarian societies (Owens and Hayden 1997), the allegory of the cave in Plato’s Republic, and the architectural metaphor of the grotto of the Renaissance (Miller 1982). They are multiple places of passage that emphasize transition from one state to another, from life to death, from light to dark, and from land to earth (Hume 2007). As such, their transition parallels the passage of the day and the seasons." -Simon KF Stoddart and Caroline AT Malone "Science and art: Two complementary ways of experiencing the natural world - the one analytic, the other intuitive. We have become accustomed to seeing them as opposite poles, yet don't they depend on one another? The thinker, trying to penetrate natural phenomena with his understanding, seeking to reduce all complexity to a few fundamental laws - isn't he also the dreamer plunging himself into the richness of forms and seeing himself as part of the eternal play of natural events?" -Heinz-Otto Peitgen and Peter Richter  Sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/ng1z1n/119_the_four_dimensions_of_reality_and_the_two/?

Explore the transformative power of the printing press during the Renaissance, which revolutionized scientific thought and astronomy. Delve into the historical shift from Ptolemy to Copernicus, revealing how printed texts democratized knowledge. Examine the unique challenges early Christians faced in calculating Easter and the differences between Christian and Islamic calendars. Discover how figures like Galileo and Newton navigated the complex interplay of science and politics, all while highlighting the printing press's crucial role in shaping modern scientific discourse.