Descartes’s Dreams: Second DreamDescartes’s Dreams: Second Dream
Don’t look now, it ain’t you or meDon’t look now, it ain’t you or me
“In a certain technoutopian view of the future, we are headed toward a post-property world. The shift from ownership to access is supposed to liberate us, enable greater sharing of resources, fuel human creativity, create more prosperity, and lead to greater equality. What we so often forget to ask, however, is who controls access? Who builds the highways?” – Whitney Erin Boesel, “Spotevangelism”
Descartes’s Dreams: First DreamDescartes’s Dreams: First Dream
In the late 1990s I produced a series of experimental sound recordings in Studio C at KUNM radio in Albuquerque. I called this series Descartes’s Dreams, from the title of the vocal portion of its longest track.
These recordings were stashed away in a plastic bag for over a dozen years before I decided to convert them to mp3 format and post them here. They’ll appear one per day on the sidebar to the left, and also here in the new posts.
Here’s the first, “Puttin’ on the Ritz.”
Are we there yet?Are we there yet?
“When the time comes that knowledge will not be sought for its own sake, and men will not press forward simply in a desire of achievement, without hope of gain, to extend the limits of human knowledge and information, then, indeed, will the race enter upon its decadence.” — Charles Evans Hughes (quoted by David Eugene Smith in The Teaching of Geometry)
PlacesPlaces
Shiprock, 1982 by Tetman Callis
Elementary, my dear Sir ArthurElementary, my dear Sir Arthur
“In the present utilitarian age one frequently hears the question asked, ‘What is the use of it all?’ as if every noble deed was not its own justification. As if every action which makes for self-denial, for hardihood, and for endurance was not in itself a most precious lesson to mankind. That people can be found to ask such a question shows how far materialism has gone, and how needful it is that we insist upon the value of all that is nobler and higher in life.” — Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (quoted by David Eugene Smith in The Teaching of Geometry)
PlacesPlaces
San Miguel Mountains, Colorado, 1982 by Tetman Callis
Multiple rebendableMultiple rebendable
“One of the essential properties of intelligence is flexibility. What does it mean to be an expert at something? What makes someone an expert is her ability to respond to a completely novel situation—to solve original problems, for example. Expertise does not only involve having command of a huge amount of factual knowledge—it does not mean being a human data bank. It involves the capacity for flexible response. It is a form of creativity. This description applies equally to the notion of ‘understanding.’ Understanding is a kind of expertise. A true measure of intelligence is this capacity for flexible and original response.” – William Byers, How Mathematicians Think
PlacesPlaces
San Miguel Mountains, Colorado, 1979 by Tetman Callis
Look at that windmill, SanchoLook at that windmill, Sancho
“I see people who do not read: they are so limited in their lives, even in the good things. They do not see beyond their immediate surroundings; they are incapable of changing anything because they neither know what there is to change, nor how to go about it. They don’t understand other people, not even their own loved ones, because they do not have the habit of reflecting on the yearnings, motives, and passions of human beings. And whatever thing they experience makes much less sense than it does for someone who reads. Besides, what would a man see in the fields of La Mancha who does not know who Don Quixote is? Dusty roads, nothing more.” – Agustin Cadena, “Why I Read” (trans. Mayo)
PlacesPlaces
San Miguel Mountains, Colorado, 1979 by Tetman Callis
Illuminating the flashlightIlluminating the flashlight
“Gödel’s incompleteness theorem is one of the great intellectual accomplishments of the twentieth century. Its implications are so far reaching that it is difficult to overestimate them. Gödel’s result puts intrinsic limitations on the reach of deductive systems; that is, it shows that given any (sufficiently complex) deductive system, there are results that are beyond the reach of the system—results that are true but cannot be proved or disproved on the basis of the initial set of axioms. The new result might be proved by adding new axioms to the system (for example, the result itself) but the new strengthened system will itself have unprovable results.” – William Byers, How Mathematicians Think
PlacesPlaces
Hell’s Canyon, Idaho, 1979 by Tetman Callis
Me an my friends, we was juss talkin about this yestidayMe an my friends, we was juss talkin about this yestiday
“Facebook can seem at times an enormous simulacrum of the Pussycat Lounge, full of voyeurism and cynical, semi-professional exhibitionism, but obviously the divide between performer and audience that structures the flow of money, power, pity, and contempt in strip clubs has been largely obliterated online. Instead, there is the ambiguous simultaneity of consuming and producing spectacle, of performing the self, of spectatorship as performance, in a medium that immediately allows you to substitute yourself for any performer with broadcast responses of your own. This stew of contradictory and self-negating impulses makes up what now often gets described simply as sharing. It’s sharing when we confess something; it’s sharing when we link to someone else’s work; it’s sharing when we simply express approval for something; it’s sharing when a social-media service automatically announces some action we took. Online we all have a million hearts to give.” – Rob Horning, “The Failure Addict”
PlacesPlaces
Arizona, 1979 by Tetman Callis
Sometimes it all adds upSometimes it all adds up
“Mathematics is not a body of facts arranged and justified by a stringent logical structure. To give a dynamic metaphor that stems from the related field of fluid flow, it is like a turbulent river. The flow of the water is extremely complex, but every now and again you see the appearance of stable structures, eddies and whirlpools. These stable structures correspond to the propositions and theorems of mathematics. It is the logical structure of mathematics that gives these theorems their stability, but when we look at things in this way we see that the stability is not absolute. The data can be structured in many different ways corresponding to what we are interested in and in the mathematical ideas that arise to do the structuring. These ideas arise in response to the question, ‘What is going on here?’—that is, from the attempt to make sense of the phenomena in question.” – William Byers, How Mathematicians Think
PlacesPlaces
Arizona, 1979 by Tetman Callis
Now, get to workNow, get to work
“Revise! Read writing that inspires and challenges you. Write about what really matters to you and do it so well that it is compelling to others. Keep editing your work. Be strict with yourself, but patient with your own process.” – Lisa Cohen (from David Low interview in The Wesleyan Connection)
PlacesPlaces
White Sands, New Mexico, 1984 by Tetman Callis
Fooled youFooled you
“Art requires suffering, just not the kind you thought.” – Hugh Sheehy, “Getting Outside”
PlacesPlaces
West Texas, 1981 by Tetman Callis
Outside the peanut galleryOutside the peanut gallery
“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.” – Theodore Roosevelt, “Citizenship in a Republic: ‘Man in the Arena’”
PlacesPlaces
Bear River Range, Utah, 1979 by Tetman Callis
aka, The Obama Conundrumaka, The Obama Conundrum
“The problem in politics is this: You don’t get any credit for disaster averted. Going to the voters and saying, ‘Boy, things really suck, but you know what? If it wasn’t for me, they would suck worse.’ That is not a platform on which anybody has ever gotten elected in the history of the world.” – Barney Frank, quoted in Andrew Ross Sorkin, Too Big to Fail
ThingsThings
GP 3446, from The Graffiti Project, 1987 by Tetman Callis
Been that, done thereBeen that, done there
“When it comes to writing, the despairing perfectionism known as alcoholism can be as tragically inhibiting as it is sordid to witness.” – Terry Castle, “You Better Not Tell Me You Forgot”
ThingsThings
GP 3441, from The Graffiti Project, 1987 by Tetman Callis
You have my word on thisYou have my word on this
“As sophisticated as the world’s markets have become, the glue that holds the entire arrangement together remains old-fashioned trust. Once that vanishes, things can unravel very quickly.” — Andrew Ross Sorkin, Too Big to Fail
ThingsThings
GP 3427, from The Graffiti Project, 1987 by Tetman Callis
Find some words that will make it interestingFind some words that will make it interesting
“It’s never enough to have lived through anything, you need to have a je ne se quoi about the way you put it into words.” – Michelle Tea, quoted by Jessa Crispin in “Sister Spit: Writings, Rants & Reminiscence from the Road”