The hoax, man's lonely and supreme ascent, and the brain

This month seems to have fled past me. Yet before March closes, and feeling April is upon us, I want to speak a little more about Loren Eiseley's The Immense Journey. Today, Friday 29th of March, I bring somewhat and briefly into focus 3 essays from the book.
1. The Real Secret of Piltdown
2. The Maze
3. The Dream Animal
These essays caught my attention because each of them deals with lingering scientific issues and pertinent inquiries. All three of the essays are related to one another, specifically in the manner in which they deal with man's lonely and supreme ascent.

Starting with the first one on the list, "The Real Secret of Piltdown" discusses the Piltdown Hoax (the greatest hoax in the history of science). This hoax, subsequently provides the thesis question of the essay, how did man get his brain? Through the arguments of Charles Darwin and his fellow contemporary, Alfred Russel Wallace, Eiseley expands the matter on the development of the human brain, which is explored through it's variants. A.R. Wallace, a scientist, proponent of natural selection and evolution "challenged the whole Darwinian position on man by insisting that artistic, mathematical, and musical abilities could not be explained on the basis of natural selection and the struggle for existence." This is the challenge that is met head on between Darwin,Wallace and also Eiseley in this essay, keeping the focus on the central point: how, why, when, where is the development of the brain. Add to Loren Eiseley's exploration within the arguments, scientific discoveries and the advancements at the disposal of current scientific inquiries, it suffices to say that the same author adds"today we can make a partial answer to Wallace's question. Since the exposure of the Piltdown hoax all of the evidence at out command– and it is considerable– points to man, in his present form, as being one of the youngest and newest of all earth's swarming inhabitants."

"Man of today, the atomic manipulator, the  aeronaut who flies faster than sound, has precisely the same brain and body as his ancestors of twenty thousand years ago who painted the last Ice Age mammoths on the walls of caves in France."

The next gleam of reason following Eiseley's argument, is the sensible conclusion that "it is man's ideas that have evolved and changed the world about him." From this statement the human being is proved to be a creature dependent on society, unable to develop alone.

"Creature of dream, he has created an invisible world of ideas, beliefs, habits, and customs which buttress him about and replace for him the precise instincts of the lower creatures. (...) The profound shock of the leap from animal to human status is echoing still in the depths of our subconscious minds. It is a transition which would seem to have demanded considerable rapidity of adjustment in order for human beings to have survived, and it also involved the growth of prolonged bonds of affection in the sub-human family, because otherwise its naked, helpless offspring would have perished. (...) Man's competition, it would thus appear, may have been much less with his own kind than with the dire necessity of building about him a world of ideas to replace his lost animal environment.

I am sure it can be derived from the previous paragraphs briefly covering "The Secret of Piltdown", a denotation that these three essays are dense and layered with information. The following two essays are no exception.

Source: http://library.thinkquest.org/29178/media/treeolif.jpg

"The Maze" covers the controversy piqued within the scientific community which followed the publishing of the previous Piltdown essay. It leads to present before the reader the Oreopithecus (the enigma), and his usage for providing the missing link previously deviated by the Piltdown hoax. From here stemmed two divergent schools concerning the search for the the crucial puzzle piece that will unite the tree of life, "the school of the little-man and that of the ape-man." In the end, the Oreopithecus is proven not to lead towards the missing puzzle piece. In the least, it is far less likely for the Oreopithecus to be the evidence that has long been searched for.

"The Dream Animal" picks up the recurrent exploration of "the mystery which enshrouds the rise of the human brain." Loren Eiseley uses   Progeria, premature aging, a curious and relatively unknown disease, to reveal how it is an indication of an internal clock "capable of running fast or slow, shortening life or extending it and, like the more visible portions of our anatomy, being subjected to evolutionary selection." This clock has paved the path for the growth of rare, particular and specialized organs. Included within the bracket of these organs is the human brain. This organ grows with greater rapidity than our nearest living relative, the great apes.

"When we are born, our brain size is about 330 cubic centimeters, only slightly larger than that of a gorilla baby. This is why human and anthropoid young look so appealingly similar in their earliest infancy. A little later, an amazing development takes place in the human offspring. In the first year of life its brain trebles in size. It is this peculiar leap, unlike anything else we know in the animal world, which gives man his uniquely human qualities. When the leap fails, as in those rare instances where the brain does not grow, microcephaly, "pinheadedness", is the result, and the child is then an idiot."

The essay proceeds to place in perspective the minute's clock of what is known of human evolution in comparison to the Astronomical clock, which spans a much, much longer millennia. Will we find the key to our human brain clock?

"For the first time in four billion years a living creature had contemplated himself and heard with a sudden, unaccountable loneliness, the whisper of the wind in the night reeds. Perhaps he knew, there in the grass by the chill waters, that he had before him an immense journey. Perhaps that same foreboding still troubles the hearts of those who walk out of a crowded room and stare with relief into the abyss of space so long as there is a star to be seen twinkling across those miles of emptiness."

Personally, all three essays offer great insight and information to be pondered. They both dually echo the previous essay spoken of a week or so back, The Secret of Life, as well as answer many lingering questions concerning our human journey. Aside from the density of information in the essays, I want to transmit the enlightenment they provide, the benefit enjoyed while reading them, the delight, the sensible, the educational element found while reading line after line of Eiseley's words.

I know I've filled this article more than usual but I hope I have conveyed wonder, and that you, reader, are infected and propelled to read Loren Eiseley, he is definitely worth the time.

"one mask of many worn by the Great Face behind"

The Secret of Life and its' multitudinous alleyways. This last article in The Immense Journey deals with the search for the secret, the key that would unlock the enigma. Within the pages the essay develops is the longing to discover the unanswered questions and the dead ends reached in the trajectory, yet towards the end there gleams a tiny speck of hope for the journey. This search is not merely concerning our origins but the tiny components that make up the earth, ourselves and organic beings around us, spanning eons back into the birth of this planet earth.

"...the wonderful correlation of parts, the perfect adaptiation to purpose, the individually vanished and yet persisting pattern..."

"It seemed clear that life was a material manifestation. Somewhere, somehow, sometime, in the mysterious chemisty of carbon, the long march toward the talking animal had begun."

Honestly, aside from the faulty dead ends described in the article, the misconceptions of having found the key by respected scientists, and the sensationalization of the search by the media, the article circles around the same theme: the search for the key to the secret of life and Loren Eiseley's own attitude and actions towards the search.

 "Nevertheless, as the years passed, the secret remained locked in its living jelly, in spite of larger microscopes and more formidable means of dissection."

One aspect I found interesting is the mention of the media, and how it disproportions the work of scientists and confounds the public. It is sadly comical that the same problems faced today in biology, archaeology, anthropology, physics, and scientific endeavors were being faced early on. Explicitly, media interpretation and the sensationalization of discoveries and scientific endeavors. I have no doubt in my mind that a great percentage of the world population has misconceptions concerning how evolution works, and what has been discovered concerning the evolution of this rock, the human species along with the other species.
This problem is related to the formation of kids in society, much like Michio Kaku and Neil Degrasse Tyson and others vociferate. Like this video:


I will end with some quotes from Loren Eiseley's essay.

"I am sure now that life is not what it is purported to be and that nature, in the canny words of a Scotch theologue, 'is not as natural as it looks.' (...) If the day comes when the slime of the laboratory for the first time crawls under man's direction, we shall have great need of humbleness."

*All quotes are from Loren Eiseley's The Immense Journey, Vintage Books 1959 edition. Title quote by Thomas Hardy, which is included in the end of Eiseley's essay.

The Immense Journey

Who am I kidding? No one needs to see my face frequently on this site. I attempted the video but I have opted, as the FINAL decision, to keep it real and actually write about literature in this literary endeavor of mine. This month is Loren Eiseley month, that is what I've secondly decided.

I've had this book for a few months now, having acquired it by chance and at no cost. It's an old beat up edition but the title lured me into taking it home. (Vintage Books, A Division of Random House)

The Immense Journey: An imaginative naturalist explores the mysteries of man and nature. I began with the last essay in the collection, I started it, again, by chance and with no great expectations. A few sentences later, I was lured into the wonder painted in the pages, with no other option but to devour the rest of the book in a matter of days. The Immense Journey is a collection of essays and was the first book published by Loren Eiseley, around 1946. Loren Eiseley was a native of Nebraska, an anthropologist, an archaeologist, a writer, a naturalist, a philosopher, an educator, a humanist and, from what I've recently learned much more.

To say this book surprised me is only skimming the surface. In each essay found in the book, perspectives are challenged as Eiseley retraces the steps of the human animal within the planet it inhabits and calls home. Each essay touches on seemingly minute details involved in the evolution of the planet and subsequently the human species.

The title of the essays are as follows (in order as they appear in the book):
The Slit
The Flow of the River
The Great Deeps
The Snout
How Flowers Changed the World
The Real Secret of Piltdown
The Maze
The Dream Animal
Man of the Future
Little Men and Flying Saucers
The Judgement of the Birds
The Bird and the Machine
The Secret of Life

The entire book is full of vivid imagery that recreates the truth and the possibilities of what once was a young earth. Each essay can be reread with pleasure and at leisure. I highly recommend to those of you who stumble upon this site of mine to find the book, used or new, and read it. And for those that have the book and haven't read it, pick it up and start with one essay. Just one, I doubt anyone would regret this enlightening book.

Therefore, for these brief reasons and more that I will show later, I have chosen to gush over Loren Eiseley's The Immense Journey this month. In just a a few days from now I will be writing about the last essay in the collection.

On a side note and to end, there is a Loren Eiseley Society that recently published The Loren Eiseley Reader.

Click on the link, or type this in a search –––––––––––––––––––––––>

The short and sweet of it

For those of you who frequently stumble upon this site and appreciate my minuscule input into the literary community, I have to confess that I almost abandoned it all. Good ol' life got obscenely in the way and I almost stopped talking of my literary escapades. But alas, 'tis not so, I am back again this year with somewhat new equipment and ready to take this to the level I wanted to in the beginning. And that is video-blogging. So, I will be making videos where I talk of literature and what I'm reading the current month. The manner will remain the same, every month different topics, only that now instead of tediously reading about what I'm reading, all y'all will be able to hear me talk about what I'm reading. YAY! Therefore, I hope those of you that come across this little baby of mine that is this site will be able to better enjoy my literary wanderings. This all begins in february. Till then!

P.S. I leave you with my youtube channel and the first few videos I attempted. 

Images in The Yard

THEHASBEENLICKTUALS
Bring out your dead
Let them fight for your life
When you're so secure
In your fear and fatigue
Too clean
In your tie(s)
And jerky curl wigs
Too intelligent
In their miseducation
To face the monster moloch on the mountain top
Where you leave your heros bleeding to death/
About-you're not getting in the cold for a damn soul.
But washing your hands in their naked blood
Affirming on their bones
Pursuing grey rainbows
Making friends with every one but your Self
Yes, I'm going to disturb you
For calling earth images abstract
You who would recall Malcolm
For no reason at all
Nor saw Rodney's blood
Or heard Paul Roberson exiled to death
Or that Mandela is alive
And not well in South Africa's dungeons–
And all the communities need building change
Bring out your dead
See what you have
To need/to fight for
People are watching you
Mimicking their pale styles
Laughing at you/ Punking out on yourself
Aspiring to the wonderless world of the boobwobsie
Calling out your name
Shallow queens
Pretty petty kings
Pretenders to the throne
Seeking reverence from each other/ and
Giving nothing in return-
She/ frustrated/
Absorbing her eggs:
"men ain't shit."
He/ masturbating before the enemy/
Busting his nuts on vain values:
"woman is a bitch."
Yes, I'm going to disturb you
Telling you,
It looks bad from here–
It looks bad.
–Lasana M. Sekou

LOSQUESECREENLECTUALES

Saquen a sus muertos 

Déjenlos luchar por su vida

Ustedes tan seguros

En su temor y fatiga

Demasiado limpios

Atados con corbatas

Y pelucas de pelo alisado

Demasiado inteligentes 

En su mala educación

Para enfrentar al monstruoso moloch de la cima del monte

Donde dejan a sus héroes desangrarse hasta morir/

Pero no pasan frío por una jodida alma

Sino que se lavan las manos en su sangre desnuda

Jurando por sus huesos

Persiguiendo grises arco iris

Haciendo amistad con todos menos consigo

Sí, voy a perturbarlos

Por llamar abstractas a las imagines terrestres

Ustedes, que recuerdan a Malcolm

Sin razón alguna

No vieron la sangre de Rodney

Ni supieron que Paul Roberson fue exiliado hasta su muerte

O que Mandela vive

Y no bien en calabozos de Sudafrica–

Y todas las comunidades necesitan cambiar

Saquen a sus muertos

Vean lo que tienen

Lo que necesitan/ por lo que deben luchar

La gente los observa

Imita sus pálidos estilos

Se burla de ustedes/ aletargados

Aspirando al desmaravillado mundo de la burguesia

Gritan sus nombres

Reinas banales

Reyecillos lindos

Pretendiendo al trono

Que procuran reverencias unos de otros/

Sin dar nada a cambio

Ella/ frustrada/ 

Abortando sus óvulos;

"los hombres no son ni siquiera mierda"

Él/ masturbándose ante en enemigo/

Reventándose los huevos en valores vanos:

"la mujer es una puta."

Sí, voy a perturbarlos 

Diciéndoles,

Se ve mal desde aquí–

Se ve mal.

–Lasana M. Sekou

*All the poems are directly from Pelican Heart: And Anthology of Poems by Lasana M. Sekou and in spanish: Corazón De Pelícano: Antología Poética de Lasana M. Sekou Emilio Jorge Rodríguez, editor.

For The Mighty Gods

CORNER FOLKS
Stagnated badmen
On desecrated highs
With their vain females– cursing the latest talk,
Riding their superficial gods to eventual doom
They pass me, and with peaceful scorn we greet.
Contemplating their next move–
I see them trying their outermost to forget their
innermost
Flaunting their implants of self-destruct
They march the line of impulsive schizophrenia
From this to that
Raste today– Ansura tomorrow
From Islam – to – aesthetic
Tonight you sleep by the grace of a Christian Virgin–
Tomorrow you walk the tune of cosmic origin
And when you are not drunk–
And when you are not drunk
You cannot talk of Truth
But when you are high
You gesture with such divine assurance
That your children's children
Shall inherit the Earth...
And your laughter is so bold
and your laughter is so bold!
And we pass again
And we greet... Peace Brother, "Peace."
Peace Woman, "Peace."
–Lasana M. Sekou

TIPOS DE ESQUINA
Hombres malos anquilosados

En alturas profanadas

Con sus hembras vanidosas... maldiciendo el último

comentario

Llevando a sus dioses superficiales a la condena final

Pasan junto a mí y nos saludamos con pacífico desdén.

Contemplando su próxima jugada–

Veo que hasta donde pueden tratan de olvidar lo que

adentro tienen

Ostentando sus implantes de autodestrucción

Marchan por la línea de esquizofrenia impulsiva

De aquí para allá

Rasta hoy – Ansura mañana

Del Islam – a – la estética

Hoy duermes por la gracia de una Virgen cristiana–

Mañana andas al compás del origen cósmico. 

Y cuando no estás borracho

Y cuando no estás borracho

No puedes hablar de la Verdad

Pero cuando estás en nota 

Indicas con tanta seguridad divina

Que los hijos de tus hijos

Heredarán la Tierra...

Y tu risa es tan osada

¡Y tu risa es tan osada!

Y volvemos a pasar

y nos saludamos... Paz, Hermano, "Paz"

Paz, Mujer, "Paz".

–Lasana M. Sekou

*All the poems are directly from Pelican Heart: And Anthology of Poems by Lasana M. Sekou and in spanish: Corazón De Pelícano: Antología Poética de Lasana M. Sekou Emilio Jorge Rodríguez, editor.

Two Nights of Excess

Following up with last week's post on Michel Onfray, my last visit to the city of New York turned up a little small book by a french author, Alfred de Musset. A renown poet, playwright and novelist of the Romantic period, this little book I stumbled upon was his try at erotic literature, Gamiani, Or Two Nights of Excess. According to the sources I've found on the book, the character of Gamiani is modeled after George Sand, another french writer, this is also said in the introduction of the book.
I found, after reading this little 100 or so page book, that in regards to the sexual aspect, it was comprehensive, covering everything from orgies, sacrilegious or otherwise, sadomasochism, bestiality, voyeurism, etc. No major perversions are neglected in the book. Much of it reminded me of the Marquis de Sade, on referring to him I highly recommend the excellent movie, Quills. This book incorporated much of the libertine spirit with a heightened element of the extreme, all for the sake of la petite mort. What distinguished this book from other erotica is its' lack of phallocentricity. The dominant character and sex is Gamiani, a woman.

On the the novel itself, it centers around two nights, between Gamiani, the Italian seductress, Fanny, the innocent virgin, and M. Alcide, the voyeur. The three meet on a night Gamiani holds a ball, the guests leave, she has lured Fanny into her room and Alcide is watching from a hidden place. No crevice is left untouched in their encounters. These three characters indulge extensively in themselves.
A brief interlude occurs during these two nights, where, the hunger of the characters is momentarily satiated and each partake in recounting their first sexual encounters. These are the moments that struck me the most, since it is in these tales recounted that one is able to see the imbalance created by the preceptors of youth, such as family members, and culture, and the predominant stigmatization of religion in regards to sexuality. Each of the characters have suffered at the hands of these stigmas, This imbalance is revealed in extremes that hinder and warp the natural, biological elements and desires that make up a person. This consequently, brought to mind Michel Onfray and his excellent treatise, Théorie du Corps Amoureux: Pour une Érotique Solaire. Which highlights the importance of letting go of the warped views of sensual relations, hindered mostly by extreme religious notions, hatred towards oneself, as well as by idealized romantic views.
If anything else, besides being an erotic novelette, Alfred de Musset in this book reveals diverse facets of human sexuality, how it is susceptible to dangerous extremes, much along the lines with the Marquis de Sade, although Musset draws a more poetic stroke with his words.
So, in the end, I recommend this book to those looking for interesting erotica. I enjoyed it.

El hombre que inventó Manhattan

I finally finished Ray Loriga's "El hombre que inventó Manhattan"
and let me just say that I loved every word of it. I still stand by what I said in my earlier post, on my first impressions of the book. This is a colorful and deliciously sordid tapestry of stories that combine to give life to a city that is at once famously elusive and enticing. Beyond its' relation to the City of New York, specifically the borough of Manhattan, I find that the entire book transcends its' title and this territory in that in general and concise words it paints for the reader the diversity found in human nature especially bred in a large mass of population coexisting in a tight space. We are all related and connected, man and nature. This was most evident when I found the chapter on the rat Missy, describing it's first adventure into central park, being a young rat. Which connects to the ending entitled, "De Ratones y Hombres", where this same rat is killed by the narrator, before his sons' eyes whom had just named it Missy.  Curiously enough, this immediately brought to mind lines by the scottish poet of the Romantic period in English literature Robert Burns, "The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men, Gang aft agley, An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain, For promis'd joy!" (Lines 39-42). This is from his poem "To a Mouse". There is an interesting correlation between these two different works that I find relevant and important in understanding the core of what Ray Loriga presents in this book. Besides a description of the human condition found in a city as diverse and populated as NYC it is also a testament of man at his most grotesque and real and the harsh reality of human nature.

Now, I have begun and am about 15 pages in in the philosophical book I said in my previous post I was to begin next, Théorie du Corps Amoureux: Pour une érotique solaire by Michel Onfray. So far, I love what the book proposes to discuss and analyze in the opening pages. Briefly and roughly, it proposes individual autonomy and freedom from the bounds of oppressive western cultural traditions retaking and reinstating the Greek philosophers.

Till next post...

El Hombre Que Inventó Manhattan by Ray Loriga

Taking a breather from philosophy, I purchased "El Hombre Que Inventó Manhattan" by Ray Loriga. From what I've gathered he is a novelist, scriptwriter and movie director from Spain. I was completely unfamiliar with him and his work but I purchased it anyway, I enjoy taking risks with unfamiliar writers. So far, it's been amazing. It's a collection of short stories that at first seem independent of each other but as one progresses with one after the other each piece of the puzzle begins to fall into place with the next and so on. It is obvious that they are all interconnected. Which leads me to the hypothesis that that is the writer's intentions in this collection of stories which have as the center the City of New York. He weaves the stories, full of a wide diversity of characters, all interconnected by the fact that in totality they form the tapestry that is said city. There are elements of the morbid, the sick, a bit of perversion, sex, lies, yet there is a string of the enchanting in it all. As of today, I am in the sixth story, stopped in my tracks by a pair of wonderful sentences that commence the story, which is called "Peces Voladores", that left me pensive. With that I conclude this post.

"Para Andreas, lo más parecido a la felicidad era el ritmo constante de las obligaciones ineludibles que le sujetaban al momento presente como los alfileres sujetan las mariposas enmarcadas. Sin embargo, por mucho que uno lo deteste, a veces no queda más remedio que pensar en las cosas que uno no quiere pensar, especialmente en los días de lluvia."

Finishing this book, I am going to pick up another recent purchase written by this fellow right here. Yikes!


Happy reading.

Voltaire and his Candide

Greetings to those who pass by here, haven't made a post in a while. I will be going back to making written posts until I am able to purchase a good video camera with which to make videos.
So, to kick off my long absence from sharing my reading adventures I start with Voltaire's Candide.
Recently, I have been getting more and more into philosophy and finding myself gravitating towards philosophical works, I'm halfway through Descartes's Metaphysical Mediations, which is considered the breakthrough in modern philosophy, and I'm highly enjoying it. Among other books, I ordered and received from bookmooch Voltaire's Candide which came with a few other stories as well. I haven't yet read the other stories but I did read Candide. Superficially, it is entertaining and full of adventure. The substance, as I'm sure many know, lies in the characters, their words and actions. Candide is the ultimate optimist trained philosophically by the philosopher Pangloss. Quickly in the story he finds himself thrown out of his comfort and henceforth encounters bizarre situation after bizarre situation. His foolishness leads him to willingly trust people yet his trust is continually broken and spurned, and the consequences are frequently unfavorable. Yet he remains undaunted. On a side note, I found it thought-provoking that there were numerous times when Candide would expound his virtuous hopefulness and "love" of mankind but he would follow that with an action that contradicted his philosophy of life. For example, when he followed his instincts and killed the characters he did, not many. It hinted at the weight of human nature, which is another theme that is touched upon in this story, what is evil?
In Candide, Voltaire was pushing against philosophical optimism and the "idealist" mentality of philosophizing as a "static" pastime. (I use the words idealist and static loosely). To Voltaire, philosophy involved the mind as much as the actions, and even though metaphysical ponderings are interesting the substance of life is found in our actions, hence the ending phrase that is emphasized, "cultivate your garden". It is interesting to compare Descartes and his meditations which stands on the other spectrum, where philosophy is an enterprise that should concern itself with the intangible, with the essence of "things". To keep it short and sweet, I highly recommend this Candide to those that haven't read it, to those that have and it has been a while, another perusal wouldn't hurt. It's a good story with substantial substance.
Until next week.