Personal update: I’m glad to report that my copy of Imaginary Landscape came in, and I’m eagerly digging in. I have also gotten quite a way through The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light, which strikes me as an impressive feat of scholarship. Why I’ve never really read W.I.T. before, I don’t know… but I am making up for it eagerly.
I love Thompson’s invocation of the “intellectual ensemble” and “mind jazz” in the IL Prologue—the appreciation of his relationships with James Lovelock, Lynn Margulis, Ralph Abraham, and Francisco Varela in particular, but also the wider networks including Gregory Bateson and others. I can see how this book is a good fit for the kind of music we trying to create in the Café.
In other news, a copy Avanessian and Hennig’s Metanoia: A Speculative Ontology of Language, Thinking, and the Brain also came in, and while it strikes me as a bit heady, I could probably get past that because of how singularly the book focuses on the role of poetics in language and thought. There is a sense of elegance to the writing in this book, which opens up my curiosity—and I think the question of what’s really happening when we say that a book “changes our lives” is pretty fascinating.
If we might carry over some of Wolfgang Smith’s work on “Platonic Physics” (from the previous thread) when we speak on Thursday, I would also be quite interested in exploring the question of “being” that he raise, namely, what kind of entities “have being” and which ones really don’t. Of course, “the question of being” in Western thought) goes all the way back to Parmenides, and was revived in the 20th century by Heidegger… but in an age of “deep fakes” and chat bots that can answer factual questions with impressive breadth and write better prose than most humans, the question takes on renewed urgency.
That’s it from me for now…