Tiled With Pentagons

(With thanks to JM, who kicked off this discussion on the summer solstice, and some apologies to MC-M.)     This is a picture of an oak tree, or at least it would be if the artist, MC-M, weren't a coward. In 1973, he created one of the foundational pieces of conceptual art:  an oak tree. Not a picture of an oak tree, but an oak tree. It consists of metal brackets, a glass shelf, a glass of water, and the ineffable act of having transformed a glass of water into an oak tree. "How long will it continue to be an oak tree?" an interviewer once asked him. "Until I change it," he replied. Tread carefully before you reject the whole premise as nonsense. I ask: would you be just as pleased to march into your nearest cathedral one fine Sunday morning, stroll down the aisle as the choir boys sing Mass, and unceremoniously knock the wafers and wine out of the bishop's hands as bullshit? If you'll bite that bullet, that transubstantiation is actually completely fake...

There is a place in Brooklyn, in New York State just outside Manhattan; a little plot of land deep in a Jewish neighborhood.  I know it, because a piece of me is buried there; a piece that existed long before I was born. There is a bit of mythology in my family, you see: I share most of my name with my great-grandfather - the one in my direct paternal line, the Jewish side of my family. Because I resemble him so closely in temperament - an aesthete, an epicure, an ideologue, a traveller, a polyglot - the story goes that I am his reincarnation, giving this whole "living" thing a second crack. I've traded an MD in internal medicine for a PhD in math, and I can't enjoy pistachio ice cream anymore, but I'm in better health and don't have to contend with a world war. So once a decade, I join my father in a visit to the buried part of me whose nameplate I share and thus inherited, right down to the "Dr.".   I visited it on a fine Saturday much like this on...

(Epistemic status: Painfully well-tested. For anyone who's ever had to navigate a reality they wished were different.)  "What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn't make it worse. Not being open about it doesn't make it go away. And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn't there to be lived." Eugene Gendlin said that, and I find myself turning it over and over in my head, especially lately. It's not because I like it - though I do - but because it's one of those chewy crystallized chunks of insight you can gnaw on forever and keep getting nourishing juice out, like some kind of  everlasting candied ginger of rationality. It cuts straight to the heart of how to stay oriented when something important about the world is so much worse than you wished it were. The operant phrase there is "interacted with". Not "observed", not "waited out", not "endured", and certa...

  (Epistemic status: what, you thought that this somehow wasn't a recipe blog?)   This is a recipe blog. It always has been, at least in part. I'm not going to give you the recipe until the very end, because that's what recipe blogs do, right? I'm going to tell you a whole bunch of irrelevant-feeling personal context about the food and then finally actually drop the recipe. But unlike most recipe blogs, that personal context is actually really quite relevant. You ever think about lost recipes? They're a tragic microcosm of lost information in greater generality. There's lost plays like Love's Labours Won, lost books like the second volume of the Poetics, lost music like Karelia Music, and lost film like Bulgasari. Each one is a wound in human culture that will never heal. There's entire lost libraries, too - the House of Wisdom during the sack after the Sack of Baghdad, the Library of Alexandria (whose books fell apart - they largely weren't bu...

(Epistemic status: a nonstandard frame for economics that finally crystallized; as usual, descriptive of patterns I've observed in trade, gift economics, and coordination; more prescriptive than my usual about what patterns build what kind of prosperity; and surely incomplete. Built heavily out of the Glowlarion theological-decisiontheoretic frame. For SC, and anyone through whose hands the coins I've made pass or have passed.) Come, sit down. Have a drink and let me tell you a tale... "Long ago, on a dusty road through a desert, there trudged a travelling merchant. The road was unpaved dirt, barely better than the shifting sands around it; the merchant's donkey struggled to pull his cart over potholes and through the occasional dune that had drifted onto the path; the merchant's cart was loaded down with bolts of fine cloth and sturdy pottery jars of preserved fruit. The merchant relaxed as he approached an oasis; he and his steed were parched, and he had been wal...

(Epistemic status: I'm not claiming that this is actually how cognition works, but I do claim that it's a useful frame, and one which I find predictive. For and with thanks to NC, IL, and M/T.)   You know how sometimes there’s something you think you want to do but whenever you try to do the thing you mysteriously lack energy? You want to do the task. You know you need to do it. You even know what to do, and how. But every time you take a run up at it to try, you lose all motive force and find yourself sliding off to some onerous chore instead, tidying up or doing dishes instead. How mysterious! Or: you have something you need to write. A paper, a grant application, an email, whatever. You sit down to work on it. It's right there in front of you. You have the time and the tools and the necessary knowledge. And yet... nothing happens. You stare at the half-finished writeup before you. You close the file. Then you open it again. You read the same paragraph three times without...