a world: "Opposed to the world, to inhabited areas where human culture and society thrived, was the vast uninhabited emptiness of the forest. This polarity replaced the an ancient urbs/rus (city/country) opposition in the European Middle Ages. In this context, savagery (Latin silvatica, from silva, forest) was not wholly inhuman, but was located at the absolute limit of human activity." D.G. White, Myths of the Dog-man. Chicago, Ill., 1991. p.9.
one sees: "The occipital lobes are the center of our visual perception system. They are not particularly vulnerable to injury because of their location at the back of the brain, although any significant trauma to the brain could produce subtle changes to our visual-perceptual system, such as visual field defects and scotomas. The Peristriate region of the occipital lobe is involved in visuospatial processing, discrimination of movement and color discrimination. Damage to one side of the occipital lobe causes homonymous loss of vision with exactly the same 'field cut' in both eyes. Disorders of the occipital lobe can cause visual hallucinations and illusions. Visual hallucinations (visual images with no external stimuli) can be caused by lesions to the occipital region or temporal lobe seizures. Visual illusions (distorted perceptions) can take the form of objects appearing larger or smaller than they actually are, objects lacking color or objects having abnormal coloring. Lesions in the parietal-temporal-occipital association area can cause word blindness with writing impairments (alexia and agraphia)." http://www.health.qld.gov.au/abios/tbi/boccipit.htm
I want to talk: Pseudo-Plutarch, "On the Life and Poetry of Homer." (Homeri vita.) In, Homeri Opera. Basel, 1567. p.204.
a single: "Today many critics, including most of the ones who insist that Homer was one man, seem convinced that the original Odyssey ended in book XXIII, line 269. Then the 'many Homers' theorists argue that if the rest of book XXIII and all of book XXIV were added at a later time by someone else, would it not be possible that the rest of the Odyssey was composed in parts by different authors also? It is also possible that there originally was a 'kernel' with all the essentials of the story that was later built up by different authors to the present day Iliad and the Odyssey. To-date, this remains the strongest point of the theory that Homer was not a single man" http://classiclit.about.com
or several: "Again we have an example of consciousness being dependent on more than one factor, but we still have no idea how such factors lead to the seemingly magic step within, the brain that enables us not only to process and object registered by our retina but to consciously see it as well." S.A. Greenfield, The Human Brain. New York, 1997. p.52.
author's gender: "If questions whether the 'Odyssey' was written by a man or a woman, and whether or no it is of exclusively Sicilian origin, where pregnant with no larger issues than the determination of the sex and abode of the writer, it might be enough merely to suggest the answers and refer the reader to the work itself. Obviously, however, they have an important bearing on the whole Homeric controversy; for if we find a woman's hand omnipresent throughout the 'Odyssey,' and if we also find so large a number of local details, taken so exclusively and so faithfully from a single Sicilian town as to warrant the belief that the writer must have lived and written there, the presumption seems irresistible that the poem was written by a single person." S. Butler, The Authoress of the Odyssey. Chicago, Ill., 1967.p.1.
written: "The human memory is capable of amazing feats, and in theory the poems, with all the links between their various parts could have been composed without the aid of writing. Only so far no example of anything comparable having been achieved has been adducted' and no one able and willing to perceive the unity of the epics is likely to believe it possible." H. Lloyd-Jones, "Remarks on the Homeric Question." In, H. Lloyd-Jones, V. Pearl, and B. Worden, Editors, History & Imagination: Essays in Honor of H.R. Trevor-Roper. New York, 1982. p.27.
A blind bard: It is believed that the blind bard Demodicus (Odyssey, books VII-IX) is a self-portrayal of Homer, which is where we get the notion that Homer was blind.
centuries apart: According to tradition, Homer was born on the Aegean island of Chios, sometime during the 9th Century B.C. What we do know about written versions of the Homeric epics is that they existed by the 6th Century B.C.
aoidoi: Roving minstrels and bards during the Greek "dark age,' which lasted about three hundred years, beginning around 1100 B.C. These singers reiterated and embellished tales from the long-past "golden age" of heroes. "Classical scholar and archaeologist Robert Flacelière wrote:
One of these minstrels who may have been born at Smyrna (on the coast of Iona) and lived in Chios...(perhaps) between 850 and 750 (B.C.), more than three centuries after the fall of Troy, was a poet of genius. It was he who had the idea of isolating from the huge cycle of epics relating to Troy and treating separately two episodes that seemed to offer subjects of outstanding significance, the wrath of Achilles and the return of Odysseus. According to ancient tradition, this poet was Homer." Quoted in Readings on Homer. San Diego, CA., 1998. P. 21.
wine dark: "I am sure that when Homer (or the many Greeks who recorded Homer) wrote it, they were simply thinking of the sea; the adjective was straightforward. But nowadays, if I or if any of you, after trying many fancy adjectives, write in a poem 'the wine-dark sea,' this is not a mere repetition of what the Greeks wrote. Rather, it is going back to tradition. When we speak of 'the wine-dark sea,' we think of Homer and of the thirty centuries that lie between us and him. So that although the words may be much the same, when we write 'the wine-dark sea' we are really writing something quite different from what Homer was writing." J.L. Borges, This Craft of Verse. Cambridge, MA., 2000. pp.13-4.
sight is lost: www.neuroskills.com/tbi/boccipit.html
domed temples: W.B. Seabrook, The Magic Island. New York, 1929.
You mean: "Rapid, plain, direct, noble: yes, these are the properties of a readable Homer in English, as any reader of Robert Fitzgerald's Homer will testify. The great challenge is that of capturing the spirit of the thing, the soul of the text, rather than wrestling only with its 'form and meaning.' In the original, what we find is a form of meaning." S. Hamill, A Poet's Work. Seattle, WA., 1990. p.118.
talking to: "perhaps the little person inside the head is just the stream of consciousness. A serial sampling parallel processes. And it, in turn, may be biased strongly toward the verbal happenings, leaving out all sorts of more mundane things like blood pressure. 'Where does this leave Julian Jaynes?' Neil asked after a moment. 'His theory that talking to ourselves wasn't evolved until recent times, back between the writing of the Iliad and the Odyssey? Before then, we heard voices telling us to do things, afterward we narrated our life's story ourselves. W. H. Calvin and G.A. Ojemann, Conversations With Neil's Brain. Reading, MA., 1994. p.282; J. Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Boston, MA., 1976
walked out: "Visual information reaches the (pontine nuclei) both as detailed factual representation and in processed form relevant for directed visual attention from the superior colliculus. Vision, however, does not help patients with cerebellar disorders make accurate intended movements. On the contrary, they can become more undulating, presumably because of more time-consuming corrections." V.B. Brooks, The Neural Basis of Motor Control. New York, 1986. p.268.
fumbled: "One of the key consequences of the assumption that the cerebellum is a censor is that it has a major function in early behavior by regulating the initial development of appropriate reentrant relationships among selected neuronal groups in the cortex and spinal cord. Upon repeated selection, however, the activity of the cerebellum may be needed only for occasional reinforcements or slight corrections. In this view, the cerebellum, like the hippocampus, does not store specific patterns for motion but, rather, serves to link successive unpredicted parts of synergies constructed in a global mapping." G.M. Edelman, Neural Darwinism. New York, 1987. p.229.
perception: "we have to reduce information and optimize the information in some fashion. And as you project into the brain there are again several hundred million nerve cells in the visual cortex that can then analyze the information again and distribute it to higher centers where you will finally have a perceived image. We don't really understand what happens. It is still a mystery. Our main problem--to understand the neural bias of perception--is still to be made." T. Wiesel, D. Brian, The Voice of Genius: Conversations with Nobel Scientists and Other Luminaries. Cambridge, MA., 2001. pp.383-84.
reassembled: "this process of compounding two things added together does not produce a third thing but suggests some fundamental relation between them." Ernest Fenollosa. In, L. Géfin, Ideogram: History of a Poetic Method. Austin, TX., 1982.
a coherent system: S. Walens, Feasting with Cannibals: An Essay on Kwakiutl Cosmology. Princeton, NJ., 1981. pp. 98-9.
Great Master Nojo: L. Downer, On the Narrow Road: Journey into a Lost Japan. New York, 1989. p.202.
if these volatile: N.K. Sandars, Prehistoric Art in Europe. Baltimore, MD., 1968. p.69.
any of: New World Dictionary of the American Language. 2nd Edition. New York, 1980.
mammoth: "Mammoths are extinct herbivorous mammals that had long, dense hair and underfur, very long tusks, a long proboscis (nose), large ears and lived throughout the world. They lived from about 2 million years ago to 9,000 years ago, millions of years after the dinosaurs went extinct. They are closely related to modern-day Indian elephants (they have common ancestor). Some tusks were straight, some were curved; the longest were up to 13 feet (4 m) long....Much of our knowledge of mammoths is from cave drawings and from mummified mammoths found in Siberian ice." http://www.zoomdinosaurs.com/subjects/mammals/Iceagemammals.shtml
frocked in green: "Babies see color from birth, but they have difficulty distinguishing similar tones such as red and orange... But starting at 2 months and continuing through month four, color differences become clearer, and your baby starts to distinguish like shades. As a result, she'll probably begin to show a preference for bright primary colors and more detailed and complicated designs and shapes." http://www.babycenter.com
projection: "But now it was possible to see an objective image in shared space, one that was not the property of particular bodies and had a life of its own, and from this point the whole history of human visual communication unfolds." R. Hughes, "Behold the Stone Age." Time Magazine, 13 Feb 95.
trout stream: "'Can I help you?' 'Yes,' I said. 'I'm curious about the trout stream you have for sale. Can you tell me something about it?' 'We're selling it by the foot length. You can buy as little as you want or you can buy all we've got left. We're selling the waterfalls separately of cause, and the trees and birds, flowers, grass and ferns we're also selling extra. The insects we're giving away free with a minimum purchase of ten feet of stream.'" R. Brautigan, Trout Fishing In America, The Pill verses the Springhill Mine Disaster and In Watermelon Sugar. Boston, MA., 1989. p.104.
gunned himself: "I the fall of 1984 Richard Brautigan went to stay for a while in Bolinas (California) where he had kept a home for some years. He holed up and kept to himself for several weeks until some friends, concerned that they hadn’t seen him for a while, stopped in to check on him. They were the first to discover his body. He had been dead for days. An autopsy revealed that he had shot himself. He was 49 years old." K. Opstedal, "A Literary History of the San Andreas Fault: Bolinas Section." http://www.jackmagazine.com/renhist.html.
"The occipital lobes are the center of our visual perception system. They are not particularly vulnerable to injury because of their location at the back of the brain, although any significant trauma to the brain could produce subtle changes to our visual-perceptual system, such as visual field defects and scotomas. E. Kandel, J. Schwartz & T. Jessell, Principles of Neural Science. 3rd edition. New York, 1991.(scotoma: An island-like blind gap in the visual field. Taber's Medical Dictionary.)
Watch your head: Of course this expression is cloisted in the fact that, except with reference to a mirror, we can't see our heads. Vision is constructed inside the skull-house, beginning with the eyes admitting information in the form of light, which is converted into electrical signals, relayed, then, to the occipital lobe in the very rear of the brain." From there, a small portion of the image, called the attention window gets sent down to the temporal lobe (the region next to your ears), where your brain determines what you're looking at. In addition, information from the entire image goes up to the parietal lobe, where information about where things are is kept. http://www.ai.mit.edu/people/wessler/thesis.html
graves have been: E.A. Armstrong, The Folklore of Birds. New York, 1970. Pp. 66-7.
redundant systems: "Our suspicion is that while these suggestions about two systems are on the right lines, they are probably over simple. The little that is known of the neuroanatomy would suggest that there are likely to be multiple cortical streams, with numerous anatomical connections between them..." F. Crick and C. Koch, "Consciousness and Neuroscience." Cerebral Cortex. 8:97-107 (1998).
Fremont Bridge: The principle of the modern suspension bridge seems to have originated in a region of the Himalayas, where a bridgebuilder "threw over the chasm two parallel cables; from these he hung vertical suspenders made of thinner rope which carried the roadway platform...It represents a great advance in culture, for it is not merely an improvement upon natural bridges: it is actually a new idea." D.B. Steinman and S.R. Watson, Bridges and Their Builders. New York, 1941. p.20.
a conspiracy: "But now it was possible to see an objective image in shared space, one that was not the property of particular bodies and had a life of its own, and from this point the whole history of human visual communication unfolds." R. Hughes, "Behold the Stone Age." Time, 13 Feb 95.
Dry Dock 4: "Thousands of people crowded the St. Johns Bridge and the banks of the Willamette River to welcome it to Portland in 1978. Politicians crowed about the prestige and jobs it would bring. Voters pledged millions for it. About 30,000 people showed up to sing, dance and explore the mammoth structure at a welcoming event. But before dawn Monday, the massive structure will leave, barring the unexpected, without ceremony or veneration." D. Rivera, "In like a lion, out like a lamb." The Oregonian.1 July 2001. p.A1.
ghosts: C. Borkhuis. From, "Slice of Life."
Denali: Athabascan name, meaning "High One," for Mt. McKinley. At 20,320 ft (6,194m) above sea level, this mountain is the highest in North America. While the higher peaks in the Himalayas and the Andes are part of mountain ranges, Denali rises almost alone, 16,000 ft. above the snowline. It is also perhaps the coldest mountain outside Antarctica, with its summit well below zero degrees Fahrenheit almost all year round.
"Most impressive mountains I have seen in Alaska: Drum and Wrangell and a third massive one whose name I forget, rising out of the vast birchy plain of Copper Valley. They are sacred and majestic mountains, ominous, enormous, noble, stirring. You want to attend to them. Beauty and terror of the Chugach. Dangerous valleys. Points. Saws. Snowy nails." T. Merton, "September 24, 1968 (Valdez)." Thomas Merton in Alaska. New York, 1989.
the sun: "In many cultures, the sun was associated with the divine eye, a luminous and powerful force watching over humanity with an untiring gaze. In the sacred Hindu writings, the sun is called 'the eye of the world,' or Toka-Chakshun. Helios, the Greek god of the sun, was referred to as the "eye of the day.' Christianity preserved this association by calling Jesus the 'light of the world,' and for many centuries Christian art represented the all-seeing, all-powerful God as an eye (or a hand or an arm) emerging from the clouds." P Webbink, The Power of the Eyes. New York, 1986. p.142.
this art: J. Dee, Mathematicall Praeface.
Eyesight almost gone: "Promising new results come from The Schepens Eye Research Institute today that demonstrate how surgeons might eventually be able to turn a blind eye back into a seeing one. The work, reported in the journal Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience, marks the first instance of transplanting stem cells, the progenitors of all cells, into diseased eyes in hopes of regenerating damaged retinas--thin sheets of cells in the back eye that collect patterns of light. In fact, many forms of blindness result from illnesses that injure the retina, including macular degeneration, glaucoma and diabetic retinopathy.
"Michael Young and colleagues derived neural stem cells from the hippocampus of adult rats and then injected them into the gel-like vitreous of eyes in rats showing retinal degeneration. In one-, four- and 10-week-old animals, the donor cells not only took, but actually migrated to the right place, started assuming the characteristics of retinal cells and extended into the optic nerve, which links the eye to the brain. In older animals the neural cells were also widely accepted. Surprisingly, the transplants worked best in the most damaged eyes.
"'These cells somehow sense that they are needed, and begin to differentiate into cells that could take on the job of retinal neurons,'" Young comments. 'It is exciting that neural progenitor cells are capable of responding to injury cues in the mature central nervous system.' Although Young cautions that there is still a long way to go, he adds that 'We are optimistic that this technique will one day restore vision to those who have been blinded by disease or injury.'" K. Leutwyler, Scientific American, August, 2001.Hebrew: "According to some...at the moment of its creation, (the primordial Torah) appeared as a series of letters not yet joined up in the form of words. For this reason, in the Torah rolls there appear neither vowels, nor punctuation, nor accents; for the original Torah was nothing but a disordered heap of letters. Furthermore, had it not been for Adam's sin, these letters might have been joined differently to form another story." U. Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language. Oxford, UK., 1995.
the sight centers: http://biology.about.com/science/biology/gi/dynamic
mysterious: "Another tantalizing and related mystery of the brain is why electrical signals arriving in the visual cortex should be experienced as vision, while exactly the same kind of electrical signals, arriving in another part of the brain such as the somatosensory cortex of the auditory cortex, should be perceived as touch and hearing respectively." S.A. Greenfield, The Human Brain. New York, 1997. p.52.
Transformer: "the Kwakiutl (People of British Columbia) believe that morality arose from the actions of Q!aneqelaku, the Transformer, the being who transforms the world from its past, amoral, hunger-dominated condition to its present, moral, hunger-controlling state." S. Walens, Feasting With Cannibals: An Essay of Kwakiutl Cosmology. Princeton, NJ., 1981. p.125.
how it may be: "Monkeys and other primates, including humans, have specialized brain cells that act like an internal mirror. These cells, aptly dubbed 'mirror neurons,' are active when a monkey does something such as grasp a block and also when the monkey sees someone else grasp a block.New research shows that the mirror neurons also fire when the experimenter grasps a block that is hidden from view, as long as the monkey can assume the block is there.
"'When I see a girl eating an apple, I understand what she is doing because there is activation of a motor mechanism in my brain. In other words, I am doing in my brain the same thing the girl does. I am in her shoes, as people say,' says Giacomo Rizzolatti, a psychologist from the University of Parma in Italy and an author of the study. 'The new data show that this mechanism is active also when we, or monkeys, do not see the action but only guess what it might be,' says Rizzolatti.
"The researchers tested the brains of two macaque monkeys, using electrodes to record the response of individual mirror neurons. The monkeys watched a person grasp a block in full view or grasp a block that was behind a screen. As long as the monkey had reason to believe the block was behind the screen, the mirror neurons responded...
The mirror neurons may represent the basic circuitry that primates use to function in a society. 'You're not going to make a society with individuals you don't understand,' says Marco Iacoboni, a neuroscientist from the University of California, Los Angeles. 'We think, with this very simple mechanism, you can understand the actions of others and the intentions of others.'" B. Mason, Dallas Morning News Orlando Sentinel, 2001.We can't anticipate: H. Gardner.
when it's walls: M. Wigley, The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida's Haunt. Cambridge, MA., 1993.
Allende: Salvador Gossens Allende (1908-1973), was president of Chile (1970-1973). "In 1970, calling for social and economic changes, Allende narrowly won the presidency, receiving just over 36 percent of the vote. His policies aimed to improve conditions for the poor and diminish the role of private property and corporations, especially foreign-owned companies, in Chile's economy. Allende called this the 'Chilean Road' to socialism, via peaceful democratic elections and legislation...
"In pursuing his goals, Allende increased the speed of land reform, breaking up large estates and giving land to poor farmers. He nationalized many businesses, including coal, steel, and the vital copper industry. His government also froze prices, raised wages, subsidized milk, and made medical care and education available to children...
"Under President Richard Nixon, the United States sought to prevent Allende's inauguration and then to speed his overthrow through economic pressure and covert aid to his opponents. The United States discouraged new private investment in Chile and blocked funds from the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and Interamerican Development Bank. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency secretly sent at least $10 million to Chilean groups that opposed Allende..." A-M. Smith, Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia 2001 http://encarta.msn.com © 1997-2001 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.very wrong: "On September 11, 1973, Allende was overthrown in a violent military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte. During the coup Allende was offered safe exile but chose to remain in the presidential offices, which were attacked with rocket fire and besieged by army troops. When the siege ended, Allende was found dead of bullet wounds. Official reports state that Allende committed suicide, but many assert that he was assassinated by the invading soldiers." Ibid.
fire: "There is almost nothing that is not brought to a finished state by means of fire." Elder Pliny, Natural History. (1st Century A.D. This includes weapons. For example, instead of using his sword to blind Polyphemus, the "much-famed" one-eyed Cyclopes, Odysseus fashions a wooden spear, heating its tip in fire until red-hot before plunging this "violent technology" into the ogre's eye. Such a spear was "the primordial weapon of man," extending back to the Paleolithic, as "the only effective weapon for hunting." W. Burkert, Structure and History in Greek Mythology and Ritual. Berkeley, 1979. p.34.
sweet smoke: "Even by 1920, the U.S. sugar industry still was small, centered mainly in Louisiana and Hawaii with a slowly developing sugar-beet presence in the Midwest. Despite a subtropical climate and an early sugar heritage--Canaveral means 'cane field' in Spanish--cane was a garden species, grown piecemeal by settlers and Seminoles. The future capital of cane was still dismissed as a hot, buggy, underpopulated state whose swampy saw-grass interior, in one account, was 'suitable only for the haunt of noxious vermin, or the resort of pestilent reptiles." P. Roberts, "The Sweet Hereafter." Harper's Magazine. November 1999. p.57.
I watch: "The universe does not exist 'out there,' independent of us. We are inescapably involved in bringing about what appears to be happening. We are not only observers; we are participators. In some strange sense this is a participatory universe. Physics is no longer satisfied with insights only into particles, fields of force, into geometry, or even into space and time. Today we demand of physics some understanding of existence. itself." J. Wheeler. In, D. Brian, The Voice of Genius: Conversations with Nobel Scientists and Other Luminaries. Cambridge, MA., 2001. p.127.
This relates to The Anthropic Principle, first suggested in 1973 by the cosmologist Brandon Carter, and now comes in three flavors: Weak (WAP), Strong (SAP), and John Wheeler's Final Anthropic Principle (FAP), which he touches on above. The Anthropic Principle, introduced 500 years after Copernicus suggested a sun-centered planetary system, places humans at the center of a universe specifically designed for them. The opposite to this anthropological point of view is philosopher Paul Feyerabend's statement that we live in "a world whose features are independent of thought and perception or, to express it more dramatically, the idea that humans are aliens, not natural inhabitants of the universe." P. Feyerabend, Conquest of Abundance. Chicago, IL., 1999. p.167.
wild bodies: "To be eaten, or not to be eaten but to eat, these are two sides of the basic process of life. Man eats animals, and consumes them, disturbing the balance of life; to make up for this, myth introduces an agent who preserves the flocks and eats men. The ogre, master of animals, is a term necessitated by structural logic, as it were, not childlike fantasy." Burkert; Ibid. p.33.
culture: "Rescued from a dead end by the use of violent technology more than once, man has triumphantly survived, but remains endangered by the curse of violated nature (represented here by the Cyclops). The antithesis of nature and culture is more than a logical game; it may be fatal." Berkert; Ibid., p.34.
| Cyclopean
Eye: Inter- gration of two images which makes it seem |
 |
as if we have a visual point that originates between both eyes. |
mask and all: "As Siegfried Giedion writes, 'A bird's head upon a human figure is one of the most venerable mythological inventions. It appears in an early phase of the Aurignacian period as well as on the female figures at Pech Merle.' These goddess figures are not set apart, three of them remain entangled in the labyrinthine lines with the mammoths. The one with a head has been named the Lady of the Mammoths. As the earliest known bird deities, they express the emotional intensity of early perceptions and beliefs covering an extremely rich system, one far more complex than had been previously been imagined." B. Johnson, Lady of the Beasts. San Francisco, CA., 1988. p.11.; S. Giedion, The Eternal Present: The Beginnings of Art. New York, 1962. p.503.
Mockingbird's song: "They are not the soft sounds of the flute or of the hautboy that I hear, but the sweeter notes of Nature's own music. The mellowness of the song, the varied modulations and gradations, the extent of its compass, the great brilliancy of execution, are unrivaled. There is probably no bird in the world that possesses all the musical qualifications of this king of song, who has derived all from Nature's self." J. J. Audubon, Birds of America. Vol. 2. http://employeeweb.myxa.com/rrb/Audubon/
wizened hawk: The Fish Hawk "may be said to be of a mild disposition. Not only do these birds live in perfect harmony together, but they even allow other birds of very different character to approach so near to them as to build their nests of the very materials of which the outer parts of their own are constructed.....It never forces its young from the nest, as some other Hawks do, but, on the contrary, is seen to feed them even when they have begun to procure food for themselves." Ibid.; Vol.1.
which Homer: "He was said to be living in a remote international scientific outpost in the Antarctic. He was reported to have bought a small island off Costa Rica and declared himself dictator. One web page gave an extensive excerpt of what was supposedly his upcoming/novel about the life of Shakespeare, told in the first person. There was no way to tell whether any or all of this was apocryphal. Horace Jacob Little seemed less and actual person than a myth handed down from generation to generation, a bogeyman in a tale that varied wildly with the teller." D. Czuchlewski, The Muse Asylum. New York, 2001. pp. 93-4.
conceived Odysseus: "the first scratchings on sheepskin or papyrus of a new scribal craft may not seem like much, but if writing could have altered the sensibilities of poets at large--in a tradition that honored poetry as much as it did athletics--those poets could have influenced the emergence of consciousness. At any rate, Odysseus--who was conceived by a poet called Homer perhaps a generation further into the eighth century and into the alphabetic tradition then Achilles, who was conceived by the poet's previous serial self, also, called Homer---displays advances in awareness of himself as a whole man." R. Eisner, The Road to Daulis. Syracuse, NY, 1987. p.96.
sends and receives: http://biology.about.com/science/biology/gi/dynamic
Radnóti: Mikos Radnóti (1909-1944) was Hungary's great classical/avant-garde poet. He was deported to Yugoslavia to work in labor camps and copper mines, finally to be murdered by the Nazis.
after Brain: "After the bullet hit, his body felt indescribably cold. It was extremely painful, but after the pain came a feeling of extraordinary comfort. That comfort lasted for only an instant: there was a feeling of comfort, and then it ended, and he died. When he had just died, at first he wasn't aware of anything, it all went dark and empty...How he came back to life later he did not know: he just felt as if he were on a springboard, then there was a somersault, and he came back." H-C Nan, To Realize Enlightenment. York Beach, ME, 1994. p.49.
Blood dried: M. Radnóti. From, "Picture Postcards."
is rarely damaged: http://biology.about.com/science/biology/gi/dynamic
between dreams: "(Allan) Hobson is probably the most influential (and controversial) neuroscientist working on dreams today. It is his conviction that dreaming is a reaction to random nervous system activity and is nothing more than a marginally successful attempt to make sense of a sequence of images in the visual cortex. These images are brought on by random bursts of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine which has, among other things, the property of causing hyperassociation, or the ability of the brain 'to jump from one class of images/thoughts to another' --in short, rampant metaphor. Dreams are, Hobson insists, 'a weak form of psychosis because they are attended by the same discontinuities and hallucinations that one finds in psychosis and delirium.'" B.O.States, "Dreams: The Royal Road to Metaphor." http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/substance/v030/30.1states.html; J.A. Hobson, The Chemistry of Conscious States: How the Brain Changes Its Mind. Boston, 1994. p.199.
eyes that see: There's a Buddhism belief that the eye is the organ by which we see, instead of neuroscience's belief that seeing takes place in the visual cortex, along with its various ancillary organs.
around corners: "this, of course, is the society of total visibility." D. Czuchlewski, The Muse Asylum. New York, 2001.
prosthetic eyes: "Illinois doctors plan to implant microscopic chips in the eyeballs of three people suffering from retinal damage, in the second phase of a study that may determine whether chips can restore human vision.
"The microsurgery starts with three incisions smaller than the diameter of a introduce a vacuuming device that removes the gel in the middle of the eye and replaces it with saline solution. Surgeons then make a pinpoint opening in the retina to inject fluid in order to lift a portion of the retina from the back of the eye, creating a pocket to accommodate the chip. The retina is resealed over the chip, and doctors inject air into the middle of the eye to force the retina back over the device and close the incisions.
"The chip, called Artificial Silicon Retina (ASR)...is just 2 millimeters in diameter and 1/1000 of an inch in thickness. It requires no batteries or wires and is completely self-contained, since it is powered by the light that enters the eye. The chip contains 3,500 microscopic solar cells that convert light into electrical impulses. It works by replacing damaged photoreceptors, the so-called light-sensing cells of the eye. Healthy cells convert light into electrical signals within the retina." D. Sherman, "Doctors Test Chips in Eyeballs to Restore Sight." Reuters, 20 July 2001.strong eyes: "An important faculty that the clever men possess, and that is assiduously trained 'the strong eye.' This means not so much the power of looking into another person's mind as the power of looking into and through a sick person's body to see whether the soul is present or not, and also of being able to see the spirit of a 'murderer' and even the spirits of the dead. In short, to possess the strong eye is to have the faculty of seeing spirits, of the living and of the dead." A.P. Elkin, Aboriginal Men of High Degree. Rochester, VT., 1994. p.50.
the Jewish sense: D. Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous. New York, 1996.
I see something: "The scientific community arrives at its definition of 'to see' by averaging the responses of a population of 'normal' individuals across numerous days of testing. In other words, the working definition of 'to see' is defined by the method of inquiry used within the context of a particular way of seeing. There is little, of anything, in the method that takes into account either our perceptual potential or any mode of seeing that falls outside what happens in a darkened laboratory setting." L. Sewall, Sight and Sensibility. New York, 1999. p.48.
vigilance: At Indiana State University, Neils Rattenborg monitored the brain waves of mallards sleeping in a row, and found that the ducks on the perimeter, who were in greater risk of attack, slept with the eye facing away from the group open, one brain hemisphere awake, while the other rested.
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Did Homer: "Whether Homer existed or not, he is described as a very old man, blind as Milton, blind as Bach, blind as Fate, the style of old age in all its greatness, coolness, and abstract transparency, is so obvious in his work that people had necessarily to conceive him in this form. He himself became myth, and since behind almost every myth stands some historical reality, we ought not to ask whether he existed or not, but should simply accept him as the mythical old man, the eternal paradigm of an epoch which demands the rebirth of myth." H. Broch, "The Style of the Mythical Age." In, R. Bespaloff, On the Iliad. Washington, D.C., 1947. p.26.
what I'm trying to see: "Every exile is a Ulysses traveling toward Ithaca. Every real existence reproduces the Odyssey. The path toward Ithaca, toward the center. I had known all that for a long time. What I have just discovered is that the chance to become a new Ulysses is given to any exile whatsoever. (precisely because he has been condemned by the gods, that is, by the 'powers' which decide historical, earthly destines). But to realize this, the exile must be capable of penetrating the hidden meaning of his wanderings, and of understanding them as a long series of initiation trails (willed by the gods) and as so many obstacles on the path which brings him back to the hearth (toward the center). That means: seeing signs, hidden meanings, symbols, in the suffering, the depressions, the dry periods in everyday life." M. Eliade, No Souvenirs: Journal, 1957-1969. New York, 1977. pp. 84-5.
Portland, OR: "Then there was Portland (where we were not supposed to be) & the plane filled up & I finished Hermann Hesse & Paul Bowles..." T. Merton, Thomas Merton in Alaska. New York, 1989. p.34.
It never leaves: I once heard a writer with a strong Brooklyn accent being interviewed on the radio. It's Henry Miller! I thought, without having heard his voice before, though it colored his writing. All those years in Paris, and then in California, had not weakened his distinctive Brooklyn squall.
what we can see: "Somewhere or other on the retina, there must be an area where there is no vision cells, allowing for optic nerve fibers and blood vessels to exit from the eye. That is why there is a 'gap' in our field of vision, the so-called blind spot. But the existence of the blind spot is not the interesting thing. What is interesting is that we do not see it...In fact it is not a blind spot at all. It is, as psychologist Julian Jaynes puts it, a 'non-spot.' Even if we have no information from that spot about what's going on, we do not experience a gap but merely experience a smoothing, an average of the immediate surroundings. We do not know that what we are seeing is a trick." T. Norretranders, The User Illusion. New York, 1998. p.180.