Philip Sugg | Blog

It’s always nice to know the name of the flower that is blooming right now; another challenge is to look for the wildflowers that have faded back to greenery. From a plant cultivator’s standpoint, the action ramps up when the bloom fades. It is then that you have to watch for the seedpods. These can be tiny–dispersed within a day–or large, ostentatious and long-lived, as in many species of milkweed.

I’d say we’re past early spring by now. The first round of squill that appeared all over the neighborhood have faded. I realized that I had never observed these flowers after they lose their blooms. Hard as they are to miss against the grey background of late winter, I forget about them and their distinctive colors as the season goes on. But even though we are two weeks or more past their blooms, the plants are still above ground. I went hunting and found the seedpods of one squill variant, Puschkinia scilloides

In L.M. Sacasas’ latest The Convivial Society newsletter, he notes

…a shrinking lexicon of words related to sense experience. I’m relying here on an observation Ivan Illich makes in “Guarding the Eye in the Age of Show,” and, by extension, the sources he cites. “Dozens of words for shades of perception have disappeared from usage,” Illich notes. “For what the nose does, someone has counted the victims: Of 158 German words that indicate variations of smell, which Dürer’s [d. 1528] contemporaries used, only thirty-two are still in use. Equally, the linguistic register for touch has shriveled. The see-words fare no better.”¹

I would add to this, on a strictly anecdotal basis, a similarly diminishing lexicon of names for natural phenomena such as flora and fauna. Generic categories do a lot of work in ordinary speech: birds, bugs, trees, etc. More specific names seem to elude many of us.

Relatedly, while language tethered to the material world appears to diminish, language tethered to the virtual realm endlessly proliferates and fragments.

While the overall trend wouldn’t surprise me–you can say best what you do, and even then you have to practice saying it–I would be interested in confirming this phenomenon in a modern empirical setting. No one could go back and verify how many words for the birds and bees a medieval everyman would have used, but trends over even the last few decades might tell something.

And I would be surprised if all the senses suffered equally. As John Berger teaches, much of the modern world is an intensely visual culture, and even if we most people today see differently than their ancestors, there is an argument that the “ways of seeing” have proliferated.

There’s a virtuous interchange between hiking culture and intellectual/book culture. People who spend lots of time outdoors–walking, or just observing–tend to be on the more contemplative end of the spectrum. Those traits also make good writers, and foster the patience and introverted concentration necessary to actually produce a book. For this reason there is a lot of detailed writing in publication about naturalistic exploration, usually written out of attachment to a specific place. The genre is not well-defined, and encourages DIY eccentricity with respect to organization: topics include what to do and where to go, amateur botany and biology, old-school naturalist appreciation, human history, and exquisite reflections on simply being there. Some of the best books are indifferent to genre and quite uncharacterizable, and tend to be written at the end of an author’s life, as an attempt to crystalize decades of on-the-ground life. Publication with a small or specialty press (of which there are fewer and fewer), or even self-publication, often makes these works possible. Michael Frome’s Strangers in High Places: The Story of the Great Smoky Mountains comes to mind. As a result these books are rarely in publication for very long; usually they fall out of print and into obscurity as soon as they appear. I’ve taken to collecting books in this space that I find particularly worthy of preservation, especially if they cover a region that I have long experience with like the Appalachians. The big centralized online booksellers like Amazon and its affiliates are often, for all their problems, the only sources for a few old copies of these books.

Sherry Turkle, The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (1984)

Children use the computer in their process of world and identity construction. They use it for the development of fundamental conceptual categories, as a medium for the practice of mastery, and as a malleable material for helping forge their sense of themselves. The computer is a particularly rich and varied tool for serving so wide a range of purposes. It enters into children’s process of becoming and into the development of their personalities and ways of looking at the world. It finds many points of attachment with the process of growing up. Children in a computer culture are touched by technology in ways that set them apart from the generations that have come before. Adults are more settled. In the worst of cases, they are locked into roles, afraid of the new, and protective of the familiar. Even when they are open to change, established ways of thinking act as a braking force on the continual questioning so characteristic of children. Family and work responsibilities and the very real constraints of social class can make it too risky to cast doubt on certainties. But there are events and objects that cause the taken-for-granted to be wrestled with anew. The computer is one of these provocations to reflection. Among a wide range of adults, getting involved with computers opens up long-closed questions. It can stimulate them to reconsider ideas about themselves and can provide a basis for thinking about large and puzzling philosophical issues.

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Thunderclouds passing out of the area, east over Lake Michigan, yesterday. I believe these unusual extensions on the underside are a somewhat rare variant known as mammatus (it means what it sounds like), which often form at the tail end of thunderstorms when unstable air falls beneath the bottom layer of the cloud, creating the whispy outgrowths visible here.

Sherry Turkle in The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit(1984) on her fieldwork about how children distinguish between humans and computers:

Emotion is the psychological quantity most frequently used to separate the human and the machine. But it is not the only one. David, twelve, a sophisticated programmer, used a concrete language to express a more nuanced set of qualities: “When there are computers who are just as smart as people, the computers will do a lot of the jobs, but there will still be things for the people to do. They will run the restaurants, taste the food, and they will be the oneswho will ove each other, have families and love each other. I guess they’ll still be the only ones who go to church. (62)

1984 was before the internet-driven tech boom, but I see its concepts anticipated in the child’s comments: computers are logical, people are emotional; what distinguishes people is their ability to feel and use the senses; people have bodily and spiritual needs, computers do not. If there is a master message in today’s commercial digital world, it is that computers do stuff so that human beings can do “more important things.” Never mind that the important things are unstated, in theory they include a lot of what the kid mentions. The current excitement about language AI only pushes this same distinction further. Language now falls under the law-like regulation of algorithms; it is time to let machines take that over, too. Turkle concludes:

László Földényi:

In Venice, in an of the out-of-the-way corner of the Piazzetta located at the corner of the basilica of Saint Mark, there is a statuary group depicting the Four Tetrarchs. Carved out of the hardest granite, the sculpture, dating from the beginning of the fourth century, depicts Diocletian with three of his chosen co-sovereigns. They huddle together as if ready to brave the in- cipient end of the world.

– Dostoevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts into Tears

Continuing:

Each draws our gaze; nonetheless, they are so uniform that no matter which one we begin to look at, we see the others as well. It does not matter with what small detail we commence our examination, we always perceive, involuntarily, the whole of the sculpture. Their shoes and their garments are uniform, their swords, crowns, and belts are uniform, the fabric on them is draped in a similar fashion, their foreheads are wrinkled in a similar manner, their gazes are uniformly careworn. There are four of them, and yet they appear to be one single living being.

Földényi identifies the sculptures with the “mass” in two ways. First, mass is what unites all things, a universal materiality that could be the divine. If matter as a whole is a divine unity, then being part of the whole elevates the individual, lightening the burden of individuation:

Human beings are themselves the crystallization of this cosmic “mass,” this fundament which can neither be enclosed nor bounded; our souls are nothing other than the “condensation” of the divine mass. We cannot step out of this mass-like existence, nor can we “state anything” about it, as every conjecture or declaration is made possible only by the mass. No matter what we might say about the mass, that statement would only be yet a further manifestation of the universal mass itself. And this universal mass does not recognize any difference between soul and body, between the dead and the living, between the material and the immaterial. Yet there is something divine within it—and human beings will have a connection to the divine for as long as we are able to vividly preserve within ourselves the experience of the cosmic roots of our own existence.

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