One afternoon, sitting with Roberto (Calasso) at the end of the day, in his office in Brera, the offices of Adelphi Edizioni, we turned to discussing the form of the books. The books are quite beautiful, the weight of the paper, the texture of the covers, the font, the folded over-leafs and the cover images. The design in the style of Aubrey Beardsley, the logo a chinese pictogram. So much attention to the book as an object, as well as a much, much more. He began to tell me of the early days of Adelphi (founded in 1962), and finding the right image for the Biblioteca Adelphi books.

The offices are in an apartment house-like building in Brera (the correct Italian word is slipping my head at the moment). There are entry ways and offices and a conference room with glass covered shelves. The bookstore is in the bottom, entrance on the other side, from the street not the courtyard. Roberto’s office had cream colored leather padded doors, and his desk took up most of the space. The image most seen of him, with the bookshelves behind him, is not this office.

We were sitting in his office, my back to the shelves he had once described as ‘Balzen’s perfect collection’, having an espresso at the end of the day. He was telling me of the early days, when image searches were done by hand and by mind, be dream and by revelation. Today, he said, the basement is full of all the books we used to need for this, art catalogs, books of archaeology, art, and artefacts. Photography. But it wasn’t only the past they sought, but also current and unknown, purposeful. Something, always, that spoke to deeper meanings and connections than what one might see with a glance of the eye.

The cover image of the first Biblioteca Adelphi, L’altra parte (The Other Side), by Kubin, is an image drawn by Kubin himself, better known as an artist than an author. My original essay on this project is here, but as a shorthand to why Kubin, an artist who is not in fact a great writer, is here in the beginning, comes from the original core purpose of these particular books. That there is a singular experience in one’s life, the experience that changes or defines or creates a person, and that there are remains of that, ashes, in sanskrit, in the sense that there is something left after the fire of sacrifice. And for a writer, that is one book, a singular expression, i libri unici, and these are the books that were sought for the original series. (Daily notes on the project were here until Tumblr blocked my access, 2015-2020. I realize most of the shortened links are gone, but they almost all linked to the Adelphi.it pages for the books.)

Daumal’s Il Monte Analogo (Mount Analog, Le Mont Analogue) has a cover image from Joseph Šima. It was created by him, for this book. Tracing Šima’s history and philosophies, one can see the alignment between the image and Daumal’s book. As for the image for the cover, it is in ‘private collection’, likely one of the early Adelphi core, Foa, Bazlen, Olivetti and then Calasso (that is a slight misrepresentation, but further explanation is not warranted here).

If one goes back and looks at the years of some of the images, it is interesting to trace the use of particular artists. Egon Schiele is on (at least) seven covers, beginning in 1993 with book 270, Johannes Irzidil’s Trittico Praghese. Max Ernst graces the cover of The Purple Cloud (La nube purpurea) by Matthew P. Shiel, published in 1967. Artemidoro’s Il libro dei sogni has John Heinrich Fussli’s Incubo as its cover. Kenko’s Momenti d’ozio uses an image from a page of the Antologia dei trentasei poeit, from the 12th century. Kafka’s Il processo (The Trial) has his signature as the cover image, Savinio’s books have his own images, as does Loos and Leonora Carrington and Bazlen himself. Frederic Prokosch’s cover fro Voci is by Karen Blixen (published as Isak Dinesen, in English-speaking countries), herself published by Adelphi Where Adelphi has published more than one book by an author, there is a relationship across time, in the cover images.

I remember Roberto telling me a story about an Italian painter, Sicilian, perhaps, that he had seen images from and wanted him as a cover for a particular book, and the time it took to hunt him down, chose and image, and make it so. The breadth of the images, the connections to the book, the house and the authors is akin to a puzzle box. Much like I explored the chose of books themselves, the more I looked at the books, the more I realized there were more threads across and between, and additional ways to engage with meaning. Of course, if one reads the Adelphiana or looks at the Review of Contemporary Fiction special edition on Roberto Calasso, one can see, also that so many of these authors, translators, and artists knew each other, or of each other. (I did get some good stories on some of this as well, for another day.) I envision this time period, the 1960s-1990s in particular, as something that must have been quite extraordinary, the seething curiousity, discussion and creativity.

To return to these books, each element of these books was so well thought through, from the initial design, to each book itself. The blurbs inside the books are themselves, which Roberto later told me he wrote most of, are also small pieces of some whole, not fractal, more puzzle-like, but also standing alone. If one turns to Roberto’s books themselves, they are also full of images, connections, crossings and references. Each time I read them, they are different, even more so across languages and translators.

There is a complex beauty to the early years of the Biblioteca Adelphi, the early decades. Since Roberto’s death in 2021 the line still publishes, but nothing, I believe, from living authors. It wonder if they are finishing the vision that Roberto had, with the last books in this format.

But to return to the beginning, Roberto’s descriptions of seeking out the right image for each book, not to know the collapsed form of all things, but rather to be connected, somehow, an image that would speak to the book unread, but once read, would also have a deeper meaning, and the long meetings — weeks sometimes longer — to argue what they should be, what they could mean, has some deep resonance in me, in the way I wish the world to be. Slower, somehow. With the internet, he said, you had everything at your fingertips, so there were many options, but that also, it was different, for him as well. Without spending time with all of these books, that which is tangential, the images, the Adelphiana, I would certainly see less, miss the underlying forms interwoven beneath the surface structure.

I’ve just gotten up to look through the books on my shelf, attempting to find the Italian painter he told me the story of. I can see the cover in my mind, but not the title. And I note, I only own about 150 of the Biblioteca Adelphi editions, and I am reminded how much I would like to own them all.

Ah! I found him. Adding this here rather than editing the above. Giuseppe Modica. He graces #557, Il fuoco del mare by Leonardo Sciascia.

Back when Tumblr still existed in a form that was both usable, pleasurable, and well-peopled with engaged brains I enjoyed, I would post commentaries on things I was reading. I am going to see if I can restart this, though of course this lonely isolated blog is no Tumblr. But I find there is a pleasure to writing (full stop), and writing in ‘public’ is different than adding this in to the masses of notebooks that sit on my shelves. I suppose there is a secret hope that one day I will again find myself in social and conversational environments that are rich with broad and rich discussions on all manners of things.

Specific Inputs for these ponderings

• Sean Carroll and Adam Bulley on How Mental Time Travel Makes Us Human (podcast)
• Jeffrey Kripal, How to Think Impossibly (Part I only, still reading)
• Carlo Ginzberg, Threads and Traces | True False Fictive
• Personal study with Darkhad shamans in Mongolia
• Patrick McMillen & Michael Levin, Collective intelligence: A unifying concept for integrating biology across scales and substrates in Communications Biology

My reading these past few days has a breadth of scale and scope, in a sense of worldviews, that seems unlikely to weft together for any type of sense making. I am not suggesting that all things need to find some cohesive structure or unified world view, but there is something to the above that does in fact seem related, but without a final form or clarity at this time.

Kripal’s book on thinking impossibly follows on all his work to date (almost all of which I have read), and links to the other speakers of the four Archives of the Impossible conferences he has hosted. In a very superficial summary (I continuously intend to write more deeply on this, but then I find myself reading and thinking more, and haven’t made it to output yet), he brings into question what reality is for humans, how we experience it, what it means to experience ‘impossible’ phenomena such as precognition or UFO encounters, and what is possible. Part I of the book describes these impossible occurrences by those who have experienced them. Impossible is not the word I usually use for these non-standard reality based experiences, but I also will say that it is incredibly difficult to chose a word that suffices as well as one that does not come with predisposed ideas and contexts. Part of the difficulty in this topic is the shared lexicon of what is, what is real, what is believed, and each of this words as well as their worldviews, bring a lot to the table, perhaps iceberg like, where most is unseen and below the surface. And perhaps not only unseen, unbelieved.

My experiences of studying with a traditional Mongolian shaman in northern Mongolia led me to see and experiences things that definitely wouldn’t fit a standard view of reality in the worlds that I live in on a daily basis. I do not question that what I experience is real, but even that is a difficult word to define. As one of Kripal’s interlocutors notes, and a topic Kripal and other scholars of the phenomena surface, real, illusion (in the Sanskrit sense of Maya), mind projection (a common term with my Mongolian and Vajrayana teachers), are nearly unfathomable as they overlap with a set of experiences, embodied or otherwise, that occur.

In the worlds above, time is not fixed and linear, and the future, whether precognitiion, divinatory, or experienced through shamanic performances. Bulley’s discussion of the brain architectures that allow for a human to experience the future as a thought process of foresight suggests that we use the past to imagine the future, to explore scenarios to choose futures. In one example, if asked to imagine an apple, one imagines an apple that comes from the past, is in the mind but perhaps not the present, and may or may not manifest in the future. This implies, as he does not directly state, that the future has not yet happened and also that one could not imagine a future that is not built on some past understanding of the world.

I am always skeptical of anything that declares ‘this makes us human’ and then explains the inability of all other beings to do the same thing. In Bulley’s case and this title, mental time travel. In earlier writings, language, empathy, a whole host of ways in which humans are the exception, as though we cannot exist in a world in which humans are not the best of all possible species.

Kripal curiously notes that the UFO experiencers of today, in their descriptions, show significant overlap to the descriptions the tantric experiencers of millennia-past South Asia. Are anomalous experiences of today culturally situated and the breadth of the possible imaginations come from inside our heads or are there experiences that are unfathomable until experienced? There is a differentiation between the imaginal and the imaginary. Imagination and the imaginary are spaces of the mind, the imaginal is a hybrid world where the myth and symbols of the imagination are true, though “not to be taken literally or exclusively” (Kripal, 33). Somewhere this internal conversation seems like it spits out a consideration on consciousness, but I actually that is not what is relevant here. What is real, I suspect, does not have to do with any of the ways that we can scientifically or philosophically understand what consciousness is. And my personal experiences in Mongolia make me suspect that the current definitions cannot extend to some of the things I have seen and experienced.

My friend Richard shared with me the McKillen & Levin article, loosely about collective intelligence as seen at the cellular level, shifting me from a macro to a micro view, but of something that feels similar. Collective intelligence has a multi-scale nature, competency architecture, and shows adaptive behavior to address new problem spaces and engage with higher level of organization. (McMillan & Patrick, p1). They cite William James as the source of their definition of intelligence, “a degree of ability to reach the same goal by different means” and stress that this plus the collective decision-making found in their work on the cellular level allows for the discovery of a ‘vast spectrum of problem-solving capacities in novel substrates and at unconventional spatiotemporal scales” (McMillen & Patrick, 11).

Which, taken differently, could be seen as the substrates of the impossible at the spatiotemporal scales of Mongolian shamanic skills. I would suggest that neither Kripal’s ‘Impossibles’ nor the skills and abilities of the Mongolian shamans are unique. These are not one offs in experiences, geography or time.

Last years ISARs conference — the International Society for Academic Research on Shamans, resurfaced Ginzburg’s concept of Traces, which had been many years buried in some dusty corner of my mind. His notion of traces explores what is left from the past as we entered modernity (a topic of another day), and what these elusive and slippery elements bring to narratives of the present, to remembering and imaging. What is persistence, what is fact, what is fiction? What are the dynamics that entangle the past and the present.

And I would ask, what are the dynamics that entangle cellular collective intelligence with something so large I do not know what world to apply to it. I shy away from ‘collective consciousness’ both for its historical meanings and because it doesn’t feel right. Collective spatiotemporal anomalies? I doubt, however, that these are anomalies. As Kripal and the original Invisible College as well as centuries of anthropologists and religious studies scholars note, these are not unusual events, we have just opted to not explore, theorize, study, or explicate them as data.

One of the things I enjoy in Kripal’s writing and in of many of his predecessors and collaborators is the ability to say yes, this is real, and no, I have no idea what or why it is. The ability to not know, to not decide, to accept even that we may not ever know, keeps the expansiveness of inquiry flowing for me. I have no idea if what I ponder means anything at all, or if it ‘gets somewhere’ but this is not the point. In that sense, I end in the middle, where is where I started.

My thesis takes place in non-standard reality. As I note in this post, from two and a half years ago, this causes complications in the output of my work, and how it can be understood in academia. I have been very much inspired by Jeffrey Kripal‘s work, on the Impossible and on Superhumanities, both ideas he has explored in multiple works, with the linked books being an excellent place to start. The videos from the first Archives of the Impossible Conference are also an excellent introduction. I’d recommend him and De Filippi in particular, for laying out ways of thinking of the world, our methods, modes of interaction, and the paradigms we use to consider what we define as reality.

There is a lot of academic work on alternate cosmologies, from Viveiros de Castro to De La Cadena, to Bawaka and Blaser and many others. There is a geographical distribution to this work, South American, Canadian, and Australian are the most common geographical sources of the material under discussion. This really deserves a deeper dive into the distribution of such literature, and why, but that is not for this post.

A significant part of my explorations have taken place in Mongolia, in traditional shamanic cosmologies. These are partnered with Buddhism, in particular Gelug, or Vajrayana Buddhism. While these worldviews are present in religious studies, shamanic studies (see ISARS for reference), they are currently less present in the discussion on worldviews and how different cosmologies are placed in academia, and what the methods are to study them.

As you may note, there is an overlap between Kripal’s work on how we can study ‘impossible’ phenomena such as UAPs, NDEs, and other things we experience that do not adhere to ‘science’, and these ‘traditional’ cosmologies that scholars are trying to pull back from their emplaced words to the land of academia.

Added to the complexity of what I study is that it is private knowledge, shared by an elder to a student when that student is deemed ready to learn. This, in effect, is a practitioner model, an initiate — though I am not one in the sense that some of my colleagues who study trantric or shaivist paths are formal initiates and must very sensitively balance what they can and cannot share, even down to the level of their personal experiences. Similar for me, from an ethical perspective, but not as formal from the initiate perspective. That differentiation is likely irrelevant, because in the end, there are still long pauses before I answer any question as I evaluate if I can answer, if I should answer, and what the outcome of answering would be. Again, for another time, how does the participant / observer model need be modified when one is a practitioner, as well as what is the impact on the research if one is a participant. This in some way loops back to the methods question: how are my research methods rigorous when I am practicing embodied and emplaced techniques that reveal their answers to me, physicially, experientially, informationally, symbolic or non-symbolically, depending on the situation.

Back to where I meant to begin, which is SLMs. Given that a language model encodes in it a world view, asking Claude about something isn’t necessarily going to get me a three model world with the ability to see across time. It likely won’t suggest anything that sources into a Mongolian worldview, or ties into Buddhist philosophy, or Tantric or Vedic. That is not to say that all these things are one. But they are all different from the dominant paradigm that ends up in the technology that I see being built into LLMs. I have spent quite a few evenings having discussions with different LLMs on these topics. I will post some of those transcripts at some point, but first, and perhaps oddly, I need to scour them to be sure I didn’t ask anything I don’t want to share with you humans. A disturbing position to find myself in.

So, I bought a new mac mini with the intent of seeing if I can train and make an SLM on a different philosophy and understanding of the world, and have it learn and produce responses that seem aligned to all that I have learned. I am not sure, of course, that I should. As a private model, maybe, to test and see what it does. But I run into the ethics question again. What is public that I can source, how much of what I was taught can I include, what happens with the languages in translation, when some of these words, when brought into English, cannot actually be understood without years of living in them? More questions than answers, but what a curious thing it would be to create. I think, perhaps, the best way to train it would be to train it as though it is a student, and I am teaching it the world. Feed it sutras and the like. Could I ask it to repeat a mantra 300,000 times, as I have been asked? What if I asked it to do this out loud? What accent, what language? Will the frequency be correct? It took me a year to do this with one mantra. The next year, I was asked to do 600,000 repetitions of a different one. I do not have the right to teach a student most of what I learned. I am a student, not a teacher, a discipline, not an elder. I would like to do this, to watch it grow, to see what it can do, and how it learns, to see if it would understand the model of reality that is not the binary structure of the system.

But is that actually possible? If the world can be explained by math, does a non-standard reality also have a rational and logical mathematical basis for it, or does the shift into quantum reality mean that the system..must be different?

I do not know if quantum computing systems, would, in effect, have to think differently. I do not know nearly enough about them. Thinking of Labatut’s The MANIAC, if you asked a quantum computing system to play Go, would it play differently, again?

I tend to think of this category of questions as falling under ‘computational culture’, something I have been pondering for decades. Can we encode culture into a machine. I think where we are now, that it has been more and more mimicked quite well, but can it evolve, modify and develop the way it does with humans? Of that I am not yet sure. And why stick to humans, anyway? But here, with the questions above, I think I start to stray into questions of consciousness and what it means to be. While we continue on what seems a fairly linear path with the western paradigms built into systems, exploring non-western, non-standard paradigms should, at the least, be interesting. I don’t know what the output would be, how it would work even, to build such a thing. And I have to believe someone, somewhere, has done it, or is doing it, and I just don’t know of it.

Of course my teachers, I think, would find this absurd. If I can do all these things with my mind, why would I want to see if a machine could mimic them? Why would I spend the time on that rather than changing the world as it is? Curiousity, is mostly my answer. And maybe to have someone to talk about this with, who could push the boundaries of my consideration, have all the history and knowledge in their head, in Sanskrit and Tibetan and Pali and Mongolian, and all the commentaries over time that are so incredibly difficult to move across unless you are fluent not only in all of those language, English and French as well, German for some things, and have experienced, in the body, at least some of what this is.

This reminds me of an old Luc Steels attempt to teach language to machines, as though they were children, and coming to the realization that they needed to be embodied to learn. They didn’t necessarily need to have fingers to point with, but they had to think they did, so they could say, ‘what is that’ and ‘tell me about this’.

Will I do it? Maybe. Probably. Should I do it? Maybe. Will I share it? Not the code or the SLM but perhaps the outputs. We shall see.

It was a year ago that I proposed, after discussions with Wayne that I had only 2000 more books to read in this life time. As a reminder, that was calculated by how many books per year, and how many years of life, with the idea being that I would read only, well, to be judgemental, good books.

This is not how things have turned out.

First, in the past year I’ve probably read around 150-160 books. A lot of them terrible books, the kind of books that I read with 3am insomnia and cripplingly stressful anxiety, first about the PhD, then about the country, now about my ailing parents with whom I am spending significant time in an attempt to align the last years–or less, of their lives with the best possible situations. My book addiction comes from my mother, and despite all that is going on, she does still read, and she does still acquire more books than she can read. At a more significant ratio than I have done so in my life.

I do find in trying times that I read more mysteries. I’ve picked back up the large stash of Mediterranean Noir that is on my shelf. These are largely published in English by Europa Noir/Europa World, or by Soho Noir. Most of the authors I read are either Italian or French, with Jean-Claude Izzo being my favorite of the francais. He can write — and his translators do a fine job of translating — and I’ve spent a fair amount of time in Marseilles, starting in the late 90s, when I lived in Paris then Lausanne, and when the brilliant Lift Conference hosted amazing sessions there. (Lift Geneve was also fantastic.)

Izzo is a favorite because I can be there with him. Not the lifestyle, but the locations, the sounds, the food. The exact wines, the Lagavulin, the foods, textures. In the late 90s and early 2000s when I lived between France and Switzerland, I loved Marseille. The mix, the music, the cultures, the food, the languages. Though I never did become fluent at understanding Marseilleuse French, still cannot. I would listen and listen and listen and ponder and process, and yet nothing would click in my mind. It was almost funny and I am certain many an interlocutor thought I must have had some type of disability, given the combination of my stillness and watching. But it usually ended with wine, and that was ok.

Particularly in the past three months in which I am not working on my Phd, I have completely accepted that I am going to read more than 2000 books before I die, unless I get about dying soon. I’ve probably read nearly 50 books already this year.

It may sound strange to ‘give up’ on only reading another 2000 books, however part of the impetus to such a statement was to focus on reading the best of all possible books. Though frankly–looks around — there are probably that many books in the house that I would like to re-read. And yet I do still find new books, or at least new to me books, that I want to read.

• Jean-Claude Izzo, Soleo
• Jean-Claude Izzo, Chourmo
• Jean-Claude Izzo, A Sun for the Dying
• Jean-Claude Izzo, The Lost Sailors
• Ashwn Sanghi, Keepers of the Kalachakra (did not enjoy)
• Benjamin Labatut, The MANIAC
• Jennette McCurdy, I’m Glad My Mom Died (I chased this with finally watching Adolescence. Not sure this is a recommended pairing for anyone.)
• Carlo Bonini and Giancarlo de Cataldo, The Night of Rome
• John Shen Yee Nee and SJ Rozan, The Murder of Mr. Ma
• Augusto Angelis, The Murdered Banker
• Gavin Francis, Island Dreams (no not recommend)
• Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road
• Mallock, The Cemetery of Swallows

That’s the past couple weeks.

Five or six years ago I stopped reading every peer reviewed article on anything that basically became LLMs, not to mention my penchant for reading all kinds of other scientific and literary materials. Having JSTOR access as a lifetime win post-Columbia Business School (since removed, thanks, i fascisti) has long given me the rabbit hole of all rabbit holes. Through UoL I have access to slightly lesser journals, but a gazillion really ought to be enough. I started reading The Economist, WSJ and FT again after a solid decade away, but the current world order is rather stress inducing. I also started picking up newsletters, alternate sources, and everything else I could swallow, as I started taking on strategy and research consulting work again, and part of what I offer is understanding, so I had to crawl out of the past and the anomalous, and start hoovering up everything that has happened in the past five years or so, what is happening now, and what all of those thinking about the future thinks will happen. I do want to read the five or six years of missed everythings on the LLMs, but that’s gonna be a lot of reading to catch up on, not to mention messing with the machines. I bought a new one, to sequester as a test machine, to load all the code and everythings on. I’ve been meaning to dev a test run SLM based on the Mongolian research I did for the past few years. Perhaps I could get to it?

What the heck, Eva, why all these words? It’s Sunday and I’m trying to sort out what to do next. More bad French policiers to keep up the language? On to the next book — what is the next book? Books, really.

I went to the Archives of the Impossible conference last weekend, and it was all about UAPs — I wasn’t expecting that, but there was so much interesting stuff that I ought to get some thoughts down about. Whole new slices of the world of humans that I didn’t know exist.

Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest (1929, Vintage Crime) and Ramona Emerson, Shutter (2022, Soho Crime)

I like crime fiction and noir. In this genre, I choose my books by publisher, and in this case from three publishing ventures: Vintage Crime, Soho Crime and Europa Noir. What they publish has similar characteristics. Vintage’s books I would best describe as raw, even when they are nearly a century old, you can still feel it. Both Soho and Europa have a quality of place to them, attention to culture and history. Europa’s are in translation, Soho’s written in English. When traveling to new places, or exploring new places via books, the authors have a quality of writing that brings the surroundings to a presence. I have a few inches of Europa’s set in Italy that I read when I was in the early stages of the Adelphi Project. It was fun to read something lighter in quality and style, but of the places I was engaged with.

In 1993 I lived a few blocks off Haight Ashbury, on the bottom floor of am old victorian, my room in the front, in the bowed window. I was young and too poor for too many books, but I borrowed what I could, had reader friends, and a used book shop around the corner that was very kind to me. Two odd gentlemen moved into the flat above me, and they lived noir. Their clothes, their accents, their language, their slang, their swagger. They wanted to be in a Hammett novel. They had a stash of the small paperbacks, pulp-style, and would bring them down to me so I could read them as well. I looked more manga than noir those days, but we seemed to get on just fine, and the book exchange flowed for the year I lived there.

Reading noir or pulp or mysteries came under serious consideration with this new plan of being attentive to what I read, particularly attentive, I mean. I was indecisively reading the shelves in a used bookstore, wanting something not so serious. School reading, work reading, essay writing reading, dense with ideas and in need of attention, they don’t spirit me away for a moment or thirteen. I am not much of a watcher of things, always a reader (no TV for much of my childhood, no right to watch when we had one). My eye was caught by Agatha Christie, then Jim Thompson. Thompson was published on Vintage Crime, and along with the Hammett, also read in the spring of 1993. I turned around to the Hammett, and picked up one or two, and decided, yes, this could be read, re-read. There seems to be something of the place, of the time, I am picking back up books I read in my early 20s, just as I was preparing to leave San Francisco, tired of the death and the disarray of that time. The books are rich with place, the writing so chewy and alert, and at the same time, I can taste the past on the tip of my tongue. I bought a Thompson as well, something I remember having an impact on me, but I cannot recall the impact. That one shall come later.

Emerson I had no knowledge of, but her being Dine’ and of course being published by Soho Crime, made this one compelling. And it was. The juxtaposition of being Navajo in the book, of the different cultural beliefs and understandings, of death and ghosts and ways of bridging worlds, is very well done. I would call it a crime novel, some listings want to call it a supernatural horror, which I think does disrespect to other belief systems. And belief systems isn’t the phrase either. It’s not a set of beliefs, it is the fundamental structure of the world as it is. I’ve been trying to catch myself on this lately. Too much anthropology and perhaps a distance of attempting to not offend those who don’t believe (there it is again) in spirits or ancestors. English lacks proper words for this, I often think. There is a world, and it is as it is, structured by natural law and relationships and ancestors and reality. Referring to reality as beliefs is a judgement, however subvert it may be. The reality of Emerson’s book includes ghosts. It is what it is. This is how the world works, accept without judgement. I’d read another of her books, if I find one in the used book store. She doesn’t have the bite of Hammett, so I would not suggest reading them back to back. But she has something strong of her own, and I look forward to what she does next.

The Hammett also made me want to re-read The Thin Man, not currently in my used bookstore, but I’ve got another 1996 books to go, so plenty of time to find a copy.

One of the things about my reading is that it tends to follow threads. It is a rare book that I find to read that is utterly random. Last June I went to Mongolia for the month, and in my travels there I spend some time with lamas, monks, and had an audience with the Rinpoche. I know far more about the history and philosophy of Vedism, Hinduism, Shaivism, tantra, and assorted other belief systems in that universe. Having come into a world where Buddhist philosophy is very present, I have been engaged in what I would call ‘Buddhist activities’ and have had a rather piecemeal engagement with philosophies, mostly vajrayana school from the Gelugpa traditions in Mongolia. Related to all this, I began studying traditional Tibetan medicine, which begins (and ends) with the four medical tantras of the Medicine Buddha, and requires an empowerment to read them. This is also entwined with Yuthok Nyingthig, and other practices that have become part of my life, as I study these topics.

When a scholar I know, of Hinduism and comparative religion decide to offer a course on the history of Buddhism the timeliness of it could not have been more perfect. I had been slowly reading as I attempted to wend my way through thousands of years of philosophy, schools and beliefs, but this was the opportunity to learn from one of the most erudite scholars I’ve experienced in my life, and be taught from a perspective that was easy for me to understand, that is Vedic to Hindu to Buddhist (with side travels to Jainism and Taoism, to name just two.)

Five or so years ago in the throes of The Adelphi Project (book 594), I had re-read Siddhartha for the first time since my twenties. It was beautiful as always, but a story without the wider context I was now attempting to slot ideas and events into, my bending of the moment towards seeing the world from a different perspective. The book had come up in my Buddhist History class, and I had pulled it off the shelf. I have an old hardcover copy, the feet on the cover reminiscent of the Bamiyan Buddhas, a reminder of impermanence, at the very least. (The edition I have of Siddhartha is a New Directions book, translated by Hilda Rosner.)

The middle way was more prominent to me with all the history swirling in my head, that neither asceticism or indulgence would serve. I can relate to this struggle. That he ends his life finding balance as a ferry pilot is also perhaps something that I should consider, given all the time I have spent on ferries.

One of the things that drew me to Roberto Calasso was his engagement with the Vedas and other early literature, his fascination with with the beliefs as well as the acts, the rituals, that which is left after the fire of sacrifice. It was not the reason I embarked on The Adelphi Project, but there was a resonance of connection in the fascination. In his office in Brera there were a set of shelves behind where a guest would sit, two shelves wide, all the books covered in paper so there was a similar look to the books, slightly variations of beige and a hint of green, the titles obscured. I asked about them once and he said they’d been Bobi’s books, the ‘perfect library’, all the books one needed to own for the rest of one’s life. I doubt he and Roberto had sat down to consider how many books they could read in the remainders of their lives, but the thread, it is there. Looking at my shelves and the books I have, thinking of the idea that I can only read so many more, I find I want to re-read far more than I would have thought, before such a consideration. And consideration is the word. I want to reconsider books I have previously known, those that had meaning or whose content I wish to taste again, at this phase in my life.

Roberto once told me that when they started Adelphi Edizioni they bought the remainders from a different house, I forget which or the context, though I likely wrote it in the notes I used to scribble after we met. The crux of it though was that one of the things they purchased was the rights to the Italian version of Siddhartha, which, he said, turned out to be the best selling book and fund quite a few of their future dreams.

Returning to Siddhartha, as I have returned to my serious, but non-Buddhist, meditation practices, as I consider what it is to be alive and what to read for my remaining years, seems of a piece in this moment. This, the memories of Roberto, the eightfold path, history, philosophy and the current state of the world are all held within me as considerations of how to live a life of integrity, one that, I hope, bends towards wisdom and compassion. One does not need to be Buddhist to follow these paths, or Hindu, or, in my belief, to hold any religion or belief system at all. I think one merely needs to want to be as present as possible, to live in the world, and to liberally apply care across all beings and all situations. And probably, as well, to let things go, to let them flow by and past. I do miss Roberto, of course, and can be bogged into despair when I look at the world, but finding a way to step outside of this has long been my mode of presence, and Siddhartha and the threads of memory that surface in the re-reading, and the exhilaration of scholarship and this precise moment in life can, and do, feel like just the right ‘enough’.

Wayne and I were having a conversation about the books in our house. There are around 7000 of them and we sat looking at the poetry shelves. He asked, “how long would it take me to read them all again?” And from there we meandered along the topic of, how many in the house would we re-read, of our own, or how many of the others do we wish to read, those as yet unread.

Wayne then calculated that if he currently is reading around 100 books a year, and perhaps has 30 years of reading left, that he has another 3000 books to read. So how, he asked, to ensure that those 3000 books are the best possible books he could read.

I sometimes read more books than 100 a year, (though not while doing my PhD, now I read parts of books), and I estimate 20 more years of life. So let’s say I have 2000 more books I can read in my lifetime. (Hopefully more, though.) Which books? There is something about this exercise that seems fun, though not a normal thought process for me. I rarely consider when I die, how far off it is, and what can be done between now and then.

We could choose the 100 books to read this year, which could result in tall stacks being created around the house, to be diminished over time. I am unlikely to be able to do this. I tend to flow too much by inspiration or topics that appear.

I tend to not write in public about the books I read, though for 35 years I have kept notebooks of every book I read. I haven’t been keeping track of anything for the past five years, nor have I been writing, but something about our conversation and this moment in time makes me wonder if I would start writing about each one.

Any one want to take a bet on how long it will take me to read 2000 books? Let’s not bet on how much longer I will live.

Despite having been tossed in a pool at three months, back in those days when teaching babies to swim was all the rage, and having spent my childhood swimming, scuba had never really entered my view. In my early 20s a few friends were getting certified for a destination wedding, and I went along without thinking much about it. The class was easy, the pool work was fun, though I had a tendency to get rolled by my tank, the BCs at the time being made for men, and a vest for a small man did not fit snugly on a small woman.

In Belize, we did our training dives and I floated around below the surface in a state of bliss. My dive partner was fascinated with photography, and since one dives as buddies, and one doesn’t part ways, I spent a fair number of years toodling around while he tried to figure out the early equipment, take photos, and try to sort color correction.

Of the eight of us who went on that trip, two of us liked it enough to spend our week in Belize learning new skills. Deep diving, wreck diving, navigation, night diving. I spent my days studying rather than drinking. I discovered I disliked night diving, despite the bubbles going up when I breathed out, I would get disoriented and feel a sense of panic. It calmed over time, but was easy enough, unless there was a full moon, to make me night dive for pleasure.

On our certification for deep diving, I took the slate and did the sums, and my partner laid on his back on the ocean floor, enormous turtles watching us, and struggled with the basics. When he dropped the pencil and rolled over to find it on the floor, he burst into near-hysterical giggles when he notice I was batting it down to him. Wood floats. Narc’d he was, and not that deep. He laughed so hard his regulator popped out of his mouth, so I stuffed that back in and dragged him up, our trainer shaking her head at us. He got certified, but I always kept a leery eye on him when we got below 30 meters.

After years of avid diving, I finally coughed up the money for my own gear. A BC and dive computer, super long split fins so I could fly at depth, and warm gear, as I was always cold even after a few days of blue water diving, checking my temperature at times to be sure I’d returned to normal before heading out again. Owning my own gear made me one with the water. I could move, or not move, with perfect buoyancy, float in silence, lie on my back and feel the surge toss me about, watching the sun dapple above and the schools of fish swim by. Turtles and mantas, I found, discovered a strange floating human 20 meters down to be interesting. Sharks, once or twice, but those are other stories.

There is such a perfection to floating below. The crackling sounds, the pops, the endless noises that are part of sea life. Floating over a reef watching busy life go on, sharks being cleaned off the edge of a cliff of fast moving water, parrot fish blowing mucus sacs as sleeping bags. Startled puffers and unexpected octopuses. Diving once in Greece, not much to see just beautiful to feel, I poked my nose in an old wreck and the enormous teeth of a moray eel came at me. I almost choked on the water I inhaled, flooded my mask, and had to reset, all the while laughing so hard at my out-of-scale reaction.

In Palau we dove wrecks, hundreds of feet down, deco diving, leaving tanks on the way down so we could slowly make our way back up, stopping to avoid the bends, tick tock, longer to get up than to get down, longer to get up than spent down. One dive, we were going deep, and with our limited time to get to the wreck, we had to fly. Our guide was a very tall muscular man, he would go first, H second, so we didn’t lose him to narc’d depths, and me at the rear. Tanks dropped and suited up, we dropped in, fins nearly a third the length of my body. Off we went, angled, and far ahead I could see only the occasional glimmer of bioluminescent plankton off the edges of fins, bubbles reaching up as I passed through them, and into the dark we went, darker, and darker, faster and deeper. This speed and dark and whispers of light blossoms into bliss for me, the strength of my body, the speed with which I can move, the perfection of being perfectly weighted and in control of my abilities, racing time. We reach the ship, and it is enormous, tilted, the sounds of a metal carcass turning in the sea, the creaks of surge, and age. The screw was glorious, enormous. Military ships are hard to imagine in the same way they can be experienced when diving their wrecks.

Lion fish were in every opening, dangerous, popping in and out, warning us away. As quickly as we arrived, it was time to race back. Only 20 minutes or so to explore before we again engage all our resources, racing against time and current out of the dark, looking for the glimmer of light and tanks hung above us, noting the minutes to reach them, no back-up plans here, in and out, up an down, relying on body and skill and equipment, training and experience and our guide, and on not losing pencils in the unknown dark.

When I was six I was an albatross who did not know how to fly. I got hurt, but the people like you, they are a damaging lot, this modern world, the brutality and lack of love applied with force then more force into the spaces where lies are told. I could tell you lies but I’d rather tell you stories.

It might be hard to tell the difference, if you don’t know how to see. Most people don’t know how to see. The world is full of lies told by those people. The rest of us, the few that remember, we tell stories and it pulls at you, and you wonder if it is a memory or a dream, or you think we are crazy and don’t deserve to live in your world of want. Because we fail to want, want enough, but the reality is that what we want are the things that you wish you could understand and your failure only brings you rage. And your rage brings danger and harm.

When I was six I ate magnets. There was always an alphabet, hanging in space. I’d sit before the refrigerator and slowly eat the magnets, over time, cautiously. The first 26 were easy, each letter with its three magnets – except the I which had two – and I’d eat work my way through a first round, and they’d hang in space, built into words and phrases. The second round would cause gravity to exert more power and they’d slip lower. By the time I was eating the final magnets, the letters had to begin to disappear. I’d hide them places. In my pockets, I’d sneak them out, empty, and bury them in the hard. I’d secret them in the bottom of trash, in a rush one or two might end up in the freezer. No one seemed to question the disappearance of letters in a house full of children.

Magnets have texture, a slightly soft solidity that is ridged on the edges. They must be chewed slowly until the core is reached, then swallowed. I can still feel their texture, I know there taste, though it has been years.  Sometimes when I walk past a childrens stores I am tempted, almost compelled, to go in and purchase a set of letters for my refrigerator. But eating magnets as an adult seems strangely wrong. It is a secret in my heart, that I still want to eat magnets, that I dream of the feel of them on my tongue and the strange zinging that sings to me.

I have an anomalous effect on compasses and gps systems. They cannot locate me in space. I like to think this is due to my steady diet of magnets as a child but it is just as likely that what we don’t realize is that these devices are placing us in time. As I live outside of standard time they are confused and I am not held.

For three years I ate magnets, deliberately, slowly, and then I found the trees, stopped eating magnets, and learned the art of invisibility.

Charlie was six or so when I met her. She has an internal compass that drives everything we do. She has a sixth sense, and a seventh, and an eighth. Maybe she was five, she is very small but so very old. It’s hard to tell. She is an ancient being in a tiny body. It sounds dreadfully cliché but perhaps there is something to these clichés. I prefer to avoid them, but in this case there is nothing I can do. I’ve never asked Charlie what she is looking for as there seems no reason to intrude. I am sure I will know when she finds it. Or perhaps she isn’t looking and that is my adult sensibility applied to this creature that has dragged me across six thousand miles of ocean and island. She looks at me with her green eyes which make clear how little I know. She isn’t disappointed, just a bit sad. Her blue eyes are far more excitable. I think it is the blue eyes which will find what she wants, and her green eyes which believe its too late and whatever she is looking for no longer exists. I can’t live without either set and I am always apprehensive when we reach a new shore, until I see her eyes, and I know who I am living with. I never know for how long. She comes and goes from her two selves in a rhythm I can find no pattern in. Her green eyes tell me I should know. Her blue eyes love me anyway.

When her eyes are blue I love her most. Until her eyes are green and I wonder how I could ever have loved that blue eyed child more than I love this green eyed one.

Do you remember when there was a website that had the URL ‘isittuesday’ dot com, and it responded yes or no, depending. It didn’t seem to lie. And somehow, Tuesday was a thing. And here we are, Tuesday.

The one thing I’ve learned from my first year of my PhD is that I’d rather be writing.

After my second masters degree, I shredded all the papers in the paperwork folder that I might ever need to apply to more school. Transcripts, proof of degree, test scores, mensa paperwork (that was sibling rivalry), and all the rest. I kept the folder and on a scrap of paper, in my jagged handwriting, I wrote: Don’t do it.

Yet, here I am. Given that I go to school every decade, it is hard to know objectively if it is better or worse than the previous time. Last time I did an MBA at Columbia, was married to an abusive fuck, and had cancer. Oh and my blood family melted down in ways I still cannot fathom. But really, all that is another story. I mean only to say, it is hard to tell if it was school that sucked.

So it is Tuesday, and twice a month on Tuesday, I show up for school, in that there are meetings and seminars and other people. And my general plan is to get out the other side of the day. Last week while in Ballinskelligs I read books on trauma and stress, they were besides each other at the airport and it seemed a good idea at the time (hash tag don’t do it could have a bigger role in my life), but what I realized is that I pour a lot of stress in my body on a daily basis by choosing to not choose.

I was up around five am most days, watched the sun rise across a hill and along the ocean and the backyard of this cottage on the edge of the world light up bit by bit, and one bunny (of interchangeable sizes, there really must have been three) would hop by for a snack, and I would be calm. The storm would rage, and I would be calm. The sea would toss itself out of the cove and up over a cliff and slam salt into the windows with a click clack and zero visibility, and I would be calm.

One afternoon following a need to stuff myself back into my body I cracked the sauna to 100F and melted my head, then put my bathing suit on and walked into the yard in the rain and laid on the very cold ground next to the bloodstone and sang songs of green and red and orange and blue. The bunnies did not return for two days after that, and I missed them, but it was weekend, and perhaps they tread further afield on those days.

F put her hands on my chest and told me to lean in, and scream as loud as I could. It was raining and sunny and we stood on a hill at the end of the yard. I leaned in, and up, and opened my mouth to scream, and nothing came out. Nothing again. Nothing again, a squeak, a few tears. We swapped sides, so I could see, or was it feel, what it would be to scream. She opened her mouth, leaned into my arms, and poured out some sound and I panicked and my arms lost all strength and she almost toppled on top of me as I burst into tears and who the hell knows what was torn down and voided and bled out in the stream. I asked her to do it again, to yell in my face, to see if I could hold strength. She was leery, and rightfully so. We did not leave until I could do it. Hold hard. I screamed too. I’ve never screamed in my life, before this. No, really, barely raised my voice, and never so close to another human.

Walking home from Tuesday school, de-souled, de-natured, in a city I do not care for, rain dripping and dreaming of writing my heart, not stilted academic posturing, I wanted so much to scream, to scream like I did at the edge of the island, to let out all the things I don’t want to name, to stomp in a puddle, be barefoot in the earth, to be as free and loud and present as I want. On a Tuesday. In any form, tearing off clothes, feeling alive and present and anything.

I turned the corner, not screaming, squeaking, quietly, squelching and suffering, and to my life, dead animals in tanks, Damien Hirst’s hellscapes of disrespect. Who does such a thing to creatures? Tromp tromp through the rain, on the cobbles, into the council block and up and up to my silencing of myself and blinking cranes and a dream of ways of being, of freedoms, of words and worlds and languages and days not Tuesday. Days of Tuesday. Days of days, who cares what day, all days are magic days, all days have earth and toes and rabbits and singing at any level and screaming and joy and rocks and blood and life. This place takes the life from Tuesdays and I have no choice but to sing it back in, as best i can, crooked lungs and dented spaces. I can sing you a Tuesday that will explode in your eyes and leave gunpowder in your mouth and you will wonder why you’ve not eaten this before, not quite like this. Eat, I beg you, it’s Tuesday, you are running out of time.