There really is no such field, but sometimes there are small toe taps towards it. It’s actually a terrible title, but trying to find a name that fits what I am trying to say inevitably ends up with too many words, all of which someone or many someones would argue the meaning of.

Linguistics is most commonly understood to refer to structural linguistics. This is de Saussure in the beginning, and to grotesquely oversimplify, it is syntax and phonetics and morphology and semantics. More about the form than the meaning. To me, this is the mathematics of language. Or the desire for one. We are in the land of signs and signifiers and the signified. There is much comparison between systems and languages, and the evolution of languages. Computation linguistics rolled out of this bed.

Originally, this looked at language as separate from context or culture. Sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, in addition to including new methods of study, looked these two Cs. My undergrad was in structural linguistics, but I dual majored in ‘Language and Culture’ with emphases on French and Japanese. (At the time I spoke both very well, the Japanese is somewhere stuffed in my head now, appears in occasional bursts of oddity, but mostly I haven’t relocated the door to that fluency. Maybe one day.) My masters degree was a mix of linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics. Georgetown at the time was most renowned for Deborah Tannen and discourse analysis, however I was more interested in hybrid languages and authority in the internet (late 90s), and focused more on pidgin and creole studies as well as basic methods and analysis. I studied the language and culture of internet communities, how authority was marked online, and in particular how it was marked in second language speakers. I didn’t end up writing my thesis on this however, just a series of papers. My thesis was on the prescriptive language qualities of software tools — spellcheck and grammar check. At the time they were newish tools and aligned to no standard of grammar that existed in American English. What was grammatical was driven by the marketing department, as there was a limit to wavy lines that people could take. Also they severely disavowed any type of ‘humanity’ (who, which) for anything non-human, and a few other strange tics that indicate a world view that is probably deeply embedded in heads and writing styles for those who have used such tools since the 90s.

Fast forward past the MBA (in which, probably obviously, not only did I focus on models of quantifying the value of design and the investment in design, I wrote a fair amount about how language impacts everything from tax planning to financial models.), I found myself in a PhD program.

Language and geography are curious bedfellows. In some ways, language is always interesting, as it is the medium of all these fields. Not that I want to dip into the philosophy of language, but it is hard not to be endlessly aware of how difficult it is to bind such words as language, communication, knowledge, place, etc. Not only in the field of geography.

Starting my PhD, I was very interested in what had been done, theorized, understood about language within the field of geography. How does language show up? Does linguistics show up? What does it do in geography? I could do the long lit review here, but that would be a bore, I suspect. So instead, some generalization.

One of the most interesting places language shows up is in the schemes for GIS data. Is it a mountain or a hill? How to deal with spatial and conceptual variation? For many decades, this is the place that adopted the title of Geolinguistics. It expanded outward with the interests of particular individuals to look at language distribution, particularly as it relates to the physical places, and then to dialect variation, language planning and policy, and power. There is also a great deal of geographic interest in the names of places, how they were named, what they mean, particularly in the UK in the context of colonialism. (The political geographers are into the philosophy of language, but we are not heading there.) In all instances there is some ‘there there’, in effect, geolinguistics suggests that languages are contextual to places, and this must be considered.

If you asked a linguist about this, I think they’d find the geolinguists naive in suggesting that the linguists are not thinking about this. There is a book called ‘Linguistic Wars’ on a different topic than this, but you can see how the linguists do like to argue with each other. The Chomsky Lakoff debates were not always civilized. (In fact, when I was a masters student you had to do your entire degree in one theory structure or the other, or you would have to start over because you had had your head filled with nonsense.) The basis of this argument was about generative grammar — meaning is driven by underlying syntax etc vs syntax being shaped by underlying meaning.

And the Linguistic Society of Paris/Société de Linguistique de Paris forbid discussions on the origins of language in the mid-1800s. The London Philological Society followed suit a few years later. Too much infighting — of which there are some really great and crazed stories, so they basically shut down a huge swathe of what linguistics and philosophy could discuss, for over a century.

Let me just take a huge step to the left here. And get into the messy space between language and communication. There are quite a few theorists over the centuries who argue that language is the most human of human traits. That language is what makes humans unique. And then in the past decades, researcher after researcher publishes that other species communicate. Sometimes it is referred to as language, as in the case of whales, who are also known to have dialects. Sometimes, as in Kohn and Simard, trees communicate. There is the dances of the bees, as well.

Let us accept the premise that language is not a human-only trait. Let us accept that many if not all beings have the means to communicate within their species and sometimes with other species as well. This gets very interesting. Trees and whales have both been on this planet far longer than humans. I am unsure what the evolutionary linguists are doing these days, but I have yet to see evidence that they are tackling non-human linguistics. Most of the word on non-human language or communication comes from fields specific to the species being studied, biology, botany, and the like. There are some people working on theories of animal languages; there is a great deal of interest in using AI to translate these languages for human consumption.

There is a great TED talk by Karen Bakker, called Could an Orca Give a TED Talk in which she addresses interesting questions such as the ethics of overlistening to other species, and whether or not they want us to understand them.

But back to geography, a study of place, of the physical features of the earth, of human activity and distribution and population and so much more. There is physical geography, human geography, and cultural geography, and many sub-fields beside. My study of language doesn’t necessarily fit cleanly in any of them — it’s not about the humans, it is about physical places, everything is or has culture (one could argue but let’s not do that now), so it could fit there as well. But much like most of the humanities there is so much overlap that the fields seem to be what one says they are, with some historical differentiation by qual or quant methodologies. Which to me, seems a bit arbitrary, and now as more methods are birthed into the world, even harder to draw lines.

As it turns out, attempting to theorize how a place has language, and what this means for language, communication, knowledge, and place, is far too big for a PhD thesis. Even attempting to define what I might mean by all of this is, to use technical term, nuts. It requires re-arguing an ocean of accepted ideas to make it academically legible, and most everyone I’ve spoken to about this, finds it interesting, they also find it impossible.

The questions though, are so very interesting to me. If language evolved to exist on this planet before humans, does that change what and how we define language? Modern human language is a symbolic language, however there are endless instances of non-symbolic languages transferring information or knowledge. This runs us into what is language — is it a tool with a particular structure, or is it a means of communication? If we define language as the means of sharing then we can extend into systems non-human with greater ease. Then we get to argue about how we know. If I am certain that tree passed me a message, how can I know? How can I convince you I know? Granted, if I told you another human told me something, you believe in the possibility of the tool, but you cannot know if I am truthfully reporting, or if I even understood what they told me and am reporting what I believe to be true, even if it is not in actuality.

In the place based research that I have done as the basis of my thesis, place matters. It matters in the existence of the language, the type of language and the evolution of the language, but it also impacts the culture and communication modes of the humans, as well as the humans with the place itself. What does that even mean, you wonder? In the simplest form, some places require certain languages, and these are not always the commonly spoken human languages of that place. In effect, there is a different way to speak to a place, because the place insists on this. Or, you could ask, does the human insist and have they fabricated this all? Topple off the cliff of philosophy, fall into a tar pit of semantics, and circle back to the ancient days when animals and rocks and trees had tongues, in the metaphorical sense, and I wonder, mythology, or were the humans more open to listen?

By which I refer to nonfiction.co, a research organization that produces interesting and beautiful reports, and seems to manage to have long time frames in which to do this research.

I’ve been fortunate in my career to get to do research that takes many months to more than a year to field, and longer to synthesize and analyze. This, for me, is where a lot of the real joy in work can be. But the reality usually is that someone has a strategy in mind, or needs one, and they toss a few days to a few weeks at research, and consider that good enough. This is a longer discussion, especially in the age of AI and synthetic subjects and all that can be done, but which I question, should it?

My favorite place of research has to do with language — what does it mean, how is it used, how can we use it to change behaviors, what are the pitfalls. This is relevant to every single thing, and is not a surface level word choice, or branding issue, but something much more deeply entangled with thought and action and a slew of emotions and the ways in which we feel people are seen and judged and understood.

My overlapping favorite places of research is around what is meaningful and important and can make lives better. I ran years of research for the NIH on how people interact with the health system and medical and genetic information to make decisions about their own care. In the US, this is grim, and tied into the historical truths of racism and misogyny and force. How does one unravel these sentiments that are often so below the surface that it is not obvious where decisions are being taken and yet the long tail outcome is really shitty health and health behaviors. The most grim research project I ran was a year long exploration of American’s beliefs around human rights. The McCain Institute started with a question about why being a supporter of human rights does not seem to have an impact on how politicians get elected. (Short and terrifying answer: American’s don’t think they have human rights, human rights are things in other countries. Unpacking they why behind that was even more fascinating, but not the purpose of this post.)

One of the most complex and complicated spaces in the US, both to research, to get deep and honest responses, and to seek out ways to make change, is, broadly, financial. At the request of a Washington Post columnist I once did an assessment of the language in a decade of their personal finance reports. Corpus analysis, in a linguistic world, but tied deeply to the culture, gender, and directionality of how one considers one’s financial situation. Of course the WP is already a limited audience, but again, what the language use does and directs, and the lack of education, showed severe limitations in assisting readers to a state of financial security.

Nonfiction’s report on The Secret Financial Lives of Americans, I think, if I read the notation properly, is from 2018? It does not have a clear date on it, except a small ‘08.0118’ on the bottom edge of each page. It also doesn’t include some recent financial tools or disasters or the current presidency. The note that it was five years in development, and that in addition to 2,238 respondents, they interviewed bank robbers. I’ve recently discovered I know a bank robber, but I suspect they were not interviewing friends. But how, how I imagine the sourcing of those respondents must have gone. And, I imagine, they have an in-house booker for these narrow demographics.

(Oddly, perhaps, this makes me want to set up a panel of synthetic bank robbers to ask questions to. Not sure why them, and it would be hard to get enough color context unless I had a solid pool of bank robbers to build from. How many bank robbers are there in the world, anyway? Caught and uncaught? I suppose I could build it off of movie bank robbers, that seems the way of the future of America — shiny and fake and untouched by the real. This also aligns in a different way with the report itself, which notes that Instagram lives are shiny and full and the reality is dark nights and tears and despair over financial issues.)

This report, like any research on the financial and banking and savings and spending behaviors of Americans who are not the uber-wealthy, suggests an entire set of services that are missing, starting from education and knowledge to support. Not only does this help not exist, not as information or services or ‘a personal cfo’ it is difficult to imagine how to provide this in an industry that rarely feels it is going to help people who are trying to get out of debt or build wealth. Without wealth, where to start? Who helps for free?

Having working researching for crypto and blockchain organizations, for neo-banks and other services, I do not believe that these alternates are helping across the board to lift up people with the knowledge they need. These technologies are unequally distributed, especially in the early days when the off-ramps were so complicated.

But as Nonfiction notes in their report, one of the most significant impacts to a lack of money or from the sense of precarity — at any income point — is the things one cannot do. Having to decide between the present — food, transport, and the future — medical care, tests, saving, continues to and I would suggest is accelerating, to the only time is now, and the only thing in the now is fear and suffering for what the future might bring. When it comes to financial health or physical health or mental health, all the research I’ve ever read suggests that you cannot survive in good health if you are always worried. Somehow this is not the ‘living in the now’ that is suggested by new ageism and gurus and the influencers jetting off to fake lives.

It is notable to me, having lived and traveled extensively outside the US, that a significant amount of these issues are American issues. It is embedded in the cultures and the expectations, of individualism, of success, of how family units do or do not support their members. It is the white picket fence and glorious lawn of perfectionism that must be shown as the outside face, while the inside darkness seeps and swallows.

The entire report is a good read, it is worth seeing what this world felt like 7 years ago, and to think about it now, with the changes that are being put in place that support the wealthy and marginalize those who are not. This is not even a poverty issue, this is also the middle class, and everyone down from there. Yes, that is poverty, but, as Nonfiction notes, not the traditional demographic one thinks of as in poverty. This is, at this point, the majority of Americans. And the protections against businesses are being taken away, the CFPB is being hamstrung, health care costs will likely go up depending on what happens with the BBB.

I do not know what the outcome of the Nonfiction research was, if any, beyond information. This is always a good start, clear vision of what the situation is. It is unclear how it was paid for and if it was for a client. I do appreciate their sharing it. I don’t think anyone has solved for this in the US, and I suspect that the cultural system that lacks for collectivism (of which there are examples of lifting up groups rather than individuals), prioritizes what people think of you, and how we present, and it is getting worse. Disinformation and the current politics of cruelty are unlikely to help as well. If this research were done today, I suspect it would be even more grim.

Off to read more research done by others…and think about ways to fund more research done by me.

Choices, so many choices. Which horrible could it be? Annus horribilis libris? Annus horribilis serpens?

This year, beginning in February with the Mongolian new year, is a black snake year. It means you would best not be an astrological snake, but also it’s a good year to stay home. In the beginning of the lunar new year, several senior Buddhist chaps basically said they were staying home, staying in, giving no empowerments, see you in the year of the horse. Right, then. Also, don’t break ground to build a house.

Two weeks ago, inspired by artist Navine G. Dossos’ year of not buying clothing, I put some thought to what I buy and what I need. I decided to do a double year: no new textiles (because beyond clothing, I have a thing for bedding), and no books. No books, yes, that is what I said. The day after I proposed this to Wayne, we went to a diner for breakfast which happens to be next to my favorite bookstore in Austin, Alienated Majesty. He bought three books, I bought none. (I took a picture of a cover. I wonder if in a years time my phone photos will be full of book covers?)

There are 37 book cases in our house, and also there are stacks of books because we have run out of shelf space. For me, about 40% of those are mine. Of my books, I would estimate I have 150 or so that I have not read. In the past few anni horribili of the PhD, I buy more than I read, and not just academic books. I’ve pluralized the latin as though it is Italian, could not help myself. I can’t make the case (collapses laughing at the geekiness) for any other path. I am pluralizing in the future, the future of the language, give it a millenium to evolve and I can pluralize at will. Also, 60% of those shelves are not full of my books and there is probably only about a 50% overlap in our book ownership. So, I shall not suffer in some bookless world. I shall still read. Also, I have a library card (or five).

I posted a story on instagram of some of my shelves and about my year without buying books, and I got laugh emojis in response. Apparently my closest people do not believe I can do this. To be fair, I cannot think of a single year long period that I have gone without buying books since I left college, possibly before. I used to save my money in SF when I was in my early 20s, skipping meals if need be, to be able to buy a few books per month. I can’t remember before that, but my childhood home was full of books and I am certain my mother, to this day, could not make it a week, let alone a year, without buying a book.

—–

In Susan Hiller’s The Provisional Texture of Reality (a title I wish I had to use), she begins the first essay on Tarkovsky with, “The late anthropologist Alfred Gell said about nature: ‘anybody’s idea of nature is likely to be heavily theory-impregnated'”. She then goes on to consider Tarkovsky’s Solaris, and the sentient planet with visitors and the horror of the unreal and the inability to comprehend what reality could be, on this planet. Solaris, the Stanislaw Lem book, is one I have turned back to several times in the past year. As Hiller notes, “The encounter with the unknown in Solaris is a problem of non-communication. Humans cannot make contact with the ocean that is Solaris, because they try to deal with it in instrumental ways rather than by intuitive or imaginary means.”

What, you may wonder, is horrid about this? Well nothing precisely, but something, imprecisely. In that my PhD thesis is about encounters with ‘the sub-surface’ but in most instances the beings that I encounter in the subsurface are a problem of communication, but not a concern that feels imaginary or instrumental, but embodied and intuitive. If by intuitive I mean: have I got a clue about what just happened and was that real? Which inevitably leads to a question about what is real, and how I would know, and then I’ve fallen off the edge of geography and into philosophy, the forbidden land.

I picked up Hiller this morning, a book I’ve had, along with many of her others, for far longer than this crackpot idea of getting a PhD has been an actuality in my life. As I was saying, I picked up this one in particular as I was curious about some of the more anthropological structurings of her thoughts, and I’ve been struggling with some writing. It wasn’t particularly helpful but the serif font was so pleasing I changed the font of the draft I am working on today, and it seemed to help…something.

In the context of my PhD I’ve had to study some Buddhist philosophy and been involved in Vajrayana Buddhist things to provide deeper contextual understanding to all things Mongolian that I research. Prior to this, my meditation practices were aligned to Hindu(ish) philosophies.

It is not lost on me that in the latter ‘one’ exists in ever unchanging form, and in the former, ‘one’ does not exist. Which is to say, in the former reality is an illusion due to one’s own misperception, and the latter, reality is an independent flow of things that one perceives but is not true. Is it real because I experience it as real, or is it real despite what I perceive? Two sides of a coin. Two truths at once opposite and true. Whether or not I exist, whether or not my research subjects exist, and whether or not the research data exists, I am still in writing up year. All of it does exist, of course, but does it?

I am reminded of one of my thesis advisor noting that a thesis must be ‘internally consistent’ and thus I shall choose a reality and write from there. Dear examiners, please accept that here we must run as fas as we can, just to stay in place. And while the Red Queen thought it was twice as fast we must run to go anywhere, perhaps running half as fast will also get us there.

I found an 82 page document today that was all the posts here from 2017. I seem to return at times and close things, remove things. 2017 I wrote heavily about language and linguistics, but also about the motivations behind why one would wish to be invisible.

That question came from Philip Ball’s book Invisible, in which he notes we speak more of means than motive, although motives for invisibility, he notes, seem to mostly have something to do with prurience or power.

Means and motive. I’d like to be able to teleport. Means is hard, motive is easy. I simply wish to be elsewhere, when I wish to be there and I find flying miserable, I am landlocked so no boats (which I love), and landlocked in a land with very limited trains or public transport.

I recently asked an eight year old if he could travel in time if he would go forwards or backwards. Forwards, he said, as there would be new and interesting things. Then he paused and said, or backwards if I can take technology with me. Then I can smash the cave people and rule the world. I asked why he wanted to smash cave people, but he just shrugged, and hopped onto the school bus I was walking him too, and headed off to school.

I am not so keen on time travel, or space travel. Perhaps time travel would be more interesting backwards if I were not female. Heading back in time as a woman seems dangerous. Though this could be a fallacy. I have recently been watching the original Columbo TV series. The episodes are from the early 70s. Women go with men, for example, Columbo, in his trench coat and with a non-police car and a badge, convinces a woman at a crime scene to let him take her home, to her house. Alone. He then makes her eggs, and nothing bad happens. In another instance, a woman agrees to dinner with a man she doesn’t know well, in his house, and he kills her. Columbo goes to many a woman’s house and has a conversation with her alone, wanders around her house poking into thing. I am very struck by this, because you would not see this on TV today, and also, I don’t think most women would invite a man in whom they do not know. When did fear and harm start, where half the population is afraid of the other half? Columbo is rather sweet and women are not treated as half-human. There are no denigrations or assumptions made. It reminds me in a way of the pre-code movies or Katharine Hepburn and the comfort and power women had in themselves. And not all movies had women seeking love or companionship. It is hard to tell where the shift was, in the screens or in the daily lives or in the realities. As the world here, the one in which I live, shifts and the state-sanctioned violence increases and the shootings and the harm, as the murders in the city I live in seem to increase (or is it news coverage), it becomes hard to remember to live without fear of humans.

When I take long solo travels in the world I am reminded how kind people are, how generous and interesting and caring. When I am home and the news catches me, or people speak of fear and assumptions, it is very hard to maintain. I live in a city where women go running alone at 5am and in the dark. I wish them to always be safe, and more women to have this opportunity, this comfort.

This, for me, would be a motive to be invisible. To wander wherever I wanted, always safe, always comfortable. But I would want to be able to blip into invisibility at will, as well, to have tea with strangers, to feel the textiles and, of course, eat snacks.

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’.