mu on you

Yeah, I don't know, zen Buddhism.  It sounds cool and hip and they do have all those clever koans, but really, if I am expecting a sober well-grounded opinion on the heavy issues that the ship of the Institute carries daily over the dark and storm tossed sea of doubt, I don't think I am going to want to hear from a zen Buddhist.  I mean likely the guy is going to post "Mu," and then go back to maintaining his motorcycle, and what am I going to have to work with in the morning?

I meant the spear comparison to be between two equally utilitarian spears, but one of them maybe the guy carved in an image of some top predator, and you know it looked pretty good, and then maybe he thought of daubing it with that staining red clay, and Gawdamn if it didn't look beautiful,  I'm sure Old Dog has some geegaws on his cycle that neither improve nor impede the utility of the vehicle but you know, look fucking cool.

What my hero. Louis Sullivan, meant by form follows function was that form is dictated by function. The function is paramount, and if you keep that in mind when designing the form your form should look just fine.  Of course he did add some doodads, looks like a lot now compared to the starkness of the international style, but in his time Louis was considered a bit stark himself, certainly no respecter of that neo Roman folderol.  If you took a quaff from a Louis Sullivan vessel it would be so satisfying that you might not even notice the beauty of the mug,.

I believe we have covered beer vessels.  But I don't think we have said boo about architecture.  I think I would like to get into that, but right now the disc of the sun is about to cross the plane of the horizon and I have far to go.

All the great civilizations started out with a written language.  The only reason those other cultures didn't have one is that they were in a stage before written language, give them maybe a thousand years and they would have one.  I don't think they knew anything that we don't know.  If you want to verify this talk to somebody who is illiterate.


My error in ascribing (Ayn) Randism to Beagles.  I thought  all conservatives went through that phase.  I am embarrassed to admit that a good liberal like myself went through such a stage.  It began late in high school and ended early in college.  I was young.

See, I think good begins with that long childhood we humans have,  You have to sacrifice a lot and for a long time to raise a kid to adulthood.  That's where we get our altruism, sacrificing something of ourselves for someone else.  It has been observed in mammals and birds so I believe it hard wired into our genes.  That's why you feel good when you give a bum a buck.

But I don't want to get into that whole giving a bum a buck thing because the metaphor became a story and then we were haggling over whether the bum deserved it.  So maybe I should just say being nice to somebody.  You know that good feeling you get when you do something nice for somebody? That's because some gene has left instructions to release dopamine when you do something like that. We kept that gene when it mutated into us because it helped us to survive.

Maybe that's not the exact mechanism, but something like that.  Later on we developed language and could talk about things and made morality more complicated and later still religion tried to take over morality and that made it more complicated still.

More on this tomorrow.