Almost everything I read today sits on the side of the interval. Maria Popova uses the Japanese ma (the unpainted part of a folding screen, the pause in a conversation) as a cure for certainty. Lalai Persson leaves a guru’s house in Berlin with more questions than she brought and notices that AI is training her out of waiting. Benedict Lombe writes about love without giving answers and says that knowing someone is your person includes not knowing. Together, these pieces would make an easy case for emptiness.
The two pieces that came through 3 Quarks Daily get in the way of that ease, and they’re why the day was worth it. In Beauty And No-Thingness, a poet reads a sonnet by Mark DeLong and points to a no-thing in it: the word “beauty” sitting where an image never arrived. And at the start of Lorna Finlayson’s piece on Habermas, the statement he signed with three colleagues in 2023 announces “some principles that should not be disputed” and passes no judgment on exactly the thing that mattered. My reading: ma only works because it has a frame, and the empty part of the screen only means something because the rest was painted. A line with a word in place of an image and a statement that doesn’t say what it saw also have empty space. From a distance, the three look alike.
culture
How to Break Free from the Tyranny of Certainty: The Japanese Concept of “Ma”, Maria Popova at The Marginalian — Starts from Szymborska’s idea that inspiration is born of a continuous I-don’t-know and arrives at ma, which Ann Tashi Slater describes in Traveling in Bardo as an interval or opening, in space and in time: the unpainted area of the screen, the silence in a conversation, the pause between two waves. The thesis fits in one sentence from the piece: “Certainty is the dominant addiction of the modern mind.” The most concrete passage comes from Kengo Kuma, for whom the emptiness of traditional Japanese space is where the body feels the light, the smell and the temperature change. What I keep is the ideogram, 間: gate and sun, light passing through a door, the same indirect light Tanizaki praised in In Praise of Shadows. When Popova carries that light to the double slit and to consciousness, the image gets bigger than the thought (my opinion).
Beauty And No-Thingness, Mark DeLong at 3 Quarks Daily — DeLong sent a sequence of sonnets to a poet he followed, and the poet got stuck on the last line of the second one: “‘beauty’s hidden folds’ is a no-thing”, a metaphor you can’t touch. DeLong accepts half the critique. He admits he doesn’t know what beauty is, but suspects it’s more than a stopgap for something better, and says that, with the techbros trying to stuff taste into AI models, it’s time to defend it as something that doesn’t reduce to data. The path runs through Old in Art School, by Nell Painter, the Princeton historian who finished her art master’s near seventy and found that her twentieth-century eyes were her biggest handicap. Then it reaches All the Beauty in the World, by Patrick Bringley, who left The New Yorker to become a guard at the Metropolitan after his brother died, and the scene that gives body to it all is Bringley’s mother crying in front of a Pietà at the Philadelphia museum. I read up to Bringley’s first day at the Met, so I don’t know where DeLong takes beauty.
Normativity from the Standpoint of Its Victims, Lorna Finlayson in Boston Review, via 3 Quarks Daily — 3QD only reproduces the opening, so this is a pointer. Habermas died in March, at 96, and Finlayson starts with his last political act: Principles of Solidarity, signed with three colleagues from the Normative Orders network five weeks after the start of Israel’s offensive in Gaza. The solidarity wasn’t with the victims of what Finlayson calls genocide, but with Israel and with Jews in Germany; retaliation was justified in principle, as long as it was proportionate, and the text didn’t venture to say whether proportion was being respected when the dead already numbered more than eleven thousand. According to Finlayson, the statement asserted without argument that “the standards of judgment slip completely when genocidal intentions are attributed to Israel’s actions”. For the philosopher of the force of the better argument, it’s a strange way to leave the stage. The title promises to read the theory from the standpoint of those it leaves out, and whether Finlayson treats the episode as a deviation or a consequence is in the rest of the essay, which I haven’t read yet.
Playwright Benedict Lombe on understanding who you are, interview by Yang Shi at The Creative Independent — Shifters moves back and forth between memory and present. Lombe says the starting point was the Kalûnga Line, the line between the natural and the supernatural world, between body and soul, and the wish not to have the answers. Lombe saw Before Sunset before Before Sunrise, without knowing there was a first film, and thinks it shaped the play: the audience meets Dre and Des as adults and fills in on its own the sixteen years between their last meeting and the reunion. On knowing someone is your person, the answer is worth the whole interview: “The thing about knowing that somebody is your person is you also don’t know, right?” The other half of the conversation is about specificity: a Black British love story, with Congolese and Nigerian characters who get to just live and fall in love, something that narratives about Congolese people, stuck on struggle and oppression, almost never allow.
brazil
Quanto tempo dura uma pergunta?, Lalai Persson at Espiral — She got a session with a guru in Berlin as a birthday present, brought a list of uncertainties and left with new questions. The main one swapped “whether” for “how” (not whether she belongs to the city, but how she belongs), and she spent more than an hour walking around the city to take it in. In a debate about who shapes culture in the age of generative AI, Anan Fries pointed out that the machine has taken the place of friends, teachers, therapists, tarot and oracles, and Persson thought of the guru: it was an hour and a half to hear her own questions, time that kind of AI gives no one. Then comes IS YOUR TIME, by Ryuichi Sakamoto and Shiro Takatani, the piano from a Miyagi school warped by the 2011 tsunami, which Sakamoto chose not to restore and which plays by itself whenever the Earth moves somewhere. “Penso no quanto o uso da inteligência artificial está me acostumando rápido demais à ideia de que tudo pode ser respondido agora.” The headline here on the 6th said text became free and understanding someone is still expensive. Persson puts that price in hours, and the question in the title still has no number.
findings
Penchants of the polymaths, Mariam Sabri at Aeon — After fifteen years teaching liberal arts in Pakistan, Sabri uses four polymaths of Islamic science (al-Biruni, Alhazen, Avicenna and al-Khwarizmi) against a university that only talks about employability, and argues that polymathy comes from the Muslim world itself, not from the global North. Every life becomes a lesson, which gets tiring. It’s worth it for the stories: al-Biruni noticed that al-Khujandi’s giant sextant was sagging because he had built his own sextants with next to nothing, and Alhazen feigned madness before the caliph when he saw the Nile couldn’t be dammed.
stalled sources
Eat Your Nuts (348 days), First Round Review (321), Dirt (303), Gurwinder (259), Literary Hub (111), web.dev (108), Out of Office (81), A List Apart (75), Anti-Mimetic (60), Off Brand (52), Philosophy Now (42), Adjacent Possible (35).