Much to our delight, our old friends Gene and Barbara Anderson were also there. In 2005 Lisa and I travelled to Turkey with them, visiting Istanbul and Konya. Gene is an anthropologist with prodigious erudition when it comes to recognizing plant and animal species, cooking medieval dishes, and much more. Barbara is a public health specialist whose idea of good time is taking students on public health tours in the poorest parts of Ethiopia or Cambodia. They'd moved up Seattle after Gene retired from the anthropology department here at UCR and Barbara left Loma Linda to become a associate dean at the the College of Nursing at Washington State University. Now she's retired too, and they're back.
We had dinner as kids came by trick-or-treating... but Lisa did
not answer the door and scare the wits out of them.
Categorification is getting really popular.
November 11, 2009
Long hidden in a Swiss bank vault, Carl Jung's Red Book is now available:
He later would compare this period of his life — this "confrontation with the unconscious," as he called it — to a mescaline experiment. He described his visions as coming in an "incessant stream". He likened them to rocks falling on his head, to thunderstorms, to molten lava. "I often had to cling to the table," he recalled, "so as not to fall apart".Had he been a psychiatric patient, Jung might well have been told he had a nervous disorder and encouraged to ignore the circus going on in his head. But as a psychiatrist, and one with a decidedly maverick streak, he tried instead to tear down the wall between his rational self and his psyche. For about six years, Jung worked to prevent his conscious mind from blocking out what his unconscious mind wanted to show him. Between appointments with patients, after dinner with his wife and children, whenever there was a spare hour or two, Jung sat in a book-lined office on the second floor of his home and actually induced hallucinations — what he called "active imaginations." "In order to grasp the fantasies which were stirring in me 'underground,'" Jung wrote later in his book Memories, Dreams, Reflections, "I knew that I had to let myself plummet down into them". He found himself in a liminal place, as full of creative abundance as it was of potential ruin, believing it to be the same borderlands traveled by both lunatics and great artists.
Jung recorded it all. First taking notes in a series of small, black journals, he then expounded upon and analyzed his fantasies, writing in a regal, prophetic tone in the big red-leather book. The book detailed an unabashedly psychedelic voyage through his own mind, a vaguely Homeric progression of encounters with strange people taking place in a curious, shifting dreamscape. Writing in German, he filled 205 oversize pages with elaborate calligraphy and with richly hued, staggeringly detailed paintings.
Jim Stasheff pointed out some really cool images of Mars taken
by the High Resolution
Imaging Science Experiment,
like these sawtooth
patterns in the carbon dioxide ice near its south pole.
November 19, 2009
Remember the Uighur uprising in northwest China?
One reason: the old town in Kashgar is being levelled.
For more photos of Kashgar, go here, here, and here.
I fell in love with the Silk Route and cities in the Taklamakan Desert, like Kashgar, Khotan and Turfan when I read this book, which you simply must read if you enjoy history, archaeology or adventure stories:
I would like to visit Kashgar before it's completely modernized!
November 21, 2009
What I see are the current devastation, the frightening disappearances of living species, be they plants or animals. Because of its current density, the human species is living in a type of internally poisonous regime and I think of the present, of the world in which I am ending my days, as this world that I do not love
- Claude Levi-Strauss
© 2009 John Baez
baez@math.removethis.ucr.andthis.edu
