Looking south from Muley Point at your stomping grounds, where "all preference is made whimsical and a man and a rock become endowed with unguessed kinships."
"Then about the meridian of the day we come upon the judge on his rock there in that wilderness by his single self. "
One of Blood Meridian's origin stories. 25th Anniversary Edition, page 131.
"Whatever his antecedents he was something wholly other than their sum, nor was there a system by which to divide him back into his origins for he would not go."
The kid dreams of emergence + decomposability. p. 322.
On my drive I listened to Blood Meridian for the 1st time. I heard in the narration (very good, by Richard Poe) strong echoes of Melville. When I read myself, I feel the antecedents but the voice is clearly Cormac's. Cormac's everyday speech is very apparent in this passage.
In Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy echoing darkly in Judge Holden Borges' Book-Man. p. 297.
"Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth."
"They passed through a highland meadow carpeted with wild-flowers, acres of golden groundsel and zinnia and deep purple gentian and wild vines of blue morninglory and a vast plain of varied small blooms reaching onward like gingham print to the farthest serried rimlands blue with… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
I once suggested at a dinner that Blood Meridian + Tropic of Cancer were siblings, w ToC presaging BM in its 2nd to final paragraph. Cormac laughed + said "I don't know about that, honey, but it is one of the greatest paragraphs in literature" and recited it word for word. twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
Cormac was aesthetically precise in everything he did. He loved fashion + for years we exchanged marked up copies of WWD. Descriptions of haberdashery abound in his books. Below, from Blood Meridian, p. 175.
COMPLEXITY BEGETS COMPLEXITY: Improvements in measurement tech + exp design reveal complexity across scales, challenging the idea it increases in more than a Russian doll sense from cells to societies. Below—an old thread + new insect/bees results. 1/N
Cultural learning (diffusion of neutral behavioral variants) was thought limited to large brained animals. @alicedbridges@LChittka show @PLOSBiology bees socially learn to solve puzzle boxes+if exposed to mult equally good solutions nonetheless come as a group to prefer one. 2/N
The bees (Bombus terrestris) working in their puzzle box. @alicedbridges@LChittka et al use a multiple-demonstrator puzzle box open diffusion experimental set-up (Figure 4A above) to test whether one functionally neutral variant comes to dominate. 3/N
@mattlark@QuantaMagazine Complexity all the way down: Bacteria + other prokaryotes have complex internal structure w membrane bound organelles that can sequester genetic material, allow nutrient digestion + synthesize molecules. Read more in this accessible @QuantaMagazine essay tinyurl.com/sxccg46
@mattlark@QuantaMagazine Complexity all the way down: @smartbiology helps those of us who are not cell biologists see the amazing internal structure & complexity of eukaryotic cells. Cells, like brains, are densely & perhaps optimally packed w information processing machinery