I Am an Oracle of Cosmic Mysteries

Another silly thing popped up on my Facebook feed, and I really like what this one calls me: an Oracle of Cosmic Mysteries. As I wrote there, it pretty much guarantees I'll never have to actually make sense, so long as I tantalizingly hint at it. Kind of like cryptic song lyrics or poetry. And, more seriously, while I love pondering cosmic-scale questions, I believe it is essential that we get comfortable with not knowing. Accept most answers will always remain mysteries. As with oracles, sometimes our best explanations will always be ambiguous and obscure. And I like the way it implies I might be providing some kind of wisdom, as that's what I'm seeking.

With that thought in mind, I will follow with a plethora of ambiguous and obscure material. The poems are my favorite selections from a recent read, Joy: 100 Poems by Christian Wiman. The quotes are randomly generated by an AI oracle. The photos are mine. And a few other bits of randomness will mix their way in.

For the first poem, I'll share one that's pretty widely known and was too long to capture with a photo, so you'll have to follow the link: Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front by Wendell Berry. It nicely espouses being random and somewhat mysterious. A few favorite lines:

So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute.
 . . .
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
 . . .
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.

Speaking of orange, this one's peel provided an island with a lonely tree.

Remember this: every man has to find out for himself in what particular fashion he can be saved. I believe that. You just have to find out what it is you're looking for.

― Marcus Sedgwick, Saint Death

This one spoke to me so much I combined it with one of my photos.

I love the invented word in this bit of randomness from InspiroBot. It's a rather perfect word for the cynical romantic. I'm not a pessimist; I'm a pessimystic.

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A reminder for the pessimystics: If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction, we lessen the importance of their deprivation. We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure, but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world. To make injustice the only measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.

By Jack Gilbert

Everyone is guilty of something, and everyone still harbors a memory of childhood innocence, no matter how many layers of life wrap around it. Humanity is innocent; humanity is guilty, and both states are undeniably true.

― Neal Shusterman, Scythe

So we live in mystery. I'm not unsatisfied with that. I don't have to find a god or not a god.

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Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, Signal to Noise

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Human nature is both predictable and mysterious; prone to great and sudden advances, yet still mired in despicable self-interest.

― Neal Shusterman, Scythe

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Is there light at the end of the tunnel?

It is, as with all creation, matter impregnated with mind.

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The blurriness of joy and the precision of pain--I want to describe, with a sharp pain's precision, happiness and blurry joy. I learned to speak among the pains.

And now a wave of semi-nonsensical AI wisdom. Don't give up, though, for a bit more other follows that.

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This article interests me as a librarian and a reader, of course, and as someone intrigued by the topic of memory. Even more pertinent, it explains the reason for the existence of this blog. The majority of my posts, like this one, share parts of things I've read or otherwise consumed. Writing the posts helps me revisit and retain the material, plus gives me an external memory source when I have trouble recalling directly.

Why We Forget Most of the Books We Read

Presumably, memory has always been like this. But Jared Horvath, a research fellow at the University of Melbourne, says that the way people now consume information and entertainment has changed what type of memory we value—and it’s not the kind that helps you hold onto the plot of a movie you saw six months ago.

In the internet age, recall memory—the ability to spontaneously call information up in your mind—has become less necessary. It’s still good for bar trivia, or remembering your to-do list, but largely, Horvath says, what’s called recognition memory is more important. "So long as you know where that information is at and how to access it, then you don’t really need to recall it," he says.

Research has shown that the internet functions as a sort of externalized memory. "When people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself," as one study puts it. . . .

If you want to remember the things you watch and read, space them out. I used to get irritated in school when an English-class syllabus would have us read only three chapters a week, but there was a good reason for that. Memories get reinforced the more you recall them, Horvath says. If you read a book all in one stretch—on an airplane, say—you’re just holding the story in your working memory that whole time. "You’re never actually reaccessing it," he says.

Sana says that often when we read, there’s a false "feeling of fluency." The information is flowing in, we’re understanding it, it seems like it is smoothly collating itself into a binder to be slotted onto the shelves of our brains. "But it actually doesn’t stick unless you put effort into it and concentrate and engage in certain strategies that will help you remember."

One final, closing thought: Realize that you are in need of human contact and don't forget to not suck.

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Be excellent to each other; and party on, dudes!