I have enough life experience to know for a fact that the words most often spoken in hippie construction are, Hey, that’s really cool.  We should put a foundation under it.  Old homesteads.  Experimental housing.  Barns and sheds.  Makeshift housing.  All that originality.  All that grace and character.  So much history in that structure.    Composting as we speak.

A lot of structures have been rescued by foundations, while some remain standing by the force of their own internal miracle.  Other structures, you should just go ahead and let them fall down.

The biggest problem with foundations with making it solid at the very bottom of things, is that they are a fiction.  You can think you have made one, but geology will always have its way with it.

The turn of the 20^th century saw a major mathematical program in academia called foundations—the search for a few self-evident concepts—definitions or principles—out of which you could derive all of mathematical truth.  The idea was to articulate the basic stuff, like maybe what a number is, and the bare-bones logical rules, like something can’t be true and not-true at the same time.  Get those basics together.  And show that you could build all of mathematics out of it.  Foundations.  Part of the march towards the digital age.

The program was a complete failure.  It seemed straightforward enough.  2 + 2 = 4.  That’s so cool we should put a foundation under it. Turns out, somebody proved that you can’t.  There’s just no way you can come up with a basic set of foundational statements to hold up math.  And even when you try, somebody can take the opposite statements and use them for a foundation to make a math that’s completely different.

Probably the best known example of this happened in geometry.  Regular old Euclidean geometry—the geometry for building houses—has, as one of it’s foundational statements parallel lines don’t meet.  But if you ask, What if they do meet? you could invent a whole different kind of geometry.  People have.  Geometries of warped spaces in many dimensions that some people dream will be useful for building spaceships.

The upshot is, even when the foundation seems pretty solid, it can be interesting to check it out.

Consider, for example, the many distinguished careers and contracts related to the breeding and carving up of living creatures to see what they’re like inside, or injecting chemicals into their brains to see what they’ll do.  This is all founded on standards, regulations, and complexities of ethics and belief that make these practices good for us, because the creatures are so much like us, except for in the kinds of things that can hurt them.

To perpetrate a genocide, you have to work into the foundation of your world that some humans are sub-human.  Savages.  Cockroaches.   With those kinds of ideas you can enslave people.  Even people you can’t see.  They’ve gotten used to living like that.  It’s a higher wage than they could get anywhere else.

A lot of people think it’s fun to start fires and blow things up.   Something in the power of that energy release.  A bunch of them have gotten together and invented a version of peace and prosperity that’s got a foundation cobbled from mutually assured destruction.

So you can put a foundation under just about anything.  Although no foundation is going to last—which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

A lot of people don’t realize when they are contemplating a structure, that 75% of the work is in the foundation.  And the other 75% is the finish work.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.   That sentence was penned by a young Noam Chomsky in his doctoral dissertation in linguistics as an example of a sentence which is grammatical, but meaningless.  Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

Problem is, no sooner do we hear something like that than we start to conjure a hue which is colorless green—listless, drab and unremarkable.  Sleeping ideas, they could be anywhere.  A furious sleep isn’t hard to imagine.   Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.  Maybe, when the ideas open their eyes, the greens will be colored with fury from the sleep.

That’s why Plato banned poets from his utopian republic.  He envisioned a society in which everybody knows what’s what because words are well-defined and the allowable sentences can be identified.  How can you be grounded in the rational, reason and the real with poets skulking around, striking random words against each other like rocks, making sparks.

I’m thinking about that because I’ve been carrying around 100 Selected Poems by e.e. cummings.  No colorless green ideas, per se, but you do find leaping greenly spirits of trees/and a blue tree dream of sky.

e.e. cummings is probably best known for his lack of capitalization and oddball punctuation, or maybe for writing eddieandbill as a single schoolchild word, but his poems also have roamingly stern bright faeries…  the whyless soul…  and children building this rainman out of snow.

sweet morons gather round, he calls and words bump into each other all over the place.  silent certainly mountains. … my sweet old etcetera/aunt lucy…  raving city screamingly street wonderful…

I turn the page and he says, my father walked through dooms of love.  Another page and he says, whenever men are right they are not young.  On another, freedom is a breakfastfood.

On the back cover, Marianne Moore says that e.e. cummings “does not make aesthetic mistakes.”  I don’t know about that, but I do know that if Plato had met Mary Daly, he’d have banned Elemental Feminist Philosophers from his republic as well.  Daly’s method is to use language as a double edged tool which at once unweaves the lies of stag-nation and restores the elemental feminine.

We are immersed in a necrophilic society, she says, surrounded by necrophiles and necrocrats, lovers and dealers of death, we are bored to death, anesthetized with boracracy whose borocratic institutions rule the mis-begotten state of boredom.

Boredom is a clockocracy, a jockocracy, a foolocratic junkocracy, where you get up every morning and listen to the olds, the same old necrological news, the patriarchal prattle.

Mary Daly would replace mister-hood with sisterhood, give the whole staledom of maledom a misterectomy, rout out the strange deadfellows, the toms, the dicks, the harrys, the butchers, the bullies, the hacks and the fops.  Down with academentia.  Derision for fembots, presbots, popbots, numbots, foolosphers, and psycho-ologists.  Calling all revolting hags, all cosmic crones in tidal time for contrary ways and counterclock whys, foxy foresight, glamor and grace.  Spinsters, weavers, wickeds, weirds, come out and dis-close, dis-order, dis-cover the words that will awaken the feminine wild.

Nope, Mary Daly would not have made it into Plato’s utopian republic.  She’d be in exile with e.e. cummings, who said, humanity i love you because you/are perpetually putting the secret of/life in your pants and forgetting/its there and sitting down on it

Alan Turing was a British mathematician and logician.  In the first half of the 20^th century he articulated a conceptual framework surrounding so-called “mechanical thinking devices”.  His ideas were entirely theoretical.  Because Alan Turing lived before the first electronic computers were actually built.  All the same, many of his ideas remain at the foundation of theories of computation and the field of computer science.

One question Turing thought about was:  Are there circumstances under which a computing machine could be said to think?  This led to the formulation of an idea which has come to be known as the Turing Test.  If, in every interaction, the machine responds in the same way as a human would, we can say that the machine mimics the activity of human thought.

Turing published this idea in 1950, a time when cognitive scientists were confident that language was a capacity unique to humans.  The computers envisioned at that time—which would soon be built—were devices that accepted written inputs and returned written outputs.  And so it happened that in the 1960s and 70s, the field of artificial intelligence blossomed with computers programmed to narrate, and converse.  They’d be stuffed with a big detailed vocabulary, a lot of grammar, and information about idioms and metaphor like,  hit the lights, and love is a rose.  Each generation of them got better and better, but sooner or later they always flubbed up and flunked the Turing Test.  At first the promising machine might  answer complex questions and tell original stories, maybe even try to lie.   But then it would invite some children down to the meadow to play in the thistles or ask someone if they’d like to exchange heads.  For a long time, computing machines flunked the Turing Test hands down.  It just wasn’t hard to make the machine give away its machine-ness.  Things are little different now.

Have you ever had an unhappy customer service interaction, full of— press 8 to return to the main menu…  please re-enter the last four digits…   your password has expired…  I’m sorry that is not a valid response…  You eject yourself from the labyrinth of menus and wait out the minutes and the muzak that it takes to reach  a customer service representative who hopes you have a satisfying experience today and who turns out to be as circularly obstinate as the robotic voices you just ran away from, and you ask, “Are you a person or a machine?”  They respond indignantly that they are a person, and you think, HA!  That’s exactly what a machine would say.

In that case, you’d be the one administering the Turing Test.  How do you make sure you are speaking to a human?  You could keep demanding to talk to a supervisor until finally someone said something that no machine would ever say.

Chances are you’ve taken the Turing Test many times—every time you do something like sending a message or a comment through a website and a panel pops up displaying a smear of smudges and asking you to type the letters that you see.  That’s how they filter out spam.  They don’t want to deal with the mail that comes from machines.  Of course, if you can’t figure out what those gloppy letters are, you flunk the Turing Test and they’re not going to deal with any mail that comes from you.  Or rather, the machine that handles the mail isn’t going to deal with mail that comes from you.  Because the machine thinks you’re a machine.  But you’re not a machine.  You were only impersonating one.

Today I made an expedition to the public library and have returned with a load of provisions.

One of the books I brought home is called, Design in Nature:  How the Constructal Law Governs Evolution in Biology, Physics, Technology, and Social Organization.  It’s by Adrian Bejan, a scientist, and his ghostwriter, J. Peder Zane and the cover promises that the book will engage  the non-scientist reader from the first sentence to the very last word.

From the book jacket and first few pages, I’m able to glean that “flow” is a central concept in the book. Inside live plants and animals, stuff flows, always.  When the flow stops, the thing is dead.  This is also true of river systems, the book says.  As well as lightning bolts.  And committees.  The book equates the presence of flow with the presence of life and proposes a law of physics that says flow is always trying to maximize itself and that’s what drives the evolution of everything from cells to social organizations.  Ambitious stuff.

Some of the chapters are called, “Why Hierarchy Reigns,”  “The Design of Academia,”  “The Design of History.”

Others have names like, “The Birth of Flow, “Witnessing Evolution”, “Seeing Beyond the Trees and the Forest.”

I’m ready to give this book a read.  Or a start.  Get far enough to have (or despair of having) the experiences promised by the back cover:  “never look at the world the same”, “blow your mind with fresh interpretation.”  Sure I’ll go for that.  Why not?

A story from the introduction explains the value of using the “constructal law” to consider and interpret phenomena that have flow.  For example, piioneering soil scientist Robert Elmer Horton spent years tramping around gathering data in river drainages, and hours at the desk developing and studying maps, counting tributaries and river channels.  After a lifetime of work, he concluded that regardless of the river or the terrain, every main stream in a watershed tends to have about 4 tributaries.  Using only pencil and blank paper, flow scientists obtained the same result in the comfort of the office, prompting the authors to muse that that, “No doubt, Horton’s empirical work made it easy for us to verify our findings.  But had he known about the constructal law, he would not have had to perform innumerable measurements to reach the same conclusion.”  Ah, if only he had known, he could have saved himself the trouble of struggling through all those boggy river basins getting blisters, frostbite, and sunburns.

That attitude reminds me of the scene from Saint-Exeupery’s The Little Prince where the tiny mysterious man declines a pill for preventing thirst, saying that he’d probably only use the time he saved to take a pleasant walk to a well and have a cool drink.

And it reminds me of a piece of paper I have stuck right here to the wall.  It astonished me so much, I ripped it out of Sky Mall,  the in-flight magazine for shopping at cruising altitude.  It’s an ad for a Double Dance Mat, 39.98, ages 5 and up.  In the picture, a colorful piece of plastic is spread out on the floor and somehow, with the aid of two “C” batteries, the nattily-dressed multicultural children various follow its cues to learn dance steps.  It looks like maybe they are supposed to stomp out flashing lights with their feet..  At any rate, beneath the tableau  the headline cheers their rollicking good behavior, promising that the dance mat will teach children how to dance without all that distracting music.

I’ve started reading The Death of Nature:  Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution by Carolyn Merchant.  The front cover promises me that a “confrontation” with this book will cause me to rethink “the meanings of science, its historical origins, and its role in today’s world,” because, as the back cover tells me, the book is about “how the scientific revolution sanctioned the exploitation of nature, commercial expansion, and the subjugation of women.”  That idea might not be as shocking as it was 30 years ago when this book was first published.  I know that Rene Descartes and Francis Bacon are key thinkers of the scientific revolution and associate them with phrases like “plundering the secrets of nature” and “knowledge is power”.  The culture I’m immersed in certainly adheres to such notions and considers phrases like “the earth is our mother” poetic or quaint.

What surprised me right off—my first confrontation in reading—was that the question the book was asking wasn’t “How did nature stop being female and a mother?”  It was, “How did nature turn into a machine?”

Which got me to thinking about the extent to which  I view nature—or rather everything—as a machine.  Cause and effect, reliability.  Do this and that will happen.  I can explain summer and winter in terms of the moving parts of the solar system.  Describe my aches and pains as dysfunctions in the systems that move my bones around.  Improve my relationships by learning how responses developed as a child operate in my present behavior.  I solve problems by straining information through sieves of logic.  Even for things I can’t see, my understanding of them is an understanding of how they work: photosynthesis, black holes, ecosystems, digestion.

If you accused me of seeing the world in that foolish, mechanistic way, where everything is part of a part, acting and reacting with all the other parts in reliable, tick-tock predictable ways, I would tell you I’m not as narrow as that.  But when, really do I think it’s irrelevant to ask, “What causes that?” or “How does that work?”

So that was my first confrontation with this book, The Death of Nature.  Thinking about thinking that everything is part of a machine.

The second confrontation was with the idea—also not unfamiliar—that it is wrong to rip into Mother Earth and mine her entrails for metals, an idea far from Western Civilization, I thought.  So it blew my mind to discover that this idea had a place in Western thought up until about 500 years ago.  In the first century, the Roman compiler Pliny wrote in his Natural History that earthquakes were a show of earth’s indignation with us for mining her bowels for treasure as though her surface was not bountiful enough.   Detractors of mining in Europe and England in the mid-1500s maintained that if Mother Nature had intended humans to use metals, she wouldn’t have buried them so deep.

I like to think I live a little closer to the earth than the average US-American—eat low on the food chain, do without glitz, go natural every chance I get.  Yet, I cannot begin to imagine my life without metal.  Is there anything in my house that, if not made of metal, wasn’t made with metal?  The sawblade on the boards, needles that stitched the upholstery, the woodstoves, the axe, the pens, the frying pans, the electronics, screws and nails, chicken wire, zippers, guitar strings, the roof, bicycle spokes, pushpins, jar lids, shovel, can opener, eyeglasses, spinning wheel…