Freeman Dyson, Carl Woese, Yuval Noah Harari

Some years ago, in a New York Review of Books article on Freeman Dyson, I ran across a quote from Carl Woese, great and renowned biologist that had such an impact on my that I have copied it into every diary I have written since then. The Review was of OUR BIOTECH FUTURE, 2007. Freeman Dyson quotes Woese:

"Imagine a child playing in ae woodland strem, po9oking a stick into an eddy in a flowing current, thereby disrupting it, But the eddy quickly reforms. The child disrupts it again, and again it reforms.....There you have it, organisms are resilent patterns in a turbulent flow, patterns in an energy flow. It is becoming increasingly clear that to understand living systems we must come to see them not as machines but as stable, complex, dynamic organization."

Harari, in an interview in Sunday New York Times, 11/14/21 says, "I explored the way in which the information revolution disintegrates the human individual which is the foundation of humanism, and liberalism......it is no longer that a human being is this magical self which is autonomous and has free will and makes decisions about the world. No, a human being like all other organisms, is an information processing system that is in continuous flow. It has no fixed assets."

What brought both of these essays to mind was an essay I was reading about the journals of Claude Fredericks, a professor of classics at Bennington College. He wasn't faouus in his on his own, but was a friend of many famous authors such as May Sarton, and Anais Nin, and poet James Merrill. He kept journals from the age of 8 until his death and the Getty has purchased and archived his journals. This was interesting to me as I have kept journals for 50 years and have been a fan of the new literary art form known as "Autofiction" which was made famous by the author Karl oOve Knaussgaard through his 4 to 6 volume work called My Struggle (of which I have read 3 or 4 volumes).

All of this coincided with an essay on not getting rid of our stuff which I wrote about yesterday. My home is, in a way, an encapsulated history of one organism, kind of like the fossil remains of a T-Rex in the desert of the West, or of a saber tooth cat in a tar pit in California. There are my journals, and my paintings, and my accumulated bits of flotsam and jetsom, rocks, fossils, photographs, postcards, books by the thousands.

All these bits of material Culture, describe the life of an organism, a free floating bit of humanity in the continuous dynamic stream of history that is time made manifest. I wanted to share these thoughts with you because they have been so compelling to me over the years. I hope you are insired to look up the original sources and read them for yourself!

Happy Trails - like leaves floating on the ripples in a pod