656
species the Toda allege is able “to indicate a person’s level of anxiety.” Writes Tarun
Chhabra, “We set out to see this flower, which shuts only if a worried person holds
the plant by its stem. How it works remains to be studied, but I can say that it has
been very accurate…”
8
In other words, from the heart of melancholy and frustration with civil society
and the breakdown in social contract theory and practice, ecological epiphanies can
help redress possibly hundreds of thousands of years of our species’ mental and
physical woes and outbursts. That is the great hope (Fig. 71.2).
71.2 Biosemiotic Impulses
Like vascular plants, every grain of sand along 800 miles of Japanese beachfront
purports to a different weight, shape, size, and color. That, too, signals a proliferation of aesthetic, scientific, and consciousness-related Otherness at its most promising. Those grains of sand each emanate differing hydrological echoes and marine
memories, geological relations to the glaciers, seas, and sinks of their mineral legacies, all unknown to us, but through the eco-poetic affairs of the mind and the heart.
Not one grain of sand on earth is the same as another. We gaze up at the stars with
an equally famished intellect when it comes to particular delineating. Such multiplicities ordain a humbling attitude, if we go with it, toward all entities. These are
the Others with whom our biosemiotic impulses are wonderfully challenged to the
extreme.
A tolerance, given to the appreciation of gradations and unrecordable nuances,
understands at a fundamental layer of consciousness that no predicate, neither multiplier nor divider, can account for the illogical premise of an equivalency anywhere
in the Cosmos, or at any time within a defined temporal span. The = sign collapses,
along with fundamental knowledge that we presume; the very languages we wield
to describe known and unknown signatures lose loft at the instant of formation.
Every turn of descriptive phrase—“unknown worlds,” “at the instant of,” and so on,
struggles forward, then in reverse, to formulate and seize upon the appropriate
catchphrase, like relativity, to reconcile the frustrations in mind of a Zeno’s Paradox,
or basic chemical reaction. To withstand the nagging suspicion that all of our truths
and untruths—the pillars of history, ethics, philosophy, and science—are fuzzy.
Even among reactive molecules like H 2 O, the ocean defies every alleged accomplishment of logic. Reason is thwarted in each wave and current. Mega-tsunamis,
like that which overwhelmed Lituya Bay in Alaska in 1958, or the 1970 Ancash
Earthquake/Landslide off Peru’s Huascaran, killing as many as 70,000 people, natural disasters, go to the core of our instability.
8 See The Toda Landscape – Explorations in Cultural Ecology, by Dr. Tarun Chhabra, with a
Foreword by Anthony R. Walker, Published By The Department of South Asia Studies, Harvard
University and Orient BlackSwan, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2015, p. lxi.
71 The Concept of Zero
species the Toda allege is able “to indicate a person’s level of anxiety.” Writes Tarun
Chhabra, “We set out to see this flower, which shuts only if a worried person holds
the plant by its stem. How it works remains to be studied, but I can say that it has
been very accurate…”
8
In other words, from the heart of melancholy and frustration with civil society
and the breakdown in social contract theory and practice, ecological epiphanies can
help redress possibly hundreds of thousands of years of our species’ mental and
physical woes and outbursts. That is the great hope (Fig. 71.2).
71.2 Biosemiotic Impulses
Like vascular plants, every grain of sand along 800 miles of Japanese beachfront
purports to a different weight, shape, size, and color. That, too, signals a proliferation of aesthetic, scientific, and consciousness-related Otherness at its most promising. Those grains of sand each emanate differing hydrological echoes and marine
memories, geological relations to the glaciers, seas, and sinks of their mineral legacies, all unknown to us, but through the eco-poetic affairs of the mind and the heart.
Not one grain of sand on earth is the same as another. We gaze up at the stars with
an equally famished intellect when it comes to particular delineating. Such multiplicities ordain a humbling attitude, if we go with it, toward all entities. These are
the Others with whom our biosemiotic impulses are wonderfully challenged to the
extreme.
A tolerance, given to the appreciation of gradations and unrecordable nuances,
understands at a fundamental layer of consciousness that no predicate, neither multiplier nor divider, can account for the illogical premise of an equivalency anywhere
in the Cosmos, or at any time within a defined temporal span. The = sign collapses,
along with fundamental knowledge that we presume; the very languages we wield
to describe known and unknown signatures lose loft at the instant of formation.
Every turn of descriptive phrase—“unknown worlds,” “at the instant of,” and so on,
struggles forward, then in reverse, to formulate and seize upon the appropriate
catchphrase, like relativity, to reconcile the frustrations in mind of a Zeno’s Paradox,
or basic chemical reaction. To withstand the nagging suspicion that all of our truths
and untruths—the pillars of history, ethics, philosophy, and science—are fuzzy.
Even among reactive molecules like H 2 O, the ocean defies every alleged accomplishment of logic. Reason is thwarted in each wave and current. Mega-tsunamis,
like that which overwhelmed Lituya Bay in Alaska in 1958, or the 1970 Ancash
Earthquake/Landslide off Peru’s Huascaran, killing as many as 70,000 people, natural disasters, go to the core of our instability.
8 See The Toda Landscape – Explorations in Cultural Ecology, by Dr. Tarun Chhabra, with a
Foreword by Anthony R. Walker, Published By The Department of South Asia Studies, Harvard
University and Orient BlackSwan, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2015, p. lxi.
71 The Concept of Zero