for - Heart Sutra analysis - from Medium article - Heart Sutra and the nyams of Dzogchen - Aleander Vezhnevets - 2022, Sept 7

Heart Sutra analysis - Form is emptiness - Intellectual analysis - Reductionist analyzes into smaller and smaller parts but - where is the essence to be found?

Maybe meaning that, "we", referring to the fallen soldiers, are saying or attempting to get across to their "predecessors" or tose soldiers who are still alive and fighting on the battfield, that they "shall not sleep" until the soldiers get done what they need to get done.

Implying here, from the sensory perspective of the larks which are flying above the gunshots being shot across the battlefield in the sky.

Addressing the next group of solider that are fighting the enemy

The overall tone of this poem is almost nostalgic, however, the way the poem picks up in the middle, almost as if going down a hill at a faster pace, the tone shifts to be one of reflection and casts a heroic shadow on the fallen soldiers. Almost as if McCrae intentionally styled the poem in this manner to create more of a tribute to these soldiers that lost their lives in World War I.

"..failing hands…" might refer to those of the solders who were struck and can no longer fight… "To you… we throw the torch…"

Perhaps with the hope of the falling soldeirs that their comrades will accept the "torch" from them to keep fighting for them and to accomplish what they can't help them to do anymore.

Interesting to make the word "dead" a proper noun. I wonder if McCrae capitalized the D to give tribute to those who fell during the war and is lost towards history.

The entirety of this stanza is written from the first person perspective, most likely intended to be told from the fallen soldiers' point of view.

this suggests the fleeting window of life, and provides an indirect comparison to the poppies, as the soldiers are speaking of themselves as the poppies that grow in the field "currently" or had started growing after their deaths. "We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, loved and were loved…" are all things that the poppies do as they continue to flourish in Flanders fields. "We are the Dead… We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, loved and were loved, and now we lie in Flanders fields" (McCrae).

"Scarce", here, refers to McCrae's reference to Larks singing in the line above, pointing to the idea that the sound of the Larks singing in the skies is muted or drowned out by the sound of gunshots involved in the battle happening below on the ground.

for - key insight - Buddhism - Tibetan - Clear light meditation at time of death - Tukdam - a physiological technique to get to the same place as philosophical analysis - recognizing nondual, ultimate nature of reality - from Youtube - Between Life and Death: Understanding Tukdam - John D. Dunne

Addressing the next group of solider that are fighting the enemy

Interesting to make the word "dead" a proper noun. I wonder if McCrae capitalized the D to give tribute to those who fell during the war and is lost towards history.

"..failing hands..." might refer to those of the solders who were struck and can no longer fight... "To you... we throw the torch..." - Perhaps with the hope of the falling soldeirs that their comrades will accept the "torch" from them to keep fighting for them and to accomplish what they can't help them to do anymore.

• The overall tone of this poem is almost nostalgic, however, the way the poem picks up in the middle, almost as if going down a hill at a faster pace, the tone shifts to be one of reflection and casts a heroic shadow on the fallen soldiers.
• Almost as if McCrae intentionally styled the poem in this manner to create more of a tribute to these soldiers that lost their lives in World War I.

The entirety of this stanza is written from the first person perspective, most likely intended to be told from the fallen soldiers' point of view. - this suggests the fleeting window of life, and provides an indirect comparison to the poppies, as the soldiers are speaking of themselves as the poppies that grow in the field "currently" or had started growing after their deaths.

"We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, loved and were loved..." are all things that the poppies do as they continue to flourish in Flanders fields. "We are the Dead... We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, loved and were loved, and now we lie in Flanders fields" (McCrae).

"Scarce", here, refers to McCrae's reference to Larks singing in the line above, pointing to the idea that the sound of the Larks singing in the skies is muted or drowned out by the sound of gunshots involved in the battle happening below on the ground.

for - adjacency / validation - for justifying Tipping Point Festival - TPF - bottom up, grassroots direct action Vs - top down, corporate, policy action - Joe Brewer - framing analysis - using cognitive linguistics

adjacency / validation - between - ustifying Tipping Point Festival - TPF - - bottom up, grassroots direct action<br /> - top down, corporate, policy action<br /> - Joe Brewer - framing analysis - cognitive linguistics - adjacency relationship - We need both bottom up and top down section, but Joe's framing analysis provides an explanation why there isn't more bottom up direct action - It requires a lot of skill to find the leverage points as well as the weakness of people power is lack of money - To awaken the sleeping giant off the commons is the purpose of the Typing Point Festival (TPF)

"As another mystical image, the mystery can refer to the possibility of transformation the man believes is inherent in the child, and thus for hope in the future. But it can also represent primordial forces, like an apocalyptic event, that elude man’s knowledge and are beyond his control." (Gipko).

https://responsejournal.net/issue/2017-06/article/road-cormac-mccarthy

More on Ending here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/ending/

"The centrality of natural forces in McCarthy's vision of the world is expressed in the novel's assertion that the maps and mazes on the trout's backs, cartographic puzzles through which life's mystery is both delineated and obscured, are visual schemata of natural processes which are beyond the power of humanity to restore to the world once they are lost." (Dowd 32).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42909448

More on Ending here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/ending/

"[...] fleeting image of the past, before the religion of capitalism takes hold. [...] the past tense of the paragraph indicates that a human hand does eventually take the trout for its own possession, giving it over to the realm of property, closing off the common use and the cognizance of that mystery and wonder of the “world in its becoming.” (Dominy 156).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/cormmccaj.13.1.0143

More on Ending here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/ending/

"This achingly mournful passage alone would justify the novel's exaggerated representation of environmental collapse, as it closes the narrative with a poetic vision of vitality which is made all the more affecting through its analeptic framing within a desolated world. […] The destitution of the novel's present-day world heightens the affective power of this simple image of an organism swimming in fresh water […]." (Dowd 32).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42909448

More on Worldbuilding here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldbuilding/

"While the boy seems to have found safety and a new family, some critics have suggested that this apparently hopeful ending may be deceptive. [...] There would, perhaps, be greater grounds for an optimistic reading if the novel’s ending remained focused on the boy, but it does not. [...] The ending yearns for the beginning but rules out any hope of a new one. The final sentence downgrades the importance of the human world and shows us a universe in which we are not the centre, and in which our passing may not after all be the ultimate tragedy." (Pudney 308).

https://shorturl.at/Qihyk

More on Ending here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/ending/

"[…] the world represented by the father, the world of late industrial, patriarchal, capitalist individualism, cannot survive much longer without a change in our ethical comportment, a change that privileges community over goods and the relief of suffering over future-oriented calculations. It’s a simple, even childlike, moral prescription, yet one that McCarthy’s novel suggests might be the only hope for we humans at the end of the world." (Elmore 145-146).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/cormmccaj.16.2.0133

More on Ending here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/ending/

"Instead of providing a rational, practical answer [...], the reader is asked to accept on faith that the boy will survive, because he deserves to. In other words, the reader is asked to make the same leap of faith as the boy’s father has, despite the crushing weight of the evidence of all that has happened so far." (Pudney 305).

https://shorturl.at/Qihyk

More on Ending here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/ending/

"[...] the father was right about goodness: it arrives on cue as a deus ex machina that has been following the pair and swiftly enfolds the boy savior into a holy family, maybe a holy commune, where they talk of the breath of God passing “from man to man through all of time.” (Brooks).

www.nytimes.com/2021/10/21/books/review/review-the-road-by-cormac-mccarthy.html

More on Ending here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/ending/

"These questions and the boy’s anxiety about the fate of the other boy are, of course, as much anxious questions about his own fate." (Elmore 139).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/cormmccaj.16.2.0133

More on Ending here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/ending/

"Beginning with the father’s dark dream of “a cave where the child led him by the hand”, the novel ends by closing the circle, as the dying father believes he is there once again [...]. He himself may never find the light but he does with the knowledge that his son carries it onward, still on the road [...]." (Mitchell 227).

https://doi.org/10.1093/litimag/imv028

More on Ending here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/ending/

"[...] in the father’s final attempt to bequeath his son the principles and wisdom that have led them throughout the novel, we discover that these rules are empty, ideological hopes rather than practical methods of success. Implicit in this concession is the notion not only that the father’s rules cannot assure his son’s survival, but that it is precisely doing the opposite of these rules, a willingness to take chances, to retrace one’s steps, and to leave one’s gun that open possibilities of future success." (Elmore 141).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/cormmccaj.16.2.0133

More on Ending here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/ending/

"In the father we see, following Stark, a prototypical Western subject: masculine, American, white, Christian, middle-class, heteronormative, able-bodied, and well-educated. He is the very picture of rugged American individualism with his stereotypically masculine proclivity for tools and guns, his knowledge of woodcraft and survivalism, his no tears attitude, and his dogged persistence [...]." (Elmore 137).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/cormmccaj.16.2.0133

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"The father even falls back on the heroic stoicism that we find in some of McCarthy 's other Southern characters, as he implores his son to keep trying [...]." (Walsh 53).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42909381

More on Style here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/style/

"McCarthy’s prose is for the most part functional and spare, describing actions rather than elaborating on inner states and feelings. The love that exists between the father and his son is beautifully depicted, but this is achieved without any hyperbole: the man’s frequent observation about his son’s thinness is quietly effective in communicating his love and his fears for the boy." (Pudney 300).

https://shorturl.at/Qihyk

More on Style here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/style/

"The lack of any personal names often leaves the reader in some doubt as to whom the pronoun “he” refers to. All this reflects the descent into a world in which the only imperative is survival." (Pudney 300).

https://shorturl.at/Qihyk

"[...] The Road often relies on pronouns for character identification. Short by nature, pronouns allow McCarthy to emphasize the characters’ deeds by drawing away as little attention as possible from action verbs [...]." (Kunsa 61).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jml.2009.33.1.57

More on Style here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/style/

"The novel repeatedly transposes descriptive terms and metaphors from physiology to the environment." (Dowd 33).

More on Style here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/style/

"The novel seems to suggest a correspondence between the functioning of a biological organism and the global ecosystems whose collapse is so apparent." (Dowd 35).

More on Worldbuilding here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldbuilding/

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42909448

"Obvious signs of indebtedness occur in the scene of footprints on hot macadam, recalling Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) in the heart-stopping glimpse of Friday’s footsteps on sand." (Mitchell 216).

https://doi.org/10.1093/litimag/imv028

More on Style here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/style/

"Cormac McCarthy was famously skeptical about punctuation. Throughout his career, he refrained from using citation marks, and in the interview, he (to the surprise of many) gave to Oprah Winfrey when she selected The Road for her book club, he said: “There’s no reason to blot up the page with weird little marks. If you write properly you shouldn’t have to punctuate. [. . .] I believe in periods, capitals, and the occasional comma. And that’s it.” (Andersen 4).

https://doi.org/10.1080/0895769X.2024.2420889

More on Style here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/style/

"The pervasiveness of consumption in The Road is evident even in the word choices of its characters and narrator. If the novel portends an end of capitalism, its setting presents an environment that is merely what is left after absolutely every resource has been harvested or appropriated, leaving only refuse, junk, and litter. The destiny of the consumed thing is to become waste, a word that appears several times in The Road, always as descriptions of the ashen dead landscape. [...] the world is both vast and empty and also the waste of itself, spent, used up, the leftovers from the passing away of the consumer society and the society of vagabonds and bloodcults wrenching nearly every last resource from the land and finally killing and eating each other."

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/cormmccaj.13.1.0143

More on "Worlbuilding" here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/?p=194

"And the very topos of the world as wasteland extends from Eliot and Fitzgerald forward, though [...] It is Hemingway, however, whose adoption of the topos most prominently engages McCarthy, in his self-conscious revision of the Nick Adams stories with their focus on the relationship of father and son [...]." (Mitchell 217).

https://doi.org/10.1093/litimag/imv028

More on Style here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/style/

"Inevitably, language too will disappear if there are not enough speakers to maintain its many dialects and conventions. The dialogs between the man and the boy indicate that the loss of language is already well underway; their conversations are often simply reserved to matters of survival or the present situation and rarely involve abstract concepts or everyday elements of the old world." (Lodoen 88).

https://shorturl.at/Fd3vS

More on Style here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/style/

"[...] Cormac McCarthy is known and admired for his careful research and close attention to the details of physical settings in his novels. [...] However, reviews by a number of apparently geographically challenged critics and commentators have suggested some novel [...] interpretations for the route." (Morgan 39).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42909380

More on Style here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/style/

"The Road has no traditional chapters, but consists of a long series of short, discrete paragraphs – 390, to be exact – that in the US first edition are separated by two lines of blank space. On the one hand, this accumulation of textual fragments emulates the broken landscape; on the other hand, the relentless progression of paragraphs mirrors the main characters’ eventful journey along the road." (Andersen 1).

https://doi.org/10.1080/0895769X.2024.2420889

"The solitary paragraphs of the novel, moreover, isolated by borders of white space, compel the abeyances, reversals, and shifts in direction that reinforce this general discontinuity—indeed, that make reading the novel similar to reading a poem, asking the reader to pause and reflect, to slow the tempo, to contemplate silences in the text as moments when language itself prepares to continue." (Mitchell 210).

https://doi.org/10.1093/litimag/imv028

More on Style here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/style/

"Parataxis, according to the Oxford English Dictionary , is "the placing of propositions or clauses one after another, without indicating by connecting words the relation (of coordination or subordination) between them." Such a narrow literal definition is often broadened to encompass a more inclusive paratactic style, in which polysyndeton, the use of many coordinating conjunctions to connect clauses, also operates in a paratacticway. Examples of this rhetorical figure can be found throughoutMcCarthy's corpus." (Dowd 24).

"The parataxis both reflects the texture of the disjunctive and depleted post-apocalyptic world and diminishes conceptual categories with which the human mind customarily shapes its encounter with reality." (Dowd 29).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42909448

More on Style here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/style/

"The motive of blindness has often been dear to McCarthy who used the device several times in the past [...]." (Juge 23).

More on Style here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/style/

"The father's oblivion has not reached the medical stage of blindness, but many around him have: his wife, for example, is blind by the time she nears her death; the man struck by lightning is also half blind [...]; and both are described as being bound to die. Blindness in The Road ,whether it is physical or spiritual, acts as a harbinger of death [...]." (Juge 23).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42909396

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"[...] the paragraph more generally echoes classics from Beowulf to The Faerie Queene, introducing a nightmarish monster as emblem for monstrous times." (Mitchell 216).

https://doi.org/10.1093/litimag/imv028

More on Style here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/style/

"Dreams play an important role in McCarthy's narratives; most of his stories are marked by the weirdness of reminiscence and the deceitful power of dream and dreamlike narratives." (Juge 21).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42909396

"Flashbacks, memories, dreams: all regularly disrupt the narrative flow in a fashion that nonetheless makes the narrative come alive, forcing us to concentrate on sounds and images that reflect the man’s mood of puzzlement, anxiety, disjointedness. But they also help defy the abysmal present, offering a rearguard defense of a vivid, humanizing past that everywhere else—in the landscape, in encounters with cannibals and psychopaths— is being obliterated." (Mitchell 212).

https://doi.org/10.1093/litimag/imv028

More on Style here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/style/

"The three similes of this first paragraph (“Like the onset of some cold glaucoma . . . Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up . . . sightless as the eggs of spiders”) are themselves weirdly disorienting, much as in a dream, establishing the dissociative aura experienced by father and child confronted by a nightmarish world." (Mitchell 211).

https://doi.org/10.1093/litimag/imv028

More on Style here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/style/

"The darkness of the world is emphasized from the start: the first two sentences of the novel use the words “dark” or “darkness” three times, and the word “cold” appears twice in the first three sentences." (Pudney 295).

https://shorturl.at/Qihyk

More on Style here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/style/

"[...] the repeated “w” (“When he woke in the woods,” “wakened,” “wandered,” “wet,” “swallowed,” “inward,” “swung,” “water,” “bowels,” and so on) has itself an odd sonic effect, enhanced by the very slippage of “w” from consonance to assonance (as a labiolized velar consonant, it can be vowel as well). It is almost as if the dream signaled a release from pedestrian prose, from the simple diction of a paratactic style to a richer, more evocative and elaborate, even distinctly human (because embellished and man-made) realm." (Mitchell 211).

https://doi.org/10.1093/litimag/imv028

More on Style here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/style/

"In total, six pages are devoted to the boy’s grief, which stands in stark contrast to his quick acceptance of his mother’s death. The treatment of the parents’ deaths and the boy’s reaction to these sets up a dichotomy, with mother/death on one side and father/life on the other." (Åström 122).

https://shorturl.at/ucj8u

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"[...] most of dreams or memories refer to the past as it once was, a past the father is struggling to let go.[...] The persistent rivalry between dreams and reality is one of the father's most difficult and tempting conflicts." (Juge 22).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42909396

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"[...] as the man is dying, he calls the child “the best guy”, a superlative that elevates the boy above simple “good guy” status and sets him apart from his father and any other decent human beings." (Kunsa 65).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jml.2009.33.1.57

"When he tells the boy that he is the one carrying the fire, that he is "the best guy", he is indicating that the child has a crucial ability that he has lost. Only a good guy who has the ability to make connections with other people, to enter or help form a community, truly carries the fire. The child has this ability. This is why the child is the one who is really carrying the fire - and always has carried it. The man carries the fire only in a secondary sense: he carries the child." (Wielenberg 11).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42909407

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"The man’s realization that he need not kill his son resembles the story of Abraham and Isaac, in which God commands Abraham to kill his son, only to reprieve him at the last minute." (Pudney 304).

https://shorturl.at/RrmMS

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"Here we return to the fundamentally masculine and individualist orientation of the father’s worldview, the chance of survival requiring a cold, self-interested, and absolute calculation of cost and benefit. Yet McCarthy’s doubling down on this masculine ethos of cost benefit is hardly an endorsement, since the father undermines the truth of his logic through the link he draws between survival and luck." (Elmore 140).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/cormmccaj.16.2.0133

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"Sight and blindness in the Bible are often associated with the power of God and therefore the power of faith upon mankind: men are cured from blindness thanks to the power of God and the power of faith. I would not say that McCarthy is setting the father's upcoming blindness as an example of moral disorder or sin per se, but I do think it connects with the loss of faith and the loss of will to see the truth since in The Road most of those who have lost sight and hope end up dead". (Juge 23).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42909396

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"The encounter with the thief reveals the complete inhumanity of the father’s abandonment of community. [...] the mere reclamation of their lost goods quickly ceases to be the father’s principle aim; rather, he seeks revenge, taking everything the man has, despite its utter lack of value to them [...]." (Elmore 144).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/cormmccaj.16.2.0133

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"The relationship of father and son embodies a tension between pragmatic self-preservation and innocent morality, keeping alive for both a fear of what they may be becoming. The father’s shrewd sense of risk is repeatedly provoked by events on the road that prompt his son’s compassionate willingness to risk. Yet gradually, each schools the other, with filial compassion balanced by paternal anxiety until finally the boy protests killing a thief who has stolen their gear [...]." (Mitchell 221).

https://doi.org/10.1093/litimag/imv028

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"God is on the periphery of their hopes, present but not tangible enough to invest in." (Hibbs).

https://wm.wts.edu/read/a-reflection-on-mccarthys-the-road

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"Disappearing with traditions and customs like table manners is language [...]. Losing its referents, language itself comes to its extinction, but the father saves it by teaching his son to read." (Guo 5).

https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.2732

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"[...] the welcome prospect of a vital past leeching into the present comes to seem akin to the likelihood of people elsewhere, here in the present, acting like them. The boy first broaches this possibility in wondering whether “on the other side” of the ocean a father and son are doing the same as they are, recalled by the father later that night as he sits on the beach and contemplates others carrying “the fire"." (Mitchell 224).

https://doi.org/10.1093/litimag/imv028

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"In the world of The Road , there is a simple rule for distinguishing the good guys from the bad guys. Bad guys eat people; good guys don't. This is what remains of the Categorical Imperative: don't treat people as mere food. While this is the most obvious principle to which good guys are committed, it is not the only one. It is possible to discern in The Road a Code of the Good Guys, a set of principles to which good guys are committed. That Code includes the following rules:

1. Don't eat people.
2. Don't steal.
3. Don't lie.
4. Keep your promises.
5. Help others.
6. Never give up.

The man tries to teach these principles to the child and he tries to follow them himself. Throughout the novel we witness the man's struggle to be a good guy, to do what is right in a world in which most people seem to have abandoned morality altogether." (Wielenberg 5-6).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42909407

"Every social institution and convention that could serve as a hallmark of civilization has passed so far into oblivion that, as Ashley Kunsa argues, the names of places, road, and people have passed into meaninglessness, leaving only the deeds of individuals to providing meaning and morality to the world (61–63). The most important dividing line for the boy is the assurance from his father that they will not eat people." (Dominy 146).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/cormmccaj.13.1.0143

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"The child wants to help the other boy, but the man is reluctant. The man insists that they have to leave the town now that they have attracted attention to themselves. Initially the man denies that the child really saw another boy. Then he insists that there were adults around to take care of the other boy; they were just hiding. He tries to rationalize his actions. Good guys help others - they certainly don't abandon helpless children. The man wants to be a good guy; therefore, he cannot admit that he is abandoning another child." (Wielenberg 7).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42909407

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"This is the only place in the book, before the man’s death, where the reader experiences things from the boy’s point of view for more than the odd sentence, and there are two ways to interpret what has happened. The first is that the boy is imagining things. This is certainly what his father thinks [...]. Certainly the boy’s intense loneliness makes this explanation plausible. But another possibility is that the boy’s goodness has attracted another “good guy”, as it will do again at the end of the novel." (Pudney 304).

https://shorturl.at/Qihyk

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"In its representation of participatory, heroic fatherhood, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road constructs the mother as lacking care, love, warmth, nurturing and survival skills. She contributes nothing to the family or the story, beyond giving birth to the child and acting as a foil for the father, who provides for the boy’s physical and emotional needs. In so doing, the narrative represents this mother specifically and motherhood more generally as irrelevant. The novel participates in a continuing cultural trend of marginalizing mothers in order to privilege fathers. This is an aspect of the novel that requires much greater discussion and analysis than scholars have so far acknowledged or provided." (Åström 125).

https://shorturl.at/ucj8u

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"Throughout the narrative, the mother’s apparent lack of awareness of, and readiness for, dealing with disaster is juxtaposed with the man’s preparedness; her emotional weakness contrasts with his dogged determination. Where the man refuses to give in, the woman does not even see herself as in charge of her own existence [...]. Even when it comes to committing suicide, it seems that the man is better prepared than the woman." (Åström 121).

https://shorturl.at/ucj8u

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"In The Road, the father is pitted against, and trumps, the mother in three areas. In so doing, he shows that as a post-feminist father, he is a much better carer and guardian for the child than she is. First, he is emotionally involved with the boy and prepared to sacrifice himself for his survival, whereas the mother is emotionally distant and seems exclusively concerned with her own existence. Second, he is resourceful and quick-thinking. The mother, on the other hand, takes no independent action and appears to have no practical or survival skills. Third, the father is essential to the boy, even after his own death. The mother, in contrast, is quickly forgotten. Where the mother is constructed as expendable in every way, the father is presented as irreplaceable." (Åström 118-119).

https://shorturl.at/ucj8u

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"The mother character is neither a traditional mother nor a ‘new’ mother. She is a non-entity with no relevance to the lives of her husband and son. By simultaneously reinforcing traditional stereotypes and embracing a ‘new’ fatherhood that is predicated on the elision of mothers, McCarthy and his critics present a futuristic world in which the only parent who is needed is the father." (Åström 114).

https://shorturl.at/ucj8u

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"[...] dreams may affect perception but they are also a clear indicator of life since it indicates persistent perception. Once death is upon men dreams indeed cease, which is the case of the wife [...]." (Juge 22).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42909396

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"[...] misery necessitates faith. In the case of the man, his love for his son motivates him to keep going. His problem is that his desire to keep going appears to lack a rational foundation. [...] Nevertheless, the man keeps on going despite recognizing, at some level, that the struggle may very well be futile. Because it is in the nature of human beings to desire that the things they do make sense, he grasps for beliefs that will make his struggle make sense. Among these is the belief that he is on a divine mission. It is not that he wants to keep going because he believes that he is on a divine mission. Rather, the desire comes first: because he wants to keep going, he believes - or tries to believe - that he is on a divine mission." (Wielenberg 4).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42909407

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"Not only does the mother refuse to live for her son, but she does not exhibit a moment’s remorse, anguish or worry about his future. The narrative describes the ‘coldness’ of her leaving as her ‘final gift’, showing the extent of her indifference towards her family. She leaves her husband and son, apparently without considering the impact it will have on them. The mother may be despondent, traumatized, depressed [...]. Nevertheless, the narrative’s contrasting of the father’s emotional outbursts [...] with the mother’s unemotional responses invites the reader to sympathize with the father." (Åström 120).

https://shorturl.at/ucj8u

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"[...] his son is a unique “product” of post-apocalyptic America. The boy is not only innocent due to his tender age; as an individual who has apparently not been exposed to the thriving American consumer culture that existed prior to the apocalypse, the boy represents a new socio-economic model—the non-consumer." (Kaminsky 1).

https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/13010

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"[...] the father’s reluctance to offer help to the man springs from his conviction that such help would ultimately imperil their own chances of survival." (Elmore 143).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/cormmccaj.16.2.0133

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"[...] the pair’s journey acquires an explicitly religious quality, a sense of divine mission reinforced by the antonomastic refrain of “good guys” — that is, the substituting of this phrase for their proper names — and the repetition of “carrying the fire,” phrases that become incantatory in the manner of a litany or a prayer." (Kunsa 59).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jml.2009.33.1.57

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"Serving as phatic discourse more than actual exchange of information, “okay” becomes an intermediate term, resonating as neither right nor wrong. [...] Depending on context, the word shelters layers of implication yet always expresses a determination of father and son to negotiate, to agree to disagree. [...] Father and son exchange “okay”s as a means of cementing their relationship, building on the very desire to maintain a verbal link that always gestures to something more than just keeping the conversation alive." (Mitchell 222).

https://doi.org/10.1093/litimag/imv028

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"Great suffering appears to constitute evidence against the existence of a loving God, but it also has the capacity to produce or strengthen belief in such a God. It is when we suffer that we most need belief in a loving God to keep ourselves going. The more reason we have to doubt God's reality, the more we need to believe." (Wielenberg 3).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42909407

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"The book of Genesis depicts God as creating through speech (Genesis 1:1-31); a God that does not speak is a God that does not create. Thus, the man's declaration is that either his son is the word of God, or, for all practical purposes, the universe is a godless one." (Wielenberg 1).

http://www.jstor.org/stable/42909407

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"[...] one of Plato's most famous theories - the often debated allegory of the Cave - [...] is interwoven in [...] The Road." (Juge 16).

"In The Road's narrative, father and son indeed wander in the vastest cave ever crafted in modern literature, a post apocalyptic, "barren, silent, godless" world." (Juge 19).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42909396

More on Worldbuilding here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldbuilding/

"His dream is symbolical: the cave in which he wanders seems to be the ethical dilemma he is trapped in and from which he struggles to get out. [...] The dream is his subconscious fear and struggle not to succumb to instincts against the principle of ethics." (Guo 4).

https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.2732

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"In the beginning of The Road, the father is awakened from a dream […]. This form of disembodiment, in the sense of losing control over one’s corporeality while surrendering to a greater force, is characteristic of the father, who struggles with his sense of body throughout the novel until his death. Thus, the father’s departure can be construed as the ultimate surrender to both the metaphorical and physical darkness." (Kaminsky 4).

https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/13010

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"McCarthy’s dystopian tale is situated after the collapse of the “American Dream,” but it certainly engages its absence, most notably through the distinction between the consumerism of pre-apocalyptic America and the non-consumerism of the wasteland. This gap is portrayed by the inherent difference between the consumer consciousness of the father, who is portrayed at the beginning of the novel as a dreamer and a relic of American consumerism, and the son as a non-consumer, both a “pure” product of the palimpsestic wasteland and a literary allusion to anti-consumerism." (Kaminsky 5).

https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/13010

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"The real darkness from the book comes not from the ashen apocalyptic world they trudge through—with all of its rust, char, and desolation, its silhouettes of life once lived buried beneath the debris of death. It comes from the smallness of the light they think is worth chasing, a light they think is inside themselves, an earthly light. [...] The man and the boy struggle all the way to the end to maintain a light of hope that is essentially dark, because it is bound to a world not that is passing away, but that has passed away." (Hibbs).

https://wm.wts.edu/read/a-reflection-on-mccarthys-the-road

More on Worldbuilding here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldbuilding/

"One of the most symbolic themes of the novel is that the South - as physical space, imaginative entity and narrative focus - acts as a redemptive agency when all else seems to have vanished." (Walsh 52).

"Although ashen, wasted and ostensibly dystopian, The Road succeeds in reviving the most cherished geocentric American myth of the frontier, of a new physical, imaginative and spatial beginning. In what is a major symbolic gesture McCarthy re-inscribes this national myth; in so doing, he reverses the westerly spatial movement of his own characters, and we leave the boy as he continues to carry his light into the South." (Walsh 54).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42909381

More on Worldbuilding here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldbuilding/

"What does it mean to carry the fire? Throughout much of the story, the two are literally carrying fire, or at least the means to produce it. Fire sustains them; it keeps them warm and cooks their food. It allows them to play cards and allows the man to read to the child at night. Fire is the foundation of civilization. Of course, fire is also the primary implement of the destruction of civilization in The Road. Perhaps to carry the fire is to carry the seeds of civilization. If civilization is to return to the world, it will be throughthe efforts of "good guys" like the man and the child." (Wielenberg 5).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42909407

More on Worldbuilding here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldbuilding/

"McCarthy demonstrates that the journey of the man and boy may have been for naught, since they discover nothing that they haven’t already seen. So the end of the journey for them offers more of the same wasteland rather that John Winthrop’s “city upon a hill” or many a settler’s Promised Land. By setting his road narrative in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, McCarthy critiques the ultimate outcome of, not just Americans’, but man’s shortsightedness, vanity, and ego." (Gipko).

https://responsejournal.net/issue/2017-06/article/road-cormac-mccarthy

More on Worldbuilding here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldbuilding/

"The remnant society of The Road has reached the totalizing end of capitalism, one in which everything and everyone is subject to ownership, exchange, and acquisition for consumption." (Dominy 149).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/cormmccaj.13.1.0143

More on Worldbuilding here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldbuilding/

"In the absence of photosynthetic flora, the atmosphere of the planet would gradually slide into chemical equilibrium, all of its oxygen being locked away through oxidation (the rusting of iron, for example). In such an environment, fires would be increasingly difficult to ignite, relying as they do upon the presence of sufficient quantities of oxygen. Human existence would have become impossible long before such an occurrence, however, given our dependence upon oxygen. The ability to light a controlled fire, one of the activities repeated by the man and boy throughout the novel, is thus a feature of an environment which has a very specific chemical make-up, one which is conducive to life. Considered from this angle, to "carry the fire" is thus to carry the relatively modest hope that life could possibly return to the planet again, in the understanding that at least one necessary condition is still being met by the environment. While fire is closely associated with death and destruction in the novel, it also stands for life itself." (Dowd 38).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42909448

More on Worldbuilding here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldbuilding/

"[...] cannibalism as a critique of unchecked consumption of environmental resources and the products made with them. Images of marketing, branding, and shopping have survived the catastrophe and serve as markers of past consumption that have outlived its own heyday." (Dominy 146-147).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/cormmccaj.13.1.0143

More on Worldbuilding here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/?p=194

"[…] the road in the novel is very linear and stands out of the landscape as if stronger than the declining landscape, an echo of the declining society [...]." (Juge 20).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42909396

More on Worldbuilding here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldbuilding/

"For most road writers, the highway offers a chance for escape and represents the possibility inherent in the country itself. [...] In contrast, McCarthy corrupts the highway in The Road, both physically and in the imagination. No longer a place for safe travel and experience, the highway becomes instead a path through a destroyed land leading into an uncertain future." (Gipko).

https://responsejournal.net/issue/2017-06/article/road-cormac-mccarthy

More on Worldbuilding here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldbuilding/

"According to the Old Testament, God created Adam from “the dust of the ground”. Later, Abraham comments that he is “but dust and ashes”. This association raises the disturbing possibility that part of what the father and his son are breathing in is in fact human remains, reduced to the dust and ashes out of which humanity was created." (Pudney 295).

https://shorturl.at/Qihyk

More on Worldbuilding here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldbuilding/

"If they continue south, keeping near streams and rivers and traveling generally downstream, they would eventually reach the South Carolina coast." (Morgan 45).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42909380

More on Worldbuilding here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldbuilding/

"The story takes place in a very specific timespan wherein the structures of the past world still exist, even if only as remnants or specters, and therefore continue to influence how people think and act. These structures, which are environmental (changing weather, climate, and ecosystems), architectural (such as the roadways and city buildings), institutional (religion, science, law), and foundational (time and language), are still very much present in the main character’s mind in the sense that they continue to shape his thoughts and actions. However, they have lost their former power to order and sustain life on a grand scale." (Lodoen 87).

https://shorturl.at/Fd3vS

More on Worldbuilding here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldbuilding/

"It seems to me that the importance of the route is that McCarthy is fictionally returning once again to his own roots in Knoxville and the southeast, to some of the places where the author spent the earlier years of his life. I believe that it is no accident that these places are the ones that are described in the most detail. Observations such as these would seem to make other autobiographical interpretations of the text more plausible." (Morgan 46).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42909380

More on Worldbuilding here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldbuilding/

"The road […] helps the duo out of the Cave to the Sun through a "process of enlightenment [which] is portrayed as a journey from darkness into light" (Annas 253,) from a light they desperately seek from the Sun that will be necessary to guide them out of the Cave, and therefore out of the land of despair." (Juge 21).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42909396

More on Worldbuilding here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldbuilding/

"Color in the world — except for fire and blood — exists mainly in memory or dream." (Brooks).

www.nytimes.com/2021/10/21/books/review/review-the-road-by-cormac-mccarthy.html

More on Worldbuilding here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldbuilding/

A disease of the eye marked by increased pressure within the eyeball that can result in damage to the optic disc and gradual loss of vision.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/glaucoma

"[...] the darkness of the nights and the greyness of the days here are associated with deterioration of vision, blindness and the slow disappearance of the world from view." (Pudney 296).

https://shorturl.at/Qihyk

More on Worldbuilding here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldbuilding/

"The twentieth century American road narrative began as an idealistic enterprise that examined the possibility and hope in America. Yet as the century progressed, road narratives increasingly criticized problems in the country like rampant materialism and commercialization. [...] The Road [...] fits squarely within the framework of the American road narrative as cultural critique. In fact, the novel becomes perhaps the most damning condemnation of America that issues from a road narrative." (Gipko).

https://responsejournal.net/issue/2017-06/article/road-cormac-mccarthy

"Readers saw something in this book that struck them deeply: […] maybe what calls people back to its pages so frequently is a deeper truth: we know full well that we're on a road. And though our lives may feel ashen and corrupt, stuck in a swirling haze, we keep getting up. We keep hunting for firewood. We keep chasing the possibility of forgotten canned goods in the storehouse of someone else's life. We keep "carrying the fire." (Hibbs).

https://wm.wts.edu/read/a-reflection-on-mccarthys-the-road

More on Worldbuilding here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldbuilding/

"McCarthy's use of the define article "the" mythologizes the road and gives it its uniqueness, out of the countable and the ordinary, and symbolizes the journey undertaken by the father and the son." (Juge 20).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42909396

More on Worldbuilding here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldbuilding/

Argumentation aufgrund von Arbeiten zur Material Flow Analysis (MFA): Das Anthropozän ist ein Akkumulozän, weil sich die Extraktion und der internationale Handel mit Rohstoffen immer mehr beschleunigt haben. Die Ungleichheit hat dabei immer mehr zugenommen: Die reichen Länder importieren mehr Materialien denn je aus den ärmeren. Es gibt kaum Substitutionseffekte. Wenn ein Material wie Holz für einen bestimmten Zweck (z.B. Energieerzeugung) nicht mehr gebraucht wird, entstehen fast immer schnell neue Nutzungsformen, für die mehr von dem Material verwendet wird als vorher. Auch Kohle wurde kaum durch Öl substituiert: Durch das Internet nahm die Verbrennung von Kohle weiter zu.

Der Verbrauch und die Ansammlug an Rohstoffen steigern sich seit 2000 noch schneller als in der großen Beschleunigung nach 1950.

In der Einleitung sagt Fressoz sehr deutlich, dass sich der Audruck „Anthropozän“ auf eine geologische Bifurkation bezieht, ohne Möglichkeit der Rückkehr zum Holozän.

Today he [Julius Kaiser] is best known for his method of “systematic indexing,” which is considered...

via [4] Svenonius, E. (1978). Facet definition: A case study. International Classification, 5(3), 131-141.

2023 wurde mit 55,5 Milliarden Fass Öläquivalent so viel Öl und Gas gefördert wie nie zuvor. 578 Unternehmen arbeiten daran, durch zusätzliche Förderstätten weitere 240 Milliarden Fass zu produzieren, obwohl zur Einhaltung des 1,5 Grad-Ziels keine Förderkapazitäten mehr aufgebaut werden dürfen. Zu den Unternehmen mit den größten Expansionsplänen gehört die an der OMV beteiligte Adnoc. Die Zahlen sind - neben vielen weiteren z.B. zur LNG-Expansion - in der aktualisierten Global Oil & Gas Exit List (Gogel) der NGO Urgewald enthalten https://www.derstandard.at/story/3000000244513/weltweite-oel-und-gasfoerderung-erreichte-2023-ein-allzeithoch

Great video about listening to music "professionally"

It's about emotion & intent (context) over the theory, usually.

Levels of understanding genres: - 0) No understanding Like the song, never heard anything like it before, but no idea about anything. - 1) Basic Understanding Knowing a bit about the name of the genre and subgenres, but you can be wrong. - 2) Immersion Really dive into subgenres and flavors of the main genre... Also a bit of history about the genre. Research. - 3) Structure Breaking down the structure of the tracks in the genre. For example through DAW. Basically first-principles thinking.

To level 1: Song Analyzer tools (for example musicstax or AI). The author recommends everynoise.com too to gain a basic understanding of genres.

To level 2: Find similar songs and artists for your playlists with that genre. Perhaps playlists. Important to understand the origin of the genre.

2023 haben Böden und Landpflanzen fast kein CO2 absorbiert. Dieser Kollaps der Landsenken vor allem durch Dürren und Waldbrände wurde in diesem Ausmaß kaum vorausgesehen, und es ist nicht klar, ob auf ihn eine Regeneration folgt. Er stellt Klimamodelle ebenso in Frage wie die meisten nationalen Pläne zum Erreichen von CO2-Neutralität, weil sie auf natürlichen Senken an Land beruhen. Es gibt Anzeichen dafür, dass die steigenden Temperaturen inzwischen auch die CO2-Aufnahmefähigkeit der Meere schwächen. Überblicksartikel mit Links zu Studien https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/14/nature-carbon-sink-collapse-global-heating-models-emissions-targets-evidence-aoe

Noch nie ist die CO2-Konzentration in der Atmosphäre so stark gestiegen wie im vergangenen Jahr, nämlich um 3,37 parts per million (PPM). Die Konzentration liegt jetzt bei 422 PPM. Vor allem die sehr geringe CO2-Aufnahme durch Ozean- und Landsenken hat diese Steigerung verursacht https://taz.de/Hiobsbotschaft-fuers-Klima/!6040258/

When agent A can transmit the full state in one symbol the agents have coordinated on a completely separating equilibrium and Q has perfect information. Also RL algs will not have a reward signal to find a more refined equilibrium unless some reward shaping is done to incentivize agents to coordinate on agent's Q's state as well.

for - question - Study on 2024 Trump win on polycrisis - Cascade Institute - why is there such a small analysis on the environment and especially planetary tipping points whilst climate clock is ticking?

Eine neue Studie stellt fest, dass nach einem Überschreiten der 1,5°-Grenze eine Rückkehr zu niedrigeren Temperaturen nicht so realistisch ist, wie es vielfach, auch in den Sachstandsberichten des IPCC, angenommen wird. Außerdem würden die erhöhten Temperaturen viele Ökosysteme irreversibel verändern. Es müssten deshalb - im Gegensatz zur aktuellen Politik - alle Anstrengungen unternommen werden, um.einen Overshoot zu vermeiden. https://www.liberation.fr/environnement/climat-un-depassement-meme-temporaire-des-15c-serait-plus-risque-quimagine-20241010_UHQSL4EKERFVPNP5V6KNV3IGWI/?redirected=1

Tests performed: Haemostatic tests ristocetin-induced platelet aggregation plasma VWF antigen VWF risocetin cofactor VWF FVIII-binding capacity VWF multimers and FVIII activity DDAVP test Concentration timecourses

sequencing from genomic DNA performed and reported in 2011

cDNA analysis

Real-time-PCR analysis

long PCR

Ellman assay (quantifying sulfhydryls)

Dynamic light scattering measurements

circular dichroism

ADAMTS13 proteolysis assay

ADAMTS13-VWF binding assay

“Oil and gas is a connected network of processes, people, and infrastructure,” ... “We are working with a client now modeling saltwater disposal wells. If you turn a valve that decreases the flow in a pipeline, it has a downstream effect on the disposal well. Knowledge graphs built on Neo4j are the perfect abstraction layer to model relationships across this kind of complex network and were a much better fit for reView than triple stores.” [Jeff Dalgliesh], Chief Technology Officer at Data².

“Analysts need to be able to dissect exactly how the AI reached a particular conclusion or recommendation,” “Neo4j enables us to enforce robust information security by applying access controls at the subgraph level.” Chief Business Officer Eric Costantini.

for - planetary emergency - risk analysis

planetary emergency - risk analysis - risk = probability x impact - If impact is high, then even low probability x high impact means high risk - If AMOC or Greenland icesheet melts, the impact is so high that it is not even economically measurable

for - question - can cities save the planet? - a critical analysis

The temperature on the same object "Führungslager" seems to be different depending on the circular segment. This is probably due from the calibration which should not be that precise.

Dem Global Energy Monitor zufolge sollen in den kommenden Jahren 1,5 Billionen Dollar in LNG Terminals und Pipelines investiert werden. 20% dieser Summe sind für Europa geplant und hier wiederum ein großer Teil für Anlagen in Griechenland. Die USA lobbyieren in Mittel- und Südosteuropa intensiv, um ihr LNG dort zu verkaufen. Der subventionierte Aufbau von Gasinfrastruktur übersteigt den europäischen Bedarf bei weitem. Reportage in der New York Times zum Gasboom in Griechenland. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/31/climate/greece-europe-natural-gas-lng.html

from - Jake Broe - Russia Ukraine war analysis - https://hyp.is/6kSnPh5PEe-eKw9uZp-QOQ/docdrop.org/video/AYvyNr4ZMSs/

from - Times Radio analysis of Russian's unsustainable attrition rate - https://hyp.is/avvydB5QEe-aheM72r6J4Q/docdrop.org/video/A-9kLZ19OAE/

for - polycrisis - Russia Ukraine war - game analysis

summary - A simplified but interesting economic game analysis of the trajectory of the Russia-Ukraine war. - Drones have become a critical technology in this war and especially their mobile and cost advantage over much heavier, more expensive and slow-moving Russian equipment. - Drones conserve Ukrainian soldiers and minimize risk substantially. The 3 million drones being manufactured this year will likely accelerate the destruction of the Russian economy, bringing the war closer to ending. - Russia is critically dependent on its oil and gas industry and with the major destruction of its refineries, it will no longer be able to finance the war.

for - geopolitics - Russia Ukraine War - Russia's unsustainable attrition rate

to - economic game analysis of Russia Ukraine War - https://hyp.is/avvydB5QEe-aheM72r6J4Q/docdrop.org/video/A-9kLZ19OAE/

for - Russia Ukraine war - Russia's unsustainable attrition rate - economic game analysis

reference - economic game analysis video of unsustainable Russian war attrition rate - https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2FA-9kLZ19OAE%2F&group=world

for - geopolitics - Russia Ukraine war - polycrisis - russia war - metacrisis - russia war - Jake Broe - Russia Ukraine war analysis

summary - An intelligent analysis of the complexity of the Russia- Ukraine war. - Key points: - Russia's successful misinformation campaign has - created the MAGA disinformed political party and has - delayed the US Aid package - enabled the rapid rise of extreme right wing politics

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jul/16/big-oil-climate-pledges-extreme-heat-fossil-fuel

Eine neue Studie beschäftigt sich mit der zunehmenden Frequenz der Aufeinanderfolge extremer Trockenheit und extremer Niederschläge in Pakistan und in vielen afrikanischen Ländern. Ähnliche Phänomene lassen sich in Norditalien feststellen. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/14/extreme-drought-in-northern-italy-mirrors-climate-in-ethiopia

Studie: https://washmatters.wateraid.org/sites/g/files/jkxoof256/files/2022-10/WaterAid%20Africa%20Drought%20work%20Methods%20and%20Full%20Results_CONFIDENTIAL_26_10_22_final%20%281%29.pdf

Die Abhängigkeit Europas von russischem Pipelinegas ist in zwei Jahren von 40% auf 10% gesunken. Die Importe von LNG haben um 40% zugenommen, wobei auch da ein erheblicher Anteil aus Russland stammt. Die USA sind der weltgrößte LNG-Exporteur. Mit großer Wahrscheinlichkeit werden bei LNG Überkapazitäten aufgebaut. In Österreich ist die Abhängigkeit von russischem Gas noch immer hoch, weil rein betriebswirtschaftlich entscheiden wird. Die OMV war 2023 verpflichtet, Gas für gut 60 TWh aus Russland zu beziehen und jedenfalls zu bezahlen. https://www.derstandard.at/story/3000000206989/warum-der-abschied-von-russischem-gas-noch-immer-so-schwer-faellt

How to use demensional analysis and what it tis

how to use demensional analysis

Die fünf größten westlichen Ölgesellschaften haben seit der Invasion der gesamten Ukraine vor zwei Jahren insgesamt 281 Milliarden Dollar Gewinn gemacht. Sie zahlen damit Rekord-Dividenden an ihre Investoren und investieren gleichzeitig enorme Summen in die weitere fossile Expansion. Shell fährt sein Programm zur Entwicklung erneuerbarer Energien zurück und hat die Selbstverpflichtung aufgegeben, die Ölproduktion jährlich zu reduzieren.https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/feb/19/worlds-largest-oil-companies-have-made-281bn-profit-since-invasion-of-ukraine

Langes Interview mit Hans Joachim Schellnhuber im Standard, under anderem zu Kipppunkten und der Möglichkeit, dass wir uns schon auf dem Weg in ein „neues Klimaregime“ befinden. Schellnhuber geht davon aus, dass auch das 2°-Ziel überschritten werden wird. Der „Königsweg“, um der Atmosphäre danach wieder CO₂ zu entziehen, sei der weltweite Ersatz von Zement durch Holz beim Bauen, den er als Direktor des IIASA vor allem erforschen wolle. Die Wahrscheinlichkeit dafür, dass „noch alles gutgehen" werde, sei gering. https://www.derstandard.at/story/3000000204635/klimaforscher-schellnhuber-werden-auch-ueber-das-zwei-grad-ziel-hinausschiessen

https://docdrop.org/pdf/The-art-of-post-tonal-analysis-spa6w.pdf/

The art of ost-tonal analysis Straus 2022

remove overlapping records and keep only the initial records

Der Standard informiert über zwei Studien, die unter anderem den Zusammenhang von Stadtentwicklung und globaler Erhitzung betreffen. Vor allem in den USA wird für die Mehrzahl der großen Städte eine Schrumpfung vorausgesagt, verstärkt durch die Folgen der Erhitzung. Die Studie verwendet ist Szenarien des IPCC. Unter anderem ergibt sich daraus die Forderung, die Stadtplanung nicht mehr vor allem an der Vorstellung von wachsenden Städten auszurichten. https://www.derstandard.de/story/3000000203501/tausende-us-staedte-koennten-bis-2100-zu-geisterorten-werden

Die großen Firmen der Fossilindustrie haben 2023 Selbstverpflichtungen zur Dekarbonisierung zurückgenommen. Im wärmsten Jahr der aufgezeichneten Geschichte haben sie an der Perfektionierung ihrer fossilen Geschäftsmodelle und an an einer weiteren Steigerung der Förderung von Öl und Gas gearbeitet. Überblicksartikel im Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/03/2023-hottest-year-on-record-fossil-fuel-climate-crisis

benesch auf seinem "es ist kompliziert" trip...<br /> wir haben also eine "controlled opposition" (AFD) (no surprise)<br /> und ein "controlled regime" (SPD/FDP/Grüne/CDU/Linke/...) (no surprise)<br /> also deutschland ist nur eine kolonie (ein vasall) von irgendwem (no surprise)

whatabout die aggressive NATO ost-erweiterung?<br /> sind da auch "die russen" schuld?<br /> oder ist das auch "nur ein talking point" von irgendwem?

eine illusion ist ja dass "der steuerzahler" irgendwas entscheiden darf.<br /> das sieht so aus, als wäre die regierung "von unten" finanziert<br /> (aktuell: bauernproteste gegen dieselsteuer und KFZ-steuer auf landmaschinen)<br /> aber es gibt trotzdem immer einfluss "von oben"<br /> also von banken (verniedlicht als "die windmühlen von zion")<br /> die der regierung kredite geben (solange die regierung brav ist)<br /> von geld das die bank aus dem nichts schöpft, ohne gegenwert, also "falschgeld"

der film "leave the world behind (2023)" will uns erzählen: "no one is in control."<br /> ich teile eher die ansicht von catherine austin fitts:<br /> es gibt einen "mister global" (also eine "weltregierung") (praktisch die UN)<br /> die schon längst alle nationalstaaten unter kontrolle hat<br /> und nur für die öffentlichkeit spielt man das theaterstück "nation gegen nation"<br /> so wie man innerhalb der nationalstaaten das theaterstück "gewaltenteilung" spielt<br /> aber unterm strich ist es alles die gleiche mafia<br /> aber das versteht man auch erst dann.<br /> wenn man sich mal anlegt mit bullen, staatsanwälten, richtern, gutachtern, jugendamt, ...<br /> solange man diese "autoritäten" nicht provoziert, sieht es aus wie "heile welt"

benesch hat auch diesen "wissen ist macht" vibe, aber das stimmt einfach nicht,<br /> und ist höchstens eine ablenkung, wenn man selber keine lösung hat...<br /> yuri bezmenov würde sagen: "only when the military boot crushes his balls,<br /> then he will understand... but not before, that is the tragedy of demoralization."

ich darf meine fresse aufreissen, weil ich hab auch nen lösungsvorschlag:<br /> pallas. wer sind meine freunde. gruppenaufbau nach persönlichkeitstyp.<br /> github com milahu alchi<br /> der staatsanwalt sagt, mein buch ist "volksverhetzung"... die drohungen werden lauter

das studieren von "geopolitik" scheitert einfach daran,<br /> dass diese probleme so groß sind, und so weit weg sind, dass man gefangen ist in passivität.<br /> deswegen mein "bottom up" ansatz: gruppenaufbau nach persönlichkeitstyp.<br /> und wenn der funktioniert, dann kommt die revolution von selber...

• for: critique - without analysis, kariotic flow - emptiness, kariotic flow - entanglement

• critique: without analysis

  • really? Or has the analysis just gone to a deeper, subconscious level?
  • everything a person has learned in life creates a complex network of ideas that is like a giant, invisible toolbox ready to be drawn upon when the environmental context cues trigger a response from the toolbox
  • this would be impossible if years of past analysis and abstraction was not already done
  • any intelligent response to an event that emerge in our environment is not arbitrary, but draws upon this complex, learned past

This piques my interest, especially (b).

口譯訊息的遺漏：刻意（運用口譯策略），還是無心（因爲無力）？

源語訊息的權重：每個meaning unit肯定有不同權重，而且權重的認定很主觀。

整個語篇論述的語意連貫、邏輯銜接、承轉(cohesion)，也是一大挑戰，如何判定？銜接詞是否僅是一個語義單位，給予某一權重，還是自成一格，必須另外設計評量方式？

• for: social tipping point - tools, cascade institute, Boolean Causal Loop Analysis, BCLA, Cross-impact balance, CIB, socio-cognitive mapping, cognitive-affective mapping, ideological state-space

原文：Thai and Burmese are alphasyllabaries, or abugidas.

這翻譯犯了一種技術錯誤，即「或」字的使用。乍看之下，「or」翻成「或」顯得無懈可擊，但細究起來，中文單一的「或」字，加上句子裡提到兩個語言，有可能誤導讀者如此對號入座：以爲泰語是第一類，緬甸語是第二類。就算沒被誤導，也無法立即讀懂這個「或」。

其實，這「or」的意思是「或稱」，表示alphasyllabary 和 abugida 是一種東西的兩種稱法，中文可以翻成「，或稱」、「，又稱」、「，也叫做」，無論怎麼翻，都勝過一個單獨的、令人混淆的「或」字。注意，這種意思的 or，前面必定有一個逗號。

看到書名，很吸睛。從網路上找到對應的原文，讀了一下，覺得挺拗口，英文句子顯得冗長，不是很好讀，但不刁鑽。

幾小段試讀的翻譯看下來，這個譯本很忠於原文，亦步亦趨採取相對直譯的策略來行文。但以此句而言，遺漏了一些重要的表達程度和強調的字眼：nothing short of、once and for all，這些詞並非空虛無意義，作者的用心處，如果能譯出來，讀者更能體會何以這道難題必須儘快破解。

原文（強調部分是我加的）：This puzzle would have to be solved quickly, though, for it constituted nothing short of a civilizational trial by which to judge once and for all whether Chinese script was compatible with Modernity with a capital M.

which所表的「運動」，意思在張的譯文中並未如所稱丟失，她明白寫出「那些運動」如何如何，只是如前述，「有助於」是多餘意思。

張後段並沒有搞錯，宋也沒有漏譯，只是各自的表達不同於毫末版。不過，我還是最欣賞毫末版，最符合原文的意思。

宋的「流變」在譯movements，「與聞其一」在譯take part in any one of，只是文字太高調、賣弄，裝高雅。張的「有助於」雖然不好，但沒有到搞錯的程度。

Der Critical Raw Materials Actt wird von Industrie-Lobbies benutzt, um Einschränkungen beim Zugang zu Rohmaterialien abzubauen, und zwar auch dann, wenn es nicht um die Energieversorgung geht. IT-, Rüstungs- und Raumfahrtindustrie versuchen von der Krisensituation bei den neuen Energien zu profitieren. Die Libéation berichtet über einen neuen Report von Lobbying-Warchdogs. Die Liste der kritischen Rohmaterialien wurde bereits von 15 auf 34 Stoffe erweitert. https://www.liberation.fr/international/europe/ue-le-critical-raw-materials-act-un-open-bar-pour-lindustrie-miniere-20231112_HZUR6376QJCZVBM5IGIUR6V2QE/

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overlap (ha!) with signals theory?

It's possible that the process of note taking and excerpting may impose levels of analysis and synthesis on their users such that when writing and synthesizing their works that they more subtly expect their readers to do the same thing when their audiences may require more handholding and explanation.

Here, both the authors' experiences and that of the cultures in which they're writing will determine the relationship.

There's lots of analogies between thinking and digesting (rumination, consumption, etc), in reading and understanding contexts.

Source: https://hypothes.is/a/hhCGsljeEe2QlccJUQ55fA

Market analysis of library card catalogs in 2023.

As card catalogs lost their functionality in libraries and were de-acquisitioned there was a wave of nostalgia which caused people to purchase them, often in auctions, at higher than expected prices. Once they had them, most of these purchasers realized that they didn't have functional uses in their homes for them (beyond wine or liquor bottle storage, small crafts, or use as a zettelkasten, which seem to be the only reasonable upcycling use cases I've seen and the last seems to be very rare and niche). They sit and take up space for very little value in return beyond some esthetic beauty and nostalgia. As a result many soured on their ownership. Most owners naturally want to recoup their original purchase price thinking that relative rarity will save them.

Combined with this there was a resurgence in mid-century design esthetic which had some furniture restorers and designers buying and doing full (and very pretty) expensive restorations of older 20s - 40s versions which sold at auctions for $4,500 and up. Given the rarity of some of these older, fine furniture versions along with the work in restoration and the limited market only those who had a tinge of nostalgia and money to burn made purchases which resulted in a limited number of actual sales.

These two factors mean that almost all of the listings for library card catalogs are heavily overvalued on eBay, Facebook Marketplace, Craig's List, Etsy, etc. The fine furniture restorations have set an artificially high price point which some feel theirs must match as well. The difference in quality however is stark. Because of their size and lack of functionality, there is a relative glut of them on the market which all bear inflated prices. Those who originally spent inordinate amounts for them, feel they will still have that same value to others, so they list them online for inflated prices.

I've been closely watching the online "market" for them for over a year and see the same several dozen or more listed across the country usually in the range of about $30-$60 per drawer. Many are listed as local pick up only, which further hampers the overall market. This also brings up the issue of shipping a 60 drawer card catalog which can easily run in the $800-$1,500+ range which usually requires additional shipping logistics involved with freight. Most catalogs are already overpriced, but adding an additional $1000 tax on top is a bridge too far for all but the highest end of the market. Some platforms like Etsy and eBay which take cuts of the final sale also add to the cost of the sale.

In the year and a half or more that I've been watching, I've only seen a handful of actual sales, all of which were local, and many of which were in the Los Angeles area. All of these sales have been for listings which eventually were reduced down to the $15 per drawer range. One local sale was in Wisconsin was for $10 per drawer (a 30 drawer file) and another in Los Angeles was for $12.50 per drawer (on a 20 drawer file).

A note on condition

Outside of a small handful of fine furniture listings in the $4,000+ range, most ex-Library card catalogs are generally very well worn and not in great condition which makes them less valuable as decoration pieces. In fact, many are often missing their original card catalog rods, have dents, dings, or other cosmetic issues. Some are missing drawers or have replacement drawers which don't match. Some may be slightly mismatched having been purchased in different eras as modular pieces and put together. Frequently they have been modified from their original states to include inserts or other material to fill in the holes which where almost standard in the bottoms of the drawers.

Advice

If you're in the market, know that it is tremendously inflated, a fact which most sellers are aware of as they've got them listed, some for many years, not resulting in actual sales. If you really want one and find it in a reasonable condition, I highly recommend making an offer for it at about $10 per drawer and potentially go up to $15. Anything higher than that is overpaying based on actual recent market conditions. If you have the money to burn, feel free, but keep in mind that like many others in the past, once the initial nostalgia has passed, you've probably got a large piece of relatively non-functional furniture in your home.

It's not common, but some government auction sites will list card catalogs for auction from time to time. Because they actively want to sell them these can be purchased in the $2-10 per drawer range or less. Often they tend toward the larger 60+ drawer range, aren't in good condition, or need to be picked up and shipped to your final destination, usually within a few days of purchase as the original owners don't or explicitly won't handle shipping. These are likely to need some restoration work to be decorative pieces in many homes.

If you want something brand new, you can check out Brodart, which is the only remaining card catalog manufacturer/sales firm I'm aware of in the United States. Their systems are modular, so you can pick and choose what you'd like to have. The only caveat is that they start at $1,700 for their smallest 9 drawer model and can go up to $11,648 (plus shipping) for a full 60 drawer model. The other potential drawback, for some, is that they are made of a mixture of wood, metal and plastic versus the all wood and metal fittings of older vintage models.

If you're in the market primarily for nostalgic reasons, then you might also consider looking at some of the older desktop wooden card catalogs which are often much less expensive, take up far less space, and can be wonderfully decorative. Some of the smaller two to six drawer desktop models have the benefit of potentially serving as recipe boxes or paper rolodexes, zettelkasten, or simply small office storage. Here again, the online markets are likely to be heavily overpriced with 2 drawer models being continually listed at $150 and 4 drawer models in the $250-400 range. These sellers know that these prices don't result in actual sales as they've been sitting on them for long periods of time (presumably hoping to get lucky). Here I'd recommend you make offers in the $20-30 per drawer range to see what you can find. Another benefit is that these smaller models are far cheaper to ship across the country. For additional advice on these, see: The Ultimate Guide to Zettelkasten Index Card Storage.

Der Guardian hat Fachleute zu Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) befragt. Die britische Regierung legitimiert neue Öl- und Gasbohrlizenzen mit gleichzeitigen CCS-Projekten. Einige Experten sind nach ersten Erfahrungen sehr skeptisch, was die grundsätzliche Realisierbarkeit von CCS an vielen Stellen der Erde angeht. CCS werde vor allem zur Dekarbonisierung von Industrien gebraucht werden, die bisher nicht CO₂-frei betrieben werden können, es sei aber keine Rechtfertigung für neue fossile Entwicklungsprojekte. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/01/is-carbon-capture-and-storage-really-a-silver-bullet-for-the-climate-crisis

• for: extreme weather, realtime extreme weather analysis, World weather attribution
• description
  • the World Weather Attribution organization is a group of research institutes that provides robust scientific answers to the question:
    • is climate change to blame?
  • when an extreme weather event has occurred
  • This is usually available days to weeks after the event and informs discussions about climate change while the impacts of the events are still fresh in the minds of the public and policymakers.

• example
  • survivorship bias
    • Abraham Wald was a statistican who was tasked by the Allied war effort with understanding how to make the Allied war planes function better.
    • And he was presented with a series of airplanes that had bullet holes throughout them as they had gone from bombing runs over Nazi Germany.
    • And he looked at them, and he saw that there were
      • holes in the wings,
      • holes in the tail,
      • holes in the nose of the plane.
    • And the general said to him, you know, "Based on your statistical expertise, where should we put extra armor?
    • Where should we reinforce the plane?"
    • And most of the people thought they should put them where the bullet holes were.
    • Abraham Wald took one look at this, and he said, "If you put armor over the places where the holes are,
      • you're going to make the planes get shot down more."
    • Because the reality was the places that didn't have bullet holes were the most crucial.
    • The places that had been shot in
      • the fuselage,
      • the middle of the plane where the engine was,
    • those were in Germany, they didn't survive,
      • they were wrecks.
    • So they never made it back to be analyzed.
    • So survivorship bias is a bias where we look at the wrong kinds of data because we only look at what survived.

The word "We" is central to the structure and content of this poem. Kostenko's repeated emphasis on the word "We" prevents the reader from separating herself from the poem's engagement with nuclear disaster and the legacy of Chernobyl. It is helpful to read the usage of this word in conversation with Andrei Voznesensky's work.

By writing about "atomic hostages to progress," Kostenko defines scientific progress not as a gateway to understanding, but as a barrier to comprehension and representation of the world around us.

The narrative of this poem is repeatedly interrupted by these "telegraphic" sections, which mimic the process of sharing information about Chernobyl with the public, as you can see in the "Gorbachev speaks" contextual note. This technique effectively simulates the disjointed and often contradictory dissemination of information about the Chernobyl disaster, both at the time of the accident and in our contemporary context, in the form of the inconclusive studies of Chernobyl's long-term effects and ongoing contests over its memory.

In this verse, Chernobyl's radioactive cloud symbolizes a disaster that "escaped" the Soviet Union and reached Europe, thereby portraying Europe as the victim of Chernobyl accident and the Soviet Union as the perpetrator. Consider this discussion of the potential problems of enforcing this strict conceptual divide between European innocence and Soviet responsibility.

While this quantitative comparison between Hiroshima and Chernobyl helps to communicate the gravity of the Chernobyl disaster, many scholars have questioned the extent to which it is possible and productive to compare catastrophes. For example, Peter Gray and Kendrick Oliver write that "The resistance of the Holocaust to narration and other practices of historical sense-making provoked a broader intellectual deconstruction of the established modes by which meaning could be imposed on human affairs." [1] That is to say, catastrophes cannot be described in relation to established temporal, linguistic, or historical frameworks. Thus, Chernobyl requires us to question whether it is possible to fully represent, interpret, and respond to disaster through narrative and analysis.

[1] Gray, Peter and Kendrick Oliver. Introduction. The Memory of Catastrophe. Manchester University Press, 2004.

Again, Hernán Urbina Joiro's poem chronicles the Chernobyl catastrophe as a battle for control that highlighted and worsened Cold War tensions between the "East" and "West." Consider the following annotations about this reading of Chernobyl and its role in the ongoing discourse about blame and responsibility:

They did not share it

The radioactive cloud

See this link for information about the usage of the words "humanity" and "human" in this poem.

Who and what can be held accountable for Chernobyl? From the beginning of this poem, Andrei Voznesensky engages with the question of blame and forgiveness in the aftermath of catastrophe. The speaker self-identifies as a "human," who is asking for forgiveness from "humanity" as a whole. In this way, Voznesensky structurally separates the "human" who accepts blame for Chernobyl from the "humanity" that was affected by the disaster.

However, reading this introduction in conversation with the rest of the poem complicates the relationship between personal responsibility, forgiveness, and collective guilt that develops throughout this poem. Consider the following annotations in conversation with this one:

Humanity versus science

Who is to blame?

Throughout this poem, the refrain "because he is a human" emphasizes that the "heroes" who responded to Chernobyl acted in accordance with their basic humanity. However, at the beginning of the poem, the speaker identifies himself as a 'human' and asks for forgiveness for the Chernobyl catastrophe. As such, the language that the speaker uses to assign blame to himself (as a "human") is paradoxically the same as the language he uses to draw attention to the sacrifices of others.

See this annotationfor a definition of the scientific term "parsec."

This verse expresses the speaker's skepticism regarding the capacity of a purely scientific framework to represent "life" and provide a viable framework for understanding reality. That is to say, science cannot adequately explain the Chernobyl catastrophe and its long-term implications for humanity. It is productive to read this line alongside Lina Kostenko's poem, which represents scientific progress as a trap that alienates humanity from language, environment, and faith alike.

Read about Theophanes the Greek and the tradition of icon painting in Russia for context.

Here, Voznesensky links the "heroic human" of Chernobyl to the memory of a famous icon painter and the practice of viewing and venerating Russian Orthodox iconography. Engaging with the gaze of the icon is recognized as an essential aspect of the ability of the faithful to communicate with the divine. In this way, Voznesensky relates the act of bearing witness to Chernobyl with the holy ritual of icon veneration and meditation.

The "poisoned fruit / of knowledge" can be interpreted as a reference to Adam and Eve's decision to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden, which is a key foundation of Judeo-Christian theology. This reference to original sin builds upon the religious symbolism in the poem, by implying that the people and systems responsible for Chernobyl repeated this irresolvable transgression.

Other examples of religious symbolism in the poem:

"Forgive me, a human"

"God is in . . ."

"Theophanes the Greek"

To learn about a potential link between Chernobyl and an apocalyptic moment referenced in the Book of Revelation, visit this annotation.

In this section, the speaker represents Chernobyl not as responsible for a profound spiritual rupture, but instead as the catalyst for a renewed relationship between humanity and God. He emphasizes the presence of the divine in the actions of the first responders to Chernobyl while simultaneously reiterating that the "heroes" of Chernobyl "simply acted like a human."

This spiritual/religious symbolism of this poem is also reflected in its structure, which from the beginning takes the form of an extended plea for forgiveness, and in the references to iconography.

Unlike Voznesensky and Kostenko's poems, which utilize the word "we" to encourage the reader to reflect on their own complicity in the conditions that allowed for Chernobyl and its subsequent memorialization, Hernán Urbina Joiro represents the Soviet Union's "Iron Curtain" as the clear antagonist of the "West." On the one hand, Joiro's poem clearly demonstrates how the environmental and political effects of Chernobyl transgressed international boundaries. On the other hand, the dichotomy between "East" and "West" that structures the poem does not facilitate reflection on the question of whether it is possible and/or necessary for people within and outside of the former Soviet Union to reflect on their responsibility for their own responses to Chernobyl and nuclear power.

This verse marks one of the first instances in the poem when the speaker distances himself from Chernobyl and interrogates who else can be held responsible for what happened. The distinction between "science" and "humanity" here is especially significant, because it presents two ways of interpreting and responding to Chernobyl. Chernobyl can be understood as an isolated scientific tragedy unique to the Soviet political and scientific contexts, or, as Kate Brown puts it, as an "acceleration on a timeline of exposures that sped up in the second half of the twentieth century . . . connected to many other events," such as war, environmental degradation, and political corruption. [1]

Read this annotation in conversation with these other important moments throughout the poem that deal with guilt and accountability:

"Forgive me, / a human, / Humanity"

Who is to blame?

Sources:

[1] Brown, Kate. Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future. W. W. Norton and Company, 2019.

By representing Doctor Gale as the man "who flew into Russia," Voznesensky depicts the international medical response to Chernobyl as equally as heroic as the sacrificial contributions of the Ukrainian and Soviet first responders. However, as the contextual note about Dr. Gale mentions, Soviet radiation specialists like Dr. Angelina Guskova questioned the legitimacy and ethicality of the bone marrow transplant procedures he conducted. That being said, both Soviet and American newspapers presented Dr. Gale as being motivated purely by humanitarian concern and goodwill, which drew attention away from the important work and needs of doctors in the Soviet Union.

As the biographical note about Andrei Voznesensky states, he spent a lot of time in the United States. Due to his travels, befriended a great number of politicians, artists, and writers abroad, which may help to explain the prominence of Dr. Gale as a representative of the American response to Chernobyl in this poem.

Compare the beginning of this part of the poem with the beginning of the first part of the poem, in which the speaker asks humanity to forgive him personally for the consequences of the Chernobyl disaster. In contrast to the plea for individual forgiveness that we saw previously, here the question of responsibility for Chernobyl is left unresolved. The use of the word "We" implicates the reader in a continuous and collective process of reevaluation and renegotiation of blame. The centrality of the word "we" in Lina Kostenko's poem achieves a similar effect.

Kostenko represents Chernobyl not only as an environmental catastrophe, but also as the cause of total alienation from spirituality and heaven. It is possible to read this poem as engaging with one well-known reading of Chernobyl, which interprets the disaster as an inevitable apocalyptic moment predicted in the Book of Revelation:

Then the third angel sounded: And a great star fell from heaven, burning like a torch, and it fell on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water. The name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters became wormwood, and many men died from the water, because it was made bitter. [1]

In Ukrainian, the world "Chernobyl" is derived from two separate roots that combine to mean "black plant." The word "Chernobyl" refers to a specific species of Artemisia, which is a type of weed. [2] In English, Artemisia is translated as "wormwood," which has led many people to link the Chernobyl catastrophe to the "wormwood" mentioned in the Book of Revelation. However, as Michael Palij and William Fletcher note, "The coincidence is not quite so striking in the Ukrainian translation of the Bible, for there the name of the star is Polyn, the genus wormwood, rather than chornobyl', a species of wormwood." [2] Although the etymological relationship between Chernobyl and the Bible does not align perfectly, the religious reading of Chernobyl continues to resonate.

Sources:

[1] The Bible. King James Version. Christian Art Publishers, 2012.

[2] Palij, Michael & William C. Fletcher. "Chornobyl: An Etymology." Ukrainian Quarterly, vol. 42 Spring-Summer 1986, p. 22-24.

Image Credit:

"Redstem Wormwood" by Moxxie is licensed by CC BY-SA 3.0. The image has not been modified in any way and falls under fair use.

By ending her poem with the "alphabet of death," Kostenko establishes that society's fixation on scientific progress at the expense of human lives has divested language of its ability to articulate the conditions of the present and imagine a future. Any attempts at linguistic representation must culminate in the "death" symbolized by the nuclear power station. As such, language itself collapses in the face of Chernobyl.

As Jean-Luc Nancy writes in After Fukushima: The Equivalence of Catastrophes, "We live no longer either in tragic meaning nor in what, with Christianity, was supposed to transport and elevate tragedy to divine salvation . . . We are being exposed to a catastrophe of meaning." [1] In other words, Chernobyl is disastrous not because of what it represents, but because it defies representation of any kind.

[1] Nancy, Jean-Luc. After Fukushima: The Equivalence of Catastrophes, translated by Charlotte Mandell. Fordham University Press, 2015.

To achieve goals, raise the floor, FOCUS on removing bottlenecks. Also create constraints by Schwerpunkt (primary objective), contrary to common wisdom, constraint actually gives freedom, it prevents analysis paralysis.