after the tempest of wrath has passed, the rule....

There is a new photo that can be found after sufficient website navigation that shows a destroyed facade on Marietta Street. The odd camera angle makes it appear that the entire building is itself a facade; the city as screen for potent invisible forces other than those of nature.

As someone wrote somewhere, there is nothing covered up that will not be uncovered, nor hidden that will not be exposed to light.

<http://alt.coxnewsweb.com/cnishared/tools/shared/mediahub/02/36/67/slide2_467362_storm>

and now that we have that little item out of the way....

We need a comprehensive general knowledge of what it is now possible for human beings to know and how those who are sufficiently specialized come to know it.

But merely the limiting motive of what interests us most gets in the way. By the time we have read the books or watched the films and videos we actually want most to read or view, then by the time some of us have finally gotten our heads round the current state of knowedge regarding the genome and regarding global interests in the border regions of Xinjiang, all the while keeping in mind the predictable irrationality that trips up American presidents as readily as it does average consumers, we realize that we no longer remember what role Planck's constant has played in physics, and certainly can no longer give a verbal explanation of that which we could never explicate mathematically.

We are back to how the mind can maintain memory of multiple topics without having the less often visited sites deteriorate from disuse. It is some of the most elementary information that vanishes because it hasn't been needed for decades. As is a commonplace piece of folk wisdom.

So given the need to learn a little about everything without forgetting the first layers of information, the need to keep everything in mind at once, I keep struggling with how to find popularizers who can be relied on in their own fields while not grossly misunderstanding everything else. (This is the more so since those who are good in one academic field so often seem to assume they must be good in any other subject of possible interest, and if they don't know anything about it, it must be unworthy of attention except by lightweights and nitwits.)

Worst of all from the perspective of finding a balance and a bridge among popularizers, even some popularizers who are off balance on just about everything they discuss will still express valid insights that have eluded everyone else. I do not claim Thomas Cahill is that bad, but I disagree with much that he writes; and yet I adore his incarnationist reading of "Deum de Deo, Lumen de Lumine / Gestant puellae viscera" as "God from God, Light from Light / now is born from the guts of a girl," and I intend to incite someone to record an appropriately corrected version of this verse of "O Come All Ye Faithful" in time for Christmas 2008. (I added "now" to the foregoing to improve the meter, in fact.)

By way of update, Parag Khanna's The Second World seems generally reliable in its breathless summarizations of global specifities, despite the necessity of a reliance on striking rhetorical shorthand that seems to come with popularization.

The need for middle positions and bridge strategies of terminology and rhetoric is brought home to me frequently in medical encounters, when specialists who realize they need not address me with fourth-grade wording quickly substitute observations and queries that grossly overestimate my prior knowledge of biochemistry. It shows up differently in the field in which I supposedly earn my salary, where the gulf between actual artistic practice and the theory used to contextualize it is often immense even before one ponders the problem of bringing popular audiences up to speed and helping them enter into the picture.

and just in time for Western Christianity's Holy Week and today's news headlines....

Emory University's annual Tibet Week begins tomorrow, March 17. Coincidentally, the Ismailis' North American tour of multinational Sufi musicians arrives the same day.

The Tibetan monks, though, will be around all week, assembling the annual sand mandala:

Sand Mandala, Opening Ceremony
Tuesday, March 18, 12:00 pm, Carlos Museum Reception Hall

Buddhist monks from the Drepung Loseling Monastery will construct a sand mandala depicting the Green Tara with millions of grains of beautifully colored sand. Green Tara is a female Buddha beloved in Tibet and renowned for her great compassion and ability to aid sentient beings. In one story of her origins, we learn that in a previous life the future Buddha Tara was told that she should pray to be reborn as a man. She responded that male and female have no ultimate reality, and she then vowed to remain in a female form in all her lives up to and including her final life as a Buddha. Another story relates that she was born from the tears of Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva of Compassion.

Viewing times:
Tuesday 12:00 noon - 5:00 pm
Wednesday through Friday 10:00 am - 5:00 pm
Saturday 10:00 am - noon (Closing ceremony begins at noon)