Tag Archives: John Durham Peters

Like bread, or the sea.

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After I left my car at the mechanic’s shop for its routine service, I set off walking down the road to the bus stop. After only a few steps I stopped to admire plants along my way; I did that a few times. The California Buckeye startled me as it always does, looking like the dead of winter in early fall. The large conker peeking out redeemed the scene.

It was fun, walking for ten minutes through a sort of industrial park, where all the people arriving for work gave their energy to the atmosphere, and lots of pickup trucks lined the road, bare of sidewalks most of the way. The air was crisp but not harsh.

On a bench at the bus stop, I looked briefly across the frontage road at the seedy mobile home park whose sign was missing some letters and read “Taylo.” A mockingbird’s song came to me from somewhere, surprisingly not drowned out by the heavy traffic noise. And then my gaze rose, hungry, to the sky.

I recognized the remains of a jet stream (or chem trail?) as one element of that picture above, but there was so much else going on up there! I began to think about what Emerson said, that “The sky is the daily bread for the eyes.” I mused on how sometimes we are given all sorts of fancy bread, but at other times the sky is plain blue, or white, or gray….

After a short ride on the bus, I got off and started walking the rest of the way home, along a boulevard where I had plenty more of those big spaces to wonder at. I was struck by the realization that I was the only human on earth to whom each particular picture was given, because I was the only one at that GPS location, at that moment in the constantly changing arrangement of images.

If one lives in the big city, with skyscrapers hogging the sky, usually a little bit at least will peek through; I like to get my bearings occasionally by looking at whatever patches are available for viewing. Being in prison, though… now that would be hard. I guess they do often let at least some of the prisoners outside sometimes, but they might not feel safe and relaxed enough to feast on their daily bread in that setting.

Twice now I’ve started reading The Marvelous Clouds, and shared some quotes here. I reread some of Albert’s comments that I included in one post about the book ; he passed on some excerpts from an article about it, which is about media. One thing the author said was that “Clouds illustrate media ontology. [They] exist by disappearing.” 

I gave that book away a while back. It’s very thought-provoking, to be sure, but I think if I had continued reading it I would have just been page by page arguing with the author over various things. I don’t like that he uses clouds for anything. I’d rather receive the gift of clouds as bread for my eyes. This arrangement of clouds below looked like it was pretending to be mountains in the distance:

The author of that book, John Durham Peters, also said that clouds are the original white noise. If you want to follow that thought, read the article linked in that more recent post of mine. But I think it’s more profitable for the soul to go out and look at the sky, whether there are clouds in it or not. When there are no clouds, or they have merged into a less enthralling picture, watching them might be like staring out at the ocean. It’s always moving, but it can be boring at the same time. Sometimes we need that plain bread. Feasting all the time is not good.

While my thoughts were on the clouds, my legs carried me into neighborhoods closer to mine, but I took a less familiar route and saw this beautiful plant that I found out is called a Common Lionspaw. I got distracted from the sky and started thinking about where I could fit one of those in my garden.

My cloud show seemed to go to intermission for a few minutes, with the actors going off stage — but quickly it started up again, as the sun began to break through.

Then, I was home again. It was time to start the rest of my day, and figure out what to eat… but my eyes had already had a big breakfast.

Books are needy.

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“Books you have read share a deep ontological similarity with books you haven’t: both can be profoundly fuzzy. At times books you haven’t read shine more brightly than those you have, and often reading part of a book will shape your mind more decisively than reading all of it; there is no inherent epistemic superiority to having read a book or not having read it.”

-John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds

After my first and second postings of quotes from this book that I still haven’t read, I found this declaration from the author quite generous, even if he does use both ontological and epistemic in one paragraph. In 2016 and 2019, which seems ages ago now, several of my readers said that they had been prompted to order the book, or at least put it on their TBR list. Did any of you pursue it further?

The Artist’s Wife by Henry Lamb

I know very well by experience what he is talking about here, how impactful books can be just by their presence on my shelves. I read the intro to The Marvelous Clouds twice already, and it evidently did not shine brightly enough in my mind for me to remember anything of it, or to continue.

I found the quote above on Goodreads, where I do quite a bit of mining from time to time. Reading a few quotes from a book is certainly a very small part, but these bits can provide a lot to chew on. Here is another thought provoking passage from the book that I also got by cheating:

“Schopenhauer remarked that buying books would be better if you could also buy the time to read them. Books are different from natural objects in that they can overwhelm us in a way that nature’s abundance rarely does. There has always been too much to know; the universe is thoroughly baffling. When we walk into a bookstore, it is easy to feel oppressed by the amount of knowledge on tap. Why don’t we have the same feeling in a forest, at the beach, in a big city, or simply in breathing? There is more going on in our body every second than we will ever understand, and yet we rarely feel bothered by our inability to know it all. Books, however, are designed to make demands on our attention and time: they hail us in ways that nature rarely does. A thing is what Heidegger calls zunichtsgedrängt, relaxed and bothered about nothing. A plant or stone is as self-sufficient as the Aristotelian god or Heidegger’s slacker things, but books are needy. They cry out for readers as devils hunger for souls.”

It could be that somewhere else in the book Peters mentions the different kinds of knowledge. When you are walking in a forest you are getting to know the trees and the air in a non-intellectual way, and that makes all the difference. It would be a shame to know rocks and trees and clouds only by reading about them.

A man may as well expect to grow stronger by always eating as wiser by always reading. ~Jeremy Collier

I had intended to think and write more about all of this, but just now ditched that plan and am headed out to see the clouds with my own eyes. It might happen that while I am gazing up there, the contents of the cloud will empty on my bare head and give me an even more intimate knowledge of its wet self. I’d rather not get experiential knowledge of the rocks along the path by tripping on them, but you never know what might happen when you get your nose out of a book.

You have to understand vagueness.

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The work of the philosopher is a marshalling of remembrances for a specific purpose.
-Ludwig Wittgenstein

Last week someone I know used the phrase, “The marvelous clouds,” and I immediately remembered a book by that name that I bought a couple of years ago and wrote a very short post about, before it had even arrived in my mailbox. Recently I had moved that book from an upstairs shelf to a downstairs one, seemingly at random, so it was close at hand and I looked inside today. How surprising to see that back then I had read the introduction. I can tell because many passages are underlined 🙂 It is comfortingly full of references to the material world and other real things, which of course the title would lead you to believe, but the subtitle, about media theory, sounds… um… scarily theoretical. Here is my first post on the book:

“Ralph Waldo Emerson once declared that language is fossil poetry. Many words that we use carelessly have, embedded within their amber-like exterior, the remnants of long lost perceptions and intuitions. When received thoughtfully and with some delicacy, words have the capacity to allow us to travel back in time, to imagine how and what the world meant to our ancestors. But unlike the insects, or dinosaur DNA fixed in amber, the meanings within words are changing, evolving, as human perceptions change.”

-Ken Myers on Mars Hill Audio Journal, introducing his interview of John Durham Peters about his new book, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media.

I listened to this interview and have ordered the book, though I fear it will be above my head, like clouds. The author was not hard to understand when he was talking, and he spoke of so many things that I would like to “hear” him discuss further, after I get the book and can read the words on paper, and flip back and forth and underline a phrase here and there of his meaningful prose. How can I resist a book that contains all together in its title the words Marvelous, Philosophy, and Clouds?

(Originally “Words have skins like amber.”)

Albert was one of several commenters in 2016 who were inspired to put this book on their To-Read list, and he shared what he found in his research:

‘Wondering if I could benefit from reading The Marvelous Clouds, I looked for information about the author, and found a rather detailed interview in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

‘Here is John Durham Peters talking about why a book on media would use clouds as its chief metaphor: “Clouds illustrate media ontology. [They] exist by disappearing. They exist in time. . .  their dynamic materiality is suggestive for media under volatile digital conditions.” And,

‘“Clouds bear significance, but without any code to clarify what they mean. Their meanings are essentially vague. . . .  [They] are the original white noise.  . . . The ability to represent the indefinite is one of the great achievements of modern mathematics and media, and clouds were at the vanguard here too. If you want to understand how meaning works, you have to understand vagueness, and clouds are a chief example.”

‘At this point I almost gave up — his ideas were too cloudy for me — but I pressed on. Half way through, when the questioner brought up the possible negative effects of limitless storage and quick retrieval of data, a new idea was discussed as “something more insidious, a kind of existential de-orientation, in which presumptions of universal storage alter our relation to loss and death.”

‘Now I was interested.

‘It turns out to be a really good, comprehensive interview. By the end I could see better. My clouds were dispersed, somewhat. For a person whose book budget is limited, Brian Hanrahan’s interview is well worth reading. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-anthropoid-condition-an-interview-with-john-durham-peters/’

Speed forward to August of 2019, and I read the Intro again, gleaning the quote at top, and have continued into Chapter 1!! I thought some of you might be interested in the author’s introductory outline of the scope of the book, in this paragraph:

“In the first chapter I outline my intellectual debts and sketch the relevant landscape of media theory. In chapters 2 and 3, I examine sea and fire media, and in 4 and 5, the two main kinds of sky media. At first such realms as ocean, flame, and the heavens would seem to be unpromising realms for human creativity or technical handling, each being hostile to our works in its own way. But in spite of their resistance, or rather because of it, such elements are seedbeds of arts and crafts, many of them so basic that it took eco-crisis and the digital shakeup to make them obvious. Hostile environments breed art. Enmity is the mother of invention. In chapter 6 I explore the earthy media of body and writing, and chapter 7 tackles the would-be ethereal medium of Google, each medium also having its own productive meditations. Finally, I offer a few concluding meditations.”

Chapter 7 is titled “God and Google,” and the last chapter, “A Sabbath of Meaning.” My goodness, but I wonder how the meat of the chapters will satisfy my appetite that has been whetted by so many provocative phrases. But it does sound fun, especially from chapter 2 on, to make a philosophical journey through sea, fire, and sky, going on to explore “earthy” media… God will surely balance out whatever about Google might bore me in Chapter 7, and if I’m exhausted by the end, well, Peters has wisely put a sabbath right there in a helpful place.

A ramble like this doesn’t lend itself to a good ending, so I’ll close with one more quote from The Marvelous Clouds:

Einer Hilfe bedarf der Mensch immer.
(The human being always needs a help.)
-F.W.J. Schelling

But you don’t need to read the book to know that.

Words have skins like amber.

books, quotes, the language, ,

“Ralph Waldo Emerson once declared that language is fossil poetry. Many words that we use carelessly have, embedded within their amber-like exterior, the remnants of long lost perceptions and intuitions. When received thoughtfully and with some delicacy, words have the capacity to allow us to travel back in time, to imagine how and what the world meant to our ancestors. But unlike the insects, or dinosaur DNA fixed in amber, the meanings within words are changing, evolving, as human perceptions change.”

-Ken Myers on Mars Hill Audio Journal, introducing his interview of John Durham Peters about his new book, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media.

I listened to this interview and have ordered the book, though I fear it will be above my head, like clouds. The author was not hard to understand when he was talking, and he spoke of so many things that I would like to “hear” him discuss further, after I get the book and can read the words on paper, and flip back and forth and underline a phrase here and there of his meaningful prose. How can I resist a book that contains all together in its title the words Marvelous, Philosophy, and Clouds?