tidbitty [final] notes from transduction

• responsibility = response + ability
• WHAT IS GOING ON
• WHAT ARE YOU DOING
• listen concertedly, and people will talk. this might also make you cry.
• "we will each take turns sounding stupid. therefore, be kind."

[thəp]/dear first year ladison

what is the definition of art?
must it serve a purpose?
how do you define that purpose? (can art be an end in itself? can beauty? can pleasure?)
what about goodness?
what if the purpose is evil, but it's really beautiful, but it's really evil [masochistic beauty? thorny rose?]

There are (still) many things that make me feel like a nobody, a noob. It's hard to strike the perfect balance, and trying to tackle a problem by formulating the hypothesis with the word "perfect" in it probably doesn't help.

But hey, freshest source of conflict: art & utility.

I've been learning a lot about the value of [utility], as counter-posed against [art]. Yes, blah blah art is purposeful; sometimes art is all we can do to render meaning and beauty; are you saying you are a utilitarian blah blah STOP. I know it's a crude and contentious distinction, but simmer down, self, cause I'm just trying to figure things out, like most of the rest of the time(s).

So I've been learning, taking in, feeling, thinking about this art-utility thing, and mostly, it's illumination upon all the things I am clearly not illuminated about - which makes me feel hopeful that I'm at least facing the right direction. As a fourth year English major, having to read and write and say a lot of words in general, I'm realizing that a lot of my time these two semester is being taken up in the Defense of Myself/My Major/My Murky Vocational Future. And I get this. It doesn't even annoy me anymore.

Because I think I'm learning, taking in, feeling, thinking, that technical and hard-sciences knowledge is actually really appealing to me, sometimes embarrassingly so, as I flounder about in my non-knowledge and blind admiration of random Bio majors and pre-health people who seem to be doing things with their lives, but still realize that the world is utterly incomplete without its random beauty and seemingly coincidental creation of things and other Things That Seem to Have No Clear Purpose.

There is indeed a place and a time for every little thing, is gonna be allriiight.

Man. The more I learn, the less I seem to know.
So, eh-hem, dear postgrad Ladison, remember these things and try to blabber less foolishly.

unsexy but so attractive

There's nothing sexy or glamorous about menstrual hygiene.

But something so attractive about revolutionarily simple, simply revolutionary science & technology that make you appreciate things you always forget to appreciate, that change lives on unimaginable scales, that isn't complicated or pompous for the sake of being complicated or pompous.


Dear future husband,

I chose to be an English major, and in this final semester of my undergrad career, am sort of regretting the education I missed out on (though I know, I know... I'll probably do this for the rest of my life, about every other thing I didn't learn). So I'm hoping you're good at science-y and technology-y things, cause this is really attractive, this desire to better lives through uncomplicated innovation. It probably helps that I feel inept in this whole realm, and am extremely easy to impress.

So. You change the world with really smart, simple science, and I'll write you poems and edit your articles to communicate to more more more people who might be in need of your help.

Dreamteam!!

mmmmmmmmmhmmmmmmmmmm 

TRANSDUCTION

It Is Enough

by Anne Alexander Bingham

To know that the atoms

of my body

will remain

to think of them rising

through the roots of a great oak

to live in

leaves, branches, twigs

perhaps to feed the

crimson peony

the blue iris

the broccoli

or rest on water

freeze and thaw

with the seasons

some atoms might become a

bit of fluff on the wing

of a chickadee

to feel the breeze

know the support of air

and some might drift

up and up into space

star dust returning from

whence it came

it is enough to know that

as long as there is a universe

I am a part of it.