1. I spent a good portion of this restful day finishing the book Why Fish Don't Exist by Lulu Miller on audible. The book troubled, frightened, fascinated, stimulated, enchanted, informed, and delighted me. On the face of it, Lulu Miller's book is an exploration of the life of biologist, taxonomist, and founding president of Stanford University, David Starr Jordan. Jordan's life was a combination of high achievement and a disturbing conviction that the world and its inhabitants comprise a hierarchy of greater and lesser beings, a conviction that inspired his views on eugenics, inspired him to support weeding out "unfit" bloodlines by sterilizing unfit women.
But, really, as Lulu Miller explores, especially in the world of biology, what Wallace Stevens calls, "blessed rage for order", what she's really primarily focused on is the chaos of creation -- the very teeming, ever changing, bountiful disorder and variety and diversity of the natural world that Charles Darwin wrote so compellingly about. Many -- how about most? -- of us assume that there is an order built in to creation. I know that I've been exposed countless times to the idea that God created an order in the world. Lulu Miller explores order, not as implicitly hard wired into the world, but as a human creation. We humans are the categorizers, the namers, the system makers, the taxonomists. We impose order onto the world and, of course, come to see these categories, systems, arrangements, and so on as truth itself, as real.
Lulu Miller explores how these categories and hierarchies we humans create and give our assent to keep us from seeing things as they really are. It's the dandelion effect. If we categorize the dandelion as a weed to be destroyed, we miss the other truths about the dandelion: they have medicinal properties; they can be woven together into crowns; they can be play things for children and adults; they can be transformed into a liqueur (known a dandelion wine). The dandelion is a chaos of possibilities. Our ability to see the wonder implicit in dandelions and the countless other plants, animals, and minerals of nature is stymied largely by our "blessed rage for order", our unending drive to categorize.
If any of this sounds interesting to you, I'd like you to read Lulu Miller's book and find out why fish don't exist -- why the category we assign to underwater, scaly creatures with gills is a bogus one. I can sort of sum it up for you, but reading this book is a lot more fun. As it turns out, as evolutionists study different fish more closely, many of these underwater creatures, under their skin, have more in common with other animals than they do each other. For example, internally, the lungfish has more in common with a cow than with a salmon, making it inaccurate, bogus even, to refer to both the lungfish and a salmon as both being "fish". The millennia long evolution of species has not been orderly. It's been a glorious, astounding, miraculous mess -- and I very much enjoyed plunging into it with Lulu Miller as my guide.
2. As I finished reading Why Fish Don't Exist today, I found myself wishing this book had been available back when Rita Hennessy and I taught composition and philosophy together at Lane Community College. This book could have enhanced our study of ethics (how do eugenicists justify sterilizing women?), epistemology (how do we arrive at knowledge and what is knowledge?), and metaphysics (what is the nature of reality?). But, alas, I am left with congregating groups of imaginary students in my head and enjoying imaginary discussions with them and reading their imaginary papers. It's not so bad.
3. We are currently staying at Debbie's brother's Brian's lake place just a block from the shore of Lake Michigan. Today Brian told us goodbye, set off for another of his homes in the Chicago suburbs, but he stopped off to play some Mississippi Stud at a local casino here in Indiana. He won about 1200 dollars and texted Debbie that he wanted to take her and me out to dinner.
So, Brian returned and we headed east about a half an hour away to a brewery we have been to before, Greenbush. We were seated. I ordered a five oz pour of their Vienna lager and later another five oz pour of their porter. For dinner, I ordered gumbo, a mildly spicy broth stocked with shrimp, sausage, and chicken along with onion and red pepper, topped with a scoop of white rice.
Brian also insisted that we order food to go to eat on Tuesday. So, I decided to get a large order of mac and cheese topped with beef brisket.
Did we have fun? Well, I think this picture our server so kindly snapped tells you we enjoyed ourselves a lot!
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