A HAG'S ATLAS

...what enabled the movement to survive in the Stalinist political environment, in addition to serious patronage and protection from enlightened and/or self-interested middle-level political figures, was its perceived harmless marginality. Doubtless Nikita Khrushchev's depiction of zapovednik naturalists as oddballs (chudaki) reflected the general views of regime leaders about these field biologists at those very rare times when they even noticed their existence. Despite occasional arrests and episodic characterizations of the movement as a hotbed of counterrevolutionary "bourgeois" professors, it was hard for the regime to perceive these ornithologists, entomologists, herpetologists, mammalogists, botanical ecologists, and biogeographers as sources of effective political speech. Marginality thus became a guarantor of the survival of scientific public opinion as social identity.

Sheldrake explains that for each scientific paper he published, he plans to write a “dark twin” in which he describes “the messy network of crazy things that underlies every piece of cool, clean science, but that you aren’t usually allowed to see—the fortunate accidents of field work, the tangential serendipitous observation that sets off a thought train, the boredom, the chance encounters.”

Ekonomissa; the insurgent sea

general gripe

Engineers, to use Karl Marx’s words, are ‘a superior class of workers.’ They believe in their language as we all believe in ours. More than the rest of us, however, engineers believe that their language and everything else can be taken apart and reassembled (and taken apart again) for the language’s and everything’s benefit. Engineers dream and plan as often and intensely as the rest of us. More than the rest of us, however, they believe that there is a calculated sameness between the planning and the dreaming. Engineers, in their essence, remain unchanged when they carry their beliefs to the limits. They merely become more impressive to the rest of us, more tragic, or more dangerous. As they reach the edge, some of them, in the words of one of the most tragic among them, may even declare theselves ‘engineers of human souls.’ Of course, there is an engineer in each of us.”

“Thomas Friedman”

I AM PARTY TO ALL THAT I STUDY AND REVILE