Caspar Henderson Dives Deep Into the World of Sound

 

A Book Of Noises: Notes on the Auraculous – Caspar Henderson (2023)

 

            Around eight years ago, I read and reviewed a very cool book titled “The Book of Barely Imagined Beings”, by Caspar Henderson.  Mr. Henderson explored the world of animals via the conceit of a bestiary where each chapter coincided with a letter of the alphabet, and an animal whose name begins with said letter.  It is an amazing book and one that opens the mind to the infinite variety found in the natural world around us.  Having dipped my toes into the mind of Caspar Henderson, I was very happy to find A Book of Noises while browsing the library shelves.  This wonderful book explores the vast landscape of sound, divided into chapters with titles such as Cosmophony: Sounds of Space, Geophony: Sounds of Earth, Biophony: Sounds of Life, ending with the chapter Anthropophony: Sounds of Humanity.  This is right up my alley!

            Caspar Henderson comes to the topic of sound and noise from the very best angle, that of wonder and awe.  The idea came to him after a visit to a nature preserve on the Norfolk coast where he witnessed tens of thousands of knots, a short stocky bird that migrates from the Arctic each year, flying overhead.  Within the cacophony Caspar could distinguish individual wing flaps.  He coined the term “Auraculous” to describe such experiences, the word meaning a marvel for the ear.  This is the true theme of this book.  Mr. Henderson explores the vast world of sound we live in and create and does so with a sense of poetry and beauty fitting to the magical world that sound provides to us.  As he puts it, “writing this book has been an attempt to listen more deeply and hold on to a sense of aliveness, in which each moment is a validation of what came before and a preparation for what comes after.”  We live out our lives ignoring most of the aural sensory input around us, much to our detriment. 

            My favorite chapter, Biophony: The Sounds of Life, explores the aural world of our plant and animal brethren.  I enjoyed reading about the various sounds plants make, many of which our modern ears just ignore.  One of the old Buddhist koans, meant to encourage introspection, famously reads, “If a tree falls in the woods, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?”  I have always found this inane.  Of course it makes a sound.  Sound exists whether anything “hears’ it.  Sound is merely the vibration of the gas, liquid, and solid matter of the world.  Sound existed on Earth far longer than life has been around and will continue to do so long after humans reach extinction.  Only the inflated egocentrism of humans (which I think is the REAL lesson behind the koan) allows us to imagine ourselves as the primal source of experience in the world.  What a disservice this is to our fellow living beings.

            Caspar Henderson uses the last chapter of this book for an exploration of the many sounds created by humanity, from onomatopoeia and musical instruments to noise pollution, and even to a rumination on silence itself.  In this chapter Mr. Henderson extrapolates the future of man-made sound, including the ability to utilize sound for healing as well as for weaponry.  As with anything in the world, whether it is used for good or evil is dependent on the human making the decision.  Sound can heal and it can harm, therefore it is up to us to determine how best to use it to improve not only humanity but the beautiful and varied world around us.  The path towards good or towards evil is one we embark on in our hearts and minds, way before any action comes.  Books such as these help us maintain our proper distance from our own ego and allow us to replace ignorance and supposition with facts and logic.  Caspar Henderson does us all a great service through his writing.  I have now read two of his works and will look forward eagerly to the next one!  To Mr. Henderson, and everyone reading this who loves to search for the Auraculous, I sign off with the rejoinder made famous on the now-defunct Sonic Youth Gossip Forum, which exhorts the recipient to live a “Sonic Life!”

 (This great book can be purchased here: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo200525016.html )

Michael Benson Shares The Awesome Beauty We Create When Art and Science Meet

 

Cosmigraphics: Picturing Space Through Time – Michael Benson (2014)

            Rarely do I come across a book such as this, one that brings together two of my greatest loves and creates something fabulous.  Author Michael Benson shows us how the worlds of Art and Astronomy are, and have always been, connected and complimentary, and the way he does so is so beautiful, informative, and clever that I am left in awe.  I love this book!

            The objects in our sky, the gorgeous night with its twinkling stars, shiny planets, comets, and meteors, and the beaming sky of day with the Sun and sometimes the Moon visible, have been our companions throughout the whole existence of life on our planet.  Ancient man not only saw, but understood, that the view afforded from Earth allows us to see the passage of time, and the cycles described by the motions of the heavens.  Using just plain, careful, repeated observation, and before the invention of written language, humanity catalogued stars and constellations, predicted eclipses, and calculated the Moon’s cycles.  We also created art to help us describe what we saw, from cave paintings to petroglyphs to carved or molded sculptures.  This is how we know that ancient man understood the cosmos in a deep and meaningful way, something which has been sadly lost to much of our modern human population.

            Cosmigraphics collects some of the most amazing images and artwork created by us to describe the heavens above and our Earth below.  This book captures the artistic legacy of the visual explorations of our cosmos, and provides wonderfully descriptive and informative text with each image.  This book is divided into sections exploring the idea of Creation, our Earth, the Moon, the Sun, the structure of the Universe, etc.  Each chapter is so gorgeous and so indicative of the immense genius required to not only grasp infinitely complex ideas but to also portray them in a visual manner, that they allow for the dissemination of information and the spread of wisdom.  These images tell a million stories.  They are beautiful in their own right, and worthy of the appreciation we rightfully lay upon masterpieces by the likes of Michelangelo or Picasso.

            We marvel at the heavens, and have always done so.  As our scientific knowledge grew, our ideas of the universe grew.  Whereas ancient man had deduced that the Earth is spherical, it was accepted doctrine that the Earth was the center of all creation (Bible bias, always), and that, according to early Greek philosophers, what we see in the sky corresponds to sequential “shells” with each carrying different denizens of the sky.  It was accepted belief that the Moon rotated around the Earth in its own sphere, then the Sun, then each known planet.  At the time, this was Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.  Beyond the planetary “spheres” was a celestial sphere containing the stars in heaven, all fixed and immovable.  It took centuries of human observation, and the perfection of lenses and the telescope, for us to understand that there are no “shells”, that the heavens do move, that our Sun is the center of our solar system, that the planets all rotate around the Sun and not Earth, and that the stars themselves are ridiculously far away from our personal solar system.  Even so, it was assumed that the whole of existence fit within our galaxy, a self-contained universe we refer to as the Milky Way.

            Astronomers and other scientists improved on the initial telescopes, and with the new-found clarity of vision, were able to discern that many of the objects in our night sky were not nebulas internal to the Milky Way, but actually their own island universes, located an inconceivable distance from our own galaxy.  Each new discovery shrunk the old world dictated by religious dogma and human make-em-up, and increased the scope of vision allowed to a human being.  As our knowledge of the universe, its galaxies, and the overall structure of it grew, the idea that humanity was the single reason for everything to exist also dissipated, much to the chagrin of every deluded, brain-dead, dogmatically religious idiot whose entire world-view is based in blind belief and obedience to thousand-year old make-believe. 

            With every new discovery, with every new tool we create to explore our universe, we find more wonder and weirdness than we could ever have imagined. There used to be just one Sun.  Now we know that our galaxy, the cloudy band of light in our night sky called the Milky Way, is composed of billions of individual stars.  We know that outside of our galaxy lie countless trillions of other galaxies, each with their infinity of suns and planets. Hell we even know that everything we can see in the sky above is just a small part of the entire universe.  Estimates now posit our Universe is on the order of 13-15 billion years old, and nearly unimaginably vast, but we can only observe about 36 billion light years distance in any direction.  In its early stages, spacetime itself expanded faster than light, causing much of the Universe to remain occulted from our vantage point.  Any observer on a planet over 36 billion light years away from us would not be able to see Earth either.  It is these type of realities that, while factually and verifiably true, crash against our ideas of “common sense.”  Common sense stated that, if the Earth were actually rotating, all plants, animals, and water would be flung off the planet! (They did not know about gravitation, just as humans in the 1800’s did not know about radiation.  Who knows what all-encompassing truths of the Universe we remain ignorant of today in 2026!)

            Many of my intellectual heroes utilized both Art and Science in their work.  Leonardo da Vinci fused art, science, and engineering in ways we are still coming to grips with today.  Even Richard Feynman, physicist extraordinaire, created a visual and artistic way of describing particle interactions with diagrams named after him still used today to explain quantum processes.  Galileo’s observations of Jupiter and his discovery of its visible moons would not have had the impact they had without his daily drawings of the gas giant and it’s satellites.  These beautiful drawings are included in Cosmigraphics.  An image is truly worth a thousand words and Galileo’s drawings helped to simplify the results from exceedingly complex visual observations, allowing the rest of us to grasp his discoveries. 

            Science, the scientific method specifically, is how we understand the basic truths of our existence.  Art is how we communicate those found truths, whether personal or universal.  In Cosmigraphics, Michael Benson catalogues and examines the confluence of Science and Art, and expands our collective minds in doing so successfully.  This is a masterpiece of artistic and scientific exposition, and I hope someday to find a copy for my own collection.  Almost nothing that we humans do is isolated.  Every field of human endeavor touches every other field, and we are better off for it.  The specialization of humanity’s explorations have led to amazing discoveries, but it is the space between the specialists, the diffuse and vague areas between concrete ideas, where the true synergy of life occurs.  We would all be better off if we recognized this fact and lived our lives accordingly.  If you know of anyone interested in science, art, or the history of humanity’s exploration of our universe, this is the book for them.  It is highly recommended.

(This amazing book can be purchased here: https://www.abebooks.com/book-search/title/cosmigraphics/author/michael-benson/ )

The Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Mother-load is Mine

Star Trek – The Deep Space Nine Companion – Terry J. Erdman, Paula M. Block (2000)

            From 1993 until 1999, what I consider the greatest science fiction television show ever aired in syndication in the United States.  Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (DS9) turned the Star Trek formula upside down.  Instead of a ship and crew of high-end achievers exploring the galaxy and encountering a new threat or danger or problem every week, DS9 showed us a flawed Commander and crew who take over a commandeered Cardassian outpost orbiting a small, seemingly inconsequential planet named Bajor.  Whereas, in Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG) the entire ship was populated by Starfleet personnel and their families, in DS9 the command crew is composed of a mix of Starfleet officers and staff, Bajoran military and government officials, and a whole slew of civilian shopkeepers and workers, not to mention the constant arrival of travelers seeking refueling, repairs, or just some rest and relaxation after a long voyage.  Because of this, DS9 was able to tell deeper, more involved stories, sometimes taking years to fully understand.

            DS9 began in 1993, as a premium syndication show, meant to be the showpiece of a new network, UPN, now defunct.  It aired for 7 years, and because it was a syndicated show sometimes it was moved, pre-empted, or otherwise ignored by the UPN people.  DS9 always sought to maintain a sense of continuity between its episodes, but once they began to fully explore serialized storytelling, if became a difficult show to follow if you had missed a few episodes.  TNG, on the other hand, told stand-alone episodes, capable of being watched in nearly any order.  Watching DS9 out of order would lead to massive confusion!  It was a good thing that the people in charge of DS9 knew how special the cast and show were and kept this all in mind as they crafted season after season of amazing science fiction television.

            Because of this, Terry Erdman and Paula Block’s book, Star Trek – The Deep Space Nine Companion, is such a favorite among fanatics of DS9. (We call ourselves Niners, BTW)  Not only does this heavy tome detail every single episode’s narrative, but it provides countless piles of data and information about the show, including cast members, trivia from behind the scenes, the production teams, and thoughts about each episode from the pertinent cast or crew members involved.  It is literally the DS9 bible, and it fetches a fair price on the secondary used book market!

            I am a huge fanatic of reference material, and to have such a motherload of data about my all-time favorite television show is so cool.  I enjoy the insight provided to me by the cast and crew as they look back on some of the best work they ever did.  I look forward to a lifetime of curiosity leading me to dig back into the Deep Space Nine Companion.  I highly recommend it, either for yourself if you are a Niner, or as a gift for someone in your life that loves Deep Space Nine.

Speculative Fiction from 1920 Still Kicking Ass

A Voyage to Arcturus – David Lindsay (1920)

            As a life-long fan of speculative fiction (science fiction and fantasy), I always have my ears out for any mention of the seminal writers in these genres.  These are authors that wrote their stories and books before the idea of science fiction had actually coalesced.  Early influencers like H.G. Wells, Alfred Bester, or Mary Shelley wrote amazing stories, each full of such imaginative ideas that they helped shape and guide speculative fiction all the way to the modern day.  In reading about the writers that influenced J.R.R. Tolkien, I came across mention of David Lindsay and his novel from 1920, A Voyage to Arcturus, which the article claimed Tolkien used as a source material for the narrative structure of The Hobbit.  While this was evident as I read A Voyage to Arcturus, what became clearer to me was the ways that this novel differed from The Hobbit, or the other Tolkien works.  A Voyage to Arcturus explores the nature of being and existence in ways that Tolkien did not.

            As with many stories from the era involving the supernatural or otherworldly, the story here begins when a group of well-heeled guests arrive at a posh, yet, spooky home for a Spiritualist séance.  Spiritualism began in earnest in the northeast United States around 1880, and by the time of the publication of this novel, was at the forefront of public consciousness.  It was all a massive crock of shit, but humans are easily fooled into believing something unnatural has occurred.  They truly believed that a con-artist would be able to draw a dead spirit from the netherworld to speak to them at a party, as if the dead soul had nothing else better to do.  The protagonist in this tale, Mr. Maskull attends the séance, and along with everyone else, is shocked when a spirit appears.  What happens next is the prelude to the true journey in this story.  Maskull travels to the other side of the Universe, to a planet called Arcturus.

            When Maskull arrives, he is all alone.  He encounters various people as he makes his way through the unknown land where two separate suns shine.  These people tell him contradictory things, yet they seem to enlighten Maskull and propel him forward in his journey.  Throughout his travels the author describes a world so alien, yet composed of similar forms to the world we know.  The physical laws of this world are not what they are on Earth.  Lifeforms appear, change, die, and are re-absorbed.  Humanoid beings of various types are met, some claiming to know Maskull, and some who want something from him.  As Maskull travels through Arcturus, he begins to peel back the layers of understanding, until he is no longer aware of what the real truth of his life is.  It parallels Gulliver’s Travels in many ways, although the people that Maskull meets are not as archetypically delineated as those that Gulliver meets on his travels.

            Each person gives Maskull their explanation for why they exist, why the world is what it is, who created it, and how it came into being.  Some of these are contradictory to each other, and serve to show the reader how much of our existence is purely based on the narrow scope by which most of us view the world.  Maskull grows and changes, but never seems to find his place, until he is shown why.  I wish I could expand more on this all, but I do not want to spoil what is a very cool and intriguing novel.

            Tolkien may have used A Voyage to Arcturus to help frame his first novel’s narrative structure, that of a quest taking the protagonist through various locales that are actually metaphors for the world around us.  In every other way, this novel is much more concerned with the esoteric, the ineffable, and the ephemeral.  It is these aspects of consciousness that David Lindsay sough to explore in this book, and which make it so enjoyable to read.  So many 100-year-old stories suffer from their dated tropes, but the early speculative writers were working on a blank canvas, with no rules, and they were able to craft some of the most interesting stories because of this.  I recommend this novel to anyone who enjoys The Hobbit, Gulliver’s Travels, or any other such fish-out-of-water speculative fiction.


(This book can be downloaded from Project Gutenberg )

G. Brent Dalrymple Provides a Great Tool to Fight the "Young Earth Creationist"

The Age of the Earth – G. Brent Dalrymple (1991)

            Back in the late 1970’s there began a series of challenges to the scholastic curriculum of schools in Alabama.  Certain religious idiots wished to force the school boards to devalue the teaching of natural selection, geology, and other science topics, while pushing the “alternate theories” of christian creationist bullshit that states the Earth and the Universe were all created sometime around 5,000-6,000 years ago (even though the nation-state of Egypt has been around for at least twice that long….morons.)  During this time Mr. Dalrymple was asked by the state if he could testify on the behalf of the science.  Mr. Dalrymple, being an eminent geophysicist and geologist, spent the better part of 5 months preparing, only to have the case be thrown out before it reached the courtroom.  Sadly, even more proudly ignorant people tried to do the same in other states, so Mr. Dalrymple saw that a need existed for a book that could explain the very many methods by which scientists have determined not only the approximate age of our planet Earth, but also the age of the Solar System, our Galaxy, and the Universe as a whole.

            A big part of how ignorant fundamentalists of every religious stripe manage to continue their assaults on everything good and decent in the world is their reliance on the lack of substantial scientific knowledge in the general American population.  Most US public schools teach the very basics of science, much of it severely outdated and archaic, but still needed as a foundation for what actual science is doing currently.  The problem lies in that schools are never given the chance to teach everything we currently now in the realms of science, as this is the purview of the Universities and their researchers.  This makes it very easy to fool people.  Make your false statements sound like actual science, and most people will assume it is.  It gives the backwards troglodyte religious-fundamentalist “humans’ among us a lot of joy to keep everyone ignorant.  If they are dumb as rocks, it makes it easy to feed them the lies that keep religions rich.  Believe me, all the religious leaders at the top KNOW their followers are blind idiots, sucking up whatever ”theology” the leaders wish to make the sheep believe.  They sit in their massive, lavish, extravagantly outfitted homes and offices and laugh and laugh and laugh….

            So, Mr. Dalrymple goes into great length to describe every aspect of how we know the ages of things.  He details what radioactivity is, what a “half-life” is, the methods used to test radioactivity, how they function, how we know they function, and what type of radiocarbon dating is good for what type of rock.  Each chapter then explains in exhaustive detail, sufficient for a learned expert, but still graspable by the lay reader, topics such as the age of the Earth based on modern geophysics and geology, the age of our Moon based on the rocks that humans have brought back, and then the age of the Universe itself, focusing on the data gathered from meteorites and interstellar debris we have collected.  In the hands of an educated person, this book could wholly rebuff any asshole trying to use make-believe fairy tales to keep young students ignorant.  This fight never ends, for ignorant fundamentalists will never change their mind, and they will go on indoctrinating their poor children in their backwards, regressive, baseless beliefs.

            The greatest aspect of science, and most scientists, is that they willingly accept the vast quantities of unknown information, without suffering from desperation.  Scientists understand that unexpected answers may point to new truth, a new area of study, or they may point to an old false belief, correcting what could be centuries of ill-informed assumptions.  The last chapter of this book details the many things we do not yet know about the age of the Earth and the Universe, much to its credit.  Scientists are always willing to concede what they do NOT know. The greatest fault in religious fundamentalists lies in that they assume without question that everything in the parts of the holy book they like are invariably and divinely true, and anything else is false.  They are so brainwashed that the world “gospel” in English has come to mean undisputed, unvarnished truth. So pathetic. Every single person that seeks to curtail a young child’s learning or that seeks to teach them patently erroneous fantasy instead of accepted scientific fact should be fought against vigorously.  It is wonderful that Mr. Dalrymple has provided at least one excellent weapon against these morons.

(This book can be purchased here:  THE AGE OF THE EARTH  )

Neil deGrasse Tyson brings the Astrophysics to us

Astrophysics for People In a Hurry – Neil deGrasse Tyson (2017)

            The science of Physics, and specifically Astrophysics, has always fascinated me.  I have found that the best way to step outside my own reality tunnel, and to gain what Mr. Tyson labels the “Cosmic Perspective,” is to read and study about the amazing achievements and discoveries that humans from ancient times have made regarding the cosmos we live in.  Our current world-society, with its incessant data-feeds and distractions, impedes people from reflecting on the Universe at large, and the amazingly complex and utterly massive nature of it.  We are all obsessed with our day-to-day grind, our jobs, our families, the news, politics, financial worries, etc.  It is because of this glut of activities and concerns that take up much of the modern human’s life that Neil deGrasse Tyson wrote this great little book.

            One of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s greatest traits is his ability to be a science explainer.  Very few scientists have this ability, and because of this, many non-scientists feel that either science is too complex to be understood by them or that scientists are purposefully being obtuse and intricate so as to not share their knowledge with “normal” people.  That is a real shame, because the basics of all the sciences affect us every single day, and without this knowledge it is too easy to be fooled by charlatans and con-artists seeking to impress you with pseudo-science and psychobabble, which all sound very plausible as long as you do not think critically about them.  Some hard-line nerds may put down Mr. Tyson because his focus is on education and dissemination, just as they used to insult Carl Sagan, that last great astronomer-teacher.  Screw them.  The world needs people who can clearly, and patiently, explain the vast knowledge we have accumulated to those who are interested, but do not have the rigorous and expensive education needed to grasp the mathematical underpinnings of science.  I would rather our best and brightest minds become celebrities than the vapid illiterates that society worships

.

            In the first chapters Neil deGrasse Tyson explores the development of astrophysics and humanity’s evolving understanding of the heavens above, deliberately highlighting how new discoveries and technologies forced us to change our perspective, from being self-absorbed and obsessed with our human primacy among the cosmos, to finding out that our planet Earth is not the center of the Universe, to discovering out that our Solar System is just one of countless billions in our Milky Way galaxy, to learning that our immense galaxy is just one among billions that populate the Universe, to understanding that we cannot even see much of the Universe due to its expansion.  It is a breathtaking journey that is all the more amazing because it happened in a blink of cosmic time, the teeny tiny sliver of time that Homo Sapiens Sapiens has been studying the heavens.  Compared to the age of our Earth (around 4.5 billion years) humans have not been around very long at all. Compared to the age of our Universe (around 14.5 billion years) we have barely begun to exist!  It blows my mind to think that we humans have only been able to study the heavens as they are for the past several hundred years.

            Each chapter is divided into the different ways that astrophysics are able to study the cosmos.  Some deal with the visible light available.  Others talk about the discovery of the remnants of the big bang, mapped through microwaves.  One chapter details the development of radio frequency telescopes, capable of exploring parts of the Universe that are invisible in any other manner.  From gamma detectors to cosmic rays, to the particle/antiparticle pairs that are popping in and out of existence throughout all of “empty” space, every major movement and field of study in astrophysics is presented, and the latest data and ideas about these findings are shared with the reader.  This is all in the service of what Mr. Tyson discusses in the last chapter, which is the beauty and joy of the Cosmic Perspective.  Understanding that we truly are one with the cosmos, that we are made of the same material that the Universe is made of, that our world is one of billions, that all life on Earth, and maybe all life in the Universe, is united by the common threads of our existence, and that it is our ability to understand the Universe itself that sets us apart, all are vital for each and every human being to understand.  The divisions that humans create to aggrandize one group and demean and subjugate another are illusions.  They are outright lies.  We are all humans, all conscious, all alive, all looking for our place in the Universe and our place among our human society.  I hope many people read this book and take the Cosmic Perspective to heart.

(This book is available for purchase here:  AMAZON  )