Hapax

. . . Drawing on philosophy and linguistics, cognitive scientists have begun to see the basic metaphors that we use all the time not just as turns of phrase, but as keys to the structure of thought. By taking these everyday metaphors as literally as possible, psychologists are upending traditional ideas of how we learn, reason, and make sense of the world around us. The result has been a torrent of research testing the links between metaphors and their physical roots, with many of the papers reading as if they were commissioned by Amelia Bedelia, the implacably literal-minded children's book hero. Researchers have sought to determine whether the temperature of an object in someone's hands determines how "warm" or "cold" he considers a person he meets, whether the heft of a held object affects how "weighty" people consider topics they are presented with, or whether people think of the powerful as physically more elevated than the less powerful.

What they have found is that, in fact, we do. Metaphors aren't just how we talk and write, they're how we think. At some level, we actually do seem to understand temperament as a form of temperature, and we expect people's personalities to behave accordingly. What's more, without our body's instinctive sense for temperature--or position, texture, size, shape, or weight--abstract concepts like kindness and power, difficulty and purpose, and intimacy and importance would simply not make any sense to us. . . .

The following words are all from languages which no longer have a single native speaker:

Unrihtwillnung: improper love (Old English)

Istamaasdu: Listen, you in the plural! (Hittite, Turkey)

Ebauthoo: water (Beothuk, Newfoundland)

Kälymentwam: path to heaven (Tocharian, central Asia)

Moíthgnatha: famously smooth (Old Irish)

Tehonannonronkwanniontak: they greeted him with respect; literally, they greased his scalp many times (Huron, Ontario)

Molatuendalaas: God's curse in your stomach (Cornish)

Tpochgo: night (Mohican, New York and New England)

Ngangki: sun (Yaralde, South Australia)

Mun*s: mouth - the fourth letter, here substituted with an asterisk, is the Runic thorn (Gothic, eastern Europe)

Xuqu'liilx'aax'ch'kk'sh: Are you going to keep tickling me in the face in the same spot repeatedly? (Eyak, Alaska)

dorkbot has only a motto: "people doing strange things with electricity". Different groups have interpreted the motto in different ways. When I thought of the motto I purposely made it broad and inclusive so that it would interest many different kinds of people doing different kinds of things. Artists, inventors, scientists, engineers. The exciting thing to me is to learn about strange things that creative people are doing around the world, with no regard for genre, style, school of thought, area of expertise, etc.

richard barnes
flight patterns














Richard Barnes's photographs, taken over two years in a Rome suburb, beautifully highlight the tension between the individual and the collective. They also highlight a growing field of research studying how animals self-organize into moving bodies. The results may provide clues to questions ranging from how cells aggregate around a wound to how financial markets swing on the aggregate choices of individuals.

lynne clibanoff
intricacies of the abyss





















''Lynne Clibanoff: 25 Years in Perspective'' is a formidable mid-career retrospective of 61 works that include prints, photographs, drawings and sculptures. ''I do a lot of different things,'' Ms. Clibanoff said. ''I make art because I have to amuse myself.''

Although the show may initially seem too inclusive, it emphasizes that the artist is dealing with spatial perception regardless of medium. She certainly blurs the distinction between art and craft.

Ms. Clibanoff creates architectural spaces that have a mysteriously haunting presence. They are familiar yet unidentifiable, questioning the notion of reality. Because her rooms have been realized as three-dimensional folded prints and box constructions, they do exist as real artistic representations.

Using her sculptures as architectural models, Ms. Clibanoff photographs these constructions. In ''Interior #25 (hard light),'' the black-and-white photograph represents a seemingly believable space, even documented by the camera. She uses light as a drawing tool to delineate such architectural features as the doorway and the staircase at the left. It may not be coincidental that her father was a popular Philadelphia magician; Ms. Clibanoff is able to create her own successful illusionist tricks.

Ms. Clibanoff is best known for box constructions, the primary focus of her career. These works suggest stage sets and recall the tradition of ideal Renaissance city plans as well as 17th-century architectural portraits by Saenredam. For example, ''Topiary'' is an intricate sculpture of three spaces with interior and exterior views. Looking directly at the electrified box, there is a staircase that leads to the manicured hedges and topiary bushes that are illuminated. At the right, a small room has a window view of another spiral topiary design. On the left side, there is a third area like some monastic cell. This is one of her largest designs, reaching a size that was less manageable for the artist. Ms. Clibanoff explained that it was cumbersome for her to carry these sculptures: ''I am a small person who does like things that are portable.''

For the past few years, she has been working on a more intimate scale with cigar boxes, calling them cabinets. They are little gems. The artist creates an architectural design of geometric forms that is perfectly sized for its container, leaving the original commercial markings on the sides of the wooden box. Each has an acrylic skylight that allows natural light to shine into the vacant interiors, adding a sense of intrigue like a setting for some story not fully told.

barbara h rosenwein
emotional communities


. . . People lived--and live--in what I propose to call "emotional communities." These are precisely the same as social communities--families, neighborhoods, parliaments, guilds, monasteries, parish church memberships--but the researcher looking at them seeks above all to uncover systems of feeling: what these communities (and the individuals within them) define and assess as valuable or harmful to them; the evaluations that they make about others' emotions; the nature of the affective bonds between people that they recognize; and the modes of emotional expression that they expect, encourage, tolerate, and deplore.

I further propose that people move (and moved) continually from one such community to another--from taverns to law courts, say--adjusting their emotional displays and their judgments of weal and woe (with greater and lesser degrees of success) to these different environments. As Lyndal Roper has put it, "competing cultures [may be seen in the] same individual man [or woman]." There are two points here: not only does every society call forth, shape, constrain, and express emotions differently, but even within the same society contradictory values and models, not to mention deviant individuals, find their place. John Baldwin has pointed to the multiple voices in medieval discourses on sex. I suggest that we recognize the possibility of finding similar varieties, as well as convergences, in emotional feeling and expression. . . .

The grand narrative that has dominated emotions scholarship cannot stand. It is based on a debunked theory of the emotions and its concomitant, but flawed, notion of progressive self-restraint. Jettisoning the hydraulic view does not mean that one new approach must take over: there are plenty of issues to consider and a variety of useful modes of attack, no one of which is going to compass the whole field for all periods and every sort of evidence. The new narrative will recognize various emotional styles, emotional communities, emotional outlets, and emotional restraints in every period, and it will consider how and why these have changed over time.

Once we have embarked upon that narrative (and some already have), we may stop worrying about emotions in history and begin to enjoy them.

photographer unknown
vanished civilization






World War Two witnessed the maturation of the newly mobile photographic technology and its ability to capture images of devastation. Think of Dresden after it was firebombed or London during the Blitz or the concentration camps of Bergen Belsen and Auschwitz after their liberation and a series of distinctive images flash in memory: powerful and haunting pictures of war's destructive impact.

But think of Hiroshima and what comes to mind is the mushroom cloud. Awesome in its way, with its bulbous head and towering stem, it is nonetheless an abstract image freed from human agency.

The lack of visual evidence of the atom bomb's effect has helped us to forget its devastating impact. To see is to remember. Up until now, there have been few publicly available images of what happened on the ground when the first atomic bomb exploded. As a result, Hiroshima has become, as the novelist Mary McCarthy wrote in 1946, "a kind of hole in human history."

These images go some way towards filling in this hole in our historical memory. Taken during the weeks following the bombing, they show a landscape that is eerily vacant and quiet, like ruins from a vanished civilization. But why were they taken and by whom? And how is it that they ended up in a pile of garbage? . . .

denise riley
shantung

It's true that anyone can fall
in love with anyone at all.
Later, they can't. Ouf, ouf.

How much mascara washes away each day
and internationally, making the blue one black.
Come on everybody. Especially you girls.

Each day I think of something about dying.
Does everybody? do they think that, I mean.
My friends! some answers. Gently
unstrap my wristwatch. Lay it face down.