When You Bring Fire Into a Habitation.. Humor Happens

Scientific American first published excellent article 'Quest for Clues to Humanity's First Fires' by Amber Dance in June 2017. Read it here. 

"...When did humankind first put fire to work for them, using it regularly for heat and cooking? Hlubik and other archaeologists who sift through the long-cold ashes of fires past cannot say for sure. It probably wasn’t as early as 2 million years ago—but it almost certainly occurred by 300,000 years ago. That leaves a big gap, with plenty to investigate...

...While calorie-rich meals might have been a main driver for the adoption of fire, there are other benefits, from warmth to protection from predators. Tending a hearth also could have made a big difference in the evolution of social skills: People would have had to cooperate to manage and feed fires, and they perhaps socialized around the flames. “When you bring fire into a habitation, I think something pretty profound happens,” says Chazan. “It’s mesmerizing.”..."

It has this wonderful image. 

'Homo erectus, depicted here in an artistic representation of a female apparently carrying a recent kill, lived between about 1.89 million and 143,000 years ago. '

 Artist: Ryan Somma, Creative Commons

 While scientists investigate that, cartoonists already know what happened in first few years  AFTER the fire was invented.

Artist: Robert Karus, The New Yorker, July 30 1960

Artist: David Sipress, The New Yorker , 2013

Artist: Joe Dator, The New Yorker, 2012

निळा सावळा ...Ajanta Blue

ही पोस्ट वाचण्याआधी ह्या ब्लॉगवरची जुलै १४ २०२० ची ही पोस्ट ('प्रशियन, कोबाल्ट, अल्ट्रामरीन) निळासांवळा..... Starry Night Over the Rhône') वाचा. 

मी एक अतिशय सुंदर पुस्तक डिसेंबर २०२० मध्ये वाचायला सुरवात केली 'The Greek Experience of India: from Alexander to the Indo-Greeks' by Richard Stoneman.

Pigments, naturally, were not imported from Greece. The pigments used at Ajanta are all derived from local materials, whether earths or plants, plus lamp black. Blue, orange, brown, green and purple are the most common colours in the later Ajanta murals. The earliest ones also use considerable quantities of white (from roots of Ipomoea digitata, with occasional substitutes, or from lime and gypsum), but in these the other colours have been much darkened, and are hard to study in the half-dark of the caves: reds, yellows, and browns are visible, as well as blues, so darkened now as to look black. Aided by some restoration in the last decade or so, vivid faces loom from the darkness, often topped by the voluminous turbans so typical of Maurya and Śunga figures, and shown in three-quarter profile like many of the faces in Macedonian tombs....

... Strong blues are the hardest colours to obtain in nature (lapis lazuli is the key ingredient), and Pliny has a good deal to say about indigo, ‘a product of India, being a slime that adheres to the scum upon reeds. There is another kind of it that floats on the surface of the pans in the purple dye-shops, and this is the “scum of purple”.’ Pliny shows marked distaste for this mucky but expensive substance, despite its known value also as a medicament for wounds. Later he is able to drag in Indian dyes as another illustration of his perennial theme of the moral decline of Rome caused by luxury:

Nowadays when purple finds its way even on to party-walls and when India contributes the mud of her rivers and the gore of her snakes and elephants, there is no such thing as high-class painting.¹⁰⁸

His account of indigo’s production is far from accurate. It was an important dye in India – where it is called nila – from at least 3000 BCE. It is produced from the leaves of the indigo plant by long boiling and treading, and throughout most of its history the reducing agent used to turn it from a pigment to dye has been urine – which may explain some of Pliny’s disgust, since the manufacture of indigo is certainly very smelly. (It is also very labour-intensive, and in 1859–60, just two years after the Indian Rebellion [‘Indian Mutiny’], the conditions of near-slavery in which it was produced led to riots in Bengal.)^"

Columba Livia Works If The Message Has a Subject

Neil Armstrong:

"The eagle ‘clasps the crag with crooked hands;/Close to the sun in lonely lands’. The nightingale, that ‘light-winged Dryad of the trees’, sings ‘of summer in full-throated ease’. The skylark ‘from the earth … springest/Like a cloud of fire’.

The pigeon? Well, the great poets have generally been less inspired by the humble pigeon (Columba livia). Its song is not a mellifluous cascade of liquid notes. It does not fall like a thunderbolt from the sky. It is not rare or endangered – exactly the opposite – and familiarity has bred contempt.

But it does have a ‘superpower’, as Gordon Corera terms it: an innate homing ability. Selective breeding has produced birds that can be taken hundreds of miles from their nests or lofts, even to another country, and then unerringly return home. This ability, still poorly understood by science, was harnessed in the extraordinary Second World War cloak-and-dagger operation that is the subject of Corera’s fascinating book...."

(review of 'Secret Pigeon Service: Operation Columba, Resistance and the Struggle to Liberate Europe' by Gordon Corera, 2018 for  Literary Review)

Artist: Will McPhai, The New Yorker, January 2016

“You know I hate when you check your messages at the table.”  

Artist: Benjamin Schwartz, The New Yorker, August 2015

फेसबुकावरील स्मारके...Status of My Facebook Pages at the end of Year 2022

 

This blog was launched in November 2006. It has completed 16 years. Today it has 2,222 published posts.

त्या ब्लॉगचे मराठी वर्तमानपत्र लोकसत्ताने डिसेंबर १७, २०१२ रोजी संपादकीय ("कुलकर्ण्यांचं लोणी..")पानात लिहलेले परीक्षण इथे (https://www.loksatta.com/sampadkiya/blogspot-searchingforlaugh-26372/) वाचा. (किंवा ह्या पोस्टच्या शेवटी)

Political Polarization and Weather Forecast

 “That was Brad with the Democratic weather. Now here’s Tammy with the Republican weather.”

Artist: David Sipress, The New Yorker, February 2017

Sense, Form, Portrait of Madame Devaucay, and Friedrich Schiller

John Armstrong:

"...Schiller thinks of human nature as an arena in which two powerful psychological drives are at work. On the one hand, there is the ‘sense’ drive which lives in the moment and seeks immediate gratification. It craves contact and possession. It can be coarse, as when one yearns to swig great draughts of beer; but it can also be elevated. Schiller associated the sense drive with his friend Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who longed to see things with his own eyes. Goethe was a direct observer, a natural empiricist who immersed himself in practical detail.

The second drive identified by Schiller was the ‘form’ drive: the inner demand for coherence over time, for abstract understanding and rational order. This drive, thought Schiller, seeks to leave behind the peculiarities of one’s own experience and discover universal principles. It is at the heart of justice – which is not about getting what you want for yourself – and is animated by principle. When we think that a person is entitled to a fair trial, we are motivated, Schiller says, by the rational ‘form’ drive. We are loyal to the abstract, general ideal of due process.

What he’s calling the sense drive and the form drive are powerful impulses in us. But they are often in conflict. The demands of the short term are at odds with the hopes of the longer view. Comfort and ease struggle against a sense of duty and responsibility. The allure of freedom clashes with the longing to be steadfast and rooted in existing commitments.

Schiller’s point is that human nature is fired by two divergent kinds of longing: we can’t hope to see why beauty matters to us unless we pay attention to them both. If we want to understand beauty, we can’t just talk about the things we find beautiful. We have to talk about our lives..."

Portrait of Madame Devaucay by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, 1807. Musée Condé, Chantilly. Photo by Getty

JA:

"...The portrait of Madame Devaucay, painted by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres in Rome in 1807, exemplifies his ideal. In one sense, the portrait is highly organised. Each detail has been manipulated so that it fits with every other. The rounded back of the chair is calculated to take the eye to her mouth, but it also balances the curve of her draped arm. The point of her chin is exactly halfway between the top of her head and the neckline of her gown. Nothing is left to chance. A hugely determined will to order dominates the image, meaning that the form drive is at full stretch. And this clarity and organisation appear to belong to the sitter as well. She seems calm, lucid and intellectually elegant.

Equally, however, the sense drive is given free rein. She appears merely to be sitting in her natural way, as we might encounter her by chance in the corner of a salon. Maybe in a moment she will laugh or adjust her necklace. For all her finery, she looks as if she would be warm and understanding – the perfect person with whom to discuss one’s troubles. The beauty of the painting is the way it calls simultaneously to our need for control and our longing for tenderness and intimacy.

It’s not a problem for Schiller if someone happens not to be moved by the particular examples that excite him. What matters is that something does, and that something is what we call beautiful.  This explains why beauty can be so moving – why it can make us weep. When we recognise beauty in a piece of music, or the graciousness of someone’s conduct, we see things that we know we have neglected or betrayed, and we feel an astonishing combination of anguish and delight...."