drmstream

Cuth­bert the appren­tice cus­to­dian looks around the vast room in despair. Boxes, con­tain­ers, books and glass­ware are strewn across the thick oak shelves, the heavy glass cab­i­nets that had been mitered and glazed by long for­got­ten appren­tices like him, the end­lessly long wooden tables. Every­thing in this stor­age room is man­dated to be made of […]

An old tree came down at the edge of the prop­erty in a wind­storm. It sat below the cot­tage at the edge of the farm road. The base was mas­sive and marred with water bumps, knocks and scars. Time had thinned out the top, mak­ing it appear fore­short­ened against the sky. The trunks and branches […]

On a trail I walk there is an old tree that has given up life but stands rooted stolidly in the ground. The trunk is thick and black. The sea­sons have embalmed it. The wood is so hard that the bark won’t break off in your hands. The boys pick up stray scraps that have been […]

The sky lit up sul­furous and unnat­ural. The dull thumps and whistling screeches rang in the air, a few beats off. We sat down by the water wait­ing for the town fire­works to start. The coun­try club up the hill was wind­ing their dis­play down. A fam­ily could have sat here 240 years ago and wit­nessed the […]

Art can­not shake off its mag­i­cal ante­cedants, nor can it be sealed off from tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tion. The Dialec­tic of Enlight­en­ment, Horkheimer & Adorno

An essen­tial step for­ward is the devel­op­ment of a fit­ting order of the day: a divi­sion of the day that gives a rhythm to the day, with a rea­son­ably fixed pat­tern of exer­tion and relax­ation, of spir­i­tual breath­ing in and breath­ing out, of order­ing one’s envi­ron­ment and moments when one is in touch with something […]

I, for one, wel­come my Nean­der­tal ances­try. It may not sound like a lot — between 1 and 4 per­cent. But that’s the equiv­a­lent of one great-great-great grandparent’s DNA con­tri­bu­tion. In the case of the Nean­der­tal con­tri­bu­tion, more than 1500 gen­er­a­tions ago, it’s an endur­ing legacy of an ancient group of peo­ple, spread across many […]

Eru­dite and thickly-written essay in The Chron­i­cle Of Higher Edu­ca­tion by David Barash speak­ing to the need of “a gen­eral the­ory of indi­vid­u­al­ity.” It’s back to the the­ory of self for us. In part, the resis­tance encoun­tered by human socio­bi­ol­ogy, Dar­win­ian psy­chol­ogy, evo­lu­tion­ary psychology—call it what you will—may reflect that none of the “ulti­mate” inter­pre­ta­tions thus […]

B.F. Skin­ner invented a con­trolled envi­ron­ment designed to give infants and new­borns more inde­pence; it was com­monly known as Baby in a Box.

The over­crowded mind can lead to an unset­tled soul. Over the years I’ve learned to trust my tech­niques for qui­et­ing my mind. I let my con­scious­ness float, drift into an unde­fined space that sus­pends the for­ward momen­tum of thought, qui­ets down the chat­ter and waits for a struc­ture to form. Even as I wait the process […]