Huge natural stone arch discovered in Afghanistan

One of the world's largest natural stone arches has been discovered in the central highlands of Afghanistan. Wildlife Conservation Society staff were tracking the area for wildlife when they chanced on this natural bridge in late 2010. They measured it in February and found that it's 64 meters wide and more than 18 meters tall.

It now ranks as the 12th largest natural bridge in the world, usurping Outlaw Arch in Utah's Dinosaur Natural Monument. Researchers named the feature Hazarchishma Natural Bridge after a nearby village.

The arch includes rock from the Jurassic period, 200 million to 145 million years ago, and the Eocene epoch, 55 million to 34 million years ago. Ancient water running through the now dry Jawzari Canyon carved out the underside of the bridge.

Lie

'Does the voice make a lie of the poem? Because a good voice can make a weak poem seem strong and a poor voice can ruin a great poem. Is the poem isolated on the page (the screen) the most accurate version of the poem, true to itself, or does the voice we use to read it in our heads also ruin great poems and resurrect the dead ones?'

The poet’s mantra: “I please myself. I pleasure myself.”

Memorization

'Memorization is not the act of remembering but the process of creating a memory, specifically an exact memory of a thing, usually a text, and it bears with it the sense that the act of creation is one that is rote and forced, something you do because it is good for you. To memorize a poem may be to love it, but it may better be a way to kill it, to remove the life from it, to make it a thing so known as to become invisible and silent.

Ray Carver, known primarily as a writer of short fiction, also wrote poetry. Carver once explained the dear value of his poems by saying that he remembered sharply the writing of each of them. This was meant as evidence from Carver of the importance of writing poetry to him, evidence of how powerful the experience of writing a poem was to him.

Yet I can recall none of his poems, none at all, and nothing of them. And I think this is good in a way. Otherwise, I am overwhelmed by the thought of his memorization of the events of creating poems, and it seems to me a way to suggest poetry is something merely magical, and not at all real, not of the body, even inhuman. I don’t remember the composition of all my poems, and I hardly remember the composition of any of them at all. My process of creating them is intense, and it is a process of the mind and the body. I lean into the making of a poem. I enter the poem so that I can make it. I am surrounded by the poem.

What I recall of their composition is general. I remember the places I normally sit to write, and when I recall something more specific I recall only an instant of the composition or a single blink of existence where I caught the inspiration for a single line. Poetry is of the body, and the body remembers dully and inexactly. Even the scars of my body tell me little about the experiences of the body. The red keloid over my sternum tells me my heart was resurrected but little else. I carry scars I know well but without remembering the occasion of their creation.

A poem is a creature of the body and recalled only glimmeringly from the body. A poem is excreted by the body, either to vanish into air or to persist as a record. We need to forget all but the outlines of the poem so that when we read it again it is suddenly a new and reborn experience.'

- http://dbqp.blogspot.com/

Abstract

'Writing can be abstracted, meaning can be abstract, the perceivable world need not be concrete. Abstract writing is equivalent to abstract art, and from it can be constructed by the reader the abstract image, wherein thoughts of things tumble but do not cohere into stable bodies or forms. Writing can be music even if it’s not musical. The sound of a word can be a shape. The shape can make the sense of it. Abstract writing provides not sustenance but the will to go forward and find sustenance. Abstract writing is a conveyance not a destination. Reading is driving that conveyance.'

http://dbqp.blogspot.com/

I Think, therefore... I scan?

Which Way Is the Future?

If you had four pictures of a person at different ages, how would you lay them out in chronological order? As an English speaker, you would almost certainly put childhood scenes on the left and pictures from old age on the right. But if you spoke another language, you might arrange the photos in a column or even from east to west.

Almost every culture in the world uses space to think about time, but the visualizations vary widely. A November paper in Psychological Science describes the first culture known to tie time’s march to the cardinal directions.

The Pompuraawan, a remote tribe in Australia, do not have terms for spatial relationships such as “left” or “in front of.” Instead they use the directions as descriptors, such as “my south arm.” They think of time the same way, the new study found. When asked to arrange four pic­tures showing a person’s life, Pompuraawans laid the photos in a line from east to west.

Three main factors affect how people imagine time, says Stanford University psychologist Lera Boroditsky, an author of the study. One influence is how the culture thinks spatially; for instance, the Pompuraawans often gesture to the sun to indicate the time of day, Boroditsky says.

The layout of the written word also plays a role. Israelis tend to think of time as flowing from right to left, Boroditsky concluded in a study last year—the same direction Hebrew is written.

Last, a language’s metaphors can have an effect. Mandarin Chinese associates “up” with the past and “down” with the future. And re­search shows Mandarin speakers often put photos in a column with the earliest at the top.

Visualizing the passage of time may be a human universal, but these studies show just how differently that can play out. Whereas we look forward to the future, the Pompuraawans say that the west is yet to come.