{"id":1687,"date":"2013-05-09T06:28:17","date_gmt":"2013-05-09T06:28:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thetravellerslastjourney.com\/shai\/2018\/11\/26\/993-autosave-v1\/"},"modified":"2019-07-14T06:26:04","modified_gmt":"2019-07-14T06:26:04","slug":"gariwerd-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thetravellerslastjourney.com\/shai\/2013\/05\/09\/gariwerd-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Gariwerd"},"content":{"rendered":"

Editorial notes<\/strong>:
\nThis Essay was found as a ‘draft’ entry in Everything2<\/sub> and is published here with minor changes. BTW, if you are already here, check out the links in the second line of the title, below. Just hovering over them will give you some insight into Shai’s unique way of thinking and expressing himself.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Discovering Geology at the Gariwerd Mountains; or, Thinking<\/a>\u00a0about\u00a0Thinking<\/a>\u00a0about\u00a0Thinking<\/a>\u00a0about\u00a0Mountains<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Gariwerd is the name given to a major geological process of sandstone mountain ranges in southern Australia, which have also been named The Grampians and are part of The Grampians National Park. I was in Gariwerd when I had my Eureka moment and\u00a0got<\/em>\u00a0geology.<\/p>\n

I remember\u00a0getting<\/em>\u00a0geology. I was at a lodge at the Grampians, a national park in Australia’s south filled with sublime vistas peppered with monolithic cliffs and threatening peaks. I already knew about plate tectonics thanks to the education system, but I hadn’t appreciated the perspective of it all. It was while reading a book on the formation of the Grampians, at night after dinner after that day’s exploring, that I\u00a0got it<\/em>. It wasn’t enough to point to a sandstone boulder and start talking about a process that began on the ocean bed. That implies an understanding that geology describes processes that take time, in fact, lots of time. But it also tends to a thinking mechanic that describes the process A-to-B-to-C as being the story of C. That is in the same way that a book on human biology might describe its formation as being by the process “fertilized egg builds itself into an embryo that ultimately becomes a human being”. Which isn’t wrong, and in the case of a living being whose raison d’etre\u00a0is<\/em>\u00a0its adult self especially useful, but it misses so much. This manner of viewing a\u00a0thing<\/em>, whether a mountain or body or any domain of study, believes that it knows the whole story because it\u00a0could<\/em>\u00a0know the whole story.<\/p>\n

This is in the same way as someone studying a photograph taken out of a series that is also a film. There is something lost between a movie-still and the whole movie; and it’s not just the story, it’s something more abstract than that, just like the study of painting is not only about their subjet-matters. As I read the book on the Grampians while walking its trails, I focused my Ideas-camera on the time-scale of a million years. By doing so my\u00a0<\/em>story disappear, but then so did my species’, and even the story of my primate family could only be told in a few staggered steps because it was such extreme perspective to myself whose interests are so vainly anthropocentric.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Editorial notes: This Essay was found as a ‘draft’ entry in Everything2 and is published here with minor changes. BTW, if you are already here, check out the links in the second line of the title, below. Just hovering over them will give you some insight into Shai’s unique way of thinking and expressing himself. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[159,103,204,108],"tags":[],"metadata":[101],"class_list":["post-1687","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-all-posts","category-essay","category-everything2","category-observations","metadata-editor_notes"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":2400,"url":"https:\/\/thetravellerslastjourney.com\/shai\/2013\/04\/17\/meta-conspiracies-2\/","url_meta":{"origin":1687,"position":0},"title":"Meta-conspiracies","author":"Pala","date":"April 17, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Editorial notes: This Essay was found as a 'draft' entry in Everything2. It was last updated on 17\/04\/2013. Here's an idea: What if a conspiracy does not need its members to be knowing participants? What next? We could go ahead and define a type of conspiracies as being those entities\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "All Posts"","block_context":{"text":"All Posts","link":"https:\/\/thetravellerslastjourney.com\/shai\/all-posts\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1779,"url":"https:\/\/thetravellerslastjourney.com\/shai\/2011\/05\/03\/defining-molecular-biology-2\/","url_meta":{"origin":1687,"position":1},"title":"Defining molecular biology","author":"Pala","date":"May 3, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"Editorial notes: This Essay was found as a 'draft' entry in Everything2. It was last updated on 03\/05\/2011. To\u00a0me,\u00a0molecular biology is that part of\u00a0biology\u00a0that is concerned with the\u00a0molecules\u00a0that make up biological systems. It is concerned with those molecules' lives, and the way they interact with each other. It manipulates molecules\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "All Posts"","block_context":{"text":"All Posts","link":"https:\/\/thetravellerslastjourney.com\/shai\/all-posts\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1741,"url":"https:\/\/thetravellerslastjourney.com\/shai\/2010\/12\/06\/fiskadoro-br-2\/","url_meta":{"origin":1687,"position":2},"title":"Fiskadoro (BR)","author":"Pala","date":"December 6, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Fiskadoro\u00a0is\u00a0Denis Johnson's\u00a0second novel, published in\u00a01985. The novel is set\u00a0beyond\u00a0some\u00a0apocalypse. It is not a dying world, although it is set in the shadow of one.\u00a0Fiskadoro\u00a0describes a vibrant culture, be it one scarred by\u00a0radiation\u00a0and\u00a0bombs, employing\u00a0shibboleths\u00a0to ward off the present: \"the quarantine will be lifted\" (is there even one?), \"Bob Marley will come\"\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "All Posts"","block_context":{"text":"All Posts","link":"https:\/\/thetravellerslastjourney.com\/shai\/all-posts\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4030,"url":"https:\/\/thetravellerslastjourney.com\/shai\/2013\/06\/21\/lockes-theory-of-knowledge\/","url_meta":{"origin":1687,"position":3},"title":"Locke’s theory of knowledge","author":"Pala","date":"June 21, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Editorial notes: Shai documents his interpretation of\u00a0Locke\u2019s Theory of Knowledge[I]\u00a0which, he explains, \u201cis famous for being based on the principle that the mind is a blank slate\u201d and that the mind is \u201cgaining everything it knows by experience\u201d. 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