Portolano
I carry wool. Between ports. Following no lines or borders.
Fuzzy gateway. Coasting along. Casting on.
Purls before knits. Cast off. Castaway. Desert island. No map. No sail. Silentio.

Amity!!!

:flower:

Portolano two letters down from Port Orlando

May 9, 2020

I noticed when folding laundry this morning that there wasn’t a stack of pants, and realized that I haven’t worn them in weeks, maybe even since this journey started. Part of the reason is because of the fair weather, which I’m grateful for, but the other reasons is simply that there’s no place to go where it might be inappropriate to not wear them. Dances, concerts, galleries, and so many other things need society, and society is the one thing that we don’t have on this lonely voyage.

Discipline has been waning and there have been rumors of mutiny. The rhumb lines are not straight, is the continuous refrain. Is this the only song that they know how to sing? If the world is flat then we’re all doomed to fall at the end, others say, so it doesn’t matter. I say pretend it’s a sphere and perhaps live a few more days. Stretch it out and live without living, or finally live.

Everywhere is marked “ecco i draghi,” and not just the unknown regions anymore. How long can we take this of faith? I’ve never seen a dragon, much less an invisible one. Can we fight it? Unknown. Will it kill us? Unknown. Will it always be there? Unknown.

Our course takes us to the edge of the world. When we get there I fear it will be too late to turn back and we will fall, or perhaps we're already falling. Maybe we've always been falling.

Bloody excellent. Captures the spirit of the day, the coronavirus way. :mask:

Stretch it out and live without living, or finally live. — praxis

Live without living is not an option. Stretching the imagination; finally live a little - in or out of the bubble, with or without pants.

Love your work. Can I have more...please :cool:

Nice vignette. I would personally like to see where this could be taken in terms of a philosophical piece - feels like a nice intro to some existential/dystopian novel.

Will there be more for us to get our teeth into by Friday?

I would personally like to see where this could be taken in terms of a philosophical piece — I like sushi

Yeah I was just kinda fooling around but that would be a good exercise. I'd very much like to improve my writing. I just read through the first thread.

Vignettes of Ortolan eaters across time from Roman era to today. One involves an a medival ship import and something happens... Someone steals inventory to try it out. Punishment is macabre.

Servants having moral reservations while pricking the eyes of the small birds. Philosopher chef biased by gustatory lust defends the practice with his reasons.

Dialogues as to the purpose of the veil of the Ortolan eater. Different humorous scenarios that cause the veil to come into being.

Recipes from the Apicius cookbook (1st century?) Must be a roman recipe for Ortolan somewhere.

Scald the flamingo, wash and dress it, put it in a pot, add water, salt, dill, and a little vinegar, to be parboiled. Finish cooking with a bunch of leeks and coriander, and add some reduced must to give it color. In the mortar crush pepper, cumin, coriander, laser root, mint, rue, moisten with vinegar, add dates, and the fond of the braised bird, thicken, strain, cover the bird with the sauce and serve. Parrot is prepared in the same manner.

I don’t know why I’ve always liked the Kafkaesque kind of writing but you make it look effortless.

They are just notes of a premise.

Youtube star causes outrage because of Ortolan Mukbang...

Weird. Not much weirder than watching caged animals though, I suppose.

@praxis @Nils Loc :starstruck:

Hey @Amity :smile:

Yay @Baden :cool:

Although I don't have the writing talent of others here, the sharing of such creativity makes me :love: :party: :starstruck:

Philosopher chef biased by gustatory lust defends the practice with his reasons. — Nils Loc

Yum.

I’m out of time! Will see if I can do something tomorrow during my lunch break.

996 words - have not reread for errors or comprehension (will have a go at that tomorrow lunchtime probs).

A Philosophical Portolano

Many a philosopher has outlined the scope and depth of philosophy throughout the ages. Analogies of layered onions, islands or vast oceans have painted a picture varied in hue and subject matter that remains to this day open to degree of personal interpretation.

One point shares a common expression. That is how philosophy has progressed (for better or worse) over the course of human inquiry into and about the world. One thought builds on another, rising - as they say - upon the shoulders of others. The of how ideas and concepts have shaped humanity’s involvement with the environment is quite pronounced, although often enough these paradigm shifts go relatively unseen during their development and even their initial fruition.

Let us view the body of philosophical knowledge as a foreign landscape with roughly sketched out shores. As time goes on we traverse over the same seas and oceans and occasionally venture forth onto the shores of knowledge with fear and trepidation of what lies within its hinterlands. Promising peaks are spied, and lush canopies admired; yet up close the blasting winds and the uncompromising ferocity of natures myriad creatures infest such seen-from-afar ‘beauty,’ and perhaps naive delight. Even so we circle this landmass, over and over: from culture to culture, from epoch to epoch. This shoreline is our recycling of thoughts and ideas across time. With each revolution around this landmass we end up back at the same spot uttering the same questions with slightly altered perspectives.

Much like the physical Earth our human appreciation of our planet has radically shifted over time, even though on the surface little has really changed. Back in the recesses of human experience people were certainly not aware of where they were or the scope of the planet they stood on - for them the idea of ‘scope’ beyond their immediate world is about as nonsensical to us today as our having a scope beyond the confines of known (and even theoretical) natural phenomenon.

Nevertheless, we were, like our distant ancestors, circling the same curious lands. The difference is we’re circling faster than we’ve ever circled before. Our conceptual perspectives have shifted more frequently over the past few millenia than previously. The change from one generation to the next stretches the generations apart, pulled as we are into a thin flotilla of views and ideas that at either end grow more and more at odds with one another. Where before our fleet ambled like a curious child fro cove to cove, exploring and exchnaging, now we’re focused on longer and longer streches of cliffs and beachs, sometimes unable to rest and find a tributry of fresh thought.

Our ‘ideas’ and ‘thoughts’ appear smaller and less important than they once did. This is merely due to our desire for containment - we ‘know’,the world now rather than having it lie beyond our comprehension. Our world view is infinite now as opposed to a physical bound finite cosmological view that allowed the thoughts and ideas to roam more freely and playfully. We’ve essentiallu done away with a huge part of human adventure by refusing the adventure as ‘childish’ or ‘impractical’.

The first hearth created the first contained human experiment. From the beating heart of this fire we arranged our items and ourselves in ‘order’. We slowly erected walls and pyxed ourselves into our own cosmological experiment ... but like an obsessive experimenter we seem to have forgotten that what lies outside our selfmade cosmos (our godhood draping us in shadowy reclusion) is the worldview we were shaped by, our finite land unmeasured and untamed, steeped in a lived experience. We imagined gods and then instead of holding such wonder chose to imitate them (to cage ourselves). From the limits of our mind came into being the physical limits of our life. The confinement led to easier control and we played at god with our unearthing of causal being - the seasons happened outside our walls whilst within lay summer heat, and the night came in yet we captured it and burnt the nights away (moreso in the modern age than ever before).

Still we circle the landmass, yet now we only see a shoreline whilst on our boats we make models of caves and lagoons, of forests, mountains and hills. We’re ‘safe’ here but there is nothing to learn Here - in terms of what lies within the dangers of the hinterlands.

As has happened many times before, an epochal shift is upon us. The wall/s to our confines are strtsched and bulging, our telescopes, speed of sailing and maps make the world seem but a dot compared to how such was viewed millenia ago.

‘God is dead,’ as said by the kin of philosophical discourse. I think it is more the case of modern humans that our experiment of being god, of confined circumspection, is quickly dying. We prefer to assume this ‘death’ is other; happening to someone or something else.

A broad and farsighted scope within our walls is infinite - it is also useless for a mobile human ‘spirit’ (in the humanist and wholly unromantic sense of the term!)

In a clinical and more conclusive summation what is being addressed here is how ‘history repeats itself,’ alongside our everexpanding appreciation of nature and the overload of information in this ‘information age’. As techinqiues have refined their scopes over time so to has the depth and breadth of the human perspective been confined. The Earth itself has gone from the cosmological constant in psychological terms, to a mere speck of rock orbiting a mere dot of gas - the ‘finite’ has been replaced by the ‘infinite’ and we’ve lost the tree of life due to the forests of our own making. We were ‘gods’ but we thought ‘gods’ were better than us - that was the mistake. A god is essentially a messed up entity fumbling around in humility and awe of its own situation (this is what humanity is).