After having elucidated a little-o-little, on the ambit of argument
literacy as the domain of the academic intellectual on our previous post, as a
follow up to Ayn Rand’s New Intellectual,
Sowell’s Modern Intellectual, Paolo
Bonari’s Liminal Intellectual, in sync with
the Intellectual Dark Web, let us now
foray into the world of Gramsci’s Organic Intellectual!
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Antonio Gramsci has pondered much on the
profound role of the intellectual to society. To him, all humans are intellectuals, because they have their own
intellectual and rational faculties. The problem crops up because all humans do
not have the social function of
intellectuals.
Hence, he draws a customized line between
the ‘traditional’ intelligentsia who see themselves, albeit wrongly, as a class
apart from society, and the thinking types, produced by every class, from its
own rank, in an organic way! He calls them Organic Intellectuals!
There’s no gainsaying the fact that the liminal intellectuals advocated by
Paolo Bonari, sync a tad better with the
organic intellectuals, put forward by Antonio Gramsci. To Gramsci, if at
all there’s a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, it musta real be effected only
through the concepts of ideology, hegemony, power, and organic intellectuals.
And these ‘organic’ intellectuals help in
expounding, through the language of culture, the feelings and experiences which
the masses could not express for themselves.
This said, I would personally regard Lincoln Paine as one such
organic intellectual of sorts, who explains, through the language of culture,
the feelings and experiences of the sea,
which the masses could not express for themselves!
All history is maritime history,
roars the byline to his official webpage, that puts forth his profound ponder
that, human beings FIRST had the
opportunity to come into contact with one another only by means of the seas, the oceans and the rivers, the lakes, and
the streams! Hence, goods, languages, religions, and even entire cultures were
specifically spread across and along the world’s waterways, bringing together
civilizations and defining what makes us most human.
He real has a knack for giving his reader
an engaging and gripping narrative right from the introduction on, where you
find the flipping of the pages seem so easy on the indexy, and makes you ask
for more from Paine! And the read, titled, The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World, is real huge, running to a whopping 1048
pages in toto!
Just a little bit of snippety nuggets from
his Intro –
I
want to change the way you see the world. Specifically, I want to change the way
you see the world map by focusing your attention on the blues that shade 70 percent
of the image before you, and letting the earth tones fade.
This shift in emphasis
from land to water makes many trends and patterns of world history stand out in
ways they simply cannot otherwise. Before the development of the locomotive in
the nineteenth century, culture, commerce, contagion, and conflict generally
moved faster by sea than by land.
Two
questions merit consideration before taking on a maritime history of the world
as either writer or reader: What is maritime history? and What is world history?
The answers to both have as much to do with perspective as with subject matter
An alternative and perhaps simpler way to approach the question, What is maritime
history? is to tackle its unasked twin: What is terrestrial history?—the view
from the land being our default perspective. Imagine a world of people bound to
the land.
The
ancient Greek diaspora would have taken a different character and been forced
in different directions without ships to carry Euboeans, Milesians, and
Athenians to new markets and to sustain contacts between colonies and
homelands. Without maritime commerce, neither Indians nor Chinese would have
exerted the substantial influence they did in Southeast Asia, and that region
would have been spared the cultural sobriquets of IndoChina and Indonesia
(literally, “Indian islands”)—in fact, the latter would have remained unpeopled
altogether.
This
book is an attempt to examine how people came into contact with one another by
sea and river, and so spread their crops, their manufactures, and their social
systems—from language to economics to religion—from one place to another.
I
have sketched this history as a narrative to show region by region the deliberate
process by which maritime regions of the world were knit together. But this is
not a story of saltwater alone. Maritime activity includes not only high seas
and coastal voyaging, but also inland navigation.
These
“signs” indicate that mankind’s technological and social adaptation to life on
the water—whether for commerce, warfare, exploration, or migration—has been a
driving force in human history. Yet many mainstream histories are reluctant to
embrace this. Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human
Societies gives barely a page to “maritime technology,” by which he means
watercraft and not the ability to navigate or any associated abilities.
Although
airplanes have replaced ships in most long-distance passenger trades —transatlantic,
between Europe and ports “east of Suez,” or transpacific—more than fourteen
million people annually embark on a sea cruise. This is far more than ocean
liners carried before the passenger jet rendered them obsolete in the 1950s,
when the names of shipping companies were as familiar as (and far more respected
than) the names of airlines today. The idea that people would go to sea for
pleasure was almost unthinkable even 150 years ago.
Pretor-Pinney, is yet another intellectual
who’s forayed deep into the world of clouds, and finds could-gazing an art and
a therapy as well!
His delightful read of sorts, The Cloudspotter’s Guide: The Science,
History and Culture of Clouds, is a real awe-inspiring treat to the culture
of clouds, that’s completely unknown to the lay hitherto!
I’m just excerpting a chat from the pages
of The Guardian, where, he opines
that, he’s embarked on this gentle quest to overturn the malign understanding
of clouds that has long informed western thinking. “People do have a slightly
derogatory view of them,” he says.
“When people say someone’s got their head
in the clouds, it’s about being disengaged from the world. Whereas I say, ‘Sod
it - what's wrong with having your head in the clouds?’ It’s a really important
thing to do, a reaction to the pressures of modern life. But there are all
kinds of negative associations: the idea of someone having a cloud hanging over
them, or clouds on the horizon - these very doomy things.
“But there’s an Arabic phrase for someone
who is lucky or blessed - they say, ‘His sky is always filled with clouds.’ It’s
the complete opposite. Clouds provide shade and rain. And rain is life; it’s
about abundance. Clouds bring beauty to the sunset. And they clear the
atmosphere. They’re purifiers: cloud droplets form around bits of pollution and
bring it back to earth. But one of the main things for me is appreciating their
beauty. Every day is like a new page.”
Indeed, there’s a silver lining to all
his clouds! He’s got one named as Morning Glory!
Also, since he’s the founder of the Cloud
Appreciation Society, he’s got their manifesto outlined in simple nuggets right
at the start of the book, with Shelley’s mighty lines on Clouds for the poetic
charm to it!
The
Manifesto
of
The Cloud Appreciation Society
We believe that clouds are unjustly
maligned and that life would be
immeasurably poorer without them.
We think that clouds are Nature’s poetry,
and the most egalitarian of her
displays, since everyone can have a
fantastic view of them.
We pledge to fight ‘blue-sky thinking’
wherever we find it. Life would be dull if
we had to look up at cloudless monotony
day after day.
We seek to remind people that clouds are
expressions of the atmosphere’s
moods, and can be read like those of a
person’s countenance.
We believe that clouds are for dreamers
and their contemplation
benefits the soul.
Indeed, all who consider the shapes they
see within them
will save on psychoanalysis bills.
And so, we say to all who’ll listen:
Look up, marvel at the ephemeral beauty,
and live life with your head in the
clouds.
Then Pretor-Pinney moves on to categorise
clouds into ten basic groups, much akin to the Latin ‘Linnean’ system, based on
their heights and appearance.
This apart, he broadly divides clouds
into three types –
The
Low Clouds, which he impishly calls the ‘cotton wool tufts
that form on a sunny day’
The
Middle Clouds, which to him are, ‘the layers of bread rolls in
the sky’
And finally, the High Clouds, which he calls, ‘the delicate streaks of falling
ice crystals’!
Some of his descriptions are so charming,
that they really tug at your heartstrings with such impact and such warmth!
Just giving y’all a snippety nugget from
his first chappy on the Low Clouds!
The rest, I bet, is as engaging as your
favvy lead actor’s blockbuster movie!
Do grab a copy for yourselves at the earliest,
dear litterateurs! It’s a collector’s treat of sorts!
Yesss! He’s got a real amazing way of enthralling
the avid nature buff in us all, with his impish, engaging and humorous descriptors
of sorts!
Here goes Gavin Pretor-Pinney –
Leonardo
da Vinci once described clouds as ‘bodies without surface’, and you can see
what he meant. They are ghostlike, ephemeral, nebulous: you can see their
shapes, yet it’s hard to say where their forms begin and end.
But
the Cumulus cloud is one that challenges da Vinci’s description. Rising in
brilliant-white cauliflower mounds, it looks more solid and crisply defined than
other cloud types. As a child, I was convinced that men with long ladders harvested
cotton wool from these clouds. They look as if you could just reach up and
touch them–and, if you did, they would feel like the softest things imaginable.
The most familiar and ‘tangible’ of the cloud family, this is a good type for
budding cloudspotters to cut their teeth on.
Cumulus
is the Latin word for ‘heap’, which is simply to say that these clouds have a
clumpy, stacked shape. The people who concern themselves with such things
divide them into humilis, mediocris and congestus formations–these are known as
‘species’ of Cumulus. Humilis, meaning humble in Latin, are the smallest, being
wider than they are tall; mediocris are as tall as they are wide, and congestus
are taller still.
It
is the smaller ones that generally start forming over land on sunny mornings.
And because neither they nor their mediocris brothers produce any precipitation,
they are widely recognised as ‘fair-weather clouds’–a pair of puffy fingers up
at those who can only think of clouds as the opposite of fine weather.
A
lazy sunny afternoon beneath the drifting candyfloss curls of the Cumulus is far
finer than the flat monotony of a cloudless sky. Don’t be brainwashed by the sun
fascists–fair-weather Cumulus have a starring role in the perfect summer’s.
There
is one other species of this cloud: Cumulus fractus. This has a much less puffy
shape, its edges being fainter and more ragged. It is the way a Cumulus looks
when it is decaying at the ripe old age of ten minutes or so.
The
distinctive shapes of Cumulus clouds may go some way to explaining why they are
the cloud of choice in the drawings of young children.
No
six-year-old’s picture of a family in front of their house feels complete without
a few puffy Cumulus floating in the sky above. Children just have a fascination
with clouds.
Can
it be that, wheeled around in prams staring up at the sky as infants, they
develop a deep connection with the clouds–like young chicks forming a familial
bond with the first thing they see out of the egg? Who knows?
Well, yesss! Who knows?
Yet another delightful read from the pen
of Gavin Pretor-Pinney is his equally lovely book on the waves! It’s titled, The Wavewatcher's Companion, where he
discusses all sorts of waves, proving his premise that waves are such an
indispensable part of our lives!
Wordsworth and Shelley have given us impactful
powerlines on the clouds and the waves!
Yet, Wordsworth for once, seems so near, and he seems to
resonate far beyond his lines, kindling a few soulful chords that tug at straight at our hearts and
souls, and now we could feel with such awe and import the aura of his famous
lines from his poem, “The World is Toooo Much with Us”!
Here goes -
The
world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting
and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little
we see in Nature that is ours;
We
have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This
Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The
winds that will be howling at all hours,
And
are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For
this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It
moves us not.
How Tooo (trueee) much!
To be continued…
