Does the earth have a climate?
What is the human conversation over geologic time? Mandelbrot once famously asked if the earth had a climate. What he seemed to ask was whether earth had a usual, a predictable climate. This prompted me to ask if there is a usual, a predictable conversation over history and before history? How could we find out? One way would be to look to our stories, our folk tales and our myths, not so much for what we usually seek: wisdom and history of thought. Rather to seek out how we conversed. Can we inspect the Grimm brothers collection? This collection is barely more than 200 years old. But it probably collects stories transmitted orally for hundreds of years before that. But what do we know about tales around the campfires and at the streams for millennia? And the songs that we sang before we knew fire? How might we discover them? What might they tell us about what it means to converse humanly?
:- Doug.
