Sublime Zettels March 2025

[Braille Anecdote]

[blindness][braille][awl]

Louis Braille had been accidentally blinded at the tender age of three years old in his father’s workshop, with an awl. Cohn remarks on this, drawing a breathtaking association: “Is it an accident that my tool for making hand-punched braille is so much like an awl?

Touching Words: on Poetry in Memoir TJ Pri... See more

[Digital Wildfire Fable]

When fire is observed publicly and in real time, new forms of participatory governance emerge, often outside of formal institutions. In our case, digital spectatorship pressured local fire managers to respond to a context, shaped by public perceptions, that was detached from actual conditions. The real fire was calm and cont... See more

around age four, children also develop ‘theory of mind’ (appreciating that people’s beliefs can fail to match reality), visual perspective-taking (understanding that something that’s blue for me will look green to you wearing yellow glasses), and tolerate ‘dual naming’ (you say tree, I say bush; we can both be right). Notably, these all involve hol... See more

Fire suppression without provisions for the inevitability of California’s fire cycles is, simply put, the pursuit of uniformity with the result of catastrophe. What if we saw fire not as a crisis to be managed, but as an epistemological break – a regular call to rethink our relationship to prediction, adaptation, and climate governance? What if we ... See more

the attempt at fencing in the ambiguity of that rule yields an arbitrary law that may draw justified objections even from proponents of the original. We have created a division and resulting conflict where none was ever necessary, and done so in the name of protecting a rule everyone agrees was just. ... Whatever we feel divides us, we should caref... See more

[Colette’s daughter sewing and thinking]

His [Han’s] tinkering is done with the stuff of thought rather than ‘wires or soldering irons’. The metaphor conveys a sense of thinking as more an environment than an activity, a distinctly German conception of the thinker’s vocation. ... [Han:] ‘Thinking is also tinkering, and thinking can produce explosion... See more

Judgment is vulnerable to error, and thus, justice requires an extra-judicial mechanism for maintaining and saving it: mercy.

The Heart of Judgment Zohar Atkins 3.7.2025