This week, I have been following my usual three-mile run around the lake while listening to a twenty-four part lecture series from The Teaching Company, called, The Darwinian Revolution. The lecturer is Prof. Frederick Gregory, and, from the very first lecture, I think I recognise in him the same impulse that drives Dr. Wentzell and myself to teach this subject. I may have to either slow the pace or increase my distance, as the lectures are just a little longer than my running time. I’ve gotten through the first four already, and I’m hooked. It is odd to listen without taking notes, however. I think I’m not naturally an aural learner; I do need to track my listening somehow, because I want to stop and note names and texts. But maybe this will help with my memory triggers; I find that I rely very much on my notetaking, and realize that, to teach a course, all needs to be ready to hand, in the short term archive.
What is intriguing me now is the relationship between time and the discussion of evolution. On my “to read” pile is Elizabeth Grosz’s The Nick of Time, a three-part text on Darwin and evolution, Deleuze and becoming, and Nietzsche and overcoming. I have been watching also a series called, Earth: The Power of the Planet, a series which dramatizes the movements of the forces of the earth – ice and water, and volcanoes, continental drift, shifting plates, and I’m dizzy with the idea of cosmic time, in which human scale time is contrasted with these incremental movements, layering, shifting, melting, flowing matter. It is as if the earth suddenly appeared to be constantly in flux, uncertain, unstable, after imagining everything laid out in orderly, fixed rows, mapped out, certain. I have never been one to gain security from certainty – I am never certain.
jencaruso
maggiewentzell
