Taomeow

According to Grok, it's a white cat thing. Q: Briefly: difference in meaning between American and British English for the word "modernism" A: In American and British English, "modernism" generally refers to a cultural, artistic, and literary movement from the late 19th to mid-20th century, emphasizing innovation, experimentation, and a break from traditional forms. The meaning is largely the same in both contexts, with no significant regional difference. Both associate it with movements in art, literature, and architecture (e.g., Joyce, Woolf, or Bauhaus). Any subtle distinctions might arise in academic or contextual usage, but these are minor and not systematically regional.

As for me, I'm not a hostage to modernism (did you mean modernity? 'cause modernism I don't have any use for, except maybe Cézanne but he was not quite that yet, just the transitional phase from art to all that nonsense). Rather, I'm trying to be an interpreter/translator when I resort to modern analogies. The reason for this is, I try to talk to real hostages-to-modernity in the parlance I hope/believe they know well. I know other languages too but those are not exactly widespread here, so I mostly keep them to myself, except for an occasional song of my people -- meow... meow... meowwwwwwwww....

When I asserted -- as I have for the past 25+ years -- that qi is the medium and message of meaningful change, I didn't say it lightly. A somewhat (but not quite) similar dual understanding which some phenomena merit causes physicists to refer to elementary particles as both particles and waves. It's not something an everyday mind steeped in "either/or" dualities of observable macro phenomena wraps itself around with ease. Could it be that your shiatsu teacher may have focused on the "message" part of what qi "is and does" but either overlooked or decided to ignore the "medium" part. Qi is both, and it is neither by itself. It's a medium/message of change, simultaneously. A bit like coffee from that old maxim: when you boil an egg in water it gets hard, when you boil a carrot in water it gets soft, but when you boil ground coffee in water it changes the water. Qi changes the medium it operates in while changing itself. Qi does travel though meridians not unlike that -- except it doesn't have to be a substance in order to both undergo and engender change... it's the pattern that travels -- and substances encountered on the way align (or resist aligning) with the pattern. Patterns underlie both matter and energy. Also sprach The Ta Chuan aka The Great Treatise on the Changes.

Does wifi exist? Is it a substance? Is your phone born with its Uber app? With its Instagram app? How about Amazon? Is your credit card stuffed with paper dollars and coins, which are substances? How do you fit them in there? Do your hundred dollar bills physically lose weight when there's inflation in the country? Does your bank account gain weight when you make a deposit? Does it lose weight when you make a payment? How about energy? What energy exactly does it gain or lose? And so on. The world does not just consist of substances and energies. The world is also choke full of changes. Changes can be meaningful or meaningless. Qi is the medium and message of meaningful change. The signifier of meaningful change is a pattern. MCO is not a substance and not "energy." (Oh the pop use of the term by folks who don't understand Newtonian mechanics, let alone quantum mechanics!) MCO is a pattern of movement of qi. A bit like an app. Sometimes it installs itself after you push the right button. Sometimes people push wrong buttons and it doesn't. But once it's there you know it's there. Just like Uber. You can get a ride if you have pushed the right button to install the Uber app. Does Uber exist? Do you carry a little inflatable car in your phone for it to exist? A hundred thousand little cars? ??? And yet you can get a ride if you have the app. Also sprach Taomeow.

Not sure about Roman concrete -- I seem to remember they used egg whites in it, but modern industrial processes have long been way too stingy for that. As for herbal birth control, I have this Chinese medical book, A Barefoot Doctor's Manual (too lazy to re-tell the story of its origins and contents but you can look it up), and it has a few plant based methods of birth control. It was developed as an entirely practical book, no tall tales, but a couple of birth control recipes there blew my socks off... There's a monthly method -- fertility is on hold while you take that herbal brew, and when you stop it gets restored within a short time. And a yearly method -- a remedy you take just once a year that switches your fertility off for that year. Also reversible. So those plant methods weren't lost everywhere... although I don't know the current fate of the plants that went into making them. Pre-civilized people always controlled their birth rates, and not via infanticide as our so-called "scholars" (indented slaves of the system, with perks) would have us believe. Women of our species, let alone matriarchs, were neither ignorant about things nature nor numb as doorknobs back then.

@old3bob So maybe you can recall the secret, lost for many centuries, of making that most desired trade item that was known as the Tyrian purple? It cost more than three times its weight in gold, and only the royalty, nobility and the Roman high clergy could afford it. I know it was obtained, via an incredibly laborious process of procurement and production, from certain species of Mediterranean snails. The snails might still be around... but the technology is lost. If you knew it in that past life and could retrieve it, you could make a fortune. The mega-wealthy still hunt for things no one else can afford, and pay incredible money for the items that come with a guarantee of no mass access to them. Of course countless modern purple pigments exist, but none can replicate that royal color. (In fact, I know the color purple has the potential of being striking, but in modern clothes, in most cases, I find it ugly. I do own one exception but that's it.)

Anemoia. From The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, by John Koenig, comes a word the language badly needed but never had until 2021. It's the feeling of nostalgia for a time you've never known. A wistful longing for an idealized past that exists only in imagination or secondhand accounts. When I first came to the US, to New York specifically, it was a different city from what it is today, and far as I'm concerned, a better one. But back then my older female co-workers, native New Yorkers, would often tell me about New York they used to know in their childhood and youth, and it was nothing like the city I was witnessing... it sounded like a dream, an urban fairy land. On more than one occasion they actually shed a tear telling me about that lost city. And they gave me anemoia. That's just one example. I'm massively afflicted by that feeling for many purposes. Some of it overlaps with nostalgia for the worlds (sic) I knew in this life, some must be genetic memory, and some -- possibly -- memories of past lives. I wonder how widespread this anemoia thing is.

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which only proves the point of the headline: I remember the early explorers of the land that was to become the USA reporting on what was to become the Hudson river -- they asserted you could cross that river stepping on salmon's backs.