Are thoughts, emotions, pains physical events? Or are they limited to the mind? The problem with such questions is that they attract inquiries to a noumenon (a hypothetically abstract categorical extrapolation beyond what is given in experience). What we pass over in silence, our experiences, correlate to these apparently spontaneous utterances, momentarily fused to ideo-reality, yet no more solid than the air used to shape them. When you walk and then stop, what happened to the walking? When the word is done spoken, what is left? No-thing. There is no ontological requirement to say we dis-cover, re-member, or under-stand a thing. The mind is as empty as the brain ever was. Until evolution, a change in base pair frequencies, burped something up.
Archive for April, 2016
Posted in Photography on April 15, 2016| Leave a Comment »
Posted in Poetry on April 15, 2016| Leave a Comment »
How many times did Judith do just that, scraping paint from her canvas
hoping somehow to unwrap another dream, carp round her task
covetously by bringing home the claps of an uncupped hand.
Should she try a little less. Undo the doer at the door. Is that romance?
Who was the very last person she ever met urgently while night
wore itself out and hope twisted dawn back from
namelessness. Where could she banish fear
of failing which was everywhere. To test this every morning
she recited to everyone she met all her words backwards.
Dr. Lecter meets Agent Starling for the first time and
realizes he has an ally in his one man war on cruelty.
Clarice had an elder ½ sister while he, he
hated census takers and other routine sociopaths
like us daily skinning others for our newer selves.
Posted in Philosophy on April 5, 2016| Leave a Comment »
In 1920 my grandfather fled the pogroms of eastern Europe for a country he envisioned would protect and support him. His family left behind was soon slaughtered wholesale in a genocide not even born yet. It is tempting to believe this was an anomaly, something located in a precise space and time, deserving of a special name like The Shoah. And yet such cruelty is all too mundane as we have seen, as I have seen, time and again. Understand that on this whole entire planet, there is no teacher, no colleague, no familiar, no lover, no friend who would not sell you out in a moment of weakness, of personal panic. What would it take for you to walk away from your dearly beloved? (Everyone has an answer to that question, validated or not.) That is the price of your own personal holocaust. It is not as dear as you thought.
Posted in Poetry on April 5, 2016| Leave a Comment »
questions like
do you sing when you should not
or write against the tide
do you feel like crying in church
do you do something else instead
what clarified the path of overcoming untangled then gone
what returned twice the inspiration of a native bird
winging past its own end to re conceive a dawn of
traced out hope do we ever over grow a beginning learn
to pair accountability with no blame
can you make your peace with cruelty
can you make it your life s work
i wanted only for forgery in the depths crimes without
appeal a trash strewn room dry dock
without a wheel why
not redeem your cash value god underwrites it all i m
a dilly a dally a blandishment of aught
or black hats that dot
the wailing wall at noon
Posted in Philosophy on April 5, 2016| Leave a Comment »
two proofs that light does not exist
1. If light traveled in ordinary space time, we could approach it, because all motion in space time is relative (according to Galilean relativity). But observationally, the speed of light is a constant for all observers, so we can’t approach it, so it can’t be traveling in ordinary space time. Therefore at the speed of light ordinary space and time don’t exist.
Posted in Philosophy on April 5, 2016| Leave a Comment »
two proofs that light does not exist
2. Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, because this would be inconsistent with the observational fact that the speed of light must be constant for all observers. And, as we approach the speed of light, space contracts, so at the speed of light, space will have dwindled away to zero, since the speed of light is the absolute limit. If space did not approach zero, there might be another limit beyond the speed of light that could still be approached (if space were not zero at the speed of light, then at the speed of light space would still be contracting, and could potentially contract some more than it already had). Also if space did not approach zero at the speed of light, it would be possible to apply an acceleration that would affect the back of my body before the front, and this would create two distinguishable inertial frames of reference, which is impossible beyond the speed of light because the speed of light is (observationally) the absolute limit. If space is zero, then time must also be zero. Therefore at the speed of light, space and time are both zero. That is they cease to exist
Posted in Poetry on April 5, 2016| Leave a Comment »
read this poem. read it now. of course,
you don’t have to read it. but i’d advise
that you do. in case it turns out
you don’t want to.
Posted in Philosophy on April 3, 2016| Leave a Comment »
As a primate with a large brain, I often find myself swimming through an emotionally intense social context. Despite how common this experience is, our culture tends to punish anyone who dares to speak of it. And it seems reasonable to suppose, as many have, that such emotional stigmata may be some of the prime controlling variables for what we call mental illness. With them, it seems to me we get attributions of many fantastic kinds: intent where there is only effect, sin where there is only chemistry, will where there is only want, should where there is only could, evil where there is only occurrence. Reward of endless cruelty and spiraling violence. Can we never see each other as we are?
metonymy4u 