Does it make a difference ...?
(50+/M/Tyneside,UK) 2014
Does it make a difference ...? philtal_uk
(38/M/Tyneside,UK) 1/12/02 10:06 am
Does it make a difference whether this message is read or not read?[!]
philiptalbot
Friday, 4 October 2013
Repetition is a Form of Change philtal_uk
(38/M/Tyneside,UK) 1/9/02 [= 9 January 2002] 7:48 pm
You can't read the same message twice - you change, it changes.
You cannot read the same message twice - you change, it changes.
Aristotle, Rhetoric.
'It is difficult to punctuate Heraclitus's writing because it is unclear whether a word goes with what follows it or with what goes before it. Eg, at the very beginning of his treatise, he says:
"of this account which holds forever men prove uncomprehending".
It is unclear what "forever" goes with.'
the same is present living and dead awake and asleep young and old for the latter change and are the former and the former change and are the latter
disconnections combinations wholes and not wholes concurring differing concordant discordant from all things one and from one all things
changing it rests and resting it changes
we step and do not step into the same rivers
we are and we are not
It is wise to listen, not to me, but to the words. The words say: 'All things are one.'
Although the words stay the same, they seem to change.
Though the words stay the same, they seem to change.
New Member philtal_uk
(38/M/Tyneside,UK) 1/9/02 8:27 pm
Hello ... pleased to meet you all - albeit marginally ... in a place on the edge of things that have no end and which is central and marginal and everywhere between at the same time and ...
Love Philip.
The Society of Heraclitus philtal_uk
(38/M/Tyneside,UK) 1/9/02 8:36 pm
Although separated and virtual strangers, we walk and talk together and blend in thoughts, emotions and feelings and find missing parts in others and giving missing parts to others and we take upon us, together and alone, the mystery of things - all things strange familiar simple complex mixed singular high low bitter sweet sorrowful joyful ... and although it can seem like meaningless nonsense it does eventually resolve itself into a sort of sense.
Does it make a difference ...? philtal_uk
(38/M/Tyneside,UK) 1/12/02 10:06 am
Does it make a difference whether this message is read or not read?
The act of writing it has brought some difference
(change)to the universe - and who can say what consequences that will have? (Tiny, trivial seeming acts can [perhaps occasionally, perhaps often, perhaps always] have wide-ranging consequences.)
Readings would further complicate matters - and responses even more so.
Plotinus on Heraclitus philtal_uk
(38/M/Tyneside,UK) 1/19/02 9:07 am
Plotinus [Enneads]:
Heraclitus who, by example, urges us to inquire into limitless matters, posits necessary exchanges from opposites and talks of paths up and down and around and
"changing it rests"
and
"it is weariness for the same to labour freely and to be ruled"
and he leaves us to conjecture and omits to make his argument clear and to reach conclusions, perhaps because he realised that we should inquire for ourselves as he himself inquired
Reality is complex, messy, not clear-cut.
So the way(s) into greater understanding of it cannot be simple, tidy, unambiguous.
Heraclitus rambles through the borderlands between coherence and incoherence.
Strange stuff emerges from that marginal zone.
Lifting the veil ... opening the doors of perception ... and all that.
It can be done - and doesn't require drugs.
But it is (perhaps) a mistake to imagine that what is revealed when the veil is lifted is more real than what is perceptible when it is still in place.
Reality is (most likely) multi-layered - all in all.
No level of reality is likely to be more real than any other
... and when you think you've got it sussed, then is the time for caution ... scepticism ... humility ... that way you go on learning ... or developing ... or just changing ...
Of reality we know nothing firmly ... it changes.
It seems unwise to speculate at random about the widest matters. But what esle can we do?
Ramble.
(1) Wander disconnectedly in discourse, talk, writing.
(2) Walk for pleasure and with pleasure, with or without a definite route, and with or without a clear destination
Flame and Vortex.
Both flame and vortex are example of dissipative structures - the maintenance of which require a continuous input of energy, and the effect of which is to dissipate that energy.
In a vortex, the energy is the potential engery of the water, which is dissipated as the water falls.
In a flame, the energy from chemical reactions is dissipated as heat.
As soon as the energy stops, the form disappear.
Shifting sands. Seething seas. Swirling skies.
Sea sounds. Synaesthesia. See sounds.
Of reality we know nothing firmly.
It changes.
... changing waterways churn on while I ramble on ...
The Society of Heraclitus philtal_uk
(38/M/Tyneside,UK) 1/9/02 8:36 pm
Although separated and virtual strangers, we walk and talk together and blend in thoughts, emotions and feelings and find missing parts in others and giving missing parts to others and we take upon us, together and alone, the mystery of things - all things strange familiar simple complex mixed singular high low bitter sweet sorrowful joyful ... and although it can seem like meaningless nonsense it does eventually resolve itself into a sort of sense.
Re: The Society of Heraclitus philtal_uk
(38/M/Tyneside,UK) 1/19/02 9:45 am
With few exceptions (perhaps none), every person experiences conscience, self-respect, remorse, empathy, shame, humility, moral outrage, etc - to varying degrees, at various times and places.
Out of this grows what seems to be a worldwide morality, including notions of altruism, justice, compassion, mercy ... even redemption.
Unfortunately, small-scale personal familiarities, and a limited sense of common interest, narrow the range of moral sentiments - making them selective: applied to 'us' but not to 'them'.
People give trust to strangers only with great effort.
True compassion, applied to all humans (recognised as fully human - and of 'us'), is in short supply.
Re: The Society of Heraclitus philtal_uk
(38/M/Tyneside,UK) 1/19/02 9:52 am
... meeting as an anonymous strangers in lonely crowds ... throwing love around ... and it changes ... and perhaps it grows ... and perhaps it blooms ... tomorrow ... or tomorrow ... or tomorrow ...
Leonardo's Heraclitean Vision philtal_uk
(38/M/Tyneside,UK) 2/2/02 9:29 am
Leonardo: 'Everything proceeds from everything else and everything becomes everything else and everything can be turned into everything else.'
[If you look for long enough, everything might be seen in a young woman's smile ... or an old man's frown.]
Re: Leonardo's Heraclitean Vision philtal_uk
(38/M/Tyneside,UK) 2/6/02 7:29 am
Leonardo:
The artist can call into being the essences of animals of all kinds, of plants, fruits, landscapes, rolling plains, crumbling mountains, fearful and terrible places which strike terror into the spectator; and again pleasant places, sweet and delightful with meadows of many-coloured flowers bent by the gentle motion of the wind, which turns back to look at them as it floats on; and then rivers falling from high mountains and the force of great floods, ruins which drive down with them up-rooted plants mixed with rocks, roots, earth, and foam and wash away to its ruins all that comes in their path; and then the stormy sea, striving and wrestling with the winds which fight against it, raising itself up in superb waves, which fall in ruins as the wind strikes at their roots.
+++++
Drafts ...
Names change ... labels change ...
Or, as the existentialist (concluding naturally, she believed) put it: 'Time passes, people change.'
True enough.
All in all ... it changes ... but the essence of it all remains the same ...
So...
The quaker, the catholic, the anglican [words meaning many things (and not necessarily indicating faiths), while also being merely nominal signifiers of particular, relatively insignificant, individualized human beings] wandered in and out of relative obscurity, and each others' and other people's lives, and noticed a few things that nobody had ever noticed before, and never would again, and missed many other matters that they might have noticed, but didn't.
While the voices sometimes sang in their ears, saying that this was maybe all folly.
'Six hands at an open door...'
But...
There might have been more, and the names might have been different, and ...
The time might not have yet come ...
Or it might have been and gone ...
Or, next time, after a reshuffle, it might all be different ...
One name might have been Zed ... who was a typically British delightfully mixed up mess ... iridescent, polyglottic, cosmopolitan ... a free-wheeling wild daisy ... daisy ... on an old-fashioned upright English bicycle ... riding to the unifying international news agency building through a changing London docklands on an island of sorts (which was nominally a home for dogs) and near the time centre at Greenwich ... and nearby lived mostly ignored people who would not recognise her as a fellow English rose because their own blooming possibilities had been neglected ... (and not far away in time and place, under a futuristic light railway bridge, a multicultural ideas spreading news agent was murdered by ethnic nationalists with closed minds who couldn't escape from their past prejudices) ... Z was a far from unnecessary letter ...
Another might have been M ... a sharp-tongued, snub-nosed Scottish socratic ... passionate and compassionate ... much concerned about The Issues ... who liked dialectics in non-standard dialects ... and complained that talking to him could be like talking to herself ... and who wrote letters with reverse strip-teases in them ... she sat in bed writing to him and put on an extra jumper and extra socks and ... well he was cold-seeming ... and he had once sat on a bed with her when she was wearing a partly transparent nightie and he had pretended very carefully not to see through it ...
Or there might have been another A ... a very sophisticated Irish named (and double-barrelled) self-styled working class lass ... who encouraged him to go with the flow with kind words and curving flowing limb motions ... and who walked alongside him in a slightly absurd part-falling manner (which might have had something to do with the vaguely ridiculous thick-souled shoes she was wearing) ... but with her, as with others, there seemed to be a mountainous obstacle course in the space between them ... which even a veteran rambler could not find a route through .. or around ... and perhaps it was better to maintain a distance between ...
And ...
You get the odd glimpse of the infinite complexity of it all ... but then you lose it ... and you go on with your small-scale guess-work ...
So ...
Call them what you will ... ally, catty, philly ... or make them up as you go along ... angels, imps, aliens ... or (as it actually seems to go) rearrange bits of the previously existing into new patterns ...
They travelled.
Chilly awakenings under canvas. Buses that never turned up. Dreary, slow, often-stopping local trains. The dizzy kaleidoscope of landscapes and ruins. Cities that changed before their eyes as they stopped to stare for an instant. Seascapes and skyscapes. Ships coming in not laden with gold. Flowing patterns of lives in motion in a world in motion, with the increasing density of everyday experience seeming to render all experiences increasingly transient and superficial.
And...
Each found places there were satisfactory for a while, then unsatisfactory.
So they went to other places - or to spaces between things that, for a while at least, they could call their own.
And then one day, or it might have been many days, they seemed to find themselves among people clutching gods of sorts that they did not quite believe in any more, or which, one way or another, or in several (even many) ways did not satisfy all their needs of belief.
It seemed to be a time of general and particular confusion ... or of reconsideration ... or of reviews ... out of which a new synthesis of older ways of thinking might emerge.
If the hypothesis of a fully transcendent creator implanting motion in the system of extended bodies were judged no long sustainable, then it would seem an instrinsic characteristic of the extended or spatial world that everything within it is constituted of particular proportions of motion and rest - which suggests that motion must be essential to and inseparable from the nature and constitution of extended things. The proportions of motion and rest within the system as a whole must be constant, since there could be no external cause to explain any change in the system; but within the subordinate parts of the system the proportions of motion and rest are constantly changing in the interaction of these parts among each other.
Spin spin spin out the ever-changing (and ever so easy to misrepresent and misinterpret) system of Spinoza, or something like it.
Minds in turmoil, how they longed to embrace simples. Many times they rushed towards them, desperate to hold on to solid forms. Many times they fluttered through clutching fingers, sifting away, like shadows, dissolving like dreams, and each time the griefs cut to the hearts sharper, and they cried out incoherent words, which winged into the darkness.
Now down they came to the water's edge, streaming tears ... drops of sea-stuff returning to the world-wide waterway.
Rumour has it that if you throw a cup of water into the sea and return a decade or so later to scoop up a fresh cup of water from the same (which is not of course the same) bit of the sea, then, despite all the churning and mixing that has occurred in the sea over the decade or so, the cup will contain some molecules of the water you threw into the sea at the earlier time. It seems unlikely, but statistical probabilities suggest it - there are more molecules of water in a cup (whatever its size) than there are cups (or the equivalent volume) in the sea.
'I don't know what to say.'
'No words. No words. Hush.'
Hush.
Sea sounds. See changes.
So we made for the outer limits, where the worldwide waterway seemed to flow towards its end - though of course it was an illusion. Some said it was where the Cimmerians previously had their homes, a realm shrouded in mist and cloud, where the sun could never flash rays through the murk. Others said it was a just a small northern town in the middle of winter.
Wandering on, bedlam melodies wandering through our minds ...
... we get by and keep on keeping on with a little help from our friends all is on little loves and small acts of kindness and big hugs pulling mussels from shells and pulling muscles in other words squeeze me you know how to do that Annie and get your gun she's passed it's a miracle her paint's all over town and Alison my aim is true I know this world is killing you and her and him and me and OK I was just Cathy's clown on a hillside desolate will nature make a man of me yet visions of swastikas two new pence to have a go and fall wanking to the floor and frigging in the rigging while there are footsteps on the dancefloor the next time I'll be true I heard on the grapevine that rumour had it that I just called to say I love you thank you for giving me the best day of my life and thank you for calling inquiries while I got stuck in the moment records stick stuck records bells on our fingers ask not whom we toll them for we shall have music wherever we go on go on go on at last the go on show at last but not the end there is no end to wandering I would go out tonight but I have not got a thing to wear but don't you forget about me as you walk on by if you see me walking down the street walk on walk on by with love in your heart and take a walk on the wild side and you just know that bitch won't fuck again but say it ain't so Joe say it Joe eh Joe Hey Joe where are you going with that gun in your hand excuse me while I take another face from the ancient gallery and kiss the sky often mistaken for kiss this guy kiss me kiss me you know how to please me yeah yeah kiss me in the milky twilight you wear that dress and I will wear those shoes and she was last seen the last time I ever saw her face wearing stop me stop me if you've heard this one before hey hey hey what's going on we're sailing off the edge of the world living like Fu Manchu there's nothing else to do maybe baby we know where we are going once in a lifetime on the road to nowhere or funky town or kook city and live life from a window just taking in the view all around the world looking for you and you just stayed in your room that day that day when we took off our clothes and you were crying and the stupid things you said and I said we were birds of paradise and you saw the whole of the moon pink pink pink moon no matter where I roam I will return to my British roses before the sky closes on them and open on others and no one will ever take me from she and she been a long time been a long time been a lonely lonely lonely long time under the northern skies waiting and wondering and wandering on for more life in a northern town wandering on and maybe tomorow maybe someday we'll get by ...
... jigsaw feeling ... has me reeling ... which may be lurching desperately ... or which may be a kind of dancing.
What triangles ...
The solitary sage of Walden (or there or there abouts - or some other place of concorde) pointed out that triangles of extraordinary size were set up when two people by chance (as it might seem) separated by many earthly miles looked at the same distant star at the same earthly instant ...
What polygons of unthinkable complexity are formed when the consciousnesses of three or more (billions maybe) are linked up deeply for a single instant.
And each individual consciousness is limitless ... set off at any instant in any direction in any individual mind, and you'll never reach an end to the association networks ...
Beyond the outlines ... barely experienced, poorly remembered ... fragmentary details ... the bewildering spread of the simple seeming event ...
Figures in a blended inscape and outscape ...
Cathy and her clown walked together near the water's edge. Blurs from some perspectives, dots, or even less from others. Viewed from some places and times they become recognizable human forms, though mostly in outline, devoid of many details. Further perspective shifts reveal complexitity upon completity. It is possible to conceive of a multiverse perspective ... all possible perspectives at the same instant.
Two little people on a coastal walk in a small town, on the margins, but at the centre of things ... So it is with all: any point, any person, any event, is central and marginal and everywhere in between.
She is small and short-stepping. He is tall and long-striding. The long and the short of it. Big he who is not so big and small she who is not so small. They do not seem well matched. Their mortions are not very synchronized-seeming, as she is too fond of pointing out for his comfort (and hers perhaps too). She walks close to him, often bumping into him rather clumsily. Mostly she talks, he listens. A deluge of words. Waves crashing on to the shore. Her voice rises in pitch and and increases in tempo as she continues. She seems anxious to get things said, while she still has the chance, while there is still time.
They walk in no particular direction, to nowhere in particular. Separate random walks are taking place, which, since they are walking together, in however an unsynchronised and clumsy and bumping manner, become a shared walk. They walk on the edge of land and sea, near a pub called the Water's Edge. Human naming systems help to make a sort of sense of things, providing reference points and an order of sorts.
They seem on the edge of things, in a marginal zone, a place of transition. and they are nearing the edge of their time together. Soon they'll separate, perhaps forever. So it seems she has to get her words said. She talks of people on the edge of things, marginalised people, known as the underclass for want of a more human label, whom she's encountered in the early stages of her training as a probation officer. It seems important to her to let him know of what she has witnessed. He's a bit puzzled by that. She's leaving him behind, but wants to fill his mind with her thoughts and experiences. She's planting trace memories perhaps.
Another way of seeing it ... on the shores of the cosmic ocean a strangely beautiful well-matched asymetric couple mess things up.
(This much seems true: new life comes from asymmetry - the evidence is all around. Fear death by symmetry - when all the complex, messy slightly disordered asymmetrical unities break up, and 'it' becomes a spread of equally distanced particle fragments drifting ever further apart.)
Random walks
The myriad contingencies of a short walk in a small town.
But when you consider them with an open mind everything can seem to connect and every part seems integral to the whole.
Sitting in my small town room, given strange powever by technologies, the workings of which I do not understand and never will, I seem to travel far, and seem to perceive many things.
Common culture. It is in us all. Flowing through us all and being transformed by us all.
All in all.
All things might be written in a single book of love, of which creation is the scattered leaves.
Organisations can form in the underground [and they can be forces for good - not terrorist networks], and they can communicate in undertones, and without the constituent parts having much conscious awareness that they are a part of a larger whole.
Birds flock together at appropriate times, but probably are not much aware that they are flocking.
Perhaps we are often acted upon by organising forces beyond our understanding.
This long watch, which dog-like he kept ... Soon the long wished for signs might relieve his passive toils ... beacons gleaming through long recurring nights ... Beacons .. which might only be cigarettes ... These walls could recall strange things .. and much else...
Like a shrunken leaf ... that is not really dying ... all recycles .. flows .. changes ... feebly feeling ... like a dream that walks by day ... the persuasive breath of memories involuntarily recalled ... mostly stirring the heart with songs .. sometimes sensed as beautiful .. sometimes not ...
Like shapes in dreams he wandered through the years, seeming random, planless, his forethought in chains ...
But the vision of the birds might yet work its end into bliss ...
But contraries might yet blast darkly first...
This way the part-time seer hymned, dubiously mixing doom and bliss, dark mingling with light ... and much confusion and obscurity ...
Sharing with the way-haunting birds, which seemed to signal something ... he was responding to the strains .. which could not be merely sounds .. there had to be some meaning, some purpose in everything ... the singings sounded of sorrows and glad days ... and of good times that might yet shame the bad.
Meanwhile ... a most unpleasant surprise was in store for the platonic prick ...
...just as the likely lass began yawning as he was telling her all sorts of amusing stories that had happend to him at different times and places, and even referring once to the Greek cynical philospher Diogenes, the weird sister appeared from one of the back rooms. Whether she had torn herself away from a cold collation, or from the little green drawing room, where some postgraduates' conversation had become more alarming to her, whether she had come of her own free will, or whether she had been thrown out of her previous environment in embarrassing circumstances, which she might or might not later reveal ... whatever the cause or collection of part-causes that had brought her from some other place to this place, she apeared to be cheerful and in the best of spirits. And she was holding on to ther arm of the devil's advocate, or one who was assuming that role, for the time being, and in the particular circumstances in which they now all found themselves. Yet he appeared unhappy. Maybe she had been dragging him along with her (and even perhaps attempting to pull him to the floor) for some time. Whatever the cause, assuming there was one, the poor putter-of-the-case-against certainly seemed discomforted, for he kept attempting to turn around, while his eyebrows beetled in all directions, and his eyes seemed to be searching for a way to excape from this amicable arm-in-arm promenade with the weird sister.
It was, indeed, quite an intolerable situation. The platonic prick saw no ther way out of it than to gulp down quickly, with forced convivialtiy, two cups of coffee, with were, of course, laced with red wine, while he kept on telling the most unlikely stories. The devil's advocate became ever more disconcerted, but still could find no way of excape. The weird sister laughed and scowled at the fun of it all. The kindly quaker remained, as often, seemingly calmly silent.
Bridge buildings ...
Ally and philly were sitting together in a bar, which might have been called The Bridge (but that was actually another place, another time) and she began openly to speak her mind to him for once ... The wonderful flow of words enters him and fills him and swells him, and the words change her in his mind ... she'll never seem the same again. After an hour or two, he feels obliged to say something about himself, but when he attempts to interrupt her word-flow, she says, 'No ... I'll speak' ... and the wonderful warming and expansive words continue to come out of her, and to close the space between them, and to fill him with a her glow, which he will never forget, even though, for various reasons, they do not see much of each other afterwards.
She was possibly the least malicious person he had ever met, but ally was the one person to speak negative things about catty into his ears - telling him that catty 'was just not worth it' and that he 'could do better than that woman'. And when he thought feelingly about it then, and for a long time afterwards, he saw multiple possible meanings in what she said ... but he could not accept the proposition that any human being was 'just not worth it', because all are worth it, or else all are worth nothing ... and maybe that was just quibbling ... but ... that was the way it was with him.
Years later, (this year in fact) pally ally cropped up in India and Pakistan (this is no fiction) at a time of tension, when some feared the possibility of a nuclear war. She was part of a leading world stateman's 'travelling entourage' (her words) ... to most a unnoticed face in a crowd ... but to the platonic prick she was a symbol of peace ... she carried love with her and no hatred that he could imagine. And oddly enough (or not) tensions on the Indian sub-continent reduced afterwards, and the threat of nuclear war faded. Of course many others were involved. The key seemed to be: not the 'great' men's [there were, alas, still too few 'great' women on the world's stage] words and deeds ... nor even the charms (which were considerable) of his known female peace symbol ... but all those millions of little loves of little lives of mostly kindly mostly decent people who didn't actually want to slaughter others, or to be slaughtered themselves - maybe they all worked together, without quite knowing it, to calm things down.
Meanwhile, the curious cat cared so much about the marginalized people whom she worked with (and for) that it once (or more) almost broke her. She saw hellish visions of 'bottomless pits of need and deprivation' ...
And there can seem to be no end to the suffering in the private hells of even an affluent society.
But even with such dispriting thoughts in mind to discourage her, she returned to work and did little things to help people and to fill up the void bit by bit.
In the near past that was a long time ago cat wrote many letters to phil and complained that he never wrote enough to her ... it was a complaint that mixed fairness with unfairness, as most do ...
In her letters, as far as he could remember, she only ever quoted him one line of poetry, from Tennyson's Ulysses:
'... I am a part of all that I have met ... '
As she might or might not have gone on to point out, the reverse it also true:
... All that I have met is a part of me ...
The surprising thing was that while Cat and Al studied much the same subject in much the same place at much the same time, and wandered more or less contemporaneously in much the same streets of at least two other cities ... and had much in common ... and must have crossed paths occasionally ... and had even perhaps caused each other some hurt of sorts, via their connections through Phil ... they never fully met (unless a trick was missed) .. which is something a shame, because they had much good to share with each other ...
It can seem like nonsense, but it does eventually resolve itself into a sort of sense ...
All this was a long time ago. But what is a long time? The long and the short of it all. Big he who was not so big and small shes who were not so small. I remember little but much. I forget much but little. And I would do it again but in different ways. Repetition is a form of change. Nothing is the same twice, so nothing is the same ever. Say hello, wave goodbye. Wave goobye, say hello. In every meeting, the image of birth, a sort of coming together. In every parting, the image of death, a sort of falling apart. I never knew you well enough, you never knew me well enough. So it goes. Undertanding of other people is, like all understanding, never good enough. On it goes. On we go. Finding out more. Making new patterns, remembering and forgetting, building up and breaking down. Say hello, wave goodbye. Kiss and hug if you want to, do not kiss and hug if you do not want to. Something was taking its course, that much is certain, if no more. Whether we follow a course to birth or to death is uncertain. And that uncertainty clouds the issue of whether we act freely or follow courses determined for us. But there does seem to be free will on the local human scale. At any possible world junction there are many, perhaps limitless, possibilities open to us, and every instant brings us to a new possible world junction, when a small act of choice can make a huge difference. But if, whatever choices we make, the overall course of things is towards a break up of all unities, and so towards oblivion for all, then individual destinies seem trivial. If it is not to be futile, then we must find courses that lead somewhere, to some betterment, some resolution, some harmony, some development, or just some continuation. Maybe it comes down to faith, but that might just be wishful thinking. But you never know - and maybe there's hope in uncertainty. No one, the pessimists or the optimists, really knows. Humans are perhaps just too limited in understanding, and probably, however developed they become, always will be. That is the way it seems to be and maybe will remain. And so one cannot escape from the voices singing that this might be all just folly. But then folly is not the same as futility. And folly is at least amusing and out of amusement might come a more profound kind of comedy, which is a movement towards harmony, and when the motion is towards harmony then perhaps the easier it becomes to make approaches towards some ideal harmonic state - even if it is never reached. And actually achieving complete harmony might not even be desirable, because that might be the end of it all - after which no more for worse or for better.
It seems foolish to speculate at random about the widest matters ... but what else can you do?
Saturday 18 January 2014
Wednesday 8 January 2014
RevisionAndReviews_for future re-editing_08012014
Science and Openness:
Fact and Fiction
Richard Preston is one of the world’s best popular
science journalists.
When he wrote books about astronomy [First Light]
and medical
microbiology [The Hot Zone] he found the scientists
involved in
these fields open-minded and keen to share their
work – as well as
themselves as human beings – with the wider world.
What emerges
from these books, which mix ‘human interest’ and
‘hard science’, is a
picture of real science as done by real human beings
– who, for example,
chat about the sports programmes they watched last
night on
t.v. in between doing highly technical observations
of the most distantly
visible galactic structures.
When Richard Preston turned his attention to
biological weapons
research, he entered a closed, secretive, reality-
denying world, where
the people involved were not prepared to talk
openly, nor to disclose
their findings to a wider public under their own
names, nor to reveal
the human realities of their work. So he wrote a
book of fiction [The
Cobra Event], using the same reporting techniques as
for his previous
books, but in which human identities were disguised
and blurred
by fictionalisation. He claims of this book: ‘the
historical background
is real, the government structures are real, and the
science is real or
based on what is possible’. In other words: he does
his best to tell it
as it is - or might be - in circumstances that make
truth-telling difficult.
[Rumour – and perhaps the odd reliable intelligence
source! –
suggests that Bill Clinton read The Cobra Event as a
antidote to the
bio-weapons intelligence reports he was being fed by
the defence
establishment while American president.]
At its best, science investigates reality by the
open consideration of
ideas and checkable physical evidence. Ideas and
evidence are put
into the public realm and [literally and
metaphorically] knocked about
in open debate. Those ideas and evidence that stand
up to the hard
knocks of public scrutiny generally pass for
something approaching
the truth – until better ideas or other evidence are
found. Science at
its best is hence democratic and progressive. It is
also commonplace
[since it deals with a common reality we all share]
and humbling
[since it reveals extraordinary wide-ranging notions
that put us
in our place in the wider scheme of things].
The best scientists have normal human prides and
other flaws, but
they also have a kind of humility – they acknowledge
their uncertainties,
and understand that while they work with nature they
do not
really control it. They also tend to be open about
their work. The
worst scientists lack humility and can come to
believe they alone
have unique intelligence, and that they can control
nature. They often
claim ‘certainties’ that they do not have. They tend
to be secretive.
And the work they produce tends to result in
distortion of the
truth [because it is not properly scrutinised in
open forums that can
bring out errors]. The truth becomes even more
distorted when secretive
scientific research is incorporated into the
command-and-control
power ‘games’ of the ‘power elite’ – political,
military and/or corporate.
As Richard Preston puts it: ‘Open, peer-reviewed
biological
research can reap great benefits. … What is
dangerous is human
intent.’
All of which is a preamble of sorts to an opening
consideration of the
death in suspicious circumstances, on Thursday, July
17, of Dr David
Kelly - a previously mostly anonymous man who,
apparently, was
one of Britain’s leading experts on biological
weapons, employed by
the British ministry of ‘defence’, and who had been
involved in weapons
inspection work in Iraq.
Dr Kelly’s family have said this weekend that ‘all
those involved should
reflect long and hard’ on his death – and who could
disagree with
them on that?
As it has been reported in the mainstream media, the
‘case’ of Dr
Kelly’s death is quite ‘open-and-shut’: a quiet and
decent academic
scientist, unused to publicity, cracked under
pressure after becom-
ing caught up in a vicious public row between
government and media
over claims of ‘spin-doctoring’ of intelligence
reports [apparently including
work done by Dr Kelly himself] and while in a
distressed
state, he committed suicide – painkillers-and-
wrist-slashing being his
chosen method, according to suggestions in police
statements.
Conspiracy theorists – rushing to conclusions in
their own ways –
are suggesting more sinister alternative
possibilities. The truth is
that at present the circumstances leading up to Dr
Kelly’s death are
generally uncertain, but his death was troubling and
mysterious –
something, indeed, for ‘all those involved to
reflect long and hard’
about.
According to the normal conventions of British law,
the cause of a
suspicious death is something for an inquest jury of
randomly selected
British citizens to reach a verdict about. In other
words, judgement
on Dr Kelly’s death should not be left to a single
judge, however
independent, appointed to lead a judicial inquiry by
a Prime Minister
whose own involvement in the course of events
leading to Dr Kelly’s
death is open to question. The basic questions for
that public inquest
jury to consider are, effectively, those that apply
to every doubtful
death: did he ‘fall’? or was he ‘pushed’?
Meanwhile, there are many legitimate questions the
wider British public
has a right to ask and to get answers to, including:
· what exactly was Dr Kelly doing in his years as a
British taxfunded
biological weapons researcher?
· why were his evaluations of the present state of
bio-weapon
research and development in Iraq [which can hardly
be regarded
as British state secrets, and which were crucial
issues
in the government’s ‘justifications’ for going to
war] not
released more openly for others to evaluate?
· in short, what did he really know?
Historical Post-Scripts
From Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory,
Chapter VI.
[Embedded quotes are from Robert Graves, Goodbye To
All That]:
“The attack is to be preceded by a forty-minute
discharge of gas from
cylinders in the trenches. For security reasons the
gas is euphemized
as ‘the accessory’. When it is discovered that the
manage-
ment of the gas is in the hands of a gas company
officered by chemistry
dons from London University, morale hits a comic
rock-bottom.
‘Of course they’ll bungle it,’ says Thomas. ‘How
could they do anything
else?’ Not only is the gas bungled: everything goes
wrong. The
storeman stumbles and spills all the rum in the
trench just before the
company goes over; the new type of grenade won’t
work in the dampness;
the colonel departs for the rear with a slight cut
on his hand; a
crucial German machine gun is left undestroyed; the
German artillery
has the whole exercise taped. The gas is supposed to
be blown
across by favourable winds. When the great moment
proves entirely
calm, the gas company sends back a message ‘Dead
calm. Impossible
discharge accessory’, only to be ordered by the
staff, who like
characters in farce are entirely obsessed,
mechanical, and unbending:
‘Accessory to be discharged at all costs.’ The gas,
finally discharged
after the discovery that most of the wrenches for
releasing it
won’t fit, drifts out and then settles back into the
British trenches.
Men are going over and rapidly coming back, and we
hear comically
contradictory crowed/crowd noises: ‘Come on!’ ‘Get back,
you bastards!’
‘Gas turning on us!’ ‘Keep your heads, you men!’
‘Back like hell,
boys!’ ‘Whose orders?’ ‘What’s happening?’ ‘Gas!’
‘Back!’ ‘Come
on!’ ‘Gas!’ ‘Back!’ A ‘bloody balls-up’ is what the
troops called it.
Historians call it the Battle of Loos.”
From Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach:
“… we are here as on a darkling plain
swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight
where ignorant armies clash by night.”
[Philip Talbot, 20/07/03]
Fact and Fiction
Richard Preston is one of the world’s best popular
science journalists.
When he wrote books about astronomy [First Light]
and medical
microbiology [The Hot Zone] he found the scientists
involved in
these fields open-minded and keen to share their
work – as well as
themselves as human beings – with the wider world.
What emerges
from these books, which mix ‘human interest’ and
‘hard science’, is a
picture of real science as done by real human beings
– who, for example,
chat about the sports programmes they watched last
night on
t.v. in between doing highly technical observations
of the most distantly
visible galactic structures.
When Richard Preston turned his attention to
biological weapons
research, he entered a closed, secretive, reality-
denying world, where
the people involved were not prepared to talk
openly, nor to disclose
their findings to a wider public under their own
names, nor to reveal
the human realities of their work. So he wrote a
book of fiction [The
Cobra Event], using the same reporting techniques as
for his previous
books, but in which human identities were disguised
and blurred
by fictionalisation. He claims of this book: ‘the
historical background
is real, the government structures are real, and the
science is real or
based on what is possible’. In other words: he does
his best to tell it
as it is - or might be - in circumstances that make
truth-telling difficult.
[Rumour – and perhaps the odd reliable intelligence
source! –
suggests that Bill Clinton read The Cobra Event as a
antidote to the
bio-weapons intelligence reports he was being fed by
the defence
establishment while American president.]
At its best, science investigates reality by the
open consideration of
ideas and checkable physical evidence. Ideas and
evidence are put
into the public realm and [literally and
metaphorically] knocked about
in open debate. Those ideas and evidence that stand
up to the hard
knocks of public scrutiny generally pass for
something approaching
the truth – until better ideas or other evidence are
found. Science at
its best is hence democratic and progressive. It is
also commonplace
[since it deals with a common reality we all share]
and humbling
[since it reveals extraordinary wide-ranging notions
that put us
in our place in the wider scheme of things].
The best scientists have normal human prides and
other flaws, but
they also have a kind of humility – they acknowledge
their uncertainties,
and understand that while they work with nature they
do not
really control it. They also tend to be open about
their work. The
worst scientists lack humility and can come to
believe they alone
have unique intelligence, and that they can control
nature. They often
claim ‘certainties’ that they do not have. They tend
to be secretive.
And the work they produce tends to result in
distortion of the
truth [because it is not properly scrutinised in
open forums that can
bring out errors]. The truth becomes even more
distorted when secretive
scientific research is incorporated into the
command-and-control
power ‘games’ of the ‘power elite’ – political,
military and/or corporate.
As Richard Preston puts it: ‘Open, peer-reviewed
biological
research can reap great benefits. … What is
dangerous is human
intent.’
All of which is a preamble of sorts to an opening
consideration of the
death in suspicious circumstances, on Thursday, July
17, of Dr David
Kelly - a previously mostly anonymous man who,
apparently, was
one of Britain’s leading experts on biological
weapons, employed by
the British ministry of ‘defence’, and who had been
involved in weapons
inspection work in Iraq.
Dr Kelly’s family have said this weekend that ‘all
those involved should
reflect long and hard’ on his death – and who could
disagree with
them on that?
As it has been reported in the mainstream media, the
‘case’ of Dr
Kelly’s death is quite ‘open-and-shut’: a quiet and
decent academic
scientist, unused to publicity, cracked under
pressure after becom-
ing caught up in a vicious public row between
government and media
over claims of ‘spin-doctoring’ of intelligence
reports [apparently including
work done by Dr Kelly himself] and while in a
distressed
state, he committed suicide – painkillers-and-
wrist-slashing being his
chosen method, according to suggestions in police
statements.
Conspiracy theorists – rushing to conclusions in
their own ways –
are suggesting more sinister alternative
possibilities. The truth is
that at present the circumstances leading up to Dr
Kelly’s death are
generally uncertain, but his death was troubling and
mysterious –
something, indeed, for ‘all those involved to
reflect long and hard’
about.
According to the normal conventions of British law,
the cause of a
suspicious death is something for an inquest jury of
randomly selected
British citizens to reach a verdict about. In other
words, judgement
on Dr Kelly’s death should not be left to a single
judge, however
independent, appointed to lead a judicial inquiry by
a Prime Minister
whose own involvement in the course of events
leading to Dr Kelly’s
death is open to question. The basic questions for
that public inquest
jury to consider are, effectively, those that apply
to every doubtful
death: did he ‘fall’? or was he ‘pushed’?
Meanwhile, there are many legitimate questions the
wider British public
has a right to ask and to get answers to, including:
· what exactly was Dr Kelly doing in his years as a
British taxfunded
biological weapons researcher?
· why were his evaluations of the present state of
bio-weapon
research and development in Iraq [which can hardly
be regarded
as British state secrets, and which were crucial
issues
in the government’s ‘justifications’ for going to
war] not
released more openly for others to evaluate?
· in short, what did he really know?
Historical Post-Scripts
From Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory,
Chapter VI.
[Embedded quotes are from Robert Graves, Goodbye To
All That]:
“The attack is to be preceded by a forty-minute
discharge of gas from
cylinders in the trenches. For security reasons the
gas is euphemized
as ‘the accessory’. When it is discovered that the
manage-
ment of the gas is in the hands of a gas company
officered by chemistry
dons from London University, morale hits a comic
rock-bottom.
‘Of course they’ll bungle it,’ says Thomas. ‘How
could they do anything
else?’ Not only is the gas bungled: everything goes
wrong. The
storeman stumbles and spills all the rum in the
trench just before the
company goes over; the new type of grenade won’t
work in the dampness;
the colonel departs for the rear with a slight cut
on his hand; a
crucial German machine gun is left undestroyed; the
German artillery
has the whole exercise taped. The gas is supposed to
be blown
across by favourable winds. When the great moment
proves entirely
calm, the gas company sends back a message ‘Dead
calm. Impossible
discharge accessory’, only to be ordered by the
staff, who like
characters in farce are entirely obsessed,
mechanical, and unbending:
‘Accessory to be discharged at all costs.’ The gas,
finally discharged
after the discovery that most of the wrenches for
releasing it
won’t fit, drifts out and then settles back into the
British trenches.
Men are going over and rapidly coming back, and we
hear comically
contradictory crowed/crowd noises: ‘Come on!’ ‘Get back,
you bastards!’
‘Gas turning on us!’ ‘Keep your heads, you men!’
‘Back like hell,
boys!’ ‘Whose orders?’ ‘What’s happening?’ ‘Gas!’
‘Back!’ ‘Come
on!’ ‘Gas!’ ‘Back!’ A ‘bloody balls-up’ is what the
troops called it.
Historians call it the Battle of Loos.”
From Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach:
“… we are here as on a darkling plain
swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight
where ignorant armies clash by night.”
[Philip Talbot, 20/07/03]
Friday 3 January 2014
Another might have been M ... a sharp-tongued, snub-nosed Scottish Socratic ...
Another might have been M ...
Another might have been M ... a sharp-tongued, snub-nosed Scottish Socratic ... passionate and compassionate ... much concerned about The Issues ... who liked dialectics in non-standard dialects ... and complained that talking to him could be like talking to herself ... and who wrote letters with reverse strip-teases in them ... she sat in bed writing to him and put on an extra jumper and extra socks and ... well he was cold-seeming ... and he had once sat on a bed with her when she was wearing a partly transparent nightie and he had pretended very carefully not to see through it ...
And ...
You get the odd glimpse of the infinite complexity of it all ... but then you lose it ... and you go on with your small-scale guess-work ...
So ...
Date: Sat Jun 8, 2002 4:34 am
Subject: Jane Makeover
Riverland is full of all sorts of fashions ... and girls who would
make natural models ... which is why we sent out own special
correspondent little Ms June Makeover to investigate a local
modelling course.
It started as a typical Saturday morning. It finished with her legs
aching, a £13 parking ticket, and a new-found image with a veneer of
sophistication.
She had rolled out of bed, splodged some make-up on to her barely
open eyes and bowled down to the Pat A. Cake Agency for a one day's
intensive grooming and self-improvement course.
The other girls were immaculate, most of them wanted to be models,
and most of them were about 15 years younger than her.
'Never mind,' said Pat, immaculate blonde, and former Ms Great
Britain, 'this course is about confidence, that's what we're here
for.'
Jone had always fancied herself as a kind of down-market glamour
kitten with tousled appeal. Someone once told her she had cheekbones
like Bo Derek. Nothing else, just the cheekbones.
When Pet started out with make-up she knew she was kidding herself.
Off came the stuff Jine'd only just put on. The lines and shadows
under her eyes that Jene'd always thought interesting came under
attack.
And there was more. Deportment - sitting, walking, taking off a
jacket, entering a room, ascending and descending stairs (models do
it sideways). They paraded in front of the huge mirror, with Pit
intoning 'Heel-ball of foot, heel-ball of foot'.
Over lunch they chatted.
Pot has all kinds on her books - glamour girls ('a bit of class'),
fashion girls, children ... and 30-something-year-olds who are in big
demand with the advertizers who need 'ordinary' looking people the
punters can identify with.
'The children are great, but some of them have very ambitious
mothers,' she said.
'One lady rang the other day and said "I'm having a baby in three
weeks, can you put it in your books", which I thought was taking it a
little far.'
She conceded that modelling work was tough, and sometimes she
accompanies her girls to make sure they don't fall into the wrong
hands.
'You get a photographer who says "You're fat, get out", which really
knocks you. You have to develop quite a thick skin,' said the last
woman in the world anyone would dream of calling fat.
In the afternoon, the utterly charming Irony Washername, herself a
model, arrived to tell about grooming.
Everything from interviews, sitting down, shaking hands, to waiting
for a bus, and choosing clothes.
'It hurts to be beautiful,' Irene said, with a beautiful smile. 'But
remember, you're as good as you think you are.'
At the end of the day Jane asked Put what her chances were in the
modelling world. 'Fantastic!' she said - and they both collapsed with
laughter.
The rest of the world watched out for them.
+++++
From: "philtal_uk" <philtal_uk@y...>
Date: Sat Jun 1, 2002 7:20 am
Subject: Re: So how come no ones discussing Heraclitus!? :)
Dear Mike
Thanks for your generous message.
I don't think I have a new creative way of regarding Heraclitus. I
follow the lead of (old) Plotinus (mentioned in a message dated
01/09/02) who suggested Heraclitus 'leaves us to conjecture and omits
to make his argument clear and to reach conclusions, perhaps because
he realised that we should inquire for ourselves as he himself
inquired'. If you are studying 'limitless matters' (which is what
philosophers do, isn't it?) then you can start anywhere - and the
fragments of Heraclitus are among my starting places.
I acknowledge huge debts to Hopkins, whose love of asymmetic off-
double patternings and 'all things counter, original, spare, strange'
has never been far from my thinking since I first encountered the
Pied Beauty poem as a boy. Plus with Hopkins there is a great respect
for humdrum-seeming everyday-daily-job-doers ('all trades, their gear
and tackle and trim')- who are often neglected, even sometimes
despised, by the more academic-minded and by the some of the more
unwor[l]dly sorts of mystics.
Personally I am trying to mix spontaneous art with hard graft labour
and bits of mystery - in a cheerful sort of way. I don't think I have
succeeded yet ...
Good luck with your grad school applications. I have difficulty with
formal application processes myself - I find orthodoxy quite
difficult ... and I tend to digress ...
Take care...
Philip.
What polygons of unthinkable complexity are formed when the consciousnesses of three or more (billions maybe) are linked up deeply for a single instant.
And each individual consciousness is limitless ... set off at any instant in any direction in any individual mind, and you'll never reach an end to the association networks ...
Beyond the outlines ... barely experienced, poorly remembered ... fragmentary details ... the bewildering spread of the simple seeming event ...
Figures in a blended inscape and outscape ...
They travelled.
Chilly awakenings under canvas. Buses that never turned up. Dreary, slow, often-stopping local trains. The dizzy kaleidoscope of landscapes and ruins. Cities that changed before their eyes as they stopped to stare for an instant. Seascapes and skyscapes. Ships coming in not laden with gold. Flowing patterns of lives in motion in a world in motion, with the increasing density of everyday experience seeming to render all experiences increasingly transient and superficial.
And...
Each found places there were satisfactory for a while, then unsatisfactory.
So they went to other places - or to spaces between things that, for a while at least, they could call their own.
And then one day, or it might have been many days, they seemed to find themselves among people clutching gods of sorts that they did not quite believe in any more, or which, one way or another, or in several (even many) ways did not satisfy all their needs of belief.
It seemed to be a time of general and particular confusion ... or of reconsideration ... or of reviews ... out of which a new synthesis of older ways of thinking might emerge.
If the hypothesis of a fully transcendent creator implanting motion in the system of extended bodies were judged no long sustainable, then it would seem an instrinsic characteristic of the extended or spatial world that everything within it is constituted of particular proportions of motion and rest - which suggests that motion must be essential to and inseparable from the nature and constitution of extended things. The proportions of motion and rest within the system as a whole must be constant, since there could be no external cause to explain any change in the system; but within the subordinate parts of the system the proportions of motion and rest are constantly changing in the interaction of these parts among each other.
Spin spin spin out the ever-changing (and ever so easy to misrepresent and misinterpret) system of Spinoza, or something like it.
Minds in turmoil, how they longed to embrace simples. Many times they rushed towards them, desperate to hold on to solid forms. Many times they fluttered through clutching fingers, sifting away, like shadows, dissolving like dreams, and each time the griefs cut to the hearts sharper, and they cried out incoherent words, which winged into the darkness.
Now down they came to the water's edge, streaming tears ... drops of sea-stuff returning to the world-wide waterway.
Rumour has it that if you throw a cup of water into the sea and return a decade or so later to scoop up a fresh cup of water from the same (which is not of course the same) bit of the sea, then, despite all the churning and mixing that has occurred in the sea over the decade or so, the cup will contain some molecules of the water you threw into the sea at the earlier time. It seems unlikely, but statistical probabilities suggest it - there are more molecules of water in a cup (whatever its size) than there are cups (or the equivalent volume) in the sea.
'I don't know what to say.'
'No words. No words. Hush.'
Hush.
'I don't know what to say.'
'No words. No words. Hush.'
Hush.
Sea sounds. See changes.
So we made for the outer limits, where the worldwide waterway seemed to flow towards its end - though of course it was an illusion. Some said it was where the Cimmerians previously had their homes, a realm shrouded in mist and cloud, where the sun could never flash rays through the murk. Others said it was [a] just a small northern town in the middle of winter.
Wandering on, bedlam melodies wandering through our minds ...
Sitting in my small town room, given strange powe[ve]r[s] by technologies, the workings of which I do not understand and never will, I seem to travel far, and seem to perceive many things.
Common culture. It is in us all. Flowing through us all and being transformed by us all.
All in all.
All things might be written in a single book of love, of which creation is the scattered leaves.
Organisations can form in the underground [and they can be forces for good - not terrorist networks], and they can communicate in undertones, and without the constituent parts having much conscious awareness that they are a part of a larger whole.
Birds flock together at appropriate times, but probably are not much aware that they are flocking.
All this was a long time ago. But what is a long time? The long and the short of it all. Big he who was not so big and small shes who were not so small. I remember little but much. I forget much but little. And I would do it again but in different ways. Repetition is a form of change. Nothing is the same twice, so nothing is the same ever. Say hello, wave goodbye. Wave goobye, say hello. In every meeting, the image of birth, a sort of coming together. In every parting, the image of death, a sort of falling apart. I never knew you well enough, you never knew me well enough. So it goes. Under[s]tanding of other people is, like all understanding, never good enough. On it goes. On we go. Finding out more. Making new patterns, remembering and forgetting, building up and breaking down. Say hello, wave goodbye. Kiss and hug if you want to, do not kiss and hug if you do not want to. Something was taking its course, that much is certain, if no more. Whether we follow a course to birth or to death is uncertain. And that uncertainty clouds the issue of whether we act freely or follow courses determined for us. But there does seem to be free will on the local human scale. At any possible world junction there are many, perhaps limitless, possibilities open to us, and every instant brings us to a new possible world junction, when a small act of choice can make a huge difference. But if, whatever choices we make, the overall course of things is towards a break up of all unities, and so towards oblivion for all, then individual destinies seem trivial. If it is not to be futile, then we must find courses that lead somewhere, to some betterment, some resolution, some harmony, some development, or just some continuation. Maybe it comes down to faith, but that might just be wishful thinking. But you never know - and maybe there's hope in uncertainty. No one, the pessimists or the optimists, really knows. Humans are perhaps just too limited in understanding, and probably, however developed they become, always will be. That is the way it seems to be and maybe will remain. And so one cannot escape from the voices singing that this might be all just folly. But then folly is not the same as futility. And folly is at least amusing and out of amusement might come a more profound kind of comedy, which is a movement towards harmony, and when the motion is towards harmony then perhaps the easier it becomes to make approaches towards some ideal harmonic state - even if it is never reached. And actually achieving complete harmony might not even be desirable, because that might be the end of it all - after which no more for worse or for better.
It seems foolish to speculate at random about the widest matters ... but what else can you do? ...
And ...
You get the odd glimpse of the infinite complexity of it all ... but then you lose it ... and you go on with your small-scale guess-work ...
So ...
Date: Sat Jun 8, 2002 4:34 am
Subject: Jane Makeover
Riverland is full of all sorts of fashions ... and girls who would
make natural models ... which is why we sent out own special
correspondent little Ms June Makeover to investigate a local
modelling course.
It started as a typical Saturday morning. It finished with her legs
aching, a £13 parking ticket, and a new-found image with a veneer of
sophistication.
She had rolled out of bed, splodged some make-up on to her barely
open eyes and bowled down to the Pat A. Cake Agency for a one day's
intensive grooming and self-improvement course.
The other girls were immaculate, most of them wanted to be models,
and most of them were about 15 years younger than her.
'Never mind,' said Pat, immaculate blonde, and former Ms Great
Britain, 'this course is about confidence, that's what we're here
for.'
Jone had always fancied herself as a kind of down-market glamour
kitten with tousled appeal. Someone once told her she had cheekbones
like Bo Derek. Nothing else, just the cheekbones.
When Pet started out with make-up she knew she was kidding herself.
Off came the stuff Jine'd only just put on. The lines and shadows
under her eyes that Jene'd always thought interesting came under
attack.
And there was more. Deportment - sitting, walking, taking off a
jacket, entering a room, ascending and descending stairs (models do
it sideways). They paraded in front of the huge mirror, with Pit
intoning 'Heel-ball of foot, heel-ball of foot'.
Over lunch they chatted.
Pot has all kinds on her books - glamour girls ('a bit of class'),
fashion girls, children ... and 30-something-year-olds who are in big
demand with the advertizers who need 'ordinary' looking people the
punters can identify with.
'The children are great, but some of them have very ambitious
mothers,' she said.
'One lady rang the other day and said "I'm having a baby in three
weeks, can you put it in your books", which I thought was taking it a
little far.'
She conceded that modelling work was tough, and sometimes she
accompanies her girls to make sure they don't fall into the wrong
hands.
'You get a photographer who says "You're fat, get out", which really
knocks you. You have to develop quite a thick skin,' said the last
woman in the world anyone would dream of calling fat.
In the afternoon, the utterly charming Irony Washername, herself a
model, arrived to tell about grooming.
Everything from interviews, sitting down, shaking hands, to waiting
for a bus, and choosing clothes.
'It hurts to be beautiful,' Irene said, with a beautiful smile. 'But
remember, you're as good as you think you are.'
At the end of the day Jane asked Put what her chances were in the
modelling world. 'Fantastic!' she said - and they both collapsed with
laughter.
The rest of the world watched out for them.
+++++
From: "philtal_uk" <philtal_uk@y...>
Date: Sat Jun 1, 2002 7:20 am
Subject: Re: So how come no ones discussing Heraclitus!? :)
Dear Mike
Thanks for your generous message.
I don't think I have a new creative way of regarding Heraclitus. I
follow the lead of (old) Plotinus (mentioned in a message dated
01/09/02) who suggested Heraclitus 'leaves us to conjecture and omits
to make his argument clear and to reach conclusions, perhaps because
he realised that we should inquire for ourselves as he himself
inquired'. If you are studying 'limitless matters' (which is what
philosophers do, isn't it?) then you can start anywhere - and the
fragments of Heraclitus are among my starting places.
I acknowledge huge debts to Hopkins, whose love of asymmetic off-
double patternings and 'all things counter, original, spare, strange'
has never been far from my thinking since I first encountered the
Pied Beauty poem as a boy. Plus with Hopkins there is a great respect
for humdrum-seeming everyday-daily-job-doers ('all trades, their gear
and tackle and trim')- who are often neglected, even sometimes
despised, by the more academic-minded and by the some of the more
unwor[l]dly sorts of mystics.
Personally I am trying to mix spontaneous art with hard graft labour
and bits of mystery - in a cheerful sort of way. I don't think I have
succeeded yet ...
Good luck with your grad school applications. I have difficulty with
formal application processes myself - I find orthodoxy quite
difficult ... and I tend to digress ...
Take care...
Philip.
What polygons of unthinkable complexity are formed when the consciousnesses of three or more (billions maybe) are linked up deeply for a single instant.
And each individual consciousness is limitless ... set off at any instant in any direction in any individual mind, and you'll never reach an end to the association networks ...
Beyond the outlines ... barely experienced, poorly remembered ... fragmentary details ... the bewildering spread of the simple seeming event ...
Figures in a blended inscape and outscape ...
They travelled.
Chilly awakenings under canvas. Buses that never turned up. Dreary, slow, often-stopping local trains. The dizzy kaleidoscope of landscapes and ruins. Cities that changed before their eyes as they stopped to stare for an instant. Seascapes and skyscapes. Ships coming in not laden with gold. Flowing patterns of lives in motion in a world in motion, with the increasing density of everyday experience seeming to render all experiences increasingly transient and superficial.
And...
Each found places there were satisfactory for a while, then unsatisfactory.
So they went to other places - or to spaces between things that, for a while at least, they could call their own.
And then one day, or it might have been many days, they seemed to find themselves among people clutching gods of sorts that they did not quite believe in any more, or which, one way or another, or in several (even many) ways did not satisfy all their needs of belief.
It seemed to be a time of general and particular confusion ... or of reconsideration ... or of reviews ... out of which a new synthesis of older ways of thinking might emerge.
If the hypothesis of a fully transcendent creator implanting motion in the system of extended bodies were judged no long sustainable, then it would seem an instrinsic characteristic of the extended or spatial world that everything within it is constituted of particular proportions of motion and rest - which suggests that motion must be essential to and inseparable from the nature and constitution of extended things. The proportions of motion and rest within the system as a whole must be constant, since there could be no external cause to explain any change in the system; but within the subordinate parts of the system the proportions of motion and rest are constantly changing in the interaction of these parts among each other.
Spin spin spin out the ever-changing (and ever so easy to misrepresent and misinterpret) system of Spinoza, or something like it.
Minds in turmoil, how they longed to embrace simples. Many times they rushed towards them, desperate to hold on to solid forms. Many times they fluttered through clutching fingers, sifting away, like shadows, dissolving like dreams, and each time the griefs cut to the hearts sharper, and they cried out incoherent words, which winged into the darkness.
Now down they came to the water's edge, streaming tears ... drops of sea-stuff returning to the world-wide waterway.
Rumour has it that if you throw a cup of water into the sea and return a decade or so later to scoop up a fresh cup of water from the same (which is not of course the same) bit of the sea, then, despite all the churning and mixing that has occurred in the sea over the decade or so, the cup will contain some molecules of the water you threw into the sea at the earlier time. It seems unlikely, but statistical probabilities suggest it - there are more molecules of water in a cup (whatever its size) than there are cups (or the equivalent volume) in the sea.
'I don't know what to say.'
'No words. No words. Hush.'
Hush.
'I don't know what to say.'
'No words. No words. Hush.'
Hush.
Sea sounds. See changes.
So we made for the outer limits, where the worldwide waterway seemed to flow towards its end - though of course it was an illusion. Some said it was where the Cimmerians previously had their homes, a realm shrouded in mist and cloud, where the sun could never flash rays through the murk. Others said it was [a] just a small northern town in the middle of winter.
Wandering on, bedlam melodies wandering through our minds ...
Sitting in my small town room, given strange powe[ve]r[s] by technologies, the workings of which I do not understand and never will, I seem to travel far, and seem to perceive many things.
Common culture. It is in us all. Flowing through us all and being transformed by us all.
All in all.
All things might be written in a single book of love, of which creation is the scattered leaves.
Organisations can form in the underground [and they can be forces for good - not terrorist networks], and they can communicate in undertones, and without the constituent parts having much conscious awareness that they are a part of a larger whole.
Birds flock together at appropriate times, but probably are not much aware that they are flocking.
All this was a long time ago. But what is a long time? The long and the short of it all. Big he who was not so big and small shes who were not so small. I remember little but much. I forget much but little. And I would do it again but in different ways. Repetition is a form of change. Nothing is the same twice, so nothing is the same ever. Say hello, wave goodbye. Wave goobye, say hello. In every meeting, the image of birth, a sort of coming together. In every parting, the image of death, a sort of falling apart. I never knew you well enough, you never knew me well enough. So it goes. Under[s]tanding of other people is, like all understanding, never good enough. On it goes. On we go. Finding out more. Making new patterns, remembering and forgetting, building up and breaking down. Say hello, wave goodbye. Kiss and hug if you want to, do not kiss and hug if you do not want to. Something was taking its course, that much is certain, if no more. Whether we follow a course to birth or to death is uncertain. And that uncertainty clouds the issue of whether we act freely or follow courses determined for us. But there does seem to be free will on the local human scale. At any possible world junction there are many, perhaps limitless, possibilities open to us, and every instant brings us to a new possible world junction, when a small act of choice can make a huge difference. But if, whatever choices we make, the overall course of things is towards a break up of all unities, and so towards oblivion for all, then individual destinies seem trivial. If it is not to be futile, then we must find courses that lead somewhere, to some betterment, some resolution, some harmony, some development, or just some continuation. Maybe it comes down to faith, but that might just be wishful thinking. But you never know - and maybe there's hope in uncertainty. No one, the pessimists or the optimists, really knows. Humans are perhaps just too limited in understanding, and probably, however developed they become, always will be. That is the way it seems to be and maybe will remain. And so one cannot escape from the voices singing that this might be all just folly. But then folly is not the same as futility. And folly is at least amusing and out of amusement might come a more profound kind of comedy, which is a movement towards harmony, and when the motion is towards harmony then perhaps the easier it becomes to make approaches towards some ideal harmonic state - even if it is never reached. And actually achieving complete harmony might not even be desirable, because that might be the end of it all - after which no more for worse or for better.
It seems foolish to speculate at random about the widest matters ... but what else can you do? ...
More Mere/Mare Satire?
Gals We Be Guys ...
By Mr Tom Smithy Shy [not his real name] ... with a
little help from
his 'friends' [... and among the things she did not
seem to realize
was that I am content enough to go along with the
myth that I am
an 'only' an alcoholic manic depressive - because
that gives a swift
soft-option, reality-side-stepping, 'get out clause'
to others and
self when the going gets really tough ...]
Are you sitting uncomfortably ... then let's begin
again with a
freshly paraphrased variation on an favourite old
theme ...
The Head was endeavouring to get to the heart of
some apparently base
material offence. She asked a fundamental seeming
question: 'You are
telling me that she enflamed your front bottom with
a bum son
burrner?'
'I am telling you that she burnt my bottom witha a
bunsen,' corrected
the Mistress of Science [Hons (Dunelm)] biology
teacher, strictly
speaking as ever.
Ms Ursula Umbilical ['umanities, 'ons ('xon)], the
girls' school top
dog, sighed with such depths of knowing resignation
that only a life-
time in a female-principled scholastic environment
could engender.
Tiring of the basically fundamentally trivial matter
of burnt bulky
biological bottoms, she switched her gaze out of the
window to
observe how some of screaming queen cream of young
British womanhood
were progressing on the playing fields of Rada Minor
Public School.
They seemed to be enjoying a rather jolly good
hookey hokey hockey
match: Probables versus Possibles. But then ...
A piercingly 'orrible 'owl - that might have been
mistaken for an
owling hoot - rose above the background bedlam to
shatter any
illusion of earthly paradise. The source was soon
identified: a
stout hermaphrodite figure who had cheated his/her
way into the
school was to be seem visibly prone and writhing.
No foul had been
whistled, indicating that this was a fair play part
of the game, and
the other players just bullied off elsewhere,
ignoring her/him.
Ms Umbilical turned away from this tender scene with
satisfaction
filling her mind. Quite clearly, her charges were
well advanced in
the development of their natural instincts and being
properly
prepared for the harshness of the world beyond the
school gates.
Ms Dode Deedes, the biology teacher, felt a tremor
ripple through her
as the Head's attention returned to the abuse of her
tender backside.
'You believe the action in question to have been
deliberate?'
inquired Ms Umbilical sternly.
'At certain levels of consciousness ...' Ms Deeds
began, straying off
her own subject and into another ... and then she
realized the
dangers of this and so paused ... and then simply
answered
precisely: 'Yes'.
'You are quite certain the action had no direct
connexion with
whatever experiment the form was then collectively
engaged in?'
Ms Deedes again paused ... in order that no factual
error should be
contained in her next statement [she was not known
as 'Stickler In-
Deedes' for nothing] ... before replying,
deliberately: 'Quite'.
'As a matter of fact, in what was the form then
engaged, Ms Deedes?' the
Head wondered.
'Testing control solutions for unwanted nucleic acid
traces,' was the
accurate scientific reply.
'This was a reproductive possibilities test, in
other words?'
'Exactly.'
The Head tried out her sigh once more and found it
satisfyingly
slightly further regressed into extreme cynical
world-weariness.
'That explains everything,' she said. 'Do sit down
while we consider
potential complications.'
'I cannot sit down.'
'Oh? ... no of course not, your bottom bits are red
raw and sore,'
the Head said matter of factly without fellow-
feeling or sympathy.
By silent agreement Ms Deedes remained standing
while Ms Umbilical
began lecturing: 'Prudence Pubescent is a high-
spirited girl of good
family. You well know my opinions on these matters:
individually and
collectively we must be careful to avoid repressing
womenhood's
natural reproductive instincts. How often must I
remind staff of
this?'
Ms Deeds suddenly flushed hotly at the suggestion of
personal
biological unprofessionalism and/or gender betrayal.
Ms Umbilitcal continued: 'Remember my address On
Balance to the
assembled multitudes just this morning. I said, in
case you have
already forgotten - and memories are so short-term,
if find these
days - that ttwo side of our nature call for equal
balanced
development, viz: emotional; physical. When balance
is lost, actions
indicative of some internal tension will inevitably
occur. Your
lesson, quite clearly, had become too coldly
scientific, thereby
suppressing the natural vitality of young Prudence.
Naturally she
enflamed your buttocks as a consequence.'
Although much provoked by this accusation of
profesional ms-practice,
Ms Deedes held her peace and said nothing - and kept
her job as a
result. Her silence did though seem to confirm the
Head's more
general point about too rationalistic science
repressing true nature.
Considering the matter of Ms Deedes enraged back
parts now closed, Ms
Umbilical picked up the required Health and Safety
Executive
documentation ... and walked over to the fireplace,
mumbling as she
did some garbled fragments of Heraclitus as she did
so, as if in
invocation. She then threw the over-bureaucratic
assessment of human
ms-fortune into the flames.
For some time Ms Umbilical stared into the flames.
'Not creative enough!' she suddenly cried, and the
matter of Ms
Deedes' burnt arse ws finished.
Ho ho ho ... very satirical ... eh?! ...
Footnote Reference text: Hume, Enquiries, XII, III
... 'If we take in
our hand any volume; of divinity or school
metaphysics, for instance,
let us ask: "Does it contain any abstract reasoning
concerning
quantity or number?" No. "Does it contain any
experimental reasoning
concerning matters of fact and existence?" No.
commit it then to the
flames: for it can contain nothing by sophistry and
illusion.'
To: heraclitussociety@yahoogroups.com
From: "Philip Talbot" <philtal_uk@yahoo.com> Add to
Address Book
Date: Sat, 10 Apr 2004 12:48:59 -0000
Subject: [Heraclitus Society] Loose Talk ... costing
nowt much really ...
From time to time and mostly without knowing it -
unconsciously it
might be said - assorted significant others slip me
bits of theeir
nihilism/ennui/depression/[call 'negative vibes't
what you will]
and 'say' to me, in effect: 'Help me out with that.'
[They never
say 'please' of course ... and offer few thanks when
I do 'enlighten'
them a little.]
Anyway ... me I put my faith in creativity ...
because if you keep
working at it ... you find through it releases from
'The Prison' ...
and even if they are not lasting ... well ... at
least you
have 'escaped' for a while ... and found some more
ways and means of
better living that take you into the future in an
improved state ...
albeit hestitantly ...
... er ... but ...
... have you ever fallen in love with someone you
should not have
fallen in love with? ...
... er ... but ...
... ever fallen in love with someone, but not quite
enough? ...
... er ... but ...
... every just wanted a fuck and abused the concept
of love - or even
friendship - in the process of getting it ...
... er ... but ...
... the motives of any given sex act are often very
varied when you
consider them ... and can boil down to something as
banal
as 'politeness' ... 'well ... he/she asked nicely
... and I did not
like to say 'no' ...' ...
... er ... but ...
... without love it is mostly frustrating and too
creatural ...
that's what I think anyway ...
... er ... but ...
... is 'love' for real or just something we try to
talk ourselves
into believing in? ... if you can ask that question
sincerely then it
is not 'real' for you ... because when you are in
love there is no
doubt about love's existence really, even if the
intensity of its
hold over you rises and falls ...
... it can be something we sort of talk ourselves
into believing
sometimes though ...
... er ... but ...
... the weirdness and the ambiguities of 'The
Absurdity' can also
help to keep me going in the some of worst times,
truth be told ...
Imagination dead, imagine that! Well it might bring
an end to a lot
of frustration and boredom and despair when you
think about it:
because much frustration, boredom, despair, etc,
comes from comparing
and contrasting the perceived actual and the
imagined possible ...
and their is always a huge gap ...
Probably hunger and other physical cravings would
not end if we
became more brain dead ... and that might be just as
bad when you
think about it ... imgine ... a real 'dog's life'
... eg ..
Anyway ...
Admass incorporated modern travesty of St
Valentine's day long over
with [... just lingering traces of fake
correspondences
between 'love' and consumer product ... with the
loved person not
properly embraced ... makes 'love' just another
disposable ...
etc ...] ... and a less commercialized Easter Day to
come ... 'so' I
could conceivably start talking about 'love'
seriously again ... Why
bother though? ... it can seem such a devalued
notion ...
... and oddly, many people find 'love' - even of the
platonic kind -
more embarrassing to talk about than sex ... Oh yes,
lest I forget
there was a marketing-type survey recently that
'proved' that 'lust
is the new love' ... No one asked me though, and I
would have been
with the minority on that one ...
Why not some pornography though? It debases
humanity, without a
doubt, but we seem to enjoy the debasement - there
can be
something 'sublime' [highs out of lows, and all
that] in it, that
much is true anyway.
Muses of pornography: a Pig and a Tart.
They promise a lot - everything even [in the
'ultimate orgasm' etc]
but never really quite deliver much lasting
satisfaction ... so aid
the drift towards ennui ... then ... nihilism ...
then ...
Without love you see ...
Porn can be mostly harmless bits of fun though ...
And more uplifting alternatives are possible ...
'The dance along the artery
the circulation of the lymph
are figured in the drift of the stars
ascend to summer in the tree
we move above the moving tree
in light upon the figured leaf
and hear upon the sodden floor
below, the boarhound and the boar
pursue their pattern as before
but reconciled among the star ...'
Today's good sexy writing award goes to TS Eliot ...
even though many
might not recognize it as 'sexy stuff' ...
And when you think about fluid dynamics, restless
rhymatics, and such
like, well it must be possible to create a more
elevated/elevating
sort of porn ...
But you sometimes have to give 'em a little bit more
of what they
might fancy in more prosaic terms of course ... it
might be
instructive though - you never know - or it might
just be impurely
clinical.
When a preorgasmic state is induced by delicate
stroking of the
clitoris with finger- or even tongue-tip, rhythmic
muscular straining
engenders a descent of the uterus by up to one inch
- or
approximately two-point-five CM. Anterior vaginal
wall is
repositioned by similar distances - and there is
likely to be a
copious flow of secretions. The resulting
rearrangement of the mouth
of the cervix means that if full penetrative
intercourse follows soon
afterwards, and ejaculation occurs, not only are the
mutual
sensations experienced during mixed clasping and
thrusting and
internal kissing more pleasurable, but conception -
if possible
within variables of ovarian cycles - is more likely.
In simpler
terms, she comes down to meet him, as he reaches up
to meet her, so
they really do get closer together, and nearer to
breaching the gap
between two people ... and so to making one out of
more-than-one. In
these and other such ways, nature has its ways of
telling us things -
things way beyond words really. And love makes it
more likely,
because, for amongst other reasons, partners who
really love each
other become just as interested in the other's
satisfactions as in
their own ... [a lot of fuckers are just fucking
themselves really]
so it is not so much a question of 'was it good for
you too?' as ...
when it was, you should not have to ask really ...
Anyway ...
Oh ... I am becoming such a tedious preachy
bourgeois formalist ...
aren't I?! ...
...
Pass me another fucking cigarette, please ... and do
you have a
fucking light, please? ...
Gals We Be Guys ...
By Mr Tom Smithy Shy [not his real name] ... with a
little help from
his 'friends' [... and among the things she did not
seem to realize
was that I am content enough to go along with the
myth that I am
an 'only' an alcoholic manic depressive - because
that gives a swift
soft-option, reality-side-stepping, 'get out clause'
to others and
self when the going gets really tough ...]
Are you sitting uncomfortably ... then let's begin
again with a
freshly paraphrased variation on an favourite old
theme ...
The Head was endeavouring to get to the heart of
some apparently base
material offence. She asked a fundamental seeming
question: 'You are
telling me that she enflamed your front bottom with
a bum son
burrner?'
'I am telling you that she burnt my bottom witha a
bunsen,' corrected
the Mistress of Science [Hons (Dunelm)] biology
teacher, strictly
speaking as ever.
Ms Ursula Umbilical ['umanities, 'ons ('xon)], the
girls' school top
dog, sighed with such depths of knowing resignation
that only a life-
time in a female-principled scholastic environment
could engender.
Tiring of the basically fundamentally trivial matter
of burnt bulky
biological bottoms, she switched her gaze out of the
window to
observe how some of screaming queen cream of young
British womanhood
were progressing on the playing fields of Rada Minor
Public School.
They seemed to be enjoying a rather jolly good
hookey hokey hockey
match: Probables versus Possibles. But then ...
A piercingly 'orrible 'owl - that might have been
mistaken for an
owling hoot - rose above the background bedlam to
shatter any
illusion of earthly paradise. The source was soon
identified: a
stout hermaphrodite figure who had cheated his/her
way into the
school was to be seem visibly prone and writhing.
No foul had been
whistled, indicating that this was a fair play part
of the game, and
the other players just bullied off elsewhere,
ignoring her/him.
Ms Umbilical turned away from this tender scene with
satisfaction
filling her mind. Quite clearly, her charges were
well advanced in
the development of their natural instincts and being
properly
prepared for the harshness of the world beyond the
school gates.
Ms Dode Deedes, the biology teacher, felt a tremor
ripple through her
as the Head's attention returned to the abuse of her
tender backside.
'You believe the action in question to have been
deliberate?'
inquired Ms Umbilical sternly.
'At certain levels of consciousness ...' Ms Deeds
began, straying off
her own subject and into another ... and then she
realized the
dangers of this and so paused ... and then simply
answered
precisely: 'Yes'.
'You are quite certain the action had no direct
connexion with
whatever experiment the form was then collectively
engaged in?'
Ms Deedes again paused ... in order that no factual
error should be
contained in her next statement [she was not known
as 'Stickler In-
Deedes' for nothing] ... before replying,
deliberately: 'Quite'.
'As a matter of fact, in what was the form then
engaged, Ms Deedes?' the
Head wondered.
'Testing control solutions for unwanted nucleic acid
traces,' was the
accurate scientific reply.
'This was a reproductive possibilities test, in
other words?'
'Exactly.'
The Head tried out her sigh once more and found it
satisfyingly
slightly further regressed into extreme cynical
world-weariness.
'That explains everything,' she said. 'Do sit down
while we consider
potential complications.'
'I cannot sit down.'
'Oh? ... no of course not, your bottom bits are red
raw and sore,'
the Head said matter of factly without fellow-
feeling or sympathy.
By silent agreement Ms Deedes remained standing
while Ms Umbilical
began lecturing: 'Prudence Pubescent is a high-
spirited girl of good
family. You well know my opinions on these matters:
individually and
collectively we must be careful to avoid repressing
womenhood's
natural reproductive instincts. How often must I
remind staff of
this?'
Ms Deeds suddenly flushed hotly at the suggestion of
personal
biological unprofessionalism and/or gender betrayal.
Ms Umbilitcal continued: 'Remember my address On
Balance to the
assembled multitudes just this morning. I said, in
case you have
already forgotten - and memories are so short-term,
if find these
days - that ttwo side of our nature call for equal
balanced
development, viz: emotional; physical. When balance
is lost, actions
indicative of some internal tension will inevitably
occur. Your
lesson, quite clearly, had become too coldly
scientific, thereby
suppressing the natural vitality of young Prudence.
Naturally she
enflamed your buttocks as a consequence.'
Although much provoked by this accusation of
profesional ms-practice,
Ms Deedes held her peace and said nothing - and kept
her job as a
result. Her silence did though seem to confirm the
Head's more
general point about too rationalistic science
repressing true nature.
Considering the matter of Ms Deedes enraged back
parts now closed, Ms
Umbilical picked up the required Health and Safety
Executive
documentation ... and walked over to the fireplace,
mumbling as she
did some garbled fragments of Heraclitus as she did
so, as if in
invocation. She then threw the over-bureaucratic
assessment of human
ms-fortune into the flames.
For some time Ms Umbilical stared into the flames.
'Not creative enough!' she suddenly cried, and the
matter of Ms
Deedes' burnt arse ws finished.
Ho ho ho ... very satirical ... eh?! ...
Footnote Reference text: Hume, Enquiries, XII, III
... 'If we take in
our hand any volume; of divinity or school
metaphysics, for instance,
let us ask: "Does it contain any abstract reasoning
concerning
quantity or number?" No. "Does it contain any
experimental reasoning
concerning matters of fact and existence?" No.
commit it then to the
flames: for it can contain nothing by sophistry and
illusion.'
To: heraclitussociety@yahoogroups.com
From: "Philip Talbot" <philtal_uk@yahoo.com> Add to
Address Book
Date: Sat, 10 Apr 2004 12:48:59 -0000
Subject: [Heraclitus Society] Loose Talk ... costing
nowt much really ...
From time to time and mostly without knowing it -
unconsciously it
might be said - assorted significant others slip me
bits of theeir
nihilism/ennui/depression/[call 'negative vibes't
what you will]
and 'say' to me, in effect: 'Help me out with that.'
[They never
say 'please' of course ... and offer few thanks when
I do 'enlighten'
them a little.]
Anyway ... me I put my faith in creativity ...
because if you keep
working at it ... you find through it releases from
'The Prison' ...
and even if they are not lasting ... well ... at
least you
have 'escaped' for a while ... and found some more
ways and means of
better living that take you into the future in an
improved state ...
albeit hestitantly ...
... er ... but ...
... have you ever fallen in love with someone you
should not have
fallen in love with? ...
... er ... but ...
... ever fallen in love with someone, but not quite
enough? ...
... er ... but ...
... every just wanted a fuck and abused the concept
of love - or even
friendship - in the process of getting it ...
... er ... but ...
... the motives of any given sex act are often very
varied when you
consider them ... and can boil down to something as
banal
as 'politeness' ... 'well ... he/she asked nicely
... and I did not
like to say 'no' ...' ...
... er ... but ...
... without love it is mostly frustrating and too
creatural ...
that's what I think anyway ...
... er ... but ...
... is 'love' for real or just something we try to
talk ourselves
into believing in? ... if you can ask that question
sincerely then it
is not 'real' for you ... because when you are in
love there is no
doubt about love's existence really, even if the
intensity of its
hold over you rises and falls ...
... it can be something we sort of talk ourselves
into believing
sometimes though ...
... er ... but ...
... the weirdness and the ambiguities of 'The
Absurdity' can also
help to keep me going in the some of worst times,
truth be told ...
Imagination dead, imagine that! Well it might bring
an end to a lot
of frustration and boredom and despair when you
think about it:
because much frustration, boredom, despair, etc,
comes from comparing
and contrasting the perceived actual and the
imagined possible ...
and their is always a huge gap ...
Probably hunger and other physical cravings would
not end if we
became more brain dead ... and that might be just as
bad when you
think about it ... imgine ... a real 'dog's life'
... eg ..
Anyway ...
Admass incorporated modern travesty of St
Valentine's day long over
with [... just lingering traces of fake
correspondences
between 'love' and consumer product ... with the
loved person not
properly embraced ... makes 'love' just another
disposable ...
etc ...] ... and a less commercialized Easter Day to
come ... 'so' I
could conceivably start talking about 'love'
seriously again ... Why
bother though? ... it can seem such a devalued
notion ...
... and oddly, many people find 'love' - even of the
platonic kind -
more embarrassing to talk about than sex ... Oh yes,
lest I forget
there was a marketing-type survey recently that
'proved' that 'lust
is the new love' ... No one asked me though, and I
would have been
with the minority on that one ...
Why not some pornography though? It debases
humanity, without a
doubt, but we seem to enjoy the debasement - there
can be
something 'sublime' [highs out of lows, and all
that] in it, that
much is true anyway.
Muses of pornography: a Pig and a Tart.
They promise a lot - everything even [in the
'ultimate orgasm' etc]
but never really quite deliver much lasting
satisfaction ... so aid
the drift towards ennui ... then ... nihilism ...
then ...
Without love you see ...
Porn can be mostly harmless bits of fun though ...
And more uplifting alternatives are possible ...
'The dance along the artery
the circulation of the lymph
are figured in the drift of the stars
ascend to summer in the tree
we move above the moving tree
in light upon the figured leaf
and hear upon the sodden floor
below, the boarhound and the boar
pursue their pattern as before
but reconciled among the star ...'
Today's good sexy writing award goes to TS Eliot ...
even though many
might not recognize it as 'sexy stuff' ...
And when you think about fluid dynamics, restless
rhymatics, and such
like, well it must be possible to create a more
elevated/elevating
sort of porn ...
But you sometimes have to give 'em a little bit more
of what they
might fancy in more prosaic terms of course ... it
might be
instructive though - you never know - or it might
just be impurely
clinical.
When a preorgasmic state is induced by delicate
stroking of the
clitoris with finger- or even tongue-tip, rhythmic
muscular straining
engenders a descent of the uterus by up to one inch
- or
approximately two-point-five CM. Anterior vaginal
wall is
repositioned by similar distances - and there is
likely to be a
copious flow of secretions. The resulting
rearrangement of the mouth
of the cervix means that if full penetrative
intercourse follows soon
afterwards, and ejaculation occurs, not only are the
mutual
sensations experienced during mixed clasping and
thrusting and
internal kissing more pleasurable, but conception -
if possible
within variables of ovarian cycles - is more likely.
In simpler
terms, she comes down to meet him, as he reaches up
to meet her, so
they really do get closer together, and nearer to
breaching the gap
between two people ... and so to making one out of
more-than-one. In
these and other such ways, nature has its ways of
telling us things -
things way beyond words really. And love makes it
more likely,
because, for amongst other reasons, partners who
really love each
other become just as interested in the other's
satisfactions as in
their own ... [a lot of fuckers are just fucking
themselves really]
so it is not so much a question of 'was it good for
you too?' as ...
when it was, you should not have to ask really ...
Anyway ...
Oh ... I am becoming such a tedious preachy
bourgeois formalist ...
aren't I?! ...
...
Pass me another fucking cigarette, please ... and do
you have a
fucking light, please? ...
Another might have been M ...
Another might have been M ... a sharp-tongued, snub-nosed Scottish Socratic ... passionate and compassionate ... much concerned about The Issues ... who liked dialectics in non-standard dialects ... and complained that talking to him could be like talking to herself ... and who wrote letters with reverse strip-teases in them ... she sat in bed writing to him and put on an extra jumper and extra socks and ... well he was cold-seeming ... and he had once sat on a bed with her when she was wearing a partly transparent nightie and he had pretended very carefully not to see through it ...
And ...
You get the odd glimpse of the infinite complexity of it all ... but then you lose it ... and you go on with your small-scale guess-work ...
So ...
Date: Sat Jun 8, 2002 4:34 am
Subject: Jane Makeover
Riverland is full of all sorts of fashions ... and girls who would
make natural models ... which is why we sent out own special
correspondent little Ms June Makeover to investigate a local
modelling course.
It started as a typical Saturday morning. It finished with her legs
aching, a £13 parking ticket, and a new-found image with a veneer of
sophistication.
She had rolled out of bed, splodged some make-up on to her barely
open eyes and bowled down to the Pat A. Cake Agency for a one day's
intensive grooming and self-improvement course.
The other girls were immaculate, most of them wanted to be models,
and most of them were about 15 years younger than her.
'Never mind,' said Pat, immaculate blonde, and former Ms Great
Britain, 'this course is about confidence, that's what we're here
for.'
Jone had always fancied herself as a kind of down-market glamour
kitten with tousled appeal. Someone once told her she had cheekbones
like Bo Derek. Nothing else, just the cheekbones.
When Pet started out with make-up she knew she was kidding herself.
Off came the stuff Jine'd only just put on. The lines and shadows
under her eyes that Jene'd always thought interesting came under
attack.
And there was more. Deportment - sitting, walking, taking off a
jacket, entering a room, ascending and descending stairs (models do
it sideways). They paraded in front of the huge mirror, with Pit
intoning 'Heel-ball of foot, heel-ball of foot'.
Over lunch they chatted.
Pot has all kinds on her books - glamour girls ('a bit of class'),
fashion girls, children ... and 30-something-year-olds who are in big
demand with the advertizers who need 'ordinary' looking people the
punters can identify with.
'The children are great, but some of them have very ambitious
mothers,' she said.
'One lady rang the other day and said "I'm having a baby in three
weeks, can you put it in your books", which I thought was taking it a
little far.'
She conceded that modelling work was tough, and sometimes she
accompanies her girls to make sure they don't fall into the wrong
hands.
'You get a photographer who says "You're fat, get out", which really
knocks you. You have to develop quite a thick skin,' said the last
woman in the world anyone would dream of calling fat.
In the afternoon, the utterly charming Irony Washername, herself a
model, arrived to tell about grooming.
Everything from interviews, sitting down, shaking hands, to waiting
for a bus, and choosing clothes.
'It hurts to be beautiful,' Irene said, with a beautiful smile. 'But
remember, you're as good as you think you are.'
At the end of the day Jane asked Put what her chances were in the
modelling world. 'Fantastic!' she said - and they both collapsed with
laughter.
The rest of the world watched out for them.
+++++
From: "philtal_uk" <philtal_uk@y...>
Date: Sat Jun 1, 2002 7:20 am
Subject: Re: So how come no ones discussing Heraclitus!? :)
Dear Mike
Thanks for your generous message.
I don't think I have a new creative way of regarding Heraclitus. I
follow the lead of (old) Plotinus (mentioned in a message dated
01/09/02) who suggested Heraclitus 'leaves us to conjecture and omits
to make his argument clear and to reach conclusions, perhaps because
he realised that we should inquire for ourselves as he himself
inquired'. If you are studying 'limitless matters' (which is what
philosophers do, isn't it?) then you can start anywhere - and the
fragments of Heraclitus are among my starting places.
I acknowledge huge debts to Hopkins, whose love of asymmetic off-
double patternings and 'all things counter, original, spare, strange'
has never been far from my thinking since I first encountered the
Pied Beauty poem as a boy. Plus with Hopkins there is a great respect
for humdrum-seeming everyday-daily-job-doers ('all trades, their gear
and tackle and trim')- who are often neglected, even sometimes
despised, by the more academic-minded and by the some of the more
unwordly sorts of mystics.
Personally I am trying to mix spontaneous art with hard graft labour
and bits of mystery - in a cheerful sort of way. I don't think I have
succeeded yet ...
Good luck with your grad school applications. I have difficulty with
formal application processes myself - I find orthodoxy quite
difficult ... and I tend to digress ...
Take care...
Philip.
What polygons of unthinkable complexity are formed when the consciousnesses of three or more (billions maybe) are linked up deeply for a single instant.
And each individual consciousness is limitless ... set off at any instant in any direction in any individual mind, and you'll never reach an end to the association networks ...
Beyond the outlines ... barely experienced, poorly remembered ... fragmentary details ... the bewildering spread of the simple seeming event ...
Figures in a blended inscape and outscape ...
They travelled.
Chilly awakenings under canvas. Buses that never turned up. Dreary, slow, often-stopping local trains. The dizzy kaleidoscope of landscapes and ruins. Cities that changed before their eyes as they stopped to stare for an instant. Seascapes and skyscapes. Ships coming in not laden with gold. Flowing patterns of lives in motion in a world in motion, with the increasing density of everyday experience seeming to render all experiences increasingly transient and superficial.
And...
Each found places there were satisfactory for a while, then unsatisfactory.
So they went to other places - or to spaces between things that, for a while at least, they could call their own.
And then one day, or it might have been many days, they seemed to find themselves among people clutching gods of sorts that they did not quite believe in any more, or which, one way or another, or in several (even many) ways did not satisfy all their needs of belief.
It seemed to be a time of general and particular confusion ... or of reconsideration ... or of reviews ... out of which a new synthesis of older ways of thinking might emerge.
If the hypothesis of a fully transcendent creator implanting motion in the system of extended bodies were judged no long sustainable, then it would seem an instrinsic characteristic of the extended or spatial world that everything within it is constituted of particular proportions of motion and rest - which suggests that motion must be essential to and inseparable from the nature and constitution of extended things. The proportions of motion and rest within the system as a whole must be constant, since there could be no external cause to explain any change in the system; but within the subordinate parts of the system the proportions of motion and rest are constantly changing in the interaction of these parts among each other.
Spin spin spin out the ever-changing (and ever so easy to misrepresent and misinterpret) system of Spinoza, or something like it.
Minds in turmoil, how they longed to embrace simples. Many times they rushed towards them, desperate to hold on to solid forms. Many times they fluttered through clutching fingers, sifting away, like shadows, dissolving like dreams, and each time the griefs cut to the hearts sharper, and they cried out incoherent words, which winged into the darkness.
Now down they came to the water's edge, streaming tears ... drops of sea-stuff returning to the world-wide waterway.
Rumour has it that if you throw a cup of water into the sea and return a decade or so later to scoop up a fresh cup of water from the same (which is not of course the same) bit of the sea, then, despite all the churning and mixing that has occurred in the sea over the decade or so, the cup will contain some molecules of the water you threw into the sea at the earlier time. It seems unlikely, but statistical probabilities suggest it - there are more molecules of water in a cup (whatever its size) than there are cups (or the equivalent volume) in the sea.
'I don't know what to say.'
'No words. No words. Hush.'
Hush.
'I don't know what to say.'
'No words. No words. Hush.'
Hush.
Sea sounds. See changes.
So we made for the outer limits, where the worldwide waterway seemed to flow towards its end - though of course it was an illusion. Some said it was where the Cimmerians previously had their homes, a realm shrouded in mist and cloud, where the sun could never flash rays through the murk. Others said it was a just a small northern town in the middle of winter.
Wandering on, bedlam melodies wandering through our minds ...
Sitting in my small town room, given strange powever by technologies, the workings of which I do not understand and never will, I seem to travel far, and seem to perceive many things.
Common culture. It is in us all. Flowing through us all and being transformed by us all.
All in all.
All things might be written in a single book of love, of which creation is the scattered leaves.
Organisations can form in the underground [and they can be forces for good - not terrorist networks], and they can communicate in undertones, and without the constituent parts having much conscious awareness that they are a part of a larger whole.
Birds flock together at appropriate times, but probably are not much aware that they are flocking.
All this was a long time ago. But what is a long time? The long and the short of it all. Big he who was not so big and small shes who were not so small. I remember little but much. I forget much but little. And I would do it again but in different ways. Repetition is a form of change. Nothing is the same twice, so nothing is the same ever. Say hello, wave goodbye. Wave goobye, say hello. In every meeting, the image of birth, a sort of coming together. In every parting, the image of death, a sort of falling apart. I never knew you well enough, you never knew me well enough. So it goes. Undertanding of other people is, like all understanding, never good enough. On it goes. On we go. Finding out more. Making new patterns, remembering and forgetting, building up and breaking down. Say hello, wave goodbye. Kiss and hug if you want to, do not kiss and hug if you do not want to. Something was taking its course, that much is certain, if no more. Whether we follow a course to birth or to death is uncertain. And that uncertainty clouds the issue of whether we act freely or follow courses determined for us. But there does seem to be free will on the local human scale. At any possible world junction there are many, perhaps limitless, possibilities open to us, and every instant brings us to a new possible world junction, when a small act of choice can make a huge difference. But if, whatever choices we make, the overall course of things is towards a break up of all unities, and so towards oblivion for all, then individual destinies seem trivial. If it is not to be futile, then we must find courses that lead somewhere, to some betterment, some resolution, some harmony, some development, or just some continuation. Maybe it comes down to faith, but that might just be wishful thinking. But you never know - and maybe there's hope in uncertainty. No one, the pessimists or the optimists, really knows. Humans are perhaps just too limited in understanding, and probably, however developed they become, always will be. That is the way it seems to be and maybe will remain. And so one cannot escape from the voices singing that this might be all just folly. But then folly is not the same as futility. And folly is at least amusing and out of amusement might come a more profound kind of comedy, which is a movement towards harmony, and when the motion is towards harmony then perhaps the easier it becomes to make approaches towards some ideal harmonic state - even if it is never reached. And actually achieving complete harmony might not even be desirable, because that might be the end of it all - after which no more for worse or for better.
It seems foolish to speculate at random about the widest matters ... but what else can you do? ...
And ...
You get the odd glimpse of the infinite complexity of it all ... but then you lose it ... and you go on with your small-scale guess-work ...
So ...
Date: Sat Jun 8, 2002 4:34 am
Subject: Jane Makeover
Riverland is full of all sorts of fashions ... and girls who would
make natural models ... which is why we sent out own special
correspondent little Ms June Makeover to investigate a local
modelling course.
It started as a typical Saturday morning. It finished with her legs
aching, a £13 parking ticket, and a new-found image with a veneer of
sophistication.
She had rolled out of bed, splodged some make-up on to her barely
open eyes and bowled down to the Pat A. Cake Agency for a one day's
intensive grooming and self-improvement course.
The other girls were immaculate, most of them wanted to be models,
and most of them were about 15 years younger than her.
'Never mind,' said Pat, immaculate blonde, and former Ms Great
Britain, 'this course is about confidence, that's what we're here
for.'
Jone had always fancied herself as a kind of down-market glamour
kitten with tousled appeal. Someone once told her she had cheekbones
like Bo Derek. Nothing else, just the cheekbones.
When Pet started out with make-up she knew she was kidding herself.
Off came the stuff Jine'd only just put on. The lines and shadows
under her eyes that Jene'd always thought interesting came under
attack.
And there was more. Deportment - sitting, walking, taking off a
jacket, entering a room, ascending and descending stairs (models do
it sideways). They paraded in front of the huge mirror, with Pit
intoning 'Heel-ball of foot, heel-ball of foot'.
Over lunch they chatted.
Pot has all kinds on her books - glamour girls ('a bit of class'),
fashion girls, children ... and 30-something-year-olds who are in big
demand with the advertizers who need 'ordinary' looking people the
punters can identify with.
'The children are great, but some of them have very ambitious
mothers,' she said.
'One lady rang the other day and said "I'm having a baby in three
weeks, can you put it in your books", which I thought was taking it a
little far.'
She conceded that modelling work was tough, and sometimes she
accompanies her girls to make sure they don't fall into the wrong
hands.
'You get a photographer who says "You're fat, get out", which really
knocks you. You have to develop quite a thick skin,' said the last
woman in the world anyone would dream of calling fat.
In the afternoon, the utterly charming Irony Washername, herself a
model, arrived to tell about grooming.
Everything from interviews, sitting down, shaking hands, to waiting
for a bus, and choosing clothes.
'It hurts to be beautiful,' Irene said, with a beautiful smile. 'But
remember, you're as good as you think you are.'
At the end of the day Jane asked Put what her chances were in the
modelling world. 'Fantastic!' she said - and they both collapsed with
laughter.
The rest of the world watched out for them.
+++++
From: "philtal_uk" <philtal_uk@y...>
Date: Sat Jun 1, 2002 7:20 am
Subject: Re: So how come no ones discussing Heraclitus!? :)
Dear Mike
Thanks for your generous message.
I don't think I have a new creative way of regarding Heraclitus. I
follow the lead of (old) Plotinus (mentioned in a message dated
01/09/02) who suggested Heraclitus 'leaves us to conjecture and omits
to make his argument clear and to reach conclusions, perhaps because
he realised that we should inquire for ourselves as he himself
inquired'. If you are studying 'limitless matters' (which is what
philosophers do, isn't it?) then you can start anywhere - and the
fragments of Heraclitus are among my starting places.
I acknowledge huge debts to Hopkins, whose love of asymmetic off-
double patternings and 'all things counter, original, spare, strange'
has never been far from my thinking since I first encountered the
Pied Beauty poem as a boy. Plus with Hopkins there is a great respect
for humdrum-seeming everyday-daily-job-doers ('all trades, their gear
and tackle and trim')- who are often neglected, even sometimes
despised, by the more academic-minded and by the some of the more
unwordly sorts of mystics.
Personally I am trying to mix spontaneous art with hard graft labour
and bits of mystery - in a cheerful sort of way. I don't think I have
succeeded yet ...
Good luck with your grad school applications. I have difficulty with
formal application processes myself - I find orthodoxy quite
difficult ... and I tend to digress ...
Take care...
Philip.
What polygons of unthinkable complexity are formed when the consciousnesses of three or more (billions maybe) are linked up deeply for a single instant.
And each individual consciousness is limitless ... set off at any instant in any direction in any individual mind, and you'll never reach an end to the association networks ...
Beyond the outlines ... barely experienced, poorly remembered ... fragmentary details ... the bewildering spread of the simple seeming event ...
Figures in a blended inscape and outscape ...
They travelled.
Chilly awakenings under canvas. Buses that never turned up. Dreary, slow, often-stopping local trains. The dizzy kaleidoscope of landscapes and ruins. Cities that changed before their eyes as they stopped to stare for an instant. Seascapes and skyscapes. Ships coming in not laden with gold. Flowing patterns of lives in motion in a world in motion, with the increasing density of everyday experience seeming to render all experiences increasingly transient and superficial.
And...
Each found places there were satisfactory for a while, then unsatisfactory.
So they went to other places - or to spaces between things that, for a while at least, they could call their own.
And then one day, or it might have been many days, they seemed to find themselves among people clutching gods of sorts that they did not quite believe in any more, or which, one way or another, or in several (even many) ways did not satisfy all their needs of belief.
It seemed to be a time of general and particular confusion ... or of reconsideration ... or of reviews ... out of which a new synthesis of older ways of thinking might emerge.
If the hypothesis of a fully transcendent creator implanting motion in the system of extended bodies were judged no long sustainable, then it would seem an instrinsic characteristic of the extended or spatial world that everything within it is constituted of particular proportions of motion and rest - which suggests that motion must be essential to and inseparable from the nature and constitution of extended things. The proportions of motion and rest within the system as a whole must be constant, since there could be no external cause to explain any change in the system; but within the subordinate parts of the system the proportions of motion and rest are constantly changing in the interaction of these parts among each other.
Spin spin spin out the ever-changing (and ever so easy to misrepresent and misinterpret) system of Spinoza, or something like it.
Minds in turmoil, how they longed to embrace simples. Many times they rushed towards them, desperate to hold on to solid forms. Many times they fluttered through clutching fingers, sifting away, like shadows, dissolving like dreams, and each time the griefs cut to the hearts sharper, and they cried out incoherent words, which winged into the darkness.
Now down they came to the water's edge, streaming tears ... drops of sea-stuff returning to the world-wide waterway.
Rumour has it that if you throw a cup of water into the sea and return a decade or so later to scoop up a fresh cup of water from the same (which is not of course the same) bit of the sea, then, despite all the churning and mixing that has occurred in the sea over the decade or so, the cup will contain some molecules of the water you threw into the sea at the earlier time. It seems unlikely, but statistical probabilities suggest it - there are more molecules of water in a cup (whatever its size) than there are cups (or the equivalent volume) in the sea.
'I don't know what to say.'
'No words. No words. Hush.'
Hush.
'I don't know what to say.'
'No words. No words. Hush.'
Hush.
Sea sounds. See changes.
So we made for the outer limits, where the worldwide waterway seemed to flow towards its end - though of course it was an illusion. Some said it was where the Cimmerians previously had their homes, a realm shrouded in mist and cloud, where the sun could never flash rays through the murk. Others said it was a just a small northern town in the middle of winter.
Wandering on, bedlam melodies wandering through our minds ...
Sitting in my small town room, given strange powever by technologies, the workings of which I do not understand and never will, I seem to travel far, and seem to perceive many things.
Common culture. It is in us all. Flowing through us all and being transformed by us all.
All in all.
All things might be written in a single book of love, of which creation is the scattered leaves.
Organisations can form in the underground [and they can be forces for good - not terrorist networks], and they can communicate in undertones, and without the constituent parts having much conscious awareness that they are a part of a larger whole.
Birds flock together at appropriate times, but probably are not much aware that they are flocking.
All this was a long time ago. But what is a long time? The long and the short of it all. Big he who was not so big and small shes who were not so small. I remember little but much. I forget much but little. And I would do it again but in different ways. Repetition is a form of change. Nothing is the same twice, so nothing is the same ever. Say hello, wave goodbye. Wave goobye, say hello. In every meeting, the image of birth, a sort of coming together. In every parting, the image of death, a sort of falling apart. I never knew you well enough, you never knew me well enough. So it goes. Undertanding of other people is, like all understanding, never good enough. On it goes. On we go. Finding out more. Making new patterns, remembering and forgetting, building up and breaking down. Say hello, wave goodbye. Kiss and hug if you want to, do not kiss and hug if you do not want to. Something was taking its course, that much is certain, if no more. Whether we follow a course to birth or to death is uncertain. And that uncertainty clouds the issue of whether we act freely or follow courses determined for us. But there does seem to be free will on the local human scale. At any possible world junction there are many, perhaps limitless, possibilities open to us, and every instant brings us to a new possible world junction, when a small act of choice can make a huge difference. But if, whatever choices we make, the overall course of things is towards a break up of all unities, and so towards oblivion for all, then individual destinies seem trivial. If it is not to be futile, then we must find courses that lead somewhere, to some betterment, some resolution, some harmony, some development, or just some continuation. Maybe it comes down to faith, but that might just be wishful thinking. But you never know - and maybe there's hope in uncertainty. No one, the pessimists or the optimists, really knows. Humans are perhaps just too limited in understanding, and probably, however developed they become, always will be. That is the way it seems to be and maybe will remain. And so one cannot escape from the voices singing that this might be all just folly. But then folly is not the same as futility. And folly is at least amusing and out of amusement might come a more profound kind of comedy, which is a movement towards harmony, and when the motion is towards harmony then perhaps the easier it becomes to make approaches towards some ideal harmonic state - even if it is never reached. And actually achieving complete harmony might not even be desirable, because that might be the end of it all - after which no more for worse or for better.
It seems foolish to speculate at random about the widest matters ... but what else can you do? ...
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