Word Stack or A Pile of Thoughts

Yes, a bit tipsy from three cups of wine.  Better stuff than beer though. The following poem was written by Dr. Roger Thurling, a good friend, logician and fellow philosophy dabbler.  It’s quite interesting.

What Is?

We meet them here, in time, as two roads
long apart, may join
and again divide

-Dr. Roger Thurling, 4 Febuary 2006

I’m a little tipsy right now, so I’ll add that I’m currently listening to "Back Home" by Yellowcard.  The conversation surrounding this particular poem revolved around the nature of the mind (biological or metaphysical?), causality, determinism, love, Irish beer, semiotics… it’s usually like this when we sit down with Thurling.

There’s a place and time for this sort of indulgence; i call it that because in some ways, conversation like this is a sort of vice, an addiction that is best taken in moderation.  Like an affair with a girl, you can only take things seriously for a little while, but you can’t let it get the best of you.  Thoughts and ideas are best in their place, but that’s not the point of life.  There’s so much more to being alive than this pursuit of the "higher" consciousness.  Sometimes, just stopping in a field while walking home after class to look at the moon rising is just as good as putting the finishing touches on a research paper or imagining a kiss. 

Hmm, there’s a dinner downstairs with suits, a jazz band, and (somewhat) good food.  More things to live for. 

I awoke this morning with a sick realization: that maybe the idea that one can decide the outcomes of one’s situations is an empty promise.  We make decisions and plans, projecting ourself through future outcomes, attempting to live lives that we decide are ideal, but all these decisions and carefully laid out dreams can never be materialized through our own work; there must always be an element of luck, or Divine, or whatever you might call the forces that drive circumstance in order for things to work out.  If you haven’t got that on you’re side, you’re doomed to failure, and no matter what you try to do, it’s going to be a lost cause.

Following that line of thinking, one begins to think about what the point is in any sort of hoping or dreaming or even idealism.  Because things almost never turn out the way we imagine them to be; Hope turns out as an illusion, a mirage of sorts.  In the end, there’s always the sigh and the creation of a new illusion that mirrors the reality of the present, having fallen short of the hopes of the past. 

We would probably like to believe that we can determine the outcomes of our lives, that we may somehow influence the trajectories of our circumstances.  It’s especially easy to believe that when everything is going well.  It’s easy to forget– when caught up in the rush of of it all– that even the good things in life are the things that we never planned or anticipated.  We come up with retrospect ideas of how we were able to influence and machinate these fortuitous events.  And then we try to map out the way to the next good thing, not knowing that the roll of the dice and the outlying variables were the roots of our circumstance, not our own trains of logic*. 

Maybe it’s better to simply not really care about the next day at all, and simply bask in blind ignorance of both the past and the future, making only the flimsiest of plans and the most whimsical of reflections.  One might even go so far as to curse a human being’s consciousness of time. 

Control and self-determination can only be the work of a mind that is either ignorant of experience or arrogant in its illusions.  In a way, it makes me think of priests and scientists as living on the same boat.  I wouldn’t go so far as to assert that all priests and scientists live under the illusion of control, but the overwhelming tendency is such.  It is the concept of the learned ignoramus: the one who is so entrenched in illusions of control that they never stop to ask if there should be any control at all.  Both religion and science present paradigms of control, each one claiming authority.  The sad truth is that authority cannot– with the influence of the outliers and unforeseen variables– work their way around the force of circumstance and unpredictability. 

It’s actually a sick joke, this thing called education.  My god, Fierro** was right.  Schools do teach the wrong lessons, and the only thing one can really do is be whimsical about life, and not really hope for anything and take things as they come. 

What a way to wake up on a Wednesday morning.

*the concept puts the principles of Chaos Theory and the Black Swan together
** Fierro is a character from the Broadway "Wicked", where he sings a song about the value of living the "unexamined life."