I Think

I think. I think

I think. Am I

thinking? I think

I am. I think I am

thinking, thinking I

am I. Thinking,

I am I. Thinking

I am I? I think. Thinking

I am, I am I, I think.

I think I think. Am I?

Leibniz and Voltaire reconciled at last

It occurred to me last night that Leibniz and Voltaire aren’t really so far apart. Leibniz claimed that “Of all possible worlds an infinite and all-powerful God would create the best.” That best world would follow the “principle of plenitude,” according to which it would contain “the maximum richness of variety of modes of being.” Voltaire looking around at our dark, spacious, flawful universe asked, rhetorically, via Candide, “If this is the best, what are the others like?” Well, if, according to the principles of Leibniz God would create the best of all possible worlds, according to the principle of plentitude, he’d create all the other ones as well. If so, we may just be living in what Candide called “One of the worst.” Reward yourself with another coffee.

After the Well Goes Dry

 

Digging a dry well deeper’s not a crime.

Hey, it’s your funeral. Everything that can be said

About the dead’s been said at least a million times.

Your chances of striking water are quite low.

If time itself is dying it’s its time.

 

But then again, who knows, there may be moisture yet

Below the empty coffin bed to fill a garden hose.

Stranger things have happened, muddy clothes

Washed in blood river come out clean. I’ve seen

 

A dead man on a concrete sleeve

After the paramedic crew’s thrown up their arms

Pull desperate balls of air into his lungs and breathe.

 

It’s true. If you ask yourself, and think quite deeply on it,

It may not be too late to write a sonnet.

The Problem with Evolution

The problem with the "theory of evolution" is not that it's false. Being a scientific theory, a conclusion based on upon a certain methodology that structures a certain type of narrative to the exclusion of all other narratives--being, as I say, a scientific theory, it is as true as it can be given the information available and the structure allowable. The problem is that it is bad story telling. It purports to be a true--not a scientific but an actually true--account, i.e. narrative, story--of how things happen and how things have happened. We are story-charged beings. We live on story. We see and experience ourselves and our world and everything in it via story. And this story sucks. It lacks a goal. It lacks even a trajectory beyond eventual extinction, which it gets when coupled with the cosmological story that starts with an event--whether or not that event is still called the Big Bang or gets a better name and more precise description. It allows for no point and no values, nothing worth living for or doing. Nothing. Even hedonism gives us something to want, some way of marking and evaluating progress. Science disavows any relationship to value or meaning even while it serves, more than it serves anything, as the elemental structure of the grand narrative of our time, and that not for a single culture but for the whole earth. Nothing is more certain to destroy humanity than bad story telling. 

NOW

the

O

of

now

the frozen past’s chaotic stasis

threaded through

the opening to all

that will have been