Mimesis

Every indi-

vidual yawned, laughed, looked up,

at the sky.

Review of "Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark"

 I read the Cecelia Watson's book over spring break—you could get through it in a sitting; it’s pretty short and easy to read—and I came to the conclusion, which was never mentioned or entertained in the book, but for which the book did give evidence, that the paradigm of “rules” is misguided. It’s foreign to how language actually works. It’s clumsy and Occam would have hated it. Instead, I want to promote the idea of “expectations.” Then we don’t ask “whose rules?” but “whose expectations?” We put “am” not “are” after “I” in almost all cases because the people who(m) we expect to read us expect us to do that. We’re not following a rule. We’re meeting an expectation. That means that there literally are no rules. What we call rules are descriptions of the expectations of a certain audience under certain conditions. This frees every act of composition up to be and do what it needs in order to meet or defy those expectations, to manipulate the reader based on their expectations. Exactly how language actually works.

A Through Thought

 As I understand your infinite God, he knows and sees and has complete power over all and every etc.

Okay, then. What can an infinite imagination imagine? For starters--everything. 

And what is it like for an infinite imagination to imagine a thing? How is imagining a thing different from creating that thing? If God imagines a thing, does it therefore thereby exist as a thing? I can't see how it can't. To an infinite and free imagination, I'd be as real as I am whether I existed in myself, outside that imagination, or just in it. 

I'd like to set aside the question then of why or whether God actually created me, whether I actually exist as anything other than a thought in the imagination of this God. How could I know? I can't even reasonably speculate--about that.

But I can about this: If I'm right that I am as real to God in his imagination as I could possibly be outside it, some things follow. God knows not just everything I ever did or will do but everything I didn't do and every branch that act would have taken if I'd done it. Every single time any one thing could have gone another way, in God's imagination it went that way, and all the other women I would have married and all the other children I would have had and all their lives.

But this infinite God is much much bigger than that. He knows what lives every stillborn baby would have lived if it had been born alive, and all the paths. And all the aborted babies. And his knowledge is as real to him as if they had lived. 

And all the babies that would have been created if each individual sperm that didn't fertilize the egg in that ejaculation had got there first. And all those lives. And all the lives that would have been created if you'd had sex on Tuesday of that week instead of Wednesday, or an hour later or earlier, and all the infinity of possibilities. Remember, this God is infinite beyond the library of Babel. 

In God's mind every sperm ever created has joined with every egg ever created and has created every baby that could have been created and all the lives they could have lived and all their forking paths.

And not just that. God knows with equal assurance every sperm that could have been created, every permutation of DNA, even the ones that never lead to live birth, in sperm and egg. Every baby that was never actually possible and how they could have interacted with all the other people in every conceivable permutation. 

It would take trillions of universes to play these things out in reality. 

There may indeed be trillions of universes. 

In fact there are, inside God's imagination or in what we like to call "reality" or "physical reality." The difference is immaterial.

Every heartbreak. Every love. Every time anyone of them was cut from a baseball team.  

It's What It's

We can say
It is what it is

But we can't say

It is what it's.

Or

It's what it's.

We an say

What it is it is.

But we can't say

What it's it's.

Or

What it is it's.

What the rule it?

Occam Has No Conductor

It starts as noise—chaos (call it)

bruit. Then, in the sonic miasma, a note

hard, loud, singularly indistinguishable

from the cacophony. And then another

giving shape to what has come before—

a loud dim din of melody. As long as you live there

will always be noise. And in the noise

melody, infinite overlapping

like symphonies on so many together turning turntables.

The joy not of life but in it.

Not the wonder of the universe,

Not the miracle of mind,

Not the blessing of the church 

But the blessings in the church.

Love in a field of indifference.

You say there’s nothing new here. That’s so.

These words still sound within the old vocabulary, within the old old language

and so you miss them if you listen hard.

The opposite of the rattle in the hum of the car.

Tinnitus on top of everything else.

If I suggest that God did not create the universe 

but was created by it and lives here 

have I excluded myself from all religion?

Such a God no one needs.

Such a God explains nothing.

Maybe Occam has another job for God.

Religion is an industry but

in that industry a melody

the managers didn’t put there

and can’t hear. Hear the shrill whistle

issuing order into sounds

confused. The diamond in the carbon deposit.

The possibility that the noise itself is a melody I can’t entertain. 

Zap all the symphonies ever made into space.

Let aliens hear them. And let one clever one among them posit

a conductor. 

Now listen.