No, We Don't Write Poems--a formless excursion

 Or music. 

One of the most misleading and perhaps intellectually damaging legacies of the Enlightenment is the idea that people write music or poems. These things are no more written than equations in math are written. They are put down. There is no right word, no single word anyway, that will adequately name the thing that is done when a poem is put down. It is captured, it is discovered, it corresponds to a being or reality that preexists it and that can be perceived when the conditions are right. All artists attest to this fact. A written poem like a written equation is false. E does not equal MC cubed. 

But the Enlightenment needed to create a way of increasing the stock of the commodity "writing." And so it created an author and authorship, a capitalist unit subject to reward an punishment. It's a false equation. Locke's philosophy was written. He can claim it. Whatever is false is written. Whatever is true is found. Locke figured out how to pay people for lying. For making mistakes. For getting it wrong. 

The advantage of math over poetry is that math's equations can be demonstrated to a much higher degree. People who understand math and physics can show that E in fact equals MC squared. But is Hope a thing with feathers? 

Still, I will not say that math or science establishes objective truth. The facts of math or science correlate to human perception and experience. E doesn't equal MC squared in heaven. If asked, God would say not "that isn't true" but "I wouldn't put it that way." 

The two people whose thoughts I'd like to refine are Gervais and deGrasse Tyson. The former says for example "there are 3000 gods, what are the chances you have the right one?" And "I just believe in one less God than you do." I'd like to say, giving God 3000 names does not multiply gods. But I'd also like to say "that doesn't mean there's only one god." The question before this conversation is "does number exist without human brains." And my answer is no. If there are no numbers in reality, no platonic form for number, then the question "how many gods are there" is a nonsense question. 

Why Don’t They Just Say What They Mean?

 

Unless the words were put down in that order in that way it could not do the thing it does to those to whom it does it.

Because the words were put down thus it does nothing to you.

Your move.

F*ing Computers

 

In trying to make our lives simpler, computers have made them hopelessly more complex. What used to be simple, straightforward, intuitive processes now require us to solve a rubrics cube a day to figure out how to store, edit, find, save, and retrieve files. Where is that thing I was working on this morning? I now have ten paths to it, half of which take me nowhere near it, three of which take me to some alternative universe version of it, two of which disappear when I try to click on them. I never know if I do get a file open if this is the one I wanted, the latest version, the best version. It's one of the versions the computer saved for me without my permission when I was thinking about options. The lost bits exist still in the ether. Now I have to train myself in the proper recovery method. I've lost my actual train of thought because I have to inhabit the amateur computer scientist section of my brain for twenty minutes and even to the thing that I dread most in the world: search the HELP menu in a desperate and fruitless attempt to get help. I put in search terms, carefully using the actual terms the computer used with me to tell me what my problem was. But the words a computer uses to talk to you are never the words the computer will allow you to use to talk to it. “You need to verify your username and password.” Ok. Since there’s no useful information there, I go to help, “How do I verify my username and password.” One of two things will happen: “Your query yielded no results.” Or “here are the 10,239 things you might be asking about, including a recipe for blueberry anchovy muffins.”

If I ever to get to the old version of the document without the 20 hours of work I’d already added to it but which, starting from, I’ll save at least 20 hours re-editing that would have been wasted looking for the version I actually wanted to work on I may start working on it again. But before I can do that, I have to offer myself up to a Buddhist monastery.

You Great Unknowns

 

WE know Emily today not because she had great talent

that’s a given

but because she had great luck.

She wrote a letter to the one person who would help her.

We know Kafka today because his best friend betrayed him.

I could go on.

 

The observation is not that we came so close to not knowing these visionaries

but that we don’t know the ones who wrote the wrong letter or had loyal friends.

 

How very many sages remain unknown to history?

We can’t answer that.

When all is finally over, earth exhausted by its native evil

and God gathers God’s own into God’s kingdom

will you finally get your reward, you great unknowns,

or will there be so many of us that we remain

anonymous?