[lit-ideas] This is a post in which I am not even going to mention God.
- From: Mike Geary <jejunejesuit.geary2@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 19 Oct 2010 01:34:31 -0500
Wow. Cool breezes. It's been such a long time. This is a summer I should
have made it rich, so awfully hot. But I hate work so much, that I had to
borrow money to get through it. I'm not sure who (whom?) to blame. I
usually accuse my father. He was pretty ambitionless. But then my mother's
to blame as well, she was an unabashed enabler, what with all her
Romanticism -- I'm sure she talked him into moving to the farm in Arkansas
to raise sheep, even as all the world was fleeing to the cities -- it's
humiliating what men will do for the women they love -- but let me tell you
this, as financially stupid as that move was, I celebrate it. I had never
known such beauty, so sensuous the lay of land. That farm infused me with a
sense Earth-immanence, so much that I still loved the dirt under my nails
and odor of musk and decay just as much as seeds must love it knowing it's
mother's milk. I don't believe I could have ever known that celebration of
things outside the farm experience. But this is not why I'm writing
tonight. I'm writing poem about about this stuff which I'll inflict about
you all, hoping before most of us die of old age. What I want to talk about
is electricity.
Marcus T. Cicero (or perhaps it was Molly Bloom) and I (among others)
engaged in a very unheated discussion about the fundamentality of
physicality. Marcus argued against physicality being the ground of our
being. I disagreed, not to the question as to whether or not there is more
to existence than the physical universe, because I don't believe in
physicality as such. I do believe that we are through and through physical
creatures -- but physicality? What the hell does that mean? It means
nothing to a cosmic ray which can and does shoot through physical masses
like the earth and never touch anything. Nothing but empty space are we to
them, no more so than granite. They zip right through us and the whole
earth 99.000009% of the time (this is good science, trust me). That
.000001% of the time probably accounts for you and I -- a cosmic ray
slamming into one or ancestor's chromosomes and altering history. Isn't
that physicality? No. Marcus (or was it Molly?) objected to the notion
that physicality could explain thought or ideation or perhaps what Bergson
called the "elan vital". He/she asserts that neuronal activity can never
account for our awareness, our curiosity, our hunger to understand, that
such drives arise out of something much deeper than mere neuronal
physicality. I would respond, were I such a flippant fellow, that both
Marcus and Molly exist only because of mere neuronal physicality. But that
is being flippant and I'm not flippant fellow. WHY DO WE EXIST? Ah,
there's the rub. Well, we didn't ask to exist, did we? It was the hormonal
physicality of our parents that brought us into being. And the wondrous
physicality of the womb -- I'll never forget that comfort -- and then into
the world. And our parent's thankless 50,000 + years of raising us -- in
physical terms that is -- that brings us to this moment, to this momentous
question: Are we going to let these Tea Party people take over America????
Wait, wait -- I got carried away. The question is this in my mind. It
seems to me with my deep understanding of Physics and Philosophy that there
is only energy -- it's the basis of everything. What is it? Where did it
come from? I take the more Asian view that I'll just dissolve back into the
flow and become perhaps parts of ten trillion things of which I surely am
already.
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