Old Orchard Beach

White Rabbits of Oblivion

The white rabbits of oblivion kept their game face on as the experiments continued. And though hope was in short supply during those long days and nights when, at a moment's notice, they would hear sudden footsteps in the hallway,  and be stricken with dread over which scientist would be the one to snatch them out of their cages with those thick plastic gloves and place them in some artificial, grassy environment only long enough to calm them down until the next injection....It would have seemed quite necessary for some creature or entity, caring, sentient, feeling voice to speak up in protest at the thought of such callous research, but you'd be amazed how little publicity these rabbits generate despite their good looks, their innocent mien, their gentle ways...

Nothing = Almost Something...

Readers of Plato and Parmenides will no doubt find these remarks tedious and derivative nevertheless....Have you ever wondered how "nothing" (when we start talking about it) is somehow more than just plain nothing as long as someone notices it, that it's really "there" somehow by virtue of being "not there." By making it part of our vocabulary, we give it a kind of substance that it's not supposed to have...The absence becomes like a presence so to speak. This ultimate vacuum, this vapid place-holder known as the "empty set" takes on a weird in-between status. Zero-when-seen counts for more than zero-unseen. For example, when someone says to you: "What's wrong?" and you say "Oh, nothing..." there's still something to that, because nothing in such a case has been mingled with a situation. True, there is nothing wrong, but the aforementioned "nothing" cannot refer to a total, all-encompassing black hole. Or, if someone says "What are you feeling?" and you say "Nothing, really..." you're still making room for a space, a mood, a state of mind apart from anything else that could be bothering you). And if someone further challenges you by inquiring: "What are you doing with your life?" and you reply: "Nothing, I tell you! Nothing!" there's more to the story than just that. But if someone gets really brave and declares that "there's nothing behind the material universe, so just get used to it!" Well - are we just going to stand there and take that at face value? I think not...Leibniz in his modern continuation of the metaphysical conversation, spoke freely about "potential beings" - non-entities not quite existing but possessing an aptitude for existence. If that doesn't sound weird then nothing does. These would have to be distinguished (I suppose) from absolute non-entities - if there are any! - that have neither the power nor the inclination to show themselves...

Questions

To be wise...

"To be wise, however, soberly to anticipate what might lie in store, was truly no easy task, for it was as if some vital yet undetectable modification had taken place in the eternally stable composition of the air, in the very remoteness of that hitherto faultless mechanism or unnamed principle - which, it is often remarked, makes the world go round and of which the most imposing evidence is the sheer phenomenon of the world's existence - which had suddenly lost some of its power, and it was because of this that the troubling knowledge of the probability of danger was in fact less unbearable than the common senses of foreboding that soon anything at all might happen and that this anything - the law governing its likelihood becoming apparent in the process of disintegration - was leading to greater anxiety than the thought of any personal misfortune, thereby increasingly depriving people of the possibility of coolly appraising the facts." - Laszlo Krasznarorkai

Time for Some Good News...

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It's the middle of summer for heaven's sake! I'm getting desperate for a happy headline...

Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before...

Something happened at a theater in Colorado. This wasn't the first time...Repeat atrocity in a new venue. At first glance, the suspect seemed too calm and intelligent to have committed such a heinous crime as this; it was hard to place him as "just another" cold-blooded killer or deranged lunatic,  but on the other hand, he fit the profile, that dreaded profile, of a quiet, subdued, loner that no one really knew, a guy whose life was coming unglued in his early 20s, a ticking time-bomb waiting to explode.  Yet still one has to wonder: how does a guy who graduates from college with highest honors in neuro-science come to this? How does a person endowed with superior intellectual gifts, who at one time was in possession of a conscience and a high degree of self-restraint, even a reputation for wit - an actual sense of humor - which would suggest some semblance of joie de vivre, get lost in a fantasy world to such a degree that he ends up identifying with an arch villain, and then enters a theater to mow down other young people who would most likely tend to be on his wavelength, who would be most sympathetic to his plight? And so it remains a mystery why and how so many young caucasian males seem to fall into this trap - assuming as I do that they don't begin life this way - only to end up ruining their own lives, while trashing the lives of others at random for no discernible reason. He apparently had lost the capacity to see outside himself....And the victims? We have their faces, their stories to remind us that something is deeply amiss in Gotham, in the heartland, in the rest of America...