Notes
Some things I've meant to have said before, some things I've thought to say today. I ought to flush them out, since tomorrow I go back to school and there will be a new flood.
What is the best way to divide the thoughts, spatially?
A horizontal line. Dig?
All day today I've had this combined mild headache and stomach bug--overstatements, because there's no pain. Just a disorientation feeling of discomfort. I've been trying to figure out how it is connected at all with the frustrations and obsessions of the past few days, since it may cause or be caused by these fluctuating moods? I don't think there's a distinction any more between any of these kinds of health--I am no longer (was I ever) a homunculus or ghost in a machine. Now I am just a complete living being. "I" refers to all of me, here and now. A stomach bug is a moral dilemma is a stomach bug.
I slept through church on the reasoning that if I didn't, I would be sleepy and not be able to follow it, and just be frustrated I went. Given the circumstances, I think it was correct. However, Mom and Dad could do nothing, afterward, but sing the praises of the interim pastor of our church who had, appropriately for the day, worked alongside Martin Luther King Jr. during his Civil Rights Movement work. Here's a story they related:
This pastor (whose name I don't know) went to visit MLK in jail, in Birmingham. In the black section of the jail, there were three cells: one on the left, holding all the black men who had been jailed for protesting, one on the right, for all the women who had been jailed for protesting, and the cell in the middle, where Martin Luther King sat alone. As this pastor approached, the two cells on either side of the King started singing, getting louder and louder as he approached--full, raucous singing of freedom songs, they just kept singing and singing--
and when the pastor got to the bars of King's cell, he tried to talk to him, but it was so loud! And so he mouthed to King: "Tell them to stop singing so that I can hear you"
And King mouthed back: "They are singing so the guards can't hear us speak."
And so they had their meeting, ear to mouth or mouth to eye, inches away from each other, through the bars, while around them burst the deafening songs of freedom...
My parents told me this story while we were out for brunch today at a Southeast Asian restaurant, because there was a woman a couple tables away who was very loud and animated and, because the music in the restaurant was apparently not loud enough, we could hear every word she was saying.
She's a Scorpio. She also, she swore adamently, not a post-colonialist. Etc.
Which reminds me: Connie Morrell (mother of Steve Morrell, remember?) is a neoplatonist, although she would not identify as such. When she was describing to me her aversion to math, days ago, she then started to talk about her respect for it: her belief that in the world thre is an underlying...I want to say "Creative principle," but I think that's because I'm mixing it up with the research I was doing today on the Freemasons. But an underlying structure, a set of immutable truths, maybe, that she thinks that math describes and which is synonymous with God, which is responsible for, which is the cause of, all that is...dare I use the word?--manifest. Observable, I suppose. I don't remember her words exactly and have though about too many related things all the time.
But I thought it was interesting to catch somebody say something so concrete about how they view truth. So many people, if they are clever, as she is, have a view, and that view is likely to be one of the four or five or so views that have been held and defended and destroyed throughout history. Platonism is everywhere--it's intuitive, it's simple, it's got loads of appeal....
I can't stand it, intellectually, of course. But it's forgivable and even comforting sometimes, especially in the elderly.
Dad is another person who has sophisticated ideas in his head: he's a materialist, I think, in the sense of physicalism, and he holds a correspondence theory of truth with regard to natural facts, but a sort of social pragmatist (I'm thinking, although I only know about through hearsay, Rorty or Davidson) view of ethics. --this is what I gathered in short, 20 minutes conversations between him coming in from work and leaving again for chorus practice.
I want to say something about this somewhere, why not here: vagueness, which occurs when the boundaries of meaning are indistinct, is not the same as ambiguity, which is when communication can be interpreted in more than one way. I'm in danger of being interpreted in more ways than I have meant. Have you interpreted me in more ways than I have meant? Don't misinterpret me. I'm all about clarity, even when I'm also all about vagueness.
What?
Today I heard a neat program on NPR on the way to Grandma's house. It was about emergence, with all the normal examples of it:
- Ant colonies, for starters, which behave, as a whole, in ways that make sense on a high level, to us, despite all the individual ants being, essentially, stupid and blind with no awareness of their place in the greater context of things.
- The organization of cities, which form ethnic enclaves, gentrify, specialize into commercial districts (streets entirely devoted to, say, flowers) without any planning, but just because of the ebb and flow of accident and the minimal communication between us, the ants.
- CONSCIOUSNESS! There is no ghost in the machine, there is an emergent property from billions of interconnected parts, which can be grouped into fewer parts, but still--emergence (self reference, would add Hofstater?) is the key. I think Whitney Wood was the first person to tell me this theory, and now I'm totally for it, as little as I know about the subject now. But I'm warning you: get used to hearing this song, because I'm going to take Philosophy of Mind this semester (with Jaegwon Kim!!) and I'm going to not shut up about emergence, ever, I expect. It will be like Neitzsche all over again.
- This wasn't in the NPR program, but emergence also has a lot to do with natural selection...
Which is talked about in The Metaphysical Club, which is this awesome book about pragmatists (Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William James, Charles Peirce, Dewey) but not really about pragmatism, that Mom got me, way tastefully, for Christmas.
It's a fun romp through a lot of history, including history of the science of evolution. Round abouts mid-1800's, it was seriously fucked. But the auther of the book, Louis Menard, does a beautiful description of the consequence of Darwin's theory of natural selection on thought--the destruction of the essence and type in favor of statistics and probability, where what exists are the individuals, and the categories are our useful but artificial creations--I'll say more about this later.
Mom is worried about my getting enough sleep because I've been sick and tired. I am not asleep yet. It is almost 1 am. I should go to sleep. There is a lot to do tomorrow, I need to pack, etc., before taking the bus to Providence and experiencing that shock. I feel ever so slightly sick. I am sweating from the backs of my knees.
But one more thing to say: I watched Black Orpheus, another Christmas present, with my parents tonight. It tells a love story.
Now I can relate to love stories. Did I ever tell you about one day last semester telling the Aristides Connection: "So now I get it..." "Yeah."--he said, understanding; I was flustered, I had meant to go on and explain-- "Yeah?" "Yeah. Now you get it." It was nice to be understood then.
What I'm saying is that throughout, I couldn't stop thinking about her.
I'm deep in it. And then, in using the internet to supplement my reactions to Piotr's musings about his life, I found this random thing, which is something I should have made the anthem to my whole life and now it very well may be, God help me if that makes me a fool or dead or one day shipwrecked:
Fortune the lover aydes in combat hee is in,
When valiantly he fights with enuy and with shame,
And shewes hee not deserues a coward lovers name,
Faint louers merit not faire ladies for to winne.
I got to get some sleep, get healthy--Diplomacy turn resolutions be damned!