Bizarre and Inexplicable

Hello, Universe. Here I am.

How are we doing, everyone? Judging by the resounding stir of nothing echoing in the distance I can only assume that no one is actually out there. Maybe someday.

What a heaping load of bullshit, huh? I know. Even as I was writing I was thinking it. But I suppose I’d like to get to the point. I’m sure you feel the same. 

So: My first post. My second try at my first post, in fact. Fucking computer deleted the original. Sorry to be crass. I’m often very annoyed about my laptop’s complete and utter disregard for my feelings. C’est la vie. I’d argue that art is more about the failures than the successes any day. Undoubtedly my most prized achievements have been born from the deep well of my failures.

I’m sure you’re beginning to wonder if this is it. Is he just going to babble on about nonsense and wallow in a sea of incomplete thoughts? What a prick!

Basically, this is it. I want to write something that I’m passionate about. I want to introduce you to the ideas and images that have had a significant role in my development as a person. Maybe you’ll see the world like me. Perhaps you’ll think I’m an asshole. I’m willing to take that risk. Which leads me to my first grand allusion, a little bitty from Douglas Adams’s The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe.

If you don’t know what this book is GO TO THE LIBRARY! Read it. But start with the first book. Work your way through them. If you get to read the new one tell me what you think, I haven’t read it yet.

“It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.”

As I discussed earlier, I’m completely willing to risk any of your opinions on my character because, according to this you and I probably don’t exist at all. Transitively your opinions would be completely null, if not terribly close to non-existent. Now I know what you’re thinking, but I am not a nihilist. I promise you that.

Ponder on this, if you have something to say about it, do. I want here back about your experience with this idea. Maybe I’ll learn something new.

I really love this quote for how true it is in a slightly paradoxical way. It’s one of those concepts that really forces you to think about what you are reading. You crave to make sense of it.

Of course, we know that this is untrue. We experience our environment. We taste. We touch. We hear. We see. We smell. We all share a common understanding of our environment. But we’ve also all been exposed to the idea that life is solely an illusion. Hamlet made a tragedy of that idea: Ophelia drowned, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead,…oh…And alas, Poor Yorick.

I think the thing that really grasped me, you know, that bit that made me nervous was the whole mathematical formulation in there. In this day and age we are so dependent on empirical knowledge that we know to accept it immediately. God knows somewhere in a dark chalk congested room an astrophysicist slaved over his crinkly notebook testing and testing and proving that formula. I’m not saying that Douglas Adams was an astrophysicist. I don’t think he was at least, but with the dark cold nudge of a mathematical proof…it makes me tense just thinking about it. Do you think this says something about my relationship with mathematics? Oh wow. I hope I didn’t repress a terrible mathematics related memory. Too much to handle.

I would like to conclude this post with a hopeful spin to this somewhat frightening philosophy. The following quote always gives me a bit of an optimistic heart even in the darkest of moments. I wish I could say that I pulled it from my musty old copy of Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus that I purchased on a rainy day trip to Ithaca, but I can’t find it. I googled this. Don’t be offended.

Camus really played with the idea that regardless of the knowledge a person had of his own existence, no matter how monotonous, and insignificant it may seem, man is still the master of his own mind. No one can take that away.

“I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

So that may have been a bit of a tangent, but I hope I made you think. I hope I affected you in some way and gave you a better understanding of the workings of my mind.

Please let me know what you thought of these excerpts. I would love to here about it.