Metaphors to Live With, Chap 7

METAPHORS TO LIVE WITH

CHAPTER 7:  TEN LITTLE DECIMAL PLACES

            Remembering the old joke about waiting for Gödel.  Not remembering the why it was funny.

            The joke, I mean.  Not being funny.  Maybe it was then and but it is now that waiting for Gödel is not funny.  I am aware that funny is a judgment.  I say aware, but in this case I probably mean more that I presume that funny is a judgment. 

            That is to say, funny is not empirically known.  Or maybe, better said, there is no empirical truth to funny.

            Not that I know it to be a truth that if you were carving a right-handed moebius strip and switched midway through your carving to a left-handed moebius strip you would automatically end with a lemniscate.  Which is what I implied previously.

            And but so it is clear, I was not attempting to make a joke.  Not attempting to be funny, that is.  Not that one has to be true to be funny, not that at all, which is what the logic of my statements seems to be saying, if not implying.

            The statements about funny not being empirically known, or rather, having no empirical truth.  But because some things that are known to be funny do have empirical truths as the root cause of why they are found to be funny.

            Imagine being the only person to find something funny.  Imagine no one other thinking that the thing you found to be funny was funny at all.  Imagine, then, being very alone with the judgments.  Judgments plural because the judgment of what is funny, and the judgment of no one other finding to be funny the thing you found funny.

            This feeling is not unlike the feeling of thinking that the world began when you began.  The feeling of aloneness, I mean.  When you alone think that something is funny is the feeling that I am referencing.

            This is all, I am sure, not as clear as I would wish it to be.

            The whole of history, written simply and just for your own personal edification.  Not that the writing would be either simple or necessarily just.  But then because all of the others in your world would read and perhaps know the history that was created for your world.  Which is why there wouldn’t be so much confusion.

            And but because if everyone had a different history, one can imagine that there would come to be a great amount of confusion.  Such as for instance, if in my history pencils are not conducive to being used as stabbing implements but in maybe someone other’s history, being used as stabbing implements and stabbing implements only is the express and correct use for a pencil.  And maybe in this other’s history, paper is simply a bandage for after the stabbing that would inevitably occur.  Not actually used to write on with the pencil, I mean.

            But so imagine if in this alternate world someone other asks to borrow your pencil and maybe some of your paper and you suspect that they would like to write something down on the paper with the pencil because maybe they have an important message for someone or they have an important number like maybe Pi that they don’t want to forget and even maybe the important message that they have that they want to borrow some of your paper and your pencil to write down is for you and so yes of course they may borrow some of your paper and so but yes of course you will loan them your pencil because it does after all seem to be the polite and courteous and right and correct thing to do and if nothing else you want to be, when it is available to be so, polite and courteous and right and correct.  But so and after being all of these things you want to be, after being polite and courteous and right and correct, imagine then your at least surprise when the person you loaned your pencil and some of your paper to stabs themselves viciously, maybe in the arm or in the chest or perhaps even in the neck, and then takes the proffered paper and dabs at themselves in an effort to bandage the wound that the stabbing with your pencil caused.

            I am aware that there is probably some vague if not legal sort of liability involved in such a scenario.  Even if only an ethical liability.  The scenario, I mean, where because you have different histories you innocently loan some other a pencil and some paper and the other in turn stabs their self viciously with the one and dabbles at their self with the other.

            The whole of history that is written simply and just (see above) for your own personal edification being what might help deter an ethical liability such as the one described above from occurring.

            I am far afield from where I started.

            Not that I am at all saying that I am in any way ungrateful for any of the things that I have been given or that I have received.  Which is not to say that I have ever received a pencil or some paper for the express purpose of stabbing myself rather than for the use to write something down.  But because I can see how one might so think after what I have written.

            And but isn’t write down an odd phrase?  As opposed, of course, to its opposite which could only mean that you are writing up.  Which phrase I’ve also heard, by the way.

            Or, if by chance, like a history created simply for your world, then every picture you ever see, be it a picture that you can hold or a picture that someone else holds or a picture of a picture that you see, is blank.  Until you look at the picture, that is.  That is to say, until you personally lay eyes on the picture there is nothing in the picture and it fills in only when you first see it.  And but then you can never un-see it.

            Lay eyes is one of those odd phrases, like write down, because of course you would have to remove your eyes to lay them somewhere.  Which would not work at all.  Well, not if you actually wanted to see what you were trying to see.

            But so for a moment you are looking at a picture of, say, the Matterhorn, but for the flash second before you think that you are looking at a picture of the Matterhorn, you are actually only seeing a blank picture.  Your mind places the Matterhorn in the picture.  Not, by the way, that it has to be the Matterhorn.  It might as easily be the Louvre, for instance, or a piano, or a Sherpa.  Which, with no certainty at all, asks the question if everyone is seeing the same piano that you see when you look at the picture.  Or the same Louvre.

            Or even the same Louvre and Matterhorn in the same picture, with the same Sherpa playing the same piano.  You might even be hearing the same tune out of the piano while the Sherpa is playing it.  Playing the piano, that is, in front of the Louvre that is located on the Northeast face of the Matterhorn.

            Or, one might say, the Mistral face of the Matterhorn.

            It would be fair, by the way, for one to mention that we strayed irrevocably far from where we started.  Fair, that is, if the one mentioning knows a) where we started, and b) exactly where we are now.  Because of the reference one would rightly need to properly judge the far, and by judging the far judging also its irrevocability.

            I am unclear why I said that the name was Möbius.  When the name is Möbius.  Not was.

© 2012 – Mark A. Douglas