back by popular demand…

The second in a quartet, another physicosophical vignette…

My theory is that Shane and I had something because of what we’d imagined for ourselves. We all have a basic idea of who we are or what we should be, and weightless though it feels, it’s enough to create a tangible relationship. Over the years our relationship grew bigger, and now that it’s over it feels much heavier.

Roger Penrose’s theory is that the property of mass is imparted by the interactions of more fundamental, massless particles. He is trying to support the Theory of Everything with his own twistor theory. I understand that the key to this is almost as simple as literally looking at the universe from another angle, and I know that I am young, and the evolution of Shane-and-I should be a learning experience, I just wish I had the math to understand the physics of it.

Some Thoughts

I found this in my Drafts folder. I wrote it two months ago, and I’m not really sure where I was going with this. But time has divorced me from this post emotionally, so while it was too trite to publish at the time it is now a window into my past. Make of it what you will…

I stubbed my toe so badly last tuesday there was legitimate concern I had broken it. It is still so swollen that wearing shoes is painful for the first twenty minutes, until the pressure forces out some of the fluid. I don’t think I walked into the table because it had been moved, or I’d forgotten where it was. I think I just expected it to get out of my way.

I have always had problems with spatiality, though. Remember Goldeneye for the N64? As impressive as the graphics were at the time, and how awesome James Bond is, I just couldn’t play it. Even with the map, I just could not for the life of me remember where I was in relation to anything, or what I had just passed. I spent the entire game trying to figure out how to get over there. Right there. Come on – I can see it, how the HELL do I get down?

The thunder this morning was so loud that as it woke me up I worried it had something to do with the structure of the house – perhaps the deck falling off onto my doorstep. Moments later another crack and another rumble and I was still concerned because it sounded like it was right on top of me. Needless to say, I couldn’t get back to sleep. I decided to try to be productive. I got up and read about Kurt Goedel’s disappearance of time, in which he discusses the dying concept of a spatial Time. I can see the simplistic appeal of trying to map temporal progression the way we do a landscape but I gotta say, if I were to fight for a spacial model of time it would be based on the fact that I seem to keep stubbing my toes on Time, too.

Oh, and so you know, my toe is still messed up. Eventually my concern over the possible long-term effects of an untreated foot injury prompted me to see the doctor, which played out exactly as I predicted: she pressed, tugged, stretched and squeezed my swollen pinky then ordered an X-ray… which I failed to follow through on. And now it’s set, and permanently enlarged, and I can’t wear high heels because the pressure on that angle creates a stabbing sensation. At least I learned my lesson, so I won’t be one of those people whose appendix bursts because they kept saying, “It’s just a stomach ache.”

Setoric

As Bill mentioned to me on the increasingly less-secluded sands of King Edward Bay, the set theory of music is definitely going to play a role in my essay on rhetorical axiomatization. The symbolic logic of mathematics will be integral to my study and I think that the proof of the relative value of pitches’ ability to elicit emotion strengthens the idea that some concepts are better served when discussed in different languages. The difference in phrasing from one linguistic family to the next is obvious to even the least-trained ear (as a child, my favorite songs were Cape Breton folk sung in Gaelic, which appealed to me almost viscerally). I think it’s fair to suggest that, though the masses will always be suckers for demagoguery, Hitler and Lenin would not have been so successful in as bastardized a language as English. Could it be the cacophony of their tongues that did it?
On the other hand, Mussolini and Franco did it with languages no longer referred to as “Romance” because of their latin roots. When looking at the specifics of musical set theory, I’m going to have to begin with these two men.