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I choose, as a determining POINT in my life, to acknowledge a bullet fired into the armpit of my grandfather, Samuel Scoville, Jr. by a thief in the night sometime in the late 19thc.
The thief escaped, my grandfather having pulled his own pistol from beneath the pillow, squeezing off a couple of rounds and sending the burglar scurrying into the
For reasons of family notoriety, the incident was reported in both
In those days couples were not advised to be alone. Unaccompanied.
Sam took a steam-driven locomotive train down to
For one thing: YOU, dear Reader, wouldn’t be reading THIS HERE right now, resurrecting these words to walk around in your skull-haus this very be-here-now moment. So even you are impacted forever by that bullet.
(I could drive up to Connecticut right now, retrieve the small bite of lead, drop it in your hand and remind you how co-incidental our life is—how inexplicable, how arbitrary & selective our accounts, how much we omit which is also absolutely necessary, how inadequate our because & affects.)
The bullet is a NECESSARY but INSUFFICIENT cause of who-I-am, without which any explanation would be incomplete. Sam Scoville
What's the alternative to rationality?
ReplyDeleteIrrationality. Of course you have to scrub off the negative popular and cultural connotation before this notion can be appreciated for it's descriptive value. Same with illogical (analogical). But I know you object to fooling with the common and conventional sense of words. You aren't alone.
ReplyDeleteIrrational
ReplyDelete“Imagine the surprise among the early Greek mathematicians
who discovered that there are simple things that occupy
physical space that are not measurable.” [In other words: irrational - no ratios to be made]
What can science do if the simple diagonal of a square [say]
is not measurable? Doesn’t size correspond to number?
Perhaps it doesn’t exist. but denying the existence of something
only makes talking about it meaningless. Hence, denying
its existence is also meaningless. And, therefore, it exists.
Incommensurable, yes? Which is to say irrational,
not to be rationed—no ratios there by golly: no
relays to be made. Well, I’m going to
measure it anyway.