Tuesday, September 29, 2009

sincerely, jd salinger

please accept from me this unpretentious bouquet of very early-blooming parentheses: (((()))).

6 comments:

  1. I went through a period of my life where I spent a lot of time imagining myself into the Glass family.

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  2. Hey man, quick thought:

    So I wondered, the moment we defined nothingness, or zero or whatever, do you think it might have stopped existing? I mean, semantically, the word becomes meaningless on a grand scale. In one case, you have a single drop of something in nothing, and suddenly all that space is considered something, like milk in water. In another case, should we look at that single atom as something, we can still define the space around it as nothing. You get deeper and deeper into magnitudes of scale and you can still define spaces of nothing around spaces of something. Not to say that there are only two cases, of course, I just haven't really thought this out.
    Take the original statement even, "nothingness ceased to exist"? As a double negative, that says something existed. On a mass, objective scale, you can throw the word out, and everything exists. The same logic applies to the normative "matters". They're both subjective and silly at larger magnitudes. Like, a dog matters, but life? There is nothing next to the oxygen atoms next to the dog, but nothing exists?

    So, I used to ask myself, why not nothing? Why does existence exist? And now I think, maybe that doesn't make any sense. Because even if there's nothing, we can still name the emptiness. In math, it's called a null set, or [0].

    Do things exist so long as we can define them? Things we can't define yet can exist only because they haven't been defined, but things that don't exist can be defined too, like dragons, magic, etc.
    So maybe nothingness is like God, useful to bring up for everyday things, but actually non-existent. I've confused myself and my point.
    Sorry!

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  3. Oh yeah I remembered now
    Maybe there's a possibility that nothing and zero are purely human functions (like binary logic), and that even though it seems completely illogical by our standards, nothing is meaningless and everything is. Fuck, that's the same paradox as saying binary logic is false.
    I'm going to shut up now.

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  4. Actually, that's not a paradox. Sorry. To consider the statement "binary logic is false" using binary logic will return false. It is the same as saying existence does not exist, which is also a false statement.

    OOPS

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  5. i think i get your point about nothingness. are you suggesting that nothingness is strictly a human creation meant to be an equally incomprehensible answer to the rest of human creations built to make meaning? like nothingness is our answer to god, both completely impossible to wrap one's mind around, yet necessary in order to make sense of the world?

    also, "naming the emptiness" would be a good autobiography title. but it also brings up interesting points about what the emptiness actually is. fuck man.

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  6. Sure - just as I see meaning/meaningless - I'm beginning to have doubts about its objectivity, and therefore its legitimacy.
    For example, old vedic philosophers in India had this idea about the immutable source of all life. The idea is that existence was all one single mass that was without any discernible attributes (or all attributes), and that any differentiation of any of the pieces of that whole were illusory.
    So I figure all attributes are subjective and illusory, right? So what about the absence of an attribute? So, at large magnitudes, if "meaning" is non-objective and illusory, then "meaningless" is also as such, and therefore serves no purpose as well. Meaningless is meaningless.
    Could we apply the same to the relationship between something and nothing? If all the universe is "thing", then could it be that there really is no "nothing"?
    What is this silliness that my brain can't comprehend? I strongly feel like there's something illogical about this that I am missing, but fear that it is logical.

    Another fun thought: Do Disney movies develop/promote specific relationship fetishes in children? Can we call things like the desire for a white knight or the need for a soul mate kinks? Sometimes I think people like dramatic relationships simply because the drama validates the whole endeavor. There's no intrinsic value, and media and everyone seems to think that these eve
    (actually, I think that these are all part of the whole "everything's a drug" thing, but hey, whatever. I AINT EVEN GONNA GET INTO THIS

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