One World, This
Dear Eugene,
I am sure some would object to what I said yesterday. Based on the kind of education we are getting, maybe we should all object.
Well, science can explain a lover's kiss, one says, We must know this by now. Things that go on in a lover's head, bring to bear a series of trigger working together and crossing paths to conjure up what finally a poet would pick up the slack to call "romance." It's simply a release of chemical cocktail that heroin and cocaine too can effectively concoct, just as "obsessive compulsive" in its serotonin-ian nature to give us a long good memory, just as culturally conditioned, almost like a basic human instinct.
Who are we (to answer yesterday's question again) to say what actually "shapes" us? Science can explain ourselves to us, and does a better job every next morning. The rest are just tassels on the fringe, perfunctory footnotes to scientific facts--the only truthful account of actuality.
So I ask a scientist--or, to be more precise and fair, this sort of "scientific" mind--what is a nuclear bomb? Can you explain it to me?
And I don't mean how it works. I can easily Google that. I am asking why we have it? What sort of justification, if there ever is any, for a scientist to invent (meaning, only to discover what was already given) something like this?
To say explaining is the only form of truth-telling must, then, entail explaining things away.
In the name of science and reason, one could explain away a lover's kiss and his stab in the heart of the same lover he once kissed--and the "stab" can be more than figurative. If I say it takes courage for a scientist to not collude with evil power, would I be told there's a scientific explanation to my "sentiment" and that "evil" is too value-laden an adjective to give an "objective" account of someone I happened to not "like"?
"There is another world, but it is in this one." To again quote Yeats. We are just too blind to see.
"Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand."
Weeping for no reason, Alex
I am sure some would object to what I said yesterday. Based on the kind of education we are getting, maybe we should all object.
Well, science can explain a lover's kiss, one says, We must know this by now. Things that go on in a lover's head, bring to bear a series of trigger working together and crossing paths to conjure up what finally a poet would pick up the slack to call "romance." It's simply a release of chemical cocktail that heroin and cocaine too can effectively concoct, just as "obsessive compulsive" in its serotonin-ian nature to give us a long good memory, just as culturally conditioned, almost like a basic human instinct.
Who are we (to answer yesterday's question again) to say what actually "shapes" us? Science can explain ourselves to us, and does a better job every next morning. The rest are just tassels on the fringe, perfunctory footnotes to scientific facts--the only truthful account of actuality.
So I ask a scientist--or, to be more precise and fair, this sort of "scientific" mind--what is a nuclear bomb? Can you explain it to me?
And I don't mean how it works. I can easily Google that. I am asking why we have it? What sort of justification, if there ever is any, for a scientist to invent (meaning, only to discover what was already given) something like this?
To say explaining is the only form of truth-telling must, then, entail explaining things away.
In the name of science and reason, one could explain away a lover's kiss and his stab in the heart of the same lover he once kissed--and the "stab" can be more than figurative. If I say it takes courage for a scientist to not collude with evil power, would I be told there's a scientific explanation to my "sentiment" and that "evil" is too value-laden an adjective to give an "objective" account of someone I happened to not "like"?
"There is another world, but it is in this one." To again quote Yeats. We are just too blind to see.
"Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand."
Weeping for no reason, Alex
"What speaks to you? Who shaped you the most?"
ReplyDeletePain - embedded within & beyond personal experiences in one world, this. Common aches, transient irritability, seismic agony, imperceptible grief, ignorant bliss - the panorama of pain which precludes me from listening to one who "sings a lasting song, thinks in the marrow bone" (Yeats).
Pain in cautiously deliberate steps arrived at my maternity ward on the day I introduced my first & only child to the world. Weeks later, I abandoned the crib & its breathing contents to return to college in an effort to redeem a lost decade of missed opportunities as if it were possible. By the time another decade and a half have elapsed, my child - who has since then leapt from crib to college-bound courses - hardly knows her working parent whose one eye rests on loan payments & the other on laundry.
Then there is the pain of the unknown curiously & recently documented in New York Times: a former philosophy professor & her severely disabled lover along with their families & communities whose billowing sorrows would have exceeded the intensity of intrigue in the most melodramatic plot at the matinee cinema.(https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/05/magazine/the-strange-case-of-anna-stubblefield-revisited.html)
What about anticipated pain, possible pain (with analysts & statisticians calculating the likelihood of occurrence or recurrence)? Will today's summit meeting on "Sunshine Policy" between North & South Korean presidents lead to enforceable actions in addressing the plight of nuclear arms? If not, its resultant pain would be an understatement.
Indeed, "God the Spirit speaks to us in different ways."
Pain - in all its shapes & weights, forms & questions, contained or explosive - has sculpted me without my permission so that I may lay "wide open to the contingency of the one True Word", perhaps even "weeping for no reason" to share your pain too.
Yours, K
Great quotes from Yeats. K, in response to your 2nd paragraph, would you have done anything differently, since they say hindsight is 20/20? How can you learn from pain and turn this adversary into an advocate?
DeleteYou hit the target question! In hindsight, if I could do it all over again, I would delay childbirth & return to school first before any thoughts of motherhood. I am still working on turning my painful history into advocating for support towards working Moms.
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