Tuesday, August 18, 2015

Journal 84 - Gettier and the Knowledge of the Moon

I discovered the moon late in life, and late at night.
The red moon hanging over a swamp at night, hearing the
critters and the creatures singing in your imagination the
dissonant sounds of heir swampy minor songs, rough and
rhythmic in their passionate cries. The moon hangs there
reflected in the water still but for the moccasin slithering
through the water with a tongue tasting the air and the
swamp, the cottonmouth swimming side to side in the
redness of the rising moon, preyful and cocky as it
shifts its weight around in the starry night. Stars shine
through time but the snakes and the rut-less deer and the
other nocturnal creatures don't notice or acknowledge this
ancient miracles of mathematical models; they eat about
their business happily ignorant of any questions of art,
induction, knowledge, warrant, fundamentalism (whether
physics or Protestantism) or justified true belief. Or
justifiable true belief - or Gettier's knowledge of luck -
ignorance is bliss is not a negative insight - regardless
of a dissatisfied Socrates. Three pages of Gettier thus
confounded the philosophical world...of epistemology, and yet
how many happy people smile happily day to day and pool
to pool, knowing full well they are happy and that they
smile, the wet smile on their wet child's face as she
jumps into the pool in a solid cannonball, splashing all
the other kids with true and justified laughter, is a smile
spread across many thousands of people throughout the
blue marshy world - smiles known to be true and justified
despite Gettier's or Plantinga's attempts at falsifying or
affirming this ubiquitous sample of natural human
knowledge. But can we trace the source of this glad
expenditure of commonality, this common human nature -
can we trace it to God our ontological Father or the cold
mixture of chemicals, accidental in their appearance of
predictability and spontaneity. Civil Wars come and
go in word and song but each day we feel the
presence of those who gave their lives for their word
and those who see the Civil Wars as a metaphor for
ourselves - our relationships with each other and our
proclivity for conflict despite our oh-so-knowledgeable Age.


12.5.2012


Wednesday, August 12, 2015

Journal 83 - Sound of a Bloody Sunday

The moment in the evening when there is a general feeling
that everything is all right and good, when you smile at the
thoughts of the kids in the yard spraying each other with
green garden hoses is a June bug in November - a quiet
harbinger from heaven, fleeting except to those whose nose
she files into. My nose hurts only on some spectacular
rare occasions. These occasions of visits from heaven-
painful as other-worldly visits are apt to be - slip in under
my eyelids while my eyes rae back and forth with red
blood vessels swelling into scary rivulets of overflowing
panic, and they (those extra-terrestrial parakletes) blow back
the bloody waters, to my surprise, as angels and gods should
instill despair, right? My despair is my comfort and my
vice. My depression is a yellow wildflower in October-
beautiful and in days dead. I sometimes wonder if
depression is a sin or a blanket draped over a child at
night in december - shielding an onslaught of cold sickles
assaulting what is left bare in the openness of our over-
heating world. Contradictions are sometimes, it seems, all
we have to lead us to the hint, to the whisper, of the
share of truth - the sand(?) of shepherd's pie & fish & chips.
That which is fast is fast, and that which is slow, slow.
And in the end it is we who are fast and slow, not food.
A shaved head & glasses for some reason says disciplined
intelligence, but my stats say intelligence is common
but discipline a relic discovered by a swift spelunker.
The sound of a Bloody Sunday should mean so much
to the world but I think it's just the quaint refrain
of a familiar song. BTW - my pen rests when my thoughts
sink. Why do we have to swelter here on Earth in
constant question of that which is and that which
isn't, craving like a drug addict for God's response-
only to have more questions with the answers in the
Bible while walking in fear of the sweltering threat
of never-ending hell itself? Why is the sirenic call
of the Walking Dead so sirenic? Paul cried out with
a loud mega cry: I would that I had three years alone
with Jesus, Immanuel, He that which none greater could be
conceived - though no lesser excuse could be conceived.


11.11.12

Friday, August 7, 2015

Journal 82 - Dylan Understood Revolutions Per Minute


The cold rain slipped in like a thief in the night to save
us from the perdition of summer. It is cold and wet and
the leaves glisten in the fallen moonlight and Ik now no
deeper thought. My eyes are bothered by this slippery beauty,
burning in the windy night, crying reluctant tears at all those
who have fallen in this beautiful wet world, like boxers struggling
in the last round of their last fight; like matriarchs who lie
to dance and shuffle their feet with a wonderfully wrinkled
smile and fought for twinkle in her wizened eyes, who passes through
this wet world with hymns and hugs and prayers and squeezing
hands. A hand squeezed can make the venom in a grin grown
sweet like a six year old at her birthday party when that one
certain person arrives ful of warmth and smiling laughter
conquers all anxiety. Red wine is so good outside at night in
the cold. Cold is a state of being and my being tells me I'm
cold. I see the lights strung around the small white fence
around my deck reflected in a semi-circle in my wine glass
like the lights on a runway (were they in a semi-circle) or the
pegs of guitar strings on a giant 27-string guitar; or the
illuminated connectors of a memory board stick, maybe
SODIMM;- and it is good. It is good to see no matter how
or what the method or what the content, no matter the
comparison - it is good to be aware. It is easy to judge and to
correct but to understand is a gift of God. To drink is not
to understand. But still Dylan understood. Life is a record player
and most of us are on the wrong speed, the wrong revolutions
per minutes - we are too fast. Thirty-three is good. Life is a
slow revolution of punctuated equilibrium that settles at the
bottom of someone's dirty ocean. Life is cycled seasons of laughter.
Life is learning ephemeral contemporary thoughts of you and me
and technology too, knowing too late these thoughts are
dark like a whore who has a trust fund in 3 banks. Life is
a song full of warmth and heartache on a record with a
scratch that keeps repeating itself over and over, always finding
a new audience with the birth of another credulous generation
who finds itself enlightened with the spirit of man. A child's
laugh is caulk for the scratches and cracks in this broken
world. The world may be a teetering pivot in a silent cold
vacuum but I hear the music in the dark spheres and i
feel the heat in the distant emptiness of our blank verse.


10.8.12