Drip, drip, drip, drip...
What is harder than rock, or softer than water? Yet soft water hollows out hard rock. Persevere.
— Ovid (43 BC - 18 AD)
Persistence Personified
Drip, drip, drip, drip...
What is harder than rock, or softer than water? Yet soft water hollows out hard rock. Persevere.
— Ovid (43 BC - 18 AD)
The titled responsion is torture to the cadence of chaos.
How hard-headed are you when it comes to your precious ideals? Are you aware of the penetrating force of chaos that chips away with this chaotic allusion? The time decay and delta force is hardly a function of the faucet, it "transcends" the ideal of everything except the kitchen sink!
Why is chaos ideal? Ideal because it [chaos] is the substrate from which we create. This ordered arrangement is ubiquitous from single-cell organisms to the complex organized long-term destruction, otherwise known as civilization.
I realize that I am projecting a sense of pessimism coupled with my ideal of how we, as global citizens, re-act to the probability of actualizing a coordinated global effort to stabilize biodiversity with the people's Will.
The value proposition is one of survival. Do we have a choice?
Transcendental Optimism
Religion is the idol of the mob; it adores everything it does not understand.
— Frederick the Great (1712-1786)
The titled responsion is made sense of chaos in a forme of positivity that we can all orient towards. Upward happens to be the most intuitive intuition of life itself.
Heliotropic worship is what I am referring to. Transcendence is a special form of metaphysics made manifest through the minds of millions and propagated through liturgical exercises and cathartic callisthenics.
Mind-Full-Ness
It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.
— Charles Darwin (1812-1870)
The titled responsion is a metaphysics of sorts. Humble, yet sincere, and very well said. Better yet, the ideal form is imagination, which is orientated towards perfection. In this case, a tryptic is full of the essence of the mind. It's a bit of a mouthful and undeniably contaminated with contemporary cliché. Does this contaminate or delegitimize the value of this endeavour? This movement toward perfected perfectibility? So say so, I say so what!
Minding your p's and q's is a reference to something logical. What comes next is circular, not in reasoning; it's understanding that flipped on the vertical axis p becomes b, and q becomes d. Big Data is where this conversation is headed, a technological "fix" that could be oriented to augment our collective understanding. To achieve this transcendence of human understanding, we will have to liberate the data exhaust that we, on average, emit and keep it out of the hands of a select few. Democratize, democratize, democratize.
Emptiness meets the metaphysics of optimism, wish-well thinking, and the wellspring of creativity that begets the ah-ha moment of an action potential actualized is far from applied. Philosophy can do better. So can you. Apply yourself!
Spoken Like a True Life-Long Learner
Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.
— John Dewey (1859-1952)
The titled responsion is an Ethos of sorts. From the autodidactic to the autocratic ruler of the self, the discipline I am referring to is a contradiction of sorts. The beauty that emerges is from within the sorting function and exists a priori as Beauty.
Reinforcing the educational pedagogy and the auxiliary learning that takes shape in various forms worldwide is quite an accomplishment. Unique to our species, this particular kind of information flow's viral nature spreads benevolently, elevating humanity out of ignorance and tribal tendencies.
Passive Pacifism
In a gentle way, you can shake the world.
— Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)
The titled responsion is a pastiche to passive persuasion and the embodiment of such an ideal in the forme of Mahatma Gandhi.
Unrealistic expectations or metaphysical wish-wash? A passive approach to pacifism may be gentle, but it's not the only way to shake things up. Discuss the Gandhian brand of passivity; if I recall, this man was steadfast in fasting for 21 days, yet his wife is rarely mentioned. Expand on this and the implications that surface.
Identity Pessimistic
A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.
— Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
The titled responsion is "Identity Pessimistic." What follows is subject to revision. Do you have any suggestions?
Fempty Optimism Will Prevail
The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.
— Walter Benjamin (1892-1940)
The titled responsion is perhaps prophetic. Only time will tell.
Ok, here it is, a gentle yet playful attempt at something that you shouldn't take too seriously. Empty optimism is vacuous and contains nothing of value, let alone substance. Yet, the fempty modification attempts a morphology of sorts giving a full-ness to the glass have full truism. Why not just say glass has full rather than fempty? If you look at the transcendental state of the water, it lies just below the meniscus, with the bottom half full of nothingness. There is no basis for the claim of transcendental femptiness, yet I can imagine it, articulate it and even replicate it as an individual cultural unit. Did I just mention meme?
Reading the Meniscus (2022) is the title of my pastiche about the transcendentalists of our past. From Plato to Henry David Thoreau and the Romantics in between, I feel we are all Platonists to some degree. I count myself as not so much a transcendentalist but a transcendental materialist of sorts. The, of sorts, is an important addition to the equation. As a watchword (pair), of sorts, indicates an aesthetic arrangement down to the cellular level, the appreciation for which only becomes relevant at our individual and collective say-so.
So you are a Materialist?
Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.
— Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014)
The titled responsion is oddly metaphysical made material (kinda).
As a fictional phenomenon, Jesus was constructed as a carpenter, and now the minds of millions, perhaps billions, are transcendental materialists. Unless you are creating literature, you are just transcendental, pretending, or dreaming. Take your pick.
If you doubt the constructed mythology that is the living body of Christ, then you have "figured" it out, separated man from the myth, and I am here to tell you that Christ was never a man made of flesh. There was no historical Jesus. This is not a bold claim; the evidence points in this direction, but it's not up to me to sharpen Occam's razor; this would be up to the Apologists and Atheists alike who feel there was a man from Galilea that walked on water, healed the sick and gave his forsaken life to humanity for our sins. Do I believe that there was such a man? Sure, but believe me is not what you are thinking.
I believe fairy tales, myths, mythical dragons, hobbits, and howling man-wolfs are true in that they are true stories originating in our imaginations. Nothing more. What we do with these stories is, well, another story.
Now, you might think that I am devaluing or delegitimizing these stories by relegating them to the world of pretend. Au contraire mon frère, the problem lies in the language itself; the pejorative meaning of "pretend" presupposes a child-like utility mixed with the simpleton capacity of the masses to experience the wisdom that emerges. The lazy response is to believe. Understanding Christ's wisdom, and the wisdom of the Bible for that matter, is something transcendent that (in Christian terms) will bring you closer to the All-Mighty.
Chances are...
I don't believe in pessimism. If something doesn't come up the way you want, forge ahead. If you think it's going to rain, it will.
— Clint Eastwood
The titled responsion is a slippery slope. I guess that's life, but this modern-day icon of male-ness is trying to convey that persistence and obstacles are inevitable. Fill your mind with the task and get the job done, rather than trying to frame it with positivity.
This flip-side view of optimism objectifies my bias toward the ideal and adjusts my operating system within and towards this transcendental potential. Preparing for the changing landscape of worst-case scenarios is not only pragmatic; it's also Stoic.
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