Missed it by a few hours, but better late….

Meditation on “To A Louse, On Seeing One on a Lady’s Bonnet at Church“

He: (watching a documentary on politics) ”O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us To see oursels as ithers see us!”

She: Burns had it wrong.

He: Which part?

She: Pretty much all of it. That wouldn’t be a gift. It would be a curse.

He: I’m thinking both Bobby Burns and the Louse might disagree.

She (Shrugs): Burns, maybe. But the Louse is free to roam and feed and live its lousy life only so long as its host remains blissfully unaware of its presence. As soon as the “gift” arrives, the jig is up.

He: Well…

She (attempting to nip that bud): If you’re about to mansplain what Burns meant about the potential difference in the poor woman’s attitude if she is humbled before her peers by hosting a common louse, spare me.

He: You can’t deny it would puncture her pretensions, and by extension, everyone else’s under the same circumstances.

She: You’re making my point. What is she pretending, except to be what her society expects from a proper woman of the time? Take that away from her, and what does she have left?

He: Herself?

She: Rubbish. Every one of us, and that includes you, build our identities from the ground up, and that perspective would amount to what Tarot calls “a Tower moment,” when everything comes crashing down. No one could survive it with their sense of self intact. That leads to madness…perhaps literally.

He: That old “we become what we pretend to be” saw? Maybe we become what we’re supposed to be.

She: Now you’re excluding free will. Are you claiming our choices are preordained?

He: Maybe, and what’s that got to do with it?

She: Everything. There’s choice involved where building a sense of self.  Not always good ones, but that’s the tragedy of free will. Maybe the “proper woman” motif is a bad choice, an unsustainable choice despite society’s expectations. But it’s hers. Does she deserve to lose it just because an observer sees what she does not?

He: Sorry, I just got a flash of the lady in church as a metaphor for Schrodinger’s cat. Alive or dead, proper or ridiculous, all depending on the observer.

She: For once you may not be too far wrong. Now. Do you really want your own fragile—and I say that because we are all fragile—identity and sense of self dependent on the kindness of strangers?

He: From a poet to a playwright. You’re mixing your argumentative metaphors.

She: Say rather I’m expanding my examples. If you always snort the same way when you choke back a laugh, do you really want or need to know that it sounds like a sow in heat?

He: It does?

She: That’s not the point. Assuming there’s nothing you can do about it, would you want to know?

He: I guess not…so, does it?

She: Of course not. It’s just an example.

He: As long as I don’t have to depend on the kindness of strangers.

©2021 Richard Parks

There should be a proper post here, but right now I’m kinda tied up. First Reader just got out of the hospital after knee replacement surgery (fragile joints seem to run in her family). So, as the only fully ambulatory (at the moment) member of this partnership, I’ve been kind of busy.

Regardless, she’s fine and making good progress, but my duties will keep this from being any more than what it is. I hope to be more on schedule by next week.

I hope to see ya’ll then.

‘Nothing’ is a difficult concept.

Seriously. Think about it. What exactly is ‘nothing’? Does it even exist? And if it did, how would we know? Aside from what, how about where?

Have you ever been looking for something lost, and somebody says, “Have you checked the closet?” And you say, “I did. It’s not there.”  Or, sometimes, “There’s nothing there.”

That statement is false. There’s certainly something there, if only cobwebs or a stray dust bunny, or air, or maybe a lost button. Possibly even clothes. Those are all somethings, to belabor the obvious, just not the something you were looking for. It’s easy to find something because it’s impossible not to do so. Finding nothing? As in the example, people claim to have found nothing all the time: Data scientists when they can’t find a correlation, or detectives looking for clues, or a child looking for fairies. They found nothing, they say. They’re always either lying or being very imprecise in their word usage. Say rather you didn’t find the specific something you were looking for. That’s fair. Say you found nothing? Liar, liar, pants on fire.

Which would certainly be something.

Quantum Mechanics says that something can be two things at the same time, like a qubit that can simultaneously be on and off or somewhere in between. Nothing may be less amorphous by comparison, but it has to be somewhere. Good luck finding it. Don’t bother looking in the closet, though. I already checked. How about deep space? It certainly looks like a vast bit of black nothing, only we know it isn’t. Even when there are no other stars, planets, or moons, there are always hydrogen atoms humming to themselves and perhaps wondering, if capable and inclined, what all the fuss is about.

Scientists theorize that there is a phenomenon called “Unruh radiation” produced by quantum fluctuations in the “nothing” of the vacuum of space which could, properly accelerated by, say, a massive black hole, produce heat and light. Yep. Light from “nothing.” Still only a theory and way above my cognitive pay grade. We’ll let the experts sort that one out.

Current cosmological theory says the universe is expanding. Into what? Nothing, say the cosmologists. The universe is its own thing, and there’s nothing else. So, logically, nothing exists, but does so beyond our physical universe. Which we cannot see except in the sense that if we could see to the end of the observable universe, we would see only the boundary beyond which nothing exists.

You’re way ahead of me. Yes, I pointed out the flaw in my own argument in the first line. ‘Nothing’ is a concept, not a physical something. In fact, it only exists in reference to and dependent on something. We define the absence of the desired something with its antonym—nothing. It’s just that the analogy doesn’t hold so far as I’m concerned. If something is capable of being both concept and the embodiment of that concept, why not ‘nothing’? Hardly seems fair. Worse, it’s limited thinking and it feels wrong. After all, there’s a balance and symmetry to nature that this sort of uneven pairing violates. Nothing has to be something, or there’s no something.

There may be a flaw or two in the reasoning. I should work on that.

After all, I have nothing to lose.

©2021 Richard Parks