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I've just come from Modern Poetry class, and boy are my frontal lobes chafed. Partially because of the objections of the Fugitive Stars and partially because I've seen a lot of cheap coffee mugs with the legend "I have measured out my life with coffee spoons" written in whimsical fonts on them (you'd think that the creators of the mugs, knowing the quote, might know where it came from and what its implications are--then again, maybe it's deliberate, a sort of memento mori), I expected to dislike T.S. Eliot. But I was wrong, oh so wrong. I dug The Wasteland, and I dug it even more after Apter kindly explained all the references that T.S. had just sort of expected his readers to get. (Maybe through the collective unconscious he likes so much? Like by poem magic?)
William Carlos Williams, my god. I always thought of him as "that wacky guy who wrote about chickens and red wheelbarrows," but so many of his poems are naughty. Plants are women--a shameless fallen leaf crushed dry under the wheel of a slicksmooth car, a blossom of Queen Anne's lace invading a meadow in interconnected orgasm, a field of silvergreen asphodel waiting to be plucked.
Also, Wisława Szymborska. Experiment is excellent. The problem is that I can't find all her poems that I wanted to share on the 'Net, and I don't really want to take the time to type them *all* out. They're...long, some of them. The Wallace Stevens one I posted a while back tested my endurance as far as transcribing goes. Wish I had the patience to sit down and type 'em all, I really do--they're genuinely funny and subtle. (They had to be subtle if they were going to be funny--she was working under the Communist regime in Poland and couldn't actually come out and say things. Consider "Experiment"--this was when the Russian government was doing experiments much like the ones described in the poem. At least if your entire head is in a jar, you know you're in a jar.)
So I turned four poems in to the Central Review, and three of them got in. I'm pretty happy with that, but the three that got in were the three that I honestly thought kinda sucked. The ones that got in: A pair of overly ornate poems about dead girls (for those of you who aren't familiar with my poetry oeuvre, you can check it out at
kindredhellion--the stuff I'm satisfied or frustrated enough with to have stopped editing it is put up there), an unedited "mini-sestina" I wrote for an exercise in Creative Poetry. The one that didn't get in was "Jubliate in Felibus," the one I sweated over and fiddled with and had to ask people about obscure parts of Latin grammar for, and the one that pretty much everybody seemed to like.
Eh. It's all a matter of taste. The poems were picked pretty quickly, though; submission date was Friday, and the winners were announced that Sunday. ('Stin, who's on the editorial board, says that not as many people submitted poems, and that she thought the senior editors did a crap job of picking a lot of them. Maybe I'll apply to edit the next one. They need a hell of a lot more fiction.)
*
Have been talking to Char and her boyfriend Robert (who's also in my Creative Poetry class, and always has highly unusual story recommendations) almost as much as I would like to. (Char is fun and full of thoughts.) We discussed the possibility of sex on Mars (and sex with Mars, for people who are just that turned on by extraterrestial geology, and came up with the idea of quantum reincarnation--
Reincarnation is, of course, the idea that one's soul goes through various incarnations in order to experience every basic experience and emotion that can be experienced. (For the purposes of this model, it has nothing to do with a system of reward or punishment. Example: I'd like to be a cat in my next life, and sort of hope to be one if I'm good, but that incarnation might not let me go through an experience that I still haven't, like the death of a spouse or, I don't know, the feeling of being cut down for paper.) Once you have experienced the entire range of emotion, you're complete and can be joined with the Cosmic Mind or go to Heaven or what have you.
Quantum immortality works off the idea that there are infinite (almost infinite) parallel universes that differ, each in turn, by infinitesimal amounts. The morbid or slightly paranoid will note that every second of your life, you have a chance to die, and there are enough universes to cover death every second of your life. Quantum immortality is the idea that upon each death, your consciousness is transferred to a universe in which you did not die. Thus, upon being poisoned by the toxic mix of powdered iced tea and milk that I'm now drinking, I will suddenly snap into another universe where the mix of powdered iced tea and milk is completely harmless. Upon being choked by the sardine I'm going to eat as soon as I get home, I will snap into a universe where I safely expelled the sardine from my throat and onto the floor where the cats can eat it, or possibly a universe where I never choked on the sardine at all.
Char brought up the possibility that because of this possibility, reincarnation in the classical sense is unnecessary. If you can transfer your consciousness to other, slightly different yous in other universes, why bother to live so many lives in sequence when you can live millions of the same one? Thus, quantum reincarnation is one single soul spread out among millions of universes, with each fragment of the soul going through a different life at the same time. Because every possibility is inherent in the universe and every possibility exists in a different universe, by the time you can't avoid dying, your soul will have gone through every single thing and experienced every single emotion it possibly can.
Question is, how much will you be able to differ before you become a completely different person with a different soul? Well, you can quantify differences as variables, and each person's life can be considered an equation. Soul A differs from Soul B because Soul A's birth-country variable is [Poland], whereas Soul B's birth-country variable is [Canada], and so on. Very broad, of course, and each variable has multiple variables attached to it (which part of Poland? Who was the midwife? Was the mother in pain? Was it raining outside?), but you get the idea. Comparing two equations would have to stop at points of difference rather than going on to compare increasingly varying variables that go along with each point of difference. From there, the question of how much difference makes two discrete souls rather than two fragments of the same soul is merely a technicality.
(Also, to take care of something that one of
anivad's posts made me ponder, free will would be a matter of chance. In this universe, you just *happen* to choose to go to college instead of working at the dry-cleaning place down the street from your parents' house, to have tacos rather than burgers, to marry or not, to eat a peach. In another universe, you do not out of necessity, because you have made that choice here. Not that you are aware of this. The mind can fool itself pretty easily.)
You'll be tested on all this later.
William Carlos Williams, my god. I always thought of him as "that wacky guy who wrote about chickens and red wheelbarrows," but so many of his poems are naughty. Plants are women--a shameless fallen leaf crushed dry under the wheel of a slicksmooth car, a blossom of Queen Anne's lace invading a meadow in interconnected orgasm, a field of silvergreen asphodel waiting to be plucked.
Also, Wisława Szymborska. Experiment is excellent. The problem is that I can't find all her poems that I wanted to share on the 'Net, and I don't really want to take the time to type them *all* out. They're...long, some of them. The Wallace Stevens one I posted a while back tested my endurance as far as transcribing goes. Wish I had the patience to sit down and type 'em all, I really do--they're genuinely funny and subtle. (They had to be subtle if they were going to be funny--she was working under the Communist regime in Poland and couldn't actually come out and say things. Consider "Experiment"--this was when the Russian government was doing experiments much like the ones described in the poem. At least if your entire head is in a jar, you know you're in a jar.)
So I turned four poems in to the Central Review, and three of them got in. I'm pretty happy with that, but the three that got in were the three that I honestly thought kinda sucked. The ones that got in: A pair of overly ornate poems about dead girls (for those of you who aren't familiar with my poetry oeuvre, you can check it out at
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Eh. It's all a matter of taste. The poems were picked pretty quickly, though; submission date was Friday, and the winners were announced that Sunday. ('Stin, who's on the editorial board, says that not as many people submitted poems, and that she thought the senior editors did a crap job of picking a lot of them. Maybe I'll apply to edit the next one. They need a hell of a lot more fiction.)
*
Have been talking to Char and her boyfriend Robert (who's also in my Creative Poetry class, and always has highly unusual story recommendations) almost as much as I would like to. (Char is fun and full of thoughts.) We discussed the possibility of sex on Mars (and sex with Mars, for people who are just that turned on by extraterrestial geology, and came up with the idea of quantum reincarnation--
Reincarnation is, of course, the idea that one's soul goes through various incarnations in order to experience every basic experience and emotion that can be experienced. (For the purposes of this model, it has nothing to do with a system of reward or punishment. Example: I'd like to be a cat in my next life, and sort of hope to be one if I'm good, but that incarnation might not let me go through an experience that I still haven't, like the death of a spouse or, I don't know, the feeling of being cut down for paper.) Once you have experienced the entire range of emotion, you're complete and can be joined with the Cosmic Mind or go to Heaven or what have you.
Quantum immortality works off the idea that there are infinite (almost infinite) parallel universes that differ, each in turn, by infinitesimal amounts. The morbid or slightly paranoid will note that every second of your life, you have a chance to die, and there are enough universes to cover death every second of your life. Quantum immortality is the idea that upon each death, your consciousness is transferred to a universe in which you did not die. Thus, upon being poisoned by the toxic mix of powdered iced tea and milk that I'm now drinking, I will suddenly snap into another universe where the mix of powdered iced tea and milk is completely harmless. Upon being choked by the sardine I'm going to eat as soon as I get home, I will snap into a universe where I safely expelled the sardine from my throat and onto the floor where the cats can eat it, or possibly a universe where I never choked on the sardine at all.
Char brought up the possibility that because of this possibility, reincarnation in the classical sense is unnecessary. If you can transfer your consciousness to other, slightly different yous in other universes, why bother to live so many lives in sequence when you can live millions of the same one? Thus, quantum reincarnation is one single soul spread out among millions of universes, with each fragment of the soul going through a different life at the same time. Because every possibility is inherent in the universe and every possibility exists in a different universe, by the time you can't avoid dying, your soul will have gone through every single thing and experienced every single emotion it possibly can.
Question is, how much will you be able to differ before you become a completely different person with a different soul? Well, you can quantify differences as variables, and each person's life can be considered an equation. Soul A differs from Soul B because Soul A's birth-country variable is [Poland], whereas Soul B's birth-country variable is [Canada], and so on. Very broad, of course, and each variable has multiple variables attached to it (which part of Poland? Who was the midwife? Was the mother in pain? Was it raining outside?), but you get the idea. Comparing two equations would have to stop at points of difference rather than going on to compare increasingly varying variables that go along with each point of difference. From there, the question of how much difference makes two discrete souls rather than two fragments of the same soul is merely a technicality.
(Also, to take care of something that one of
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You'll be tested on all this later.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-20 07:28 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-20 07:34 pm (UTC)I happened to see you in the library. Do I in fact know you and have somehow forgotten on a conscious level?
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-20 08:27 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-21 04:26 am (UTC)Ah! You had "Z." in that issue. I got the same feeling when I read it, although I only recall seeing you then, and today...
I'm always coming across people I should have been friends with for years in ways I would not have expected. Online communities seem to facilitate that.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-20 07:57 pm (UTC)Interesting take on reincarnation. I once thought something like that when I was younger, but it wasn't to do with death, it was to do with grief; others will suffer around you, but the second anything bad happens to you, you'll be swapped over into an alternate universe. Therefore, each of us are protected from grief by living in our own protective universe.
All of which was BS, of course; I only came up with that theory because I hadn't experienced personal grief yet (still really haven't, but I've come to my senses). This all kind of stemmed from yet another theory that I'm the only real person in the world and that God has created the universe around me, because how do I know if people are actually people? Etc.
Sorry for bringing general vague craziness in here.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-21 02:16 am (UTC)I had that idea as a kid. I think a lot of kids do; they haven't really learned empathy yet. Solipsism for the win, I guess. (I still wonder about that sometimes, but ever since I've started to really like people, the idea makes me too upset to think about dispassionately.)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-20 08:07 pm (UTC)Interesting discussion of Quantum Immortality. Reminds me a little bit of the idea of eternal return, as presented in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. At least, I pick up on the same sense of longing for something to lend weight or permanence to our lives in the face of futility.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-21 02:20 am (UTC)I haven't seen The Unbearable Lightness of Being, but I think I know the concept. The idea that the universe repeats itself, right? It's very much a comforting idea. The only problem is that even quantum immortality really has to end sometime, considering the natural lifespans of human beings. (Unless you find a universe in which humans are, in fact, immortal.)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-20 10:13 pm (UTC)However, I think at the moment of death that fragment of soul would re-enter a state of eternity and be reconnected with every other fragment of soul from all of your other lives. Being outside time makes temporal concepts (and tenses) awkward but essentially the soul would 'always already' have lived all those lives, as well as being perpetually in the state of anticipating being reincarnated into this funfair, and returning from having been reincarnated. Also.. i think we may all be the same soul. You ask: how much change can there be before it's a different soul? For me, the possible answers are either that every single soul-incarnation is different, like every print of a painting or every $5 note, or that all souls are the same.
btw, it may be a coinkydink but I saw a quote from The Wasteland the other day in a book on anarchism. I loved (and was disturbed by) The Experiment. I live to be disturbed though. Please do keep pointing these things out.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-21 03:21 am (UTC)That's the most logical answer I could think of. Introducing a conscious divine element into it would add another variable, though, and I'm never sure whether to assume an ineffable God as a presence when I'm talking about the idea of a soul or not. The one's existence would seem to depend on the other's, no?
Do try to find a Szymborska collection! Not all of her poems are online, and they're very much worth a read if you liked Experiment.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-21 11:27 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-21 12:24 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-21 02:10 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-21 02:22 am (UTC)Will you be online soon/later?
(frozen) (no subject)
Date: 2007-03-21 01:18 am (UTC)Not a new concept. I wonder, ponderingly, why believing me was so difficult when the idea "in theory" makes you feel terribly enlightened. Ah, it's not true, I do know; it's easier not to have to think.
(frozen) (no subject)
Date: 2007-03-21 01:32 am (UTC)(frozen) (no subject)
Date: 2007-03-21 01:40 am (UTC)(frozen) (no subject)
Date: 2007-03-21 02:00 am (UTC)(frozen) The nature of reality
Date: 2007-03-21 03:19 am (UTC)Let us leave it at this, shall we? We loved you dearly and Neo was hoping to be able to talk to you again, but it looks like you've chosen the snooty end of things. I had no hope that you would ever be as you were. I'm only doing this for him because he gets very upset over stuff like this.
You know, the whole friends stabbing him in the back thing.
Love to you,
Trinity
(frozen) Re: The nature of reality
Date: 2007-03-21 03:50 am (UTC)I'm not trying to define the reality of others. I'm trying to define my own reality, and I came to feel that I couldn't do that while I was still in the group. I didn't try to convince you or anyone else that you or they were crazy before I did, I just left and tried not to make a fuss about it.
And no, I don't think I will be able to talk to you guys again. My relationship to you was based mostly on the group, and I don't want to be a part of it again.
Wish you the best of luck, though.
(frozen) Oh, please.
Date: 2007-03-21 03:51 am (UTC)I would be more impressed if you really could leave it at this. I'm sorry if you feel hurt or if one of you thought there would be opportunity for reconciliation. But this has ended, and it's going to stay ended.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-21 05:05 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-21 07:15 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-21 05:56 pm (UTC)I think free will is a necessary illusion. We need to believe in choice because otherwise we cannot learn from our experiences or apply our knowledge.
I don't get that whole quantum reincarnation thing. It seems to rely on the idea of alternate realities, a concept which has never made sense to me. Are you saying that you experience many realities, or that somehow all people in the world could be one persona? I suppose if you look at it from a Life Force perspective, we all have the same life force and from that, if you combine all humanity as one, Humanity is collecting all of our experiences.
Interesting. But I don't think that this sort of metaphysical speculation has any real use in life, except as a form of mental exercize. The funny thing about disbeliving in free will is that then you can't make decisions. You choose to be unable to choose... the very act of deciding whether or not you believe it is already decided. Disbelieving in free will is wholly impractical. And then you get into the whole complicated idea of fate...
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-21 11:30 pm (UTC)A little bit of both, I guess. I'm still unsure as to the specific metaphysics of this little gedanken, since I don't actually believe in the concrete reality of anything that could be called a soul and therefore am not sure how to handle it.
But someone's belief or lack of belief in free will doesn't have any impact on whether they actually have it or not. If they do have free will and choose not to believe that they do, it's still their choice to believe that.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-26 05:49 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-21 11:52 pm (UTC)Which WCW work would you recommend for a novice?
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-26 05:46 pm (UTC)Sorry for the delay. As far as WCW goes, "To Elsie" is an excellent one; it really brings out the shift away from Romanticism and toward a 20th-century American identity.