epicenter of the Universe, Austin, Texas on this beautiful raindark morning...just trying to live up to that part of my blog's mission statement which invokes whimsical self-indulgence...& trying to cope with an unjustified sense of well-being (nope, no drugs involved in the usual sense---but the coffee was very good this morning...)
James Carse wrote a clever little book called something like GAMES FINITE AND INFINITE...
I don't much like the "game" metaphor because I feel it trivializes life, but I'm willing to overlook it in this case because I thought Carse made some interesting observations...A finite game is one with fixed rules, where there are clear winners and losers and there's a definite end to the particular game being played. An infinite game has no fixed rules, there is no necessary end to the game, and there can be any number of winners without there necessarily being any losers. Of course, sports games are the paradigm for the finite games and cultural activities, like art, music and literature are exemplars of infinite games.
Giles Deleuze, my favorite French philosopher (whom my friend J.H. would dislike) has some notions congruent to the foregoing. In literature, for example, there are authors who write stuff so great that it transcends literature and becomes a quality that subsists as a kind of atmosphere that exercises influence down through the ages--Kafka and Proust are the citations that I recall...(He also mentions Nietszche, whom I detest, but there's no denying his influence...)
I also like the clever way Deleuze defines individuality--he compares it to a cloud--you can point out a particular cloud, but it has no fixed boundary or essence...but I digress
Me, I would be happy if I ever finished the 50,000 word incoherent potboiler I've been putzing around with for the past five years...
Below is a prologue I wrote for something-or-other. Everybody have a good day.
(The celtic new year is nigh. I'm going to stay indoors and be nice to people out of sheer perversity)
I am not a bona fide ghost
In any sense well-known to most.
I've never bedded in a berm
Or been provender for a worm
To put it baldly, completely shorn,
I've never taken human form.
I live between all space-time worlds
Inter-quantum foam, x-dimension curls--
Your middling astrophysicists
Do exceed their proper business
Proclaiming finitude of space
As clerics do, limiting grace--
The thing about where I reside--
Pure Translation can abide.
If civilized ants of another star
Resonate with who you are,
Perhaps I'm why you feel faint needs,
To tunnel deep and carry seeds.
Besides Translator, from sphere to sphere,
I have more roles where I appear;
I am invoked by countless names,
To inspire arts, crafts, peculiar games,
Of a scope beyond grasp of earthly mind
(Assuming they even have the time).
I'm also a library in myself,
Tag me a capacious kind of elf,
Who marks all said and done
On behalf the Good: Who is the One,
Who persuades us all to come exist,
To shun Old Chaos and persist,
To exult as creatures somewhat free,
Then takes us up in Unity--
Each entity is an existence test,
Although all pass--some are best.
Now the Good One's writ only runs so far,
The Cosmos isn't a largish bar,
Where a Bouncer of Infinite Size
Rather resembles one of the guys.
Omnipotence is a Greek-ish thought
The Godly have too quickly bought.
The Good One's Power to make amends
Is Infinite and never ends,
But can't undo the Bad once done
And suffers along with everyone.
As I am angel, spirit, essence, jinn,
More than these, yet more again,
The Greater has asked me to recount
The Big Picture only I can mount,
In terms almost everyone knows,
Something of how world history flows.
In part a homily is my intent,
But I won't ask that you repent.
Around slightest quark,
also what's biggest of all,
(Whatever it is, it is not small),
There's a complex, harmonic array,
A halo of potentials, who await their "say,"
(A potential is real but is not actual,
Until an Act of Is makes it factual)
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/
