Sophie's Ode

Alas, poor cat!
Your life was grand!
You would have made a wonderful hat
I like sand

When thence you shuffled off thine mortal coil
My lifelong dreams of friendship were foiled
One tends to plant daisies in the soil
And robots work better when fuelled by oil

Ahem! *tear*

Fabulous feline, awash with poise
Your farts make far too much noise
You look like an idiot when you play with your toys
Constantly pursuing them hot feline boys
Oh, joys!

How now shall I function, deprived of my pet?
Bottomless, teary waves my glands do beget
And so I write this poem so I will not forget
That most glorious of eves on which we first met

*more tears*

I recall those days when you and your bro
Would frolic and leap and play in the snow
Forever I'll be jealous of yo' crazy sweet flow
Your litterbox will stay dirty foreva mo

Fin

-----

A silly poem written on a Thursday afternoon
Coauthored by Marsha Marzouca

Denouement

What are they? Where did they come from? I do not like crimson. It clashes with the terrible orange of the bleak, malignant sands that stretch as far one might care to look. They're not supposed to be here. They don't fit? Where did they come from?

So many questions. Focus deserted me weeks ago. I'm not getting any answers. Why won't they respond? Why?! I can't resist but to spew questions and inquiry. I sleep, I breathe, I cringe at my disparate inadequacy but the questions keep, keep coming. Bouncing off the ignorant, stupid monoliths like the elements.

I hate red. My blood is red. And smooth. Or brown. Dried, scattered on the dust, sucked through the teeth of the wind and stolen by the sun's condescending kiss. They mock me. I don't understand.

This is not why I'm here. Someone find me.

Please.

Tell me why. WHY. Unfathomably, inexplicably, immeasurably colossal. Gigantic. Obviously unperturbed by the elements. Rage is beneath me. Darkness never comes. But defeat...

I will never be satisfied with not knowing.

But is She Gold?

I can hardly tell what I see anymore. Maybe it's what I want to see. Reality is skewed. Certainty is so hard to come by. I used to meet it on the sidewalk, while walking down the street. I'd tip my hat, smile comfortably, and amble on. Seems the last year has changed that. I don't meet reason and clarity anymore. Too focused on the future. Or maybe not enough. Reason shouldn't be intangible and grey. I just don't know how to begin looking for something I can't remember how I lost.

But what of this form? Somehow, beauty persists through irrationality. I imagine a form. Effeminate, slender, radiant. Daydreaming. She goes nowhere, pleasantly brushes time away, and paints a moment of lax, rejuvenating, serenity.

I want to be caught in this bubble. Alone, distant, separate from questions, answers, and silly temporal restrictions. But I can't. Almost. Not quite. I just watch. The form sways, I reciprocate.

I guess it's gold. Golden. In changing, unsure hues. I impose my vanity and desires upon her. Part dream, part vision, the most I can do is watch and wonder. I'll have to get back to reality eventually. Wether I care or not, time continues it's aggravating pull on me. I'm glad I can just watch every once in a while. Gold is magnificent. I hope I never meet her.

Exposition

Odd, he supposed. Great, spiraling, mounds of metal and with a foreign sort of elasticity that felt plastic enough to be acceptable, but resistant enough to further emphasize their dominating presence. I guess they were red, if you looked closely. Crimson might be more accurate. But so deep. Objects constructed by the living shouldn't be allowed to have such a majestic hue.

Their size helped too. If the inanimate could exude feeling, then these monstrosities would be weeping with the weight of their own imposition. Simply seeing the objects grow in the distance miles before arrival paled in contrast to confronting the monoliths physically. Touching their indifferent shells, stretching one's neck further and further up until one becomes dizzy with comprehension, how incredibly contained are we by comparison?

Turn your face up. Try to spot the tip of the closest tower. Imagine how tall they must be, then imagine something still taller. Sweep your eyes skyward until you become lost in the supreme volume of the great, dark, things.

If one had to apply measurement or description, it could be said that they were hexagonal. For if anything can compete with such mass, numbers and their fantastical possibilities fit the closest. Neither do I even know their height. No one has ever bothered to measure. Why even try? Giant, deep red, terrifying, unfathomable, indifferent to their stark dissimilarity with the dead, dusty wastes that sprawl around their location, praising height with the lack of the same. Illogically, they defy the containment inherent within a sentient mind.

I have come to peace with not knowing.

On Truth II

It seems that there is truth. Certain logical certainties, like the curved shape of a circle or Aristotle's Theory of Non-Contradiction, simply cannot be denied. Any argument to the contrary signals a lack of education on the questioners' part.

Digression: But are there kinds of truth? Logical truths are true indeed, but what about fallible human-proposed truths? Like the example of cup throwing in my last post, when someone says they are going to do something, the truth of their statement rests in whether or not their claim is fulfilled. The confirmation of a statement of action relies on the future to be true, not on the present. End digression.

In the modern world in which I live (but really, I would refer to the time period I live in as "modern" no matter what year it was), I am getting to experience a great slew of ideas, both fashionable and otherwise. Inevitably, some of these theories deal with truth. Or specifically, the lack of truth.

Philosophies and the terms we use to describe them have an annoying tendency to convolute conversation due to the semantic issues surrounding many of them. For example, "nihilism," as defined by Dictonary.com, can be any of six different definitions, from the simple rejection of established institutions, to anarchy, to the specific credo of a group of 19th century Russian revolutionaries. In my limited experience, the conglomerative definite of nihilism that I have come to understand it to be is the idea that there is no possibility for the objective basis of truth. Humans cannot know ultimate truth, because there is nothing outside of our existence that causes truth to be true.

Firstly, this contradicts my previous conclusion that there is truth. I suppose nihilism would say that I couldn't decide upon the existence of truth because truth does not exist. But is that statement true? For that matter, wouldn't a nihilist inherently believe that the philosophy of nihilism is true? The contradiction is thus: in order to accept nihilism, one must believe that the statement, "there is no objective truth" is objectively true.

Likewise with postmodernism; it claims to reject the possibility of universal explanatory truth systems while at the same time being a truth system. It also seems to be blatantly untrue because of the contradiction necessary to make it true. And if the first semester of university taught me anything, it's that argumentative contradictions are bad. Yeah.

You see what I just said? I don't really like it. For the same reasons that Anselm's cosmological argument for the existence of God just doesn't seem to jive, the contradictions of nihilism and postmodernism don't jive. And just like Anselm's argument, I can't really think a refutation to what I just said. This is one of those times where I don't feel like I'm getting my ideas across adequately. Whatever.

On Truth

Let us consider for a moment how we know what we know. It can hardly be denied that what we experience is not static. We experience change, and can interact with existence as we perceive it. At least, we can interact with the physical parts of existence. The mental and ethereal portions of reality as we know them, things like numbers and happiness, can be understood by us, but we can't really change anything about them. Or can we?

Well, let's take numbers. What is "3?" It's more than 2 and less than 4. Any child who knows how to count could tell you that. The fact is that when you take an object, another object, and then a final object, and put them together, you have 3 objects. We just can't deny that. Numbers don't seem to be things we can influence. We can understand and use numbers, but no matter how hard we try, we couldn't change the essence of what "3" represents.

This seems to indicate that there is truth. A trio of objects contains three different objects, and no other number of objects. 3 is always 3, never more, never less.

What other things are undeniably true? What if you were sitting across the table from me, and I told you that I was going to throw my drink on the ground? You might just sit there, and then after a few seconds, I would prove myself truthful by throwing my drink on the ground. But what if something stopped me from doing that? What if I reached for my cup, and then a bus smashed through the wall and ran me over? That would make my previous statement about throwing my drink to be untrue.

If someone tells you they're going to do something, you don't know whether what they say is true or not until they do it. Until then, things may happen that prevent them from being truthful. So when I tell you that I'm going to throw my drink on the ground, is there any way to know whether I'm lying until I actually throw it? Is my statement both true and false at the same time because we don't know what the result is going to be? I would say that my statement has the potential to be either true or false, but isn't both true and false at the same time.

So what about God? He knows everything, so he surely knows whether the things I say I'm about to do are true or not. So when I tell you I'm going to throw my drink on the ground, he already knows whether I throw the drink or not, right? Say God knows that I'm going to throw my drink, that makes my statement true. Does this apply with all statements?

It seems that everything we say, or predict, is about to happen, is unarguably true or false, because God knows the eventual outcome, and this foreknowledge causes all human predictions to be irrevocably true or false.

Even Song Escapes Us

Say we had no daylight,

Say all we had was song,

Would simple music get us by?

Would we even get along?

The sun gone, disappeared,

Out of thought and gone from memory.

The stars composed of minor chords,

A soft, auditory chemistry.

What if it wasn’t music?

What if all we had was sound?

Forget coherence and harmony,

Forget the rhythmic playground.

Soon notes and fragments of,

Would gently waft away.

Our mouths would function noiselessly,

There’d be nothing left to say.