del sentimiento trágico de la vida desbarajustada

Unamuno, I was taught in an elementary Spanish class some time in the neo-paleolithic, es único (not because he is, though the proposition is fairly defensible), but because of the assonance-or-whatever of the juxtaposition, which was supposed to make the phrase stick in your head (which it did -- in my cabeza, at least -- so that I ended up reading Del Sentimiento Trágico de la Vida and was gobsmacked by Unamuno's phenomenal erudition, but what now stays with me is just the title, which resonates ever more painfully as the years go by). Unamuno it was, too, I think, who wrote, San Manuel Bueno, Martirio, the singular theological point of which, if it doesn't escape me, is that faith and the comfort it comports can sometimes by imparted to others even by a soul to whom it is denied by his innate, relentless, unforgiving rationalism (that can even be his geas): somewhat on an analogy with Moses' success in leading his people to the promised land, only to be denied that sight in his own life. This doesn't actually correspond to mypersonal experience, since though an inveterate rationalist, I'm also a person of faith, but the tragedy of it did always strike me, irony being, I suppose, of all tragedies, the most unendurable.

Que sais-je?

Aucune idée. Faut éviter les chauves-souris dans le beffroi. (Autant que l'araignée, vraisemblablement Aragog, dans le plafond.)

Evil - Depthless, Immitigable and Ineradicable

And human. Resident, that is to say, in humans, and note the plural. 5% of us, sociologists (viz. Martha Stout) seem by consensus unduly to upperbound the prevalence of the coeurs du mal, are just unadulterated sociopaths, and we -- the mostly well-intentioned though afflicted, the gens moyennes affligées, the ones for whom Eliot laments the "strain on the brain of the small folk" -- might, just might muster the spiritual and the temporal strength to overcome, or at least to resist, since victory in the temporal realm for aught but the myrmidons of Satan appears somehow to have been forbidden... were it not for the one devastating and insuperable impediment of the lack of countervailing moral absoluteness on our side. Those of us not born (or nurtured) to persecute the innocent, ravage the planet, or emulate, as best we can, Snidely Whiplash the Plutocrat in reverent genuflection to the Antichrist, insatiable, in principle, while there's yet a widow left not tied to the railroad tracks. By which, I mean, there's a spectrum. Yes, most of us aren't sociopaths, but we're also not perfect and immaculate in an innocuousness symmetrically to oppose the moral toxicity of the sociopaths, who are, to all appearances, unadulterated, untrammeled and unvitiated in their passionate malignance (impossible not to think of Yeat's contrast of feeble conviction overborne by passionate intensity). So, are we doomed? Well, duh. Yes. At least, temporally. The problem is that, among the ones not explicitly pledged to evil (which includes not only the 5%, but their oath-respecting minions), mere weakness is enough. All that is required for evil to triumph -- well, practically nothing is required, because it's been demonstrated amply that good men and women, among whom I'd include at least the ones not oath-bound to Evil, will do just exactly "nothing" in nearly every single case. Out of fear, out of despair, out of oppression, out of what they may just rationalize (and correctly, from a temporal standpoint) as pragmatism. And those are most of the best among us. The Mother Teresas, the ones who'll stand in front of tanks in Tianenman Square, can be counted on the fingers of -- who knows? -- a few thousand hands? Or the feet of one millipede? Make no mistake. This isn't an unequal struggle or an uneven playing field. This is Hell. And it's been engineered to be this way by the very worst among us for centuries, for millennia, for as long as there've been the two facilitating elements.

Groups and Secrecy

Most singleton humans (the non-sociopathic ones) will do, for the most part -- well, the thing enjoined by the Hippocratic Oath -- no harm to others. The problem arises when they become members of groups, since those who seek to moderate the mob mentality of groups, the power-seekers, ipso facto the sociopaths, will overbear their better instincts, their moral compass, their better reason. Or, for want of a shorter word, their humanity, a thing that can seem to endure only in the smallest of gatherings of humans -- maybe, one is moved to think, those of our ancestors who huddled in caves and had too much to worry about fending off natural predators to kowtow to the ones who'd want to enslave them a few tens of thousands of years later for the useful purpose of constructing Big Stone Tombs. Then and today. the sociopaths band together with their minions, and their works grow in the fertilizer of secrecy. For Power.

And it's never enough. Caligula's motto: oderint dum metuant. Not sufficient that I (the sociopath) succeed, howsoever ueber-outrageously. Everyone else must suffer. We have a world run on an engine of Schadenfreude, a sort of universal Catherine's Wheel. An engine, I guess, maintained by the Morlocks, still hiding from the light.

Not that I'm complaining. It's just the way things are.

I have to assume (since most of us *do* have moral compasses), that they came from somewhere (Someone), and that the temporal battle isn't the real battle. And that the temporal (dominated by the Chthulu-worshipers) really doesn't matter in the spiritual frame. I don't disagree with Spinoza. The loss of any human life is the loss of a universe, and loss immune to quantification, let alone minimization in some cosmic speculum. It's just that each of us is something more than this, something more invulnerable to temporal immolation, something more immutable in the meaning of this 14-billion-year-old universe. And the sociopaths are chaff.

And "therefore..."

I hope it's some consolation. We Eloi so desperately need it.

Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Apparently everybody, albeit in some kind of circular epistemological firing squad. Can even Dekker's Algorithm, or perhaps the precative invocation of mutual exclusion, save us from the gridlock? Stay tuned. Or don't. If you don't bother to watch, perhaps the cat will come out of the box,

Predicates and Precatives

"The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason." I do not aspire to know (which would be wrongly) why God has chosen to make this so difficult, nor do I ask to be given any more humanly-decipherable answer than was vouchsafed Job. I am human, and I wasn't there, either, nor am I, perhaps, so honest and upright as he to whom no answer but this could ever be afforded, though I try.

God, since understanding is beyond me - I am ill-adept at apprehending meanings not reducible to predicate logic, forever inconsistent or inconsolably incomplete - but that is the me you chose to make - grant me peace. And the persistence of love. Oh...and deliver me from evil. Amen.

Eschatopredicatelogic and Hoffnungsloesigkeit

For all X, Hopeless(X). Except that the aforementioned is inadmissable on grounds of 2 Corinthians 4:7-12; 16-18 (NIV). What is impossible is *necessary*. And *true*, in the light of God. Why does it always feel so not-quite-graspable, so unendingly antelucan, though?

"Wer, wenn ich schriee...?"

Well, I know Wer, but how about Venn? A diagram would always be helpful. Or an angel. One that wasn't "schrecklich." Where *did* Rilke get that idea? I'm not in a Bavarian Castle, nor does the idea much appeal, even in the game of Anywhere But Here. Maybe you had to be there. Night -- and there's night, when the ice weasels come -- really drains our spiritual strength. Fiat lux. Hear that, sun?

Is 'heterologous' heterologous? Goedel and Turing and Epimenides, oh my!

This blog post is fallacious.

Suppose 93179747 were prime, and somehow managed to encode the logical proposition, "statement 93179747 is false." Imagine a flowchart which uses a putative solution to the halting problem to loop indefinitely on presentation of any program the logic of which would cause *it* to terminate naturally, and within a predictable interval -- and conversely. Imagine all the lonely people, living lives of peace. Or lies of Epimenides. Imagine this paragraph could be construed to have semantic content, and not to be ill-formed.

The first statement of this entry post is semantically ill-formed. Or not.

This statement is not the last, but it should be.

Colleges in Trouble

For years innumerable (and students innumerate — the latter, not our fault), we have been purveying an educational product that made no sense (and I fought the mythos, but the insanity was invincible). OF COURSE, students will migrate to community colleges, now that the luxury no longer can be afforded of courting economic Armageddon for the sake of exposure to pedagogy delivered by professors who are actively punished for each second benightedly devoted to serving their students well, rather than publishing as incessantly as if possessed by the injunction from Thessalonians about when to pray. And where, I’d like to know, have those prodigious sums been going, the tuition moneys that have been escalating at rates that can only be described with exponential expressions? I’ll tell you one place they haven’t been going. Into the pockets of the academicians who do the actual teaching, as virtually any retired professor who’s actually labored in the trenches and experienced the system of incentives will tell you. More sense would accrue from a policy of hiring professional football players on the basis of their ability to play chess than now emerges from the ideology of hiring and tenuring only teachers to whom teaching is anathema, and devotion thereto to the detriment of grant-grubbing an immitigable disgrace. I will profoundly grieve the loss of any institution and any teacher who falls to the current economic climate, but my God, what *have* we been doing?

Schrödinger's Feline Language

Please do not open box.

Better Forgotten

FFFF 0000 0000 BAR

well, not quite hexadecimal. BAR an exception for the 'R.'

The Great Forgotten Language

Still working on it. Have eliminated Eurish, Loglan and Klingon, but "Ash nazg durbatulûk," just to choose a synecdochic specimen at random, seems both too depressing and too annoyingly pharyngeal.

Riverrun past Orodruin, and I'm still looking. King Charles I is not a propitious source. His recommendations -- "Je parle espagnol a Dieu, italien aux femmes, français aux hommes et allemand a mon cheval." -- basically suck, inasmuch as all of these are memorable, and anyway, the blog is for humans (or maybe just a single solipsistic one), wherefore serais-je obligé d'écrire en français o italiano. Merde.

I guess it really is forgotten. Coming up: annoying posts in hexadecimal.