<gg> "surface of sandwiches"......."more negligible than the dressings of
economists"........hee hee hee....
joodles
2008/9/12 David Bircumshaw <[log in to unmask]>
> I wrote this back in 1994. I notice they haven't yet found 'the
> Higgs'. The format won't come out quite right in this media, but I
> hope some of the jokes do.
>
> A DIGRESSION ON AN ABSENCE OF FACT
> A NOT QUITE ECLOGUE
> (A quiet glade in the Outer Realms. Hilarius Hilaricon floats
> peacefully over the stream of nothingness, meditating on abstruse
> tangles of being. Something sparkles on the nothing-stream.)
> H.H. - Hello there, who are you?
> H.B. - One who is tormented with existence, harried like a hare by the dogs
> of
> knowledge. My name is Boson, Higgs Boson.
> H.H. - My friend, what is your problem?
> H.B. - Until but a few years ago - how long it all seems now — I was happy,
> at
> peace and non-existent - I had no problems then - but then the Higgs
> appeared and forced me into name and the scar I bear to this very day.
> H.H. - Are you telling me it was your father?
> H.B. - Father, creator, inventor, discoverer - it's all alike to me.
> It prised me from
> the contentedness of nothingness, weighed me with gravity, squeezed mass
> from my cries, discontented me into content.
> H.H. - But that's being born. We all must endure it.
> H.B. - Not if you do not exist. And I don't. Yet I am forced to be. I
> am but a simple
> particle, my friend, my needs are few, my resources little, yet the Higgs
> and
> its kind would entangle me with everything, from the birth of the Universe
> to the surface of sandwiches. I am not made for this. I haven't the
> strength
> to bear it.
> H.H.- So the Higgs turned you from a simple Boson to a particle in great
> demand?
> H.B.- Even the Boson came with the Higgs.
> H.H.- But why? Why are you persecuted so?
> H.B.- For explanations.
> H.H.- Ah, I see.
> H.B.- They have plans for me, you know. I feel so - so - hunted. I can
> sense them
> at every turn, they're looking everywhere for me, they're out to get me.
> H.H. -Please, please, take a hold of yourself.
> H.B. - I can't, I don't exist.
> H.H. -You're beginning to sound paranoid.
>
> A SIMPLE FRIENDSHIP
> H.B. - I know they're after me, I've seen them. I am not, but am becoming.
> H.H. - So why do you not go to the Higgs and its kind, speak to them,
> try to come to an agreement, to make a pact on your emptiness.
> H.B. - Because I do not exist.
> H.H. - But the Higgs and its allies plot to make you material?
> H.B. - Yes, yes, I never was and they will make me be. I was thinner than
> the
> rarest air, less than the shadow of a molecule, slighter than the skimpiest
> verse, more negligible than the dressings of economists. I can't, I can't
> take the weight of it all. The Higgs and its creatures want to hurl things
> at
> me underground, where others cannot see their crimes, to prove their
> equations, to make me count - I, who have no knowledge of mathematics –
> shooting their numbers ever faster towards infinity and me, until I am
> forced out of nothing by the bombardment.
> H.H. - That sounds very painful but ....
> H.B. - Have you ever been hit with a hadron?
> H.H. - No, but I think the only thing you can do is wait until you
> exist and then
> talk to them. Surely they want to understand?
> H.B.- Talk? I shall do more than talk. I shall change into a wave. I shall
> drown
> them with in-existence, I shall submerge them in apparitions.
> (Hilarius Hilaricon brightens at the last word and floats higher in
> the air. Interest animates his voice.)
> H.H.- Apparitions?
> H.B.- Yes, my friend.
> H.H.- Call me Hilarius. You mentioned apparitions?
> H.B.- Yes, Hilarius, my friend, I too am a ghost. You are the ghost of
> the living,
> . I am the ghost of an idea. You are the haunted, I, the hunted.
> H.H.- We shall talk further on these matters.
> (As the darkness falls on the page, they merge into the thickening
> nothing, entering its non-existent folds, like shepherds plodding
> homeward, into the brotherhood of a void bucolic.)
>
>
> 2008/9/12 Patrick McManus <[log in to unmask]>:
> > INTRUDED
> >
> > he intruded upon her
> > telerehabilitation haptic interfaces,
> > with his
> > metaphysical presuppositions.
> > and finally embedded himself
> > in her
> > somatosensory space
> > via haptic matching tasks
> >
> > Patrick noninformative visual information poet
> > Cheers all
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Poetryetc: poetry and poetics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
> > Behalf Of Roger Day
> > Sent: 12 September 2008 09:00
> > To: [log in to unmask]
> > Subject: Re: space questions (spaced out???)
> >
> > Well, it's all relative as Einstein announced with a big bang ...
> >
> > Very interested in the links - like Patrick, I'm extremely ignorant in
> > these regions. I feel the pull of unknown terms. I shall spend this
> > weekend perusing the links.
> >
> > thanks
> > Roger
> >
> > On Fri, Sep 12, 2008 at 8:37 AM, Christopher C Jones
> > <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> >> Distortions of perspective it may be? It may well be the position from
> >> which I pose such a query but could it be said that the question of
> >> space is the big question that spans the 20th century?
> >>
> >> I was just interrupted by a telemarketing cold call which I then
> >> immediately hang up on so have forgotten the question.
> >>
> >> >From Husserl and phenomenology on to Heidegger and beyond to Deleuze's
> >> metaphysics it appears that philosophy seems to make a claim for space
> >> as the big question of the 20th C. The claim that these philosophers are
> >> concerned with time it seems to me would be to misplace the question?
> >> William James questioning transcendental philosophy, without reading
> >> again, also seems a question of space. Einstein, no doubt, makes a new
> >> claim for space in theoretical physics and mathematics.
> >>
> >> Rightly or wrongly this seems, for me, to return again and again to
> >> questions of form. Poetic forms in free verse, prose novels and art
> >> photography... all with a big question of space hanging over them?
> >>
> >> Some years back on this forum there was a discussion of open form and
> >> New Poetry and not wishing to start another war it does seem that the
> >> big differences were again questions of space. This could be a question
> >> of open and closed spaces with ethical questions of one over the other?
> >> (It could be said that closed forms allow an immanent critique
> >> foreclosed to open form?)
> >>
> >> At the risk of a short circuit, it could be said that against a
> >> pragmatics of time which occupies the greater part of my formal
> >> education in poetry writing, poetics and aesthetics and many others, it
> >> could be said that a pragmatics of space is yet to find any solutions.
> >> This would include a pragmatics of affects with such illuminating names
> >> as William James and Silvan Tomkins? Are we still in the arena of space
> >> and affects and still without time?
> >>
> >>
> >> Just some URLs of articles I have been reading and found using google
> >> search: haptic space perception
> >>
> >>
> >> Remembrance of places past: a history
> >> of theories of space
> >>
> >> http://www.cognitivemap.net/HCMpdf/Ch1.pdf
> >>
> >>
> >> Noninformative vision improves haptic spatial perception
> >>
> >> http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=13964253
> >>
> >> article on haptic computer interfaces
> >>
> >> http://csdl2.computer.org/comp/mags/mu/2006/03/u3022.pdf
> >>
> >> (There are other articles on jstor and ingenta but I no longer have
> >> research library access to these thanks to illness.)
> >>
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > My Stuff: http://www.badstep.net/
> > "I began to warm and chill
> > to objects and their fields"
> > Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
> >
>
>
>
> --
> David Bircumshaw
> Website and A Chide's Alphabet
> http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/
> The Animal Subsides http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books/animal.html
> Leicester Poetry Society: http://www.poetryleicester.co.uk
>
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