Country duality through the lexicon lens

I just got home from a very busy day. In the late afternoon, it included running up the Interstate to Morgantown to the weight loss clinic for medical stuff and a class. At the end of the class, Torri, a Master's level educator/counselor, asked what I had gotten out of class. Ever the enfant terrible, I responded with total candor, I got a set of notes for a kickin' discussion of where Captain Reality meets Duality. (My wryness there usually is directed at my own silly past.)

Do I play with words? I'm not sure. Certainly, I play with ideas, and we have this clumsy device called language with which to do so. I find when I'm talking to various intimates that we argue a while and then figure out that we are really using different words to express very similar thoughts. The words that drop-started my thoughts (drop-started? Is that reference understandable? I know a hell of a joke where that's the punchline, but you need to know timber and EMS to get it. That's a touch esoteric.) (Don't these parenthetical phrases in the middle of a damn sentence get distracting?) was the idea of "momentum" for weight loss. That is, if one is doing well, does that give one "momentum" which makes it easier to continue tomorrow and the day after without problems? Well, we talk about momentum all the time. If a politician or a football team is behind but gaining, we say that they have momentum, meaning that their trend to increase their share or points will continue and surpass their competition. Is that a valid concept or is it simply the result of random grouping of events? In any event, "momentum" when applied to future behavior is a null concept to me. With respect to weight loss, you make a conscious decision when you get started every morning, and you probably will have "opportunities" (i.e., temptations) to revisit that decision occasionally throughout the day. To be successful, you must make a positive decision nearly all the time. (Here, maybe my opinion of momentum falters -- does screwing up once make it easier to do in the future? I think so. It's illogical, but I still think so.) But making a positive decision yesterday does NOT cause me to make a positive decision today -- I revisit it anew. Every damn day, EACH of us confronts what is, to us, a metaphorical demon. Like Room 101 from Orwell's 1984, that demon is different for each of us. For Friend JC, it's alarm systems. For a former partner, it's snakes. For some, it's ethanol. For me, it's fucking doughnuts. Every day, we have the opportunity to bring fear and failure into our lives. Is that fair? Is that healthy? By avoiding the demon or fighting the demon or ignoring the demon (the latter what I try with mixed success to do), do we build up "momentum"? Does it exist in the social or mental world in the same manner it exists in the physical world? I wonder - Maybe we NEED to believe in momentum, like some say that we need a "Higher Power."

And if we have "momentum," then we have to do better and better ("Every day in every way, I become better and better."), and we will NEVER get to the point of being good enough. When is it OK to "just keep on keeping on"? The idea of needing constantly increasing goals sets us up for certain failure at some point. We are people. We have finite capacities. Maybe we have capacities far above what we actually use (I certainly buy that), but at some point they are finite. Somebody can high jump 7 or 8 feet these days. (I can't.) They aren't going to get to, say, 12 feet with the current development of our species. There is a finite limit. That certainly applies to weight loss. Your calorie intake can go lower and lower - until it reaches zero, then you cannot do "better". Theoretically, your physical activity calories can keep increasing, but that too is subject to some finite limits. And yet we are urged ALWAYS to have "our reach exceed our grasp," according to Robert Browning. When is what we do "enough"? When do we get to go to bed and say, "Hey, I did great today, I did GOOD ENOUGH." I'm not the world's best at anything. Likely, neither are you. We don't need to be. All we need to be is the best at being US.

Everything in our society ends up a competition. Take the frisbee for example. It's a simple plastic disc that one throws with a spinning motion which makes it an airfoil that is spin-stabilized, so it goes slowly through the air and goes a longer distance and stays up in the air longer than we can make it do if we throw the same weight if it were not a spin-stabilized airfoil. It's great, if you haven't tried it, you need to. You get to be outdoors. You can play with your dog. The nicest dogs I ever met were my former partner's, Libby the German shorthair pointer, and Friend JC's Bucky the Dalmation, both of whom LOVED to play frisbee with me or anybody else they could con into a game. It's formless. There are no rules, there is just throwing and chasing and fun and petting the dog and taking a break for water or a (lite) beer and then playing some more. Then, along comes "Frisbee Competitions." Who can throw the frisbee the farthest or most accurately, and keep the dogs off the "field of play," because they'll interfere with the serious competition, and interfere with determining who is the ONE person who "wins," and who the myriad "losers" are. Must EVERYTHING be a zero sum game? Are we not permitted to just have fun, to be happy to be the best at being US?

Read the label, it says right there (in the book of Deuteronomy?) that life IS duality, yin and yang, good and evil, boy and girl, black and white, blah, blah, blah. DUALITY IS A SHAM. It's a concept which provides refuge for the intellectually weak or lazy, the unscientific, the morally fearful, and for all those many people who are, to a greater or lesser degree, scared to death of Captain Reality. They are afraid of ANYTHING except that which has a high-contrast weltanschaunge. They lose soooo much. They are unable to appreciate the subtlety of a sunset or the uncertainty of the wind, they appreciate Norman Rockwell (so do I) but not Monet. When I was in school, LaElu and I lived in an old, old mansion that was divided into apartments. We had the unit on the side by the street, with the huge old porch. My law school buddies and I used to love to sit on the porch in the warm weather and drink cheap wine (Nectarose was my favorite, haven't seen it for years) and hassle the drug dealers across the street. Nearly every night, a fellow from the neighborhood took a walk. He would bundle up warmly even in warm weather, and walk with a measured step and pointed a flashlight 3 feet in front of him the whole way. He missed the bats and squirrels and drunken law students, and his world consisted of a pool of light in front of him and "here there be dragons" everywhere else.

Nothing is yin or yang. Nothing is good or evil, in the moral world, the philosophical world or the physical world. The vacuum of deep space is only vacuum relative to high density places like suns and planets and atmospheres -- there is approximately one molecule of Hydrogen per cubic meter of "space." We have widely accepted beliefs. Some of those are relatively precise. The accelleration due to gravity on Earth ("G") is approximately 9.8 meters per second squared. But G is just a little different on Mt. Everest than it is in Death Valley. As happy as we would be with absolutes in any area of thought, there aren't any. Are there moral absolutes? OK, let's try one. It is a bad thing to physically damage people. Wait a minute, we arm police officers. We expect them (rarely) to harm others. But, we say, that's OK, there is an EXCEPTION. Absolutes have no exceptions. Where there is an exception, there is no absolute. Abortion. Capital punishment. Is it good or bad to terminate what is or will be a human life? Oddly, people who say yes to either one say no to the other. Exceptions, not absolutes, rule us. I oppose capital punishment. I have met 2 individuals in my life who I would honestly like to see executed. (Would I do it personally, or is that an exception, too?) (Oh, only one of them is legally eligible for the death penalty.) We watch The Godfather (several Academy Awards, constantly replays on AMC), and we root for the Corleone family, which pimps, runs gambling, extorts money from honest people, kills their enemies in Italian restaurants, but oh, they are a FAMILY and they hang together, and wouldn't it be nice to have that kind of closeness, even if a family member or two gets whacked at times. We all fear the "Dark Angel," old Thanatos, the spectre of Death, s/he is BAD. Wait a minute, why do we then speak of death releasing someone from great pain as "God's mercy." Would God do something bad? We talk about the weather: Is it GOOD or BAD today? Must it be one or the other? And what is "good" weather? Sunshine? What if you are fair-skinned? Warmth? What if you like to ski? (What slides down hills: Avalanches and fools.) Relative, all relative. We pooh-pooh old Sherlock Holmes, for he used "merely" deductive logic, while according to one of the unexpectedly wise writers of the last century, Robert A. Heinlein, inductive logic is far better because it "can produce new truths." Bushwah. There is no inductive, there is no deductive. We find facts, we develop hypotheses, we call on past hypotheses and proofs, we find more facts, we make conclusions and if we are smart, we will always be willing to revisit those conclusions. (My executing the two who I think deserve it, though, would make revisiting that conclusion a tad tardy.) Why must we describe everything and have a totally consistent world view or FAIL? Why is it a bad thing that Special Relativity and General Relativity aren't consistent for the present? Perhaps it just means we haven't gotten there yet. Perhaps it means that the Universe is not simply stranger than we DO imagine, it's stranger than we CAN imagine.

Religion, we find absolutes there. I think. Oddly enough (and the better you know me, the odder it seems), we are studying the letters of Paul at Bible study at the church. Hey, THERE is duality, THERE is yin and yang. Wives, SUBMIT to your husbands, all of you, it doesn't matter is your husband is a drunken, shiftless idiot. (Pastor Josh may visit here at times - hey, Josh, feel free to post a dissent in the comments, I love dissent.)

All is relative. But we don't take that to reductio ad absurdum, where there the lack of a yin-yang duality becomes a moral homogeneity. There is often an agreed-upon PREPONDERANCE of dual thought, and I feel just fine believing that and acting on it in such a way as to impose it on others. It IS "bad" to hurt people, and the exceptions (e.g., self-defense) make sense to us as a whole. The edges are not clear, that's where the moral-certainty crowd gets confused, but the trends are there. Polluting the Earth - bad, to most of us. A certain discreet segment of society disagrees. I think they are nuts. They think I'm a tree-hugger. Well, I am. My favorite tree is an old gnarled oak at the farm, and she always welcomes me. Meanness - bad. But admired, particularly in my profession. Caring - good. But don't "nice guys finish last"? No, generally they don't. Stengel disagrees. OK, I can live with that.

It's all relative.

Hey, I'm down 180. I've got momentum, don't bother me.

Pippa passes. Mizpah.

R