Category: Uncategorized
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You taught me language, and my profit on it is I know how to curse
I’ve been thinking about the theory of knowledge lately –epistemology. Well, perhaps more about epistemic harm, actually. Sometimes I wonder if it is more one of overthinking than anything else; even if it is a widely held belief, in retrospect the longer you consider it the less valid it might begin to seem; more exceptions…
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Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.
When I was young and growing up in a 1950ies Winnipeg school, it didn’t occur to me to categorize the unusual people I encountered there. There were those who seemed to behave themselves in class, and those who didn’t. I suppose there were variations among the disruptors: some -those who usually sat at the back…
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Why do we insist on asking Why…?
Now that I am retired and have been consigned to the less productive part of society, it has occurred to me to ask why we find it so important to question things -even things we think we already understand; even things which might be better left alone; even the value of the questions themselves… I suppose…
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What, can the Devil speak true?
There are times when riding in a bus can be like overhearing the goings-on in a Confessional Booth; I am not a Catholic, I hasten to add, but I’ve seen enough movies about Confessionals to feel I should have been. It’s not the priest’s advice for redemption that intrigues me as much as the similarity…
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Can a flower be a weed in disguise?
Over the years, I have learned to depend on many things I have never seen; I have to do that, I suppose, because not everything needs to be noticed, wants to be publicly accountable. Unlike, say, red Lamborghinis or Brioni suits, some things are offended by the light and manage quite nicely behind the scenes.…
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‘Oh, how this spring of love resembleth the uncertain glory of an April day which now shows all beauty of the Sun, and by and by a cloud takes all away’
Can we really speak from places where we are not; from times we have visited and then been forced to leave; pretend we still understand how it felt to be young? What truth can memories tell us of our lives…? Do we only remember the sharp edges of things: the significant comings and goings of…
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Most people are other people
Do I really have a true self? There was a time when it seemed obvious that I, quite apart from being an individual and not a replica of my neighbour, possessed a unique identity; or at least it was something that I would eventually have, because, as the philosopher Sartre wrote, existence precedes essence; I…
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God hath given you one face, and you make yourself another.
I’ve never been much on religion; my mother, an immigrant from Britain, was once an Anglican, and my Canadian father a Baptist. The compromise they settled on for my upbringing was the United Church of Canada for some reason. It was a religious choice that, unlike my father’s, allowed dancing, although it still seemed a…
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Bouba-Kiki…?
Now that I’m well into my dotage, and taming my thoughts is harder than trying to herd the ants that live on the porch, I have to wonder why nobody seems to understand why I have taken to calling myself G. It’s a perfectly balanced name, and seems to act as a subtly nuanced, although…
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Not so close, eh?
I have this thing about spaces between stuff for some reason -maybe it’s because my only sibling was ten years older than me, and I hated sharing a bed with him when I was young; he rolled around a lot at night. One of my first comments on personal space in writing, though, was an…