“The mind that’s afraid to toy with the ridiculous will never create the brilliantly original…”
-David Brin
My brain is all over the place today (for an oddity, I can’t quite explain the why of that — maybe the storm front blowing through, some sort of sleep disturbance… maybe it only matters to me because usually I can pinpoint the reason). And so, too, is going to be whatever I end up putting down here.
Been thinking a fair amount about time, in a general, conceptual way. As a dimension — just like height, and width and depth, observable, measurable and experiential. (I sometimes wish some of my writing came with a way to observe me in the process of writing — to wit, just now, watching myself debate and erase and readd and erase again a couple of Oxford commas. I wonder what look crosses my face at times like those?) Like the fact that if you take a single instance of the smallest unit of time — suddenly, you have nothing more than a photograph or a hologram, but one limited to a single point of perspective, a unique and non-redefinable vantage point.
The differences in perception of time from culture to culture. On one hand, that sort of thing is to be expected, but it’s still fascinating to me. Further evidence of evolution on a community scale.
All of this is leading to a near-future reread of Edwin Abbott’s Flatland. I can’t recall how I ended up getting a copy or what prompted my initial read, but I do distinctly remember my brain opening wide at the idea of the limitations of what we can perceive, and how especially our human egos have a tendency to think that we are the top of the food pyramid — but because of our perceptual limitations, odds are pretty decent that we’re closer to the middle (or perhaps even lower). I don’t understand nearly enough about physics to pretend to talk more than conceptually about dimensions beyond our (my) perceived four, but I have seen mentions of up to ten. (That’s a fun article if you need nightmare fuel — save it for the last thing you read after a particularly grueling day.)
Look, I warned you that my brain is firing on all cylinders, all at once, today.
If the Butterfly Effect is a real thing — and why wouldn’t it be? — then you have a fairly strong basis for rationalizing astrology, as well. Maybe not from the standpoint of telling the future (I don’t really go in for the pre-determinism that implies), but at least toward some level of explaining why people are who they are. Or why people under similar signs are likely (?) to have similar relationships.
On the flip side, this is using star groupings that were conceived and named by sailors and explorers to be able to travel at night in times before all kinds of science, which does seem like a random way to try to explain anything, much less predict shit.
(And I just spent twenty minutes reading about my sign on the internet, where all things are true, all the time. Which tells me it’s time to step away from this little black box and probably start drinking until I manage to forget I do shit like this too often.)