Claustrophobia or Agoraphobia

Is the universe too full or too empty? This is, of course, a conceptual, not a scientific question. Is the world too much with us, as Bill Wordsworth suggests (and he was talking more of the busyness of the world, not its oppressive physical structure) or are we isolated in an incomprehensibly large cosmos, both on the macro and the micro levels: claustrophobia or agoraphobia? Let's say that there are two kinds of people (the joke: there are two kinds of people--those who think there are two kinds of people and those who don't): claustrophobics and agoraphobics. (Limiting? Of course.) I'm a claustrophobic: I feel the weight of the world, even the cosmos. Others I imagine feel the terror of emptiness. (And others just don't think about it--or employ a fantasy religious text to salve their fears.)

Or is that just one more illusion: an aristocracy of the terrified--an imagined elite of thinkers? Oh yeah, the world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel. (And nada to those who don't think or feel.)

Yeah, Rog, you think too much: go drink a beer. leer at cleavage, read the sports page. What would the nihilist do?

Do?

Belatedly he answers

HAMMOND Some two months after the City Council's appointments to the Port Authority came into question, Council President Dan Repay said the group is still awaiting a legal opinion from Roger Berger, council attorney.
Repay said he did not expect the council to appoint anyone to the Port Authority seat vacated by former Councilman Ernie Dillon, now a county councilman, until Berger comes to a conclusion.
"In everyone's interest, it would be best that they wait until we have a firm legal opinion," Repay said. * * *
Repay said Berger had contacted several sources and gotten conflicting information.
"He's hopefully close to rendering an opinion," Repay said.
The council is expecting a letter from Berger with not only his own interpretations and recommendations, but those of others, he said.
Repay could not say whether Berger had contacted the office of Indiana Attorney General Steve Carter.
Carter spokeswoman Staci Schneider said in January that Berger, as the attorney for the appointing body, would have been directed to the attorney general's Dual Office Holding Guide, a lengthy document prepared for officeholders and their attorneys. Any interested parties could file a petition in court for a judge to make a determination.

I say no. No, in cosmic thunder.

A Most Literary Entry

"In a small town in Scotland they sell books with one blank page hidden someplace in the volume. If the reader opens to that page and it's three o'clock in the afternoon, he dies."

-Julio Cortazar, "The Instruction Manual"

What is the most frightening part of this quotation? The small town in Scotland.


"It's a mistake
to believe that anything's 'solid': really matter
--us, a pebble, a Happy Meal toy, a stadium--is emptiness
in emptiness, a field of unthinkable quark existence."

-Albert Goldbarth, ". . . a museum, of sorts, for errors."

Here? The quotation marks around solid. They give it away--put the lie to the lie of emptiness, for if you can imagine that a word can be ironized or emphasized, it means that you value something more than something else: some emptiness is more meaningful than another emptiness. And that's a no-no for nihilists. It's always location, location, location: the oxygen around me is important, more important than the oxygen around you. Call it the proximity factor. The town in Scotland--it doesn't matter which town--is somewhere, a location, a place, and at the very moment I am opening up that book around 3 o'clock in the afternoon, someone else is walking by, in a hurry, to meet someone else, not noticing the stark surprise of my collapse. I used to be frightened of "human kind / Cannot bear very much reality": but that's not right. There's always too much reality, in this place, now.

All About Me!

Writing a blog is, naturally, an arrogant act of hubris and narcissism: it's all about me! Me! Me! No, it's not about you. It's about me. And, natch, it's public in a mostly meaningless way. It's not quite Twitter, which is even more trivial, but it's close.

So I intend to write about me--my thoughts about me, my life, my world, my universe. No readers? No matter! And as soon as I figure out something to say about me, then I'll write about it and post it. Until then, any of you out there is that vast, meaningless "community" called cyberspace who has nothing to do (evidenced by your pathetic reading of this blog and possibly by your pointless response to my meaningless blather), I await your attention.

The Very Idea

The very idea! One day, after I commit the heinous act which will bestow notoriety on me, then, and only then, will my billions of readers know the power of my deathless prose.