Two days ago I mailed four visiomathematical poems off to Rattle, the literary magazine I mentioned a while back, I think, that’s running a poetry contest. My cost to enter: $18. But I get a year’s subscription out of it. As though I don’t already have enough to read. But I have serious hopes of winning one of the fifteen also ran prizes of $100. My rationale: that the editors choosing them will decide to include one of mine to advertise their openness to all poetic forms. They do publish what they term visual poetry, by the way. I didn’t bother investigating their magazine in advance: I was set to enter their contest regardless, so there would have been no point to it. I hoped it’d get me to come up with some new poems, finally–as it did. I haven’t added to my negative credits for a while, either. But, yes, my incurable optimism was a factor, too: I will probably never stop believing that there will come a day when someone other than a relative or close friend will be taken by something I’ve done.
I like my four entries–they seem to me about as good as I can do.
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That which has never physically revealed itself in some direct way to any human sense either does not exist or exists too limitedly to be meaningful.
Note: the preceding statement is not as dopey as it may immediately seem to some. I could spend hundreds of paragraphs expanding on it and defending it. Ditto the following set of questions. They concern a given: (1) a penny-storing machine that pennies can be inserted into through a slot and that a penny a day is ejected from and that contains a penny-counter that causes the machine to say, “I’m hungry,” whenever there are less than 100 pennies in it; (2) a human being that says, “I’m hungry,” when a normal human being’s digestive system would tell it to. Question #1: has the machine a consciousness that tells it to say what it says and is aware that it does so? Question # 2: has the human being a consciousness that tells it to say what it does and is aware that it does so? Question #3: if the machine has no such thing, but the human being does, can it be physically described? Question #4: if not, how do you know it exists? Question #5: if so, what is it about what you physically describe that gives it any awareness of what the human being says–or, how do you know it has that awareness.
The real mystery to me is how an awareness of anything can come into existence. How can it simply be something thing pings into existence once some “complexity” of molecular inter-connections evolve? Why isn’t that something from nothing? If that something from nothing is possible, what prevents other something-from-nothing from being possible? (Same problem, of course, with the Big Bang Theory, at least as it’s often stated.)
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Another mystery: how it is that after struggling to write more than a sentence or two of my latest book review, this afternoon, I suddenly wrote all 1100 words of it. And they probably will need minimal polishing. This happens a lot to me, and to many others. It still amazes me. I’m certainly happy about it. I do have another column for Small Press Review to write, but that should be easy. Except for the other mystery in my life, and the lives of most people like me–that no matter how simple a creative or semi-creative task (as all writing tasks are) is, people like me can take inordinate amounts of time to take care of it.
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