{"id":9816,"date":"2012-02-10T10:48:22","date_gmt":"2012-02-10T15:48:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=9816"},"modified":"2012-02-10T10:48:22","modified_gmt":"2012-02-10T15:48:22","slug":"ready-or-not-for-surprise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2012\/02\/ready-or-not-for-surprise\/","title":{"rendered":"Ready (or Not) for Surprise"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/object><\/p>\n

[See the note at the foot of this post for information about this video.]<\/em><\/p>\n

From whiskey river<\/a><\/em>:<\/p>\n

I don’t know what I’m doing most of the time. There’s a certain humor in realizing that. I can never figure out the kind of tie to put on in the morning. I don’t have any strategy or plan to get through the day. It is literally a problem for me to decide which side of the bed to get out on. These are staggering problems. I remember talking to this Trappist monk in a monastery. He’s been there twelve years. A pretty severe regime. I expressed my admiration for him and he said “Leonard, I’ve been here twelve years and every morning, I have to decide whether I’m going to stay or not.” I knew exactly what he was talking about.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Leonard Cohen, 1988 interview with Jon Wilde in Blitz<\/em>\u00a0[source<\/a><\/em>])<\/p>\n

…and<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Solitude (I)<\/strong><\/p>\n

I was nearly killed here, one night in February.
\nMy car shivered, and slewed sideways on the ice,
\nright across into the other lane. The slur of traffic
\ncame at me with their lights.<\/p>\n

My name, my girls, my job, all
\nslipped free and were left behind, smaller and smaller,
\nfurther and further away. I was a nobody:
\na boy in a playground, suddenly surrounded.<\/p>\n

The headlights of the oncoming cars
\nbore down on me as I wrestled the wheel through a slick
\nof terror, clear and slippery as egg-white.
\nThe seconds grew and grew — making more room for me —
\nstretching huge as hospitals.<\/p>\n

I almost felt that I could rest
\nand take a breath
\nbefore the crash.<\/p>\n

Then something caught: some helpful sand
\nor a well-timed gust of wind. The car
\nsnapped out of it, swinging back across the road.
\nA signpost shot up and cracked, with a sharp clang,
\nspinning away in the darkness.<\/p>\n

And it was still. I sat back in my seat-belt
\nand watched someone tramp through the whirling snow
\nto see what was left of me.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Tomas Transtr\u00f6mer [source<\/a><\/em>])<\/p>\n

…and<\/a>:<\/p>\n

There will come a time when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that’s what everyone else does.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(John Green [source<\/a><\/em>])<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Not from whiskey river<\/em>:<\/p>\n

I set down in a chair by the window and tried to think of something cheerful, but it warn’t no use. I felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead. The stars was shining, and the leaves rustled in the woods ever so mournful; and I heard an owl, away off, who-whooing about somebody that was dead, and a whippowill and a dog crying about somebody that was going to die; and the wind was trying to whisper something to me and I couldn’t make out what it as, and so it made the cold shivers run over me. Then away out in the woods I heard that kind of a sound that a ghost makes when it wants to tell about something that’s on its mind and can’t make itself understood, and so can’t rest easy in its grave and has to go about that way every night grieving. I got so down-hearted and scared, I did wish I had some company…<\/p>\n

…after a long time I heard the clock away off in the town go boom—boom—boom—twelve licks—and all still again—stiller than ever. Pretty soon I heard a twig snap, down in the dark amongst the trees. Directly I could just barely hear a “me-yow! me-yow!<\/em>” down there. That was good! Says I, “me-yow! me-yow!<\/em>” as soft as I could, and then I put out the light and scrambled out of the window onto the shed. Then I slipped down to the ground and crawled in amongst the trees, and sure enough there was Tom Sawyer waiting for me.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Mark Twain [source<\/a><\/em>])<\/p>\n

…and:<\/p>\n

Parable of the Hostages<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Greeks are sitting on the beach
\nwondering what to do when the war ends. No one
\nwants to go home, back
\nto that bony island; everyone wants a little more
\nof what there is in Troy, more
\nlife on the edge, that sense of every day as being
\npacked with surprises. But how to explain this
\nto the ones at home to whom
\nfighting a war is a plausible
\nexcuse for absence, whereas
\nexploring one\u2019s capacity for diversion
\nis not. Well, this can be faced
\nlater; these
\nare men of action, ready to leave
\ninsight to the women and children.
\nThinking things over in the hot sun, pleased
\nby a new strength in their forearms, which seem
\nmore golden than they did at home, some
\nbegin to miss their families a little,
\nto miss their wives, to want to see
\nif the war has aged them. And a few grow
\nslightly uneasy: what if war
\nis just a male version of dressing up,
\na game devised to avoid
\nprofound spiritual questions? Ah,
\nbut it wasn\u2019t only the war. The world had begun
\ncalling them, an opera beginning with the war\u2019s
\nloud chords and ending with the floating aria of the sirens.
\nThere on the beach, discussing the various
\ntimetables for getting home, no one believed
\nit could take ten years to get back to Ithaca;
\nno one foresaw that decade of insoluble dilemmas — oh unanswerable
\naffliction of the human heart: how to divide
\nthe world\u2019s beauty into acceptable
\nand unacceptable loves! On the shores of Troy,
\nhow could the Greeks know
\nthey were hostages already: who once
\ndelays the journey is
\nalready enthralled; how could they know
\nthat of their small number
\nsome would be held forever by the dreams of pleasure,
\nsome by sleep, some by music?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Louise Gl\u00fcck [source<\/a><\/em>])<\/p>\n

____________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>About the video:<\/strong>\u00a0A trefoil knot<\/em>\u00a0(that’s one over there at the right), says Wikipedia<\/a>, is<\/p>\n

…the simplest example of a nontrivial knot. The trefoil can be obtained by joining together the two loose ends of a common overhand knot, resulting in a knotted loop… The trefoil knot is nontrivial, meaning that it is not possible to “untie” a trefoil knot in three dimensions without cutting it. From a mathematical point of view, this means that a trefoil knot is not isotopic to the unknot.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Not isotopic to the unknot<\/em>: uh-huh. One suspects Wikipedia’s editors of having us on a little…)<\/p>\n

Imagine the path that a tiny (subatomic?) particle might travel around the surface of a trefoil knot. It would describe a sort of super-trefoil knot, no? The thing is, it would keep going, never concluding its orbit as it zoomed around in ever tighter, ever more knotty<\/em>\u00a0loops…\u00a0That’s what “mathematical artist” Jos Ley has depicted in this animation. The New Scientist<\/a> site, where I saw this, says that “if it were allowed to continue growing, it would eventually fill the whole of 3D space.” Zowie.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[See the note at the foot of this post for information about this video.] From whiskey river: I don’t know what I’m doing most of the time. There’s a certain humor in realizing that. I can never figure out the kind of tie to put on in the morning. I don’t have any strategy or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[247,1393,274,251],"tags":[376,657,1344,1972,2619,2787,2800,2801,2802],"class_list":{"0":"post-9816","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-ruminations","7":"category-whiskey-river-runningaftermyhat","8":"category-cartoons","9":"category-poetry-writing_cat","10":"tag-louise-gluck","11":"tag-mark-twain","12":"tag-surprise","13":"tag-mathematics","14":"tag-leonard-cohen","15":"tag-john-green","16":"tag-jos-ley","17":"tag-tomas-transtromer","18":"tag-trefoil-knots","19":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-2yk","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9816","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9816"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9816\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9835,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9816\/revisions\/9835"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9816"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9816"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9816"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}