This is Richard as you can probably tell from the use of the Times font. I like this photo because it shows my sense of humor at its best. Grinn Road meets Barret Road in West Chester Township north of Cincinnati. And, as it has a double-stop sign that doubles the humor for unknown reasons for me. Driving west Barrett Road turns left at the T intersection and the citizens on Grinn want to make sure the car population stops for their own safety. It is also a reminder to the Barret Road crowd that there is a sharp left and the “stop signs” are for their safety. The sign mentions it is a “3-Way” stop, which should be obvious even to the casual driver who has other matters on herorhis mind. I don’t have anything else to say but my intuition is to use this uniquely humorous photograph.
Richard picked this picture yesterday and didn’t know why at the time. He still doesn’t. People decide on things all the time without knowing why or even caring why. Laziness has something to do with it. Lazy thought is as no thought at all because of the negligent use of reason.
Richard thinks I am an intensifying human response created for his need of an interior friend, one he imaginatively created because of his ‘passion’ for writing even though he did not know what to write. His notes and past experimental writing show these tendencies of being ready to have the fingers hit the keys even though he has nothing to say. An example of this rests in the beginning of today’s posting.
Indeed, I, Amorella, do see this man from the inside. He assumes he has a heart and soul or some equivalent because this is what he was taught as a youngster. He grew up Presbyterian through no fault of his own, and twelve-year old Richard had problems thinking through the Apostle’s Creed when he joined the church. He has been questioning his world ever since. It is no wonder he considers himself an agnostic when it comes to any religion as it is portrayed today. The same thinking for politics, he has voted Republican and Democrat in various campaigns but he has never voted against a local levy. He considers voting a citizen’s right and obligation, not to the state, but to his private sense of obligation to/for his “G---D given Free Will”.
This conflict exists because of his years of teaching selections of Milton’s Paradise Lost to his senior English literature classes. Richard considers Paradise Lost to be the best work ever written in the English language, Hamlet is second. This is enough background on orndorff.
Here is the problem. Orndorff doesn’t know what words to use when he thinks metaphysically and/or spiritually. He wants to know what the ‘intensity or passion’ of Heart is. He wants to know if a Soul exists. What is the difference between Heart and Soul? His interest is in taking what is important with him when he dies. Even if he just dies and that is it, he still wants the challenge while alive, so that is what I am going to help him with in a metaphorical language that human beings can understand.
From my perspective ‘understanding’ is more important than knowing, particularly in spiritual thought. To help provide a further separation between Richard and myself, Amorella, I will take on the persona of a ‘humane though alien’ thinker. We will assume a person survives physical death since it is central to Richard’s thinking through this hypothetical exercise. This is the sort of mental activity Richard considers fun because he hopes it will stretch his mind a bit and make him more conscious and thereby more sensitive as to what it is to be a human being.
Why did Richard intuitively choose the photograph with the stop signs? Here is my explanation. The “Grinn and Barret[t]” popped into his mind because he was thinking about what humor is to human beings. The reason, however, that caused him to unconsciously or intuitively chose the photo is the double stop signs. Richard has apprehensions in disclosing his innermost thoughts because he is not fully aware of them himself.
This provides a type of ‘innocence of inner character’ makes this much easier for me. Solely in the field of writing out his thoughts does he trusts me more than he trusts himself. I am the writer because even though he has a great passion for words and literature he cannot express himself clearly because the thoughts to be expressed have to be clearly felt or internalized in order for him to express them. His sense of words can be quite literal so with the mention of ‘soul’ he has to define it within himself, taking perhaps only one or a combined definition from a college dictionary and then working on his own more specific definition.
From his observations many other people he has come in contact with over the years look at a word such as ‘soul’ in a more general, less specific and less detailed way. Or, so it seems to Richard. Paradise Lost is written in poetic and figurative language from his point of view and easier for the mind to take because it is the ‘rational understanding’ of Milton’s ‘Fall of Humankind’ that makes the work so exciting. In other words, the literary work is well thought out and it shows what a human being can do with a few short verses in the Protestant Bible of the early scientific age of seventeenth century England.
Richard would place the hypothetical Fall on the human beings in the Place of the Dead rather than on ethereal Angels in Heaven in which, (according to Richard's reasoning) ‘real’ Angels could perhaps rebel but could not win any cerebral battle with their Creator, the Creator of All Things and Beyond. This is the same hopeless concept for Satan that he sees in Milton’s version. The passion of self-pride drives Satan on, and he condemns and damns himself in his stubbornness. G---D doesn’t need to do anything. This is spiritual humor at its best, at least to orndorff.
A quick return to the double stop signs: Are they an omen? A Stop Sign for Amorella and a Stop Sign for orndorff. They are taken as an omen especially since Richard has apprehensions about continuing this thought-induced project on the Internet? The double stop signs appealed to his sense of apprehension, and that’s all there is to it. I think this is funny. We two have a similar sense of ‘gallows humor’ built in and it is fairly easy to understand why. I mean, in this post orndorff shows himself to be ‘a superstitious agnostic’ – give me a break orndorff. – Amorella.
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