Mid-morning. You are sitting in the blue Honda Accord waiting for Carol. On your walk you stopped and chatted with Mr. France as you had his two boys, David and Daniel. David teaches chemistry at the University of Glasgow, his wife is Sarah. Daniel is an IT specialist at Nationwide in Columbus and you had Dan’s wife, Amanda, (a researcher at Battelle) in class too. He and your nephew, Vic Gonzales, create beer brews as an avocation. Vic and his wife, your niece, Karen, own and run The Chocolate Octopus, a chocolate factory/store at the Columbus International Airport. Dan and Amanda and Karen and Vic are close friends because of the brewing. Karen and Vic bought your parents’ old house on East Park in Westerville while your sister, Cathy and Tod, bought an old house on West Park. Karen’s sister, also your niece, Jennifer and her husband, Joe McIntyre, moved to Westerville this year from a few years in New Orleans. Both are in the restaurant business. Thus, part of the Orndorff clan has returned to its local twentieth century roots. The point here – human connections are an interesting phenomenon.
I used to think there was something to it beyond chance and/or coincidence. Everyone has connections. What’s the theory? . . . Checking Wikipedia I found:
** **
Six degrees of separation refers to the idea that everyone is on average approximately six steps away from any other person on Earth, so that a chain of, "a friend of a friend" statements can be made, on average, to connect any two people in six steps or fewer. It was originally set out by Frigyes Karinthy and popularized by a play written by John Guare.
. . .
Computer networks
In 2001, Duncan Watts, a professor at Columbia University, attempted to recreate Milgram's experiment on the Internet, using an e-mail message as the "package" that needed to be delivered, with 48,000 senders and 19 targets (in 157 countries). Watts found that the average (though not maximum) number of intermediaries was around six.
A 2007 study by Jure Leskovec and Eric Horvitz examined a data set of instant messages composed of 30 billion conversations among 240 million people. They found the average path length among Microsoft Messenger users to be 6.6 (some now call the theory, "the seven degrees of separation" because of this.).
It has been suggested by some commentators that interlocking networks of computer mediated lateral communication could diffuse single messages to all interested users worldwide as per the 6 degrees of separation principle via Information Routing Groups, which are networks specifically designed to exploit this principle and lateral diffusion.
Selections above from Wikipedia on “Six Degrees of Separation”
** **
Let’s say, hypothetically, it is seven degrees of separation. We can use this principle among the Dead. – Amorella.
I suppose so, but why?
We have to show a routing system, an organization that would allow this to happen, and I would like this to come up in this chapter. – Amorella.
The study of 30 billion conversations among 240 million people is pretty impressive. However, I thought this was a rebellion of the first ten thousand or hundred thousand. I can’t remember. In any case, that is not all the Dead.
Remember one of your favorite movies, The Power of One; it was a simpler version of this theory, and it was through education that the people were moved away from apartheid in South Africa.
Yes.
We will need to show how the Dead became educated for such a rebellion to take place. – Amorella.
This is all rather detailed for a fiction.
Existential stories are full of details on how people see their predicament and attempt to free themselves from it. Post. - Amorella.
On the nonfiction side, it would seem that I myself must have a predicament of sorts and can only attempt to free myself from it through writing this blog and the Merlyn novels.
Yes, and it is no mystery to you as to what this predicament is. – Amorella.
No BS here. Yes, though you were rather blunt. But, in all honesty I cannot find a way to articulate it.
False. This is the reason for the blog and books. They are the articulation even if you cannot summon more direct words. – Amorella.
I assume then, if I live long enough and complete the six books I will have articulated the predicament.
Even with the post – play after the six books you will not complete the task. You will never complete the task, boy.
This is not reasonable.
Neither are you.
Daughter reminds me never to say never.
Never in this lifetime, boy. How’s that? – Amorella.
This is not very pleasant to think about.
You’ll forget about it. Post. Later, dude. – Amorella
Tomorrow, Mary Lou comes down and the three of you are going to the early film of “Super 8” at the Regal, then to lunch. Your poison ivy is spreading and you called the office for a prescription and hope to start treatments today, it is spreading on your left arm and your right cheek (facial). New place for the late lunch, Smash Burger, a different take than Five Guys. You both enjoyed the burgers and sweet potato fries so you will return.
You have taken the prednisone for the poison ivy. Almost time for the nightly national news. You have trimmed the material from Wikipedia on Anaximander to the point of its relevancy to Merlyn’s possible thinking in this coming passage. Place it here: then post. Later, old man. – Amorella.
** **
Anaximander . . . (c. 610 BC – c. 546 BC) was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher who lived in Miletus, a city of Ionia; Milet in modern Turkey. He belonged to the Milesian school and learned the teachings of his master Thales. He succeeded Thales and became the second master of that school where he counted Anaximenes and Pythagoras amongst his pupils.
In physics, his postulation that the indefinite (or apeiron) was the source of all things led Greek philosophy to a new level of conceptual abstraction. Anaximander claimed that an 'indefinite' (apeiron) principle gives rise to all natural phenomena.
Theories
In his desire to find some universal principle, he assumed like traditional religion the existence of a cosmic order and in elaborating his ideas on this, he used the old mythical language which ascribed divine control to various spheres of reality.
The basic elements of nature (water, air, fire, earth) which the first Greek philosophers believed that constituted the universe represent in fact the primordial forces of previous thought.
Apeiron
Anaximander understood the beginning or first principle to be an endless, unlimited primordial mass (apeiron), subject to neither old age nor decay, that perpetually yielded fresh materials from which everything we perceive is derived. He proposed the theory of the apeiron in direct response to the earlier theory of his teacher, Thales, who had claimed that the primary substance was water.
Anaximander argues that water cannot embrace all of the opposites found in nature — for example, water can only be wet, never dry — and therefore cannot be the one primary substance; nor could any of the other candidates. He postulated the apeiron as a substance that, although not directly perceptible to us, could explain the opposites he saw around him.
According to him, the Universe originates in the separation of opposites in the primordial matter. It embraces the opposites of hot and cold, wet and dry, and directs the movement of things; an entire host of shapes and differences then grow that are found in "all the worlds" (for he believed there were many).
Multiple worlds
According to Simplicius, Anaximander already speculated on the plurality of worlds, similar to atomists Leucippus and Democritus, and later philosopher Epicurus. These thinkers supposed that worlds appeared and disappeared for a while, and that some were born when others perished. They claimed that this movement was eternal, "for without movement, there can be no generation, no destruction".
In addition to Simplicius, Hippolytus reports Anaximander's claim that from the infinite comes the principle of beings, which themselves come from the heavens and the worlds (several doxographers use the plural when this philosopher is referring to the worlds within, which are often infinite in quantity). Cicero writes that he attributes different gods to the countless worlds.
Bertrand Russell in the History of Western Philosophy interprets Anaximander's theories as an assertion of the necessity of an appropriate balance between earth, fire, and water, all of which may be independently seeking to aggrandize their proportions relative to the others. Anaximander seems to express his belief that a natural order ensures balance between these elements, that where there was fire, ashes (earth) now exist. His Greek peers echoed this sentiment with their belief in natural boundaries beyond which not even their gods could operate.
Friedrich Nietzsche . . . claimed that Anaximander was a pessimist who asserted that the primal being of the world was a state of indefiniteness. In other words, Anaximander viewed "...all coming-to-be as though it were an illegitimate emancipation from eternal being, a wrong for which destruction is the only penance". The world of individual objects, in this way of thinking, has no worth and should perish.
(Selection above from “Anaximander” in Wikipedia)
** **
(Later.) Now, what to do with this? There are several aspects of the above that I really like, but that is not the point. How is this information useful to Merlyn, and how does the information strengthen the development of the elements of a novel? (I rarely, if ever, think about these things consciously, and perhaps I should as Amorella is leading me on to other dimensions of the story, none of which I have really consciously considered.)
No response from Amorella. Well, the thoughts came to mind so I wrote them. Now I am jammed up. Writer’s block. This is a rare occurrence.
Actually, it is a fairly regular occurrence, orndorff, which is the reason you allow me to do the writing. – Amorella.
I am not in complete understanding here.
Do you think you could have conjured up this book, consciously on your own?
No. I never know exactly where the story is going, mostly I don’t really have any idea. All the Merlyn books are rather serendipitously written (proof can be found in the daily notes). This one even more so. I tell people who ask that I am writing about the rebellion of the Dead somewhere around the year 700 BCE. That usually ends the questioning. If I mention that quantum mechanics is part of the equation, that deadens the questions completely.
You are not capable of seeing the broader picture of the six books. You were not capable of seeing the broader picture of the first three books. – Amorella.
The six books; I agree. I cannot grasp what will advance in the elements of the story. Sometimes this is frustrating because I feel I should be able to do this with a book that I am putting my name to. However, I was better able to grasp the sense of the first three books because these people, most of them, I could understand. The plots however did not braid together until after the fact. This book is out there, Amorella, at least as far as I am concerned.
Yesterday I had those notes on the observations of the movamulet. I put them together in paragraphs, it seemed rather a straight order, but then I became caught in the pinpoints of light and thought of Milton’s words on the brandished sword of an Angel and all at once it was as though Merlyn had been eaten whole by an Angel of God. I even mentioned it on Facebook of all places. Where did that come from? I thought.
Place the Facebook note for all to see; then we’ll call it a night. You can’t go where you have never gone before (in your mind) without reasonable and rational direction for yourself. I provide that, boy, free of charge. This is not a matter of hope; this is a matter of faith (on your part) that I will deliver as I have delivered so far.
"Writing can be such an intensity, it drives from the very soul. (working on a scene where Merlyn appears to have been swallowed by an Angel) I know better, of course, but the words must have come from somewhere. ;-) rho" [From rho's Facebook page]
"Writing can be such an intensity, it drives from the very soul. (working on a scene where Merlyn appears to have been swallowed by an Angel) I know better, of course, but the words must have come from somewhere. ;-) rho" [From rho's Facebook page]
You have your doubts, but you do have faith to, in yourself to write as long as I am alongside. You are not embarrassed to have faith in yourself, you are embarrassed to have faith in a creature of your imagination, myself, Amorella. The irony here is almost too much for me to handle without a, forgive me, an angelic smile. You see the joke; you are no fool, or not the one you think you are in any case. It is funny, orndorff. You can see that yourself.
In an odd way, in context, it is funny, funny enough to have a slight smile. The personal and private humor of the situation – the notes, the blog, the books – has a twisted humor to it I cannot resist.
Post. – Amorella.
No comments:
Post a Comment