Mid-morning. You and Carol were up before sunrise, read the
Sunday paper and had cereal for breakfast. Currently it is bright and sunny,
cool but without much wind. Doug’s notes yesterday focused on several points: 1,
fabric threads woven in space/time; 2. go with dimple skin, string theory and
quantum mechanics; 3. an electron’s quantum vacuum cloud prevents the universe
from exploding by reducing the effective force between charged particles; the
distance in front of the speed of light is zero; and 4. a universe may begin
within a universe.
Before
focusing too much on a humanoid perspective let’s view this fictional setup of
the cosmos from a hypothetical angel’s perspective. First, we need a definition
of this hypothetical angel. Are you with me, boy? – Amorella
0917 hours. I had not thought this hypothetical angel
perspective. I am open here but need to mentally readjust first. I will begin
with the etymology from Wikipedia.
** **
Etymology
The word angel in English is a fusion of
the Old English/Germanic word engel (with a hard g) and the Old French angele.
Both derive from the Latin angelus which in turn is the romanization of
the ancient Greek ἄγγελος (ángelos), "messenger",
"envoy", which is related to the Greek verb ἀγγέλλω (angéllō),
meaning "bear a message, announce, bring news of" etc. The earliest
form of the word is the Mycenaean a-ke-ro attested in Linear B syllabic
script.
The ángelos is the default Septuagint’s rendition of the
Biblical Hebrew term mal’akh denoting
simply “messenger” without specifying its nature. In the Latin Vulgate however
the meaning becomes bifurcated: when mal’akh or ángelos is
supposed to denote a human messenger, words like nuntius or legatus
are applied. If the word refers to some supernatural being – the word angelus
appears. Such differentiation has been taken over by later vernacular
translations of the Bible, early Christian and Jewish exegetes and eventually
modern scholars.
** **
And now the word hypothetical defined:
** **
the
scenario I suggested was strictly hypothetical: theoretical, speculative,
conjectured, conjectural, notional, suppositional, supposed, putative, assumed;
academic.
From –
Oxford/American software
** **
0939
hours. (I don’t know how else to go about this.) I need to see what format of
meaning you are working from when you say, “hypothetical angel”.
“Notional” is the better word here, not
hypothetical. As for “angel”, lets thread from the etymology to Aristotle and
Neo-Platonism. - Amorella
** **
Unmoved
mover
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The unmoved mover (Ancient Greek: ὃ
οὐ κινούμενον κινεῖ, ho ou kinoúmenon kineî, "that which moves
without being moved") or prime mover (Latin: primum movens)
is a philosophical concept described by Aristotle as a primary cause or
"mover" of all the motion in the universe. As is implicit in the
name, the "unmoved mover" moves other things, but is not itself moved
by any prior action. In Book 12 (Greek "Λ") of his Metaphysics, Aristotle describes the
unmoved mover as being perfectly beautiful, indivisible, and contemplating only
the perfect contemplation: itself contemplating. He equates this concept also
with the Active Intellect. This Aristotelian concept had its roots in
cosmological speculations of the earliest Greek "Pre-Socratic "
philosophers and became highly influential and widely drawn upon in medieval
philosophy and theology. St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, elaborated on the
Unmoved Mover in the quinque viae.
First
philosophy
Aristotle argues, in Book 8 of the Physics and Book 12 of the Metaphysics , "that there must
be an immortal, unchanging being, ultimately responsible for all wholeness and
orderliness in the sensible world". In the Physics (VIII 4–6)
Aristotle finds "surprising difficulties" explaining even commonplace
change, and in support of his approach of explanation by four causes, he
required "a fair bit of technical "machinery" includes
potentiality and actuality, hylomorphism, the theory of categories, and
"an audacious and intriguing argument, that the bare existence of change
requires the postulation of a first cause, an unmoved mover whose necessary
existence underpins the ceaseless activity of the world of motion". Aristotle's
"first philosophy", or Metaphysics
("after the Physics"), develops his peculiar stellar
theology of the prime mover, as πρῶτον κινοῦν ἀκίνητον: an independent divine
eternal unchanging immaterial substance.
Edited from – Wikipedia, (redirected from
Primum movens) to unmoved mover
**
Neoplatonism
In the commentaries of Proclus (4th century,
under Christian rule) on the Timaeus of Plato, Proclus uses the terminology of
"angelic" (aggelikos) and "angel" (aggelos)
in relation to metaphysical beings. According to Aristotle, just as there is a
First Mover, so, too, must there be spiritual secondary movers.
From – Wikipedia - Angels
** **
1009
hours. So, then the definition of Angel is an unchanging immaterial “Notational
Spirit”?
In context and for word flow let’s say “Theoretical
First Spirit”. – Amorella
1017
hours. You mean an Adam/Eve like Spirit?
This
will do. – Amorella
I need a break. I have to think this through.
No problem. Post. - Amorella
It is worth mentioning. Later, dude. -
Amorella
Coming on noon local time. You completed
another forty minutes of exercises and sitting down in the black lounger you
checked out BBC and discovered an article on one of your favorite bookstores
and poets, Ferlinghetti’s City Lights. - Amorella
MAGAZINE
29 March 2014
Last updated at 21:07 ET
The radical readers of San Francisco
By
Andrew Whitehead
BBC
World Service
Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who co-founded the shop in 1953
The
city of San Francisco is home to some of the world's best bookshops, including
one which specialises in obscure political tracts and another which has become
synonymous with the Beat literary movement.
"City
Lights is not just a bookstore, it's a church," one literary San
Franciscan tells me. Describing the spiritual headquarters of the Beat poets -
more Godless than God-fearing - in religious terms is the sort of discordant
note you might get in... well, Beat poetry perhaps. But the comment was
intended as praise, recognition of the store as a public space as well as a
place of reverence.
City
Lights has a fair claim to be the world's best-known independent bookshop.
It
was set up more than 60 years ago close to San Francisco's lively, bohemian
North Beach district by, among others, the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
Back
then it was tiny, a beacon of the counter-culture, and made its name publishing
Allen Ginsberg's long poem Howl - for which it was prosecuted for obscenity and
acquitted - and championing the Beat movement also associated with Jack
Kerouac, Gregory Corso and William Burroughs.
It
has now taken over the entire block and is open until midnight every day of the
week. It's the wonderful sort of bookshop that has easy chairs dotted around
and signs inviting you to "sit and read". Its stock is catholic, as
befits a good bookshop. And if it's now a church, then the small room upstairs
is the shrine - the shelves devoted to the Beats and to the poetry City Lights
itself has published.
And the Beats?
Well,
some would say that, alongside rock'n'roll, they were about the most inventive
aspect of America in the 1950s and early 60s. Rebellious, distinctly,
disconcertingly, masculine. Tinged with booze, jazz, pills and dope. Given to
freewheeling prose, iconoclastic verse and road trips. Kerouac's On the Road is
the Beat generation's best-known work - a novel I read as a teenager, and which
so captivated me I've never dared to revisit it in case I find the magic has
faded.
So
for me, browsing at City Lights is - oh dear, another religious term - a bit of
a pilgrimage.
While
the store and its rigorously organised shelves still fly the standard, it's a
measured, late-middle-aged radicalism rather than the red-hot rage of youth. So
that fits, too. The Beats began as an East Coast phenomenon - Ginsberg and
Ferlinghetti were both from New York - and it found an enduring home on the
other side of the country. San Francisco is America's "alternative"
capital and it has been for decades.
Following
in the Beats' footsteps came Haight-Ashbury and the hippy era. As the song
says: "If you're going to San Francisco, be sure to wear flowers in your
hair." The hippy movement was more about music and performance than
literature, more overtly political than the Beat movement, and left - as far as
I can tell - a less pronounced cultural mark on the city. That 1967 summer of
love embraced gay love. One consequence of the flower power influx was that San
Francisco developed the liveliest gay scene in the country. Refugees from
censorious parents and disapproving communities, those in search of anonymity
or a new start, congregated here.
The
Castro, a former working class district, is a gay village which has become distinctly
middle-aged. This tolerant, laidback city has found its literary representation
in Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City and its sequels - San Francisco not
simply as venue but presiding genius. So one of the world's most digitally
minded cities - where so many of the movers and shakers of Silicon Valley have
made their homes - is also among the most literate.
And
it still offers sanctuary to the printed word. Printed not just in books, but
on badges, leaflets, posters and pamphlets as well. For collectors of old political pamphlets and ephemera - OK,
so there aren't all that many of us, but this is a place for minorities of all
sorts - San Francisco is paradise, in the shape of a cavernous upstairs
second-hand bookshop in the almost-up-and-coming Mission district.
The
shop, Bolerium, specialises in what it calls social movements - politics, civil
rights, green issues, feminism, lifestyle. There are 60,000 items in all. The
best selling lines, I asked? Gay pulp fiction, and American Trotskyism. I
assume there's not much overlap, but this being San Francisco you can't be
sure.There are tracts and leaflets from all over the world. Regency radical
squibs, high Tory manifestos, left-wing song sheets, right-wing election
hand-outs. It's amazing that such fragile items survive - amazing the prices
the choicer items can now attract.
You
might wonder who'd pay enough for a slap-up meal and a good bottle of wine to
buy a Spanish Civil War-era anarchist handbill from the streets of Barcelona. Well,
here's the answer - some perfectly normal people... such as me.
** **
1337
hours. From what I remember we stopped once in the summer of 1960 and then
again a couple of years ago, on our northern California wine country trip with
Craig and Alta. Most awesome.
Carol is on the phone but shortly you will
be going for a Subway picnic along the Little Miami. We have more to do on this
First Spirit business later this afternoon. – Amorella
I have been absorbing the new concept. I take it this is not
for the book but rather so that I can make a rough sketch or diagram of how
this is. I am really pumped on the idea. I have never thought of a First Spirit
before in my life, never entered my mind. Reason says though that there has to
be a First Cause who’s to say there’s not a First Spirit?
What is bothering you is that although I
present something new you get caught up in Ferlinghetti and the bookstore. –
Amorella
1346 hours. Yes, it does bother me but I wasn’t going to
mention it. I don't know where my mind went.
You
had a decent Subway picnic splitting a turkey and ham on a nine-grain honey oat
bun, a small pack of Sun chips and three cookies. As a couple in front of you
was having a little too much PDA you left and are now at Pine Hill Lakes. Back
to the Theoretical First Spirit – we need a description but this spirit is not
a ghost one with a heart and soul within like the little one in Grandma’s pocket.
– Amorella
1530 hours. I am trying to conjure up those many images
described in books or seen in films. The first problem is that this must
represent a virgin spirit, so to speak. It would have had to have been ‘grown’
in the Before or quickly after and its attributes would have been tempered by
its environment. Plus with only space and time – this Being would not be an
Angel yet, right?
Interesting process of construction, boy. –
Amorella
If time exists then a process of evolution or something similar
would have to exist for their to be growth. Aristotle used the words “First
Movers” so there has to be a force to push or pull, a spiritual gravity of
sorts to keep it realistic to the reader. I don’t want this to be so far out
there the reader can’t understand the analogy, which is in an evolutionary or
growth form.
What’s next? Who created the First Spirit? –
Amorella
1546 hours. Now, this argument I have had before, in earnest
in Catechism class when I was twelve. I remember debating with someone I don’t
remember who. God was considered First Cause so then who created ‘Cause’.
Looking back, it was a matter of grammar which was a lot of fun in the seventh,
eighth and ninth grades. We did a lot of diagramming so I would have put (I did) put ‘First’ on
a diagonal below the base line being the noun Cause. I got in trouble because
the teacher said that a proper noun would go on the nominative base but I said
that John Goss for instance would be Goss on the base and John on the diagonal
below because it was a particular Goss and there were other. If one wrote “the
Goss family” surely family would go on a base and Goss would go on the diagonal
below. I remember this. That was my argument. I still think I’m right on this
point and that was sixty years ago. I think every on of my teachers of English
said I was mistaken because of the rule for proper nouns. So, back to what you
just stated – First Spirit. As such the ‘Spirit’ would have been the ‘parent’
of the First. Isn’t this right?
It’s your mind I’m using, boy. You are my
immediate environment. Do you understand? I have no choice because in order to
communicate, i.e. you are the alien here, if you catch my drift. –
Amorella
Okay, in theory certain conditions have to be accepted on
which to base this ‘analogy of Before and ‘Creation’.
Do you want me to begin with “Once Upon A
Time In Space”? – Amorella.
Okay. Why don’t I just shut up.
You have to let the prerequisites go, but
not the humor. – Amorella
You raise a very good point. Tone. What about a laugh at the
end of a very good joke? The Before is the Joke. “Before the Beginning was the
Joke.” (Irony)?
You have been working on the house with
Carol, getting ready for Craig and Alta. You think they car coming tomorrow;
Carol thinks they are coming Tuesday. The upstairs is completely done and the
downstairs only needs light work as it was cleaned less than a week ago. Carol
is making soup and you are relaxing. Late lunch, late supper. Let’s work up
something with the irony, rather than original sin or a similarity scattered
into the world. – Amorella
1849 hours. Whoa. This will be a parody of the creation
story?
No, besides this is Before, no universes
yet. We a setting up an earlier perspective -- no humans, boy, no sin. What do
you think? – Amorella
I cannot believe you are coming up with this material. You
are right. First, I would have to have readers to have critics.
What can any of the critics say other than
it could be better written? – Amorella
1855 hours. I’m guilty of that already. They could say it is
too complicated.
Hardly too complicated for an angel, what do
you think? – Amorella
Good one, Amorella.
If everyone wrote a novel of their inner
life woven in life experiences I doubt their novels would be any less
complicated, even those of the critics. – Amorella
1900 hours. You have good responses, Amorella. I respect and
appreciate your countenance very much.
Countenance is an interesting word to use
here. Drop in the definition.
** **
countenance – noun
his
strikingly handsome countenance:
face, features,
physiognomy, profile; (facial) expression, look, appearance, aspect, mien
Selected
from – Oxford-American software
** **
I,
the Amorella, have no face or appearance.
You
do have features though, a character profile, an aspect, an aura, a manner and
demeanor, a bearing and an attitude.
Let’s
use those aspects for our Theoretical First Spirit as well as loosing the great
poetic devises for entertainment, intellect, and humor, dark and otherwise. –
Amorella
1915 hours. I really like this.
Good. Post. - Amorella
You
watched the news and last week’s “Revenge”. The stairs need to be swept but all
is ready for company tomorrow shortly before noon. You are both excited to see
your old friends and long time traveling companions, Craig and Alta B. - Amorella
It is always good to visit with these two. I played football
with Craig at Westerville High. I think Ron Meyer was captain one of those two
years. He went on to be a professional coach at one time. Jim Scarfpin was head
coach my freshman year. I liked him best. He died the next year. I was very
sorry about that and for his daughter Judy who is in our Class of 1960. We used
a single wing offense sometimes. I don’t know if they use that anymore. I don’t really
follow the sport any more. Craig was a really good player, left end if I
remember right, and so was his younger brother. I worked in a foundry in
Cleveland after high school and took some night classes at Fenn College
downtown. Craig was a year behind me so we both entered Otterbein in 1961 as
freshmen. We took a lot of the same classes because one of his majors was
history and history was my minor. In high school we had had the same teachers
and the same projects so we related that way too. Many of the same memories. We
pledged our local Pi Kappa Phi fraternity. No nationals were on campus. It’s
nickname is “Country Club”. Dad was in the same fraternity. My cousin Dave S.
is a Clubber as well as Jim S. who we travel with and so was Bob Pringle. I
have been thinking about him, as we have been housecleaning. He would have
loved to have the poetic devices scattered out with the beginnings of the tree
of universes. I’m sure he would have. What a great thing for Amorella to come
up with. Poetic devices – it’s wonderful.
All for tonight, boy. Post. – Amorella
You are wonderful too, Amorella.
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