Plath Rotatus Pariter

Listening to Pooka by Pooka

I don’t like synchronicity – it seems artificial and meaningless in a world that is just so big. In an infinite universe everything happens eventually and what we have to bear in mind is the match between the number of people in the world and the number of events that people can ascribe to synchronicity. Forgive me rationalising but when you compare the number of people who DON’T find their long-lost rings in the stomachs of the very fish that they have just caught 30 years down the line with the number who do then it all falls into place. It is exactly because the event is rare that it makes the news. So the gee-whizz reaction to just such a coincidence is self-deflating. If everyone found rings in fish then they’d just shrug and get on with things. However, this paragraph was sparked into being by the similarity between two things I have been reading. One is an entry in The Old New Thing regarding being competent enough in a foreign language to be able to understand without having to translate it into your own language. Douglas Hofstadter talks about wondering what it would be to think like the speaker of another language as part of trying to get inside other consciousnesses. I have to say that without really having it formally defined in my head, I have thought about this myself. You come across words from a foreign language which match with words in English and they make me wonder about whether jokes and puns work in specific languages. In GEB, Hofstadter printed version of Jabberwocky in French and German to show that it is possible to muck around with language however you speak.

I’m apparently on the down escalator. See Theologian damns most Britons to hell. You may argue with my intellectual analysis of this but I struggle to see how anyone who believes in such nursery views of theology can actually manage to get to be a Doctor (of whatever) . I’m not sure whether I mention it because giving credence to such a view is – in a comparison that the good doctor may have heard of in his professional career – like discussing how many angels can dance on the point of a needle. Now I know that this question is in itself a bit like Knut attempting to turn back the waves – usually completely misunderstood but the proverbial nature of the Angels dancing question conveys the pointlessness of what so many people will talk about for hours. I suppose I am dangerously close to trying to find a divide between what is legitimate religious discussion and irrelevance. I recall the statement by some Christians during a large scientific trial in to the power of prayer which included people of all religions that they thought that the people that THEY prayed for would be helped but that they could not see how any other denominations could possibly get their messages across – in effect – everyone else is a heretic. All or nothing people. This has reminded me that an ex-colleague of mine has just completed a second MA and is considering a Ph.D. Importantly this will be in a discipline which might actually be of some use rather than to back up a position of authority to be used for damning 90% of the population to a place which absolutely, positively does NOT EXIST. Stuff that in your incense burner!

I finished Rendezvous With Rama last night – went upstairs to read so as to avoid being a Jinx to our brave lads but failed miserably. I am pleased with the redrawing of the images in my head – though I still feel that my youthful images were better than the illustrations. I loved the tension that wasn’t particularly tense, the final images of the Endeavour craft being spun by the backwash from Rama’s space drive, the general reality of space travel which is what you expect from Arthur C Clarke. I do hope the film does it’s best to stick to reality. I’m not sure what to read now – I do have nineteen-eighty-four by the bed but it might be a bit heavy for current times.