William:
All that Catholic learning is responsible for your habit to explain
the mysterious as if it were causal -- or something like what you
said. In other words, what you say might be true, true enough to
reveal its falsity.
From causality to casuistry? Nah. I'm using a razor here, trying to
scrape away all that can be properly explained by causal arguments.
Then we're left with marvels. We go from causality to splendor! <g>
I think that the intricacies of the natural world are marvels that are
almost inexhaustible, and that emanence of the marvelous suffuses
every experience. I think the rather common reaction of going from
seemingly inexplicable event--such as how blood clots or how a few
lines on a white square can "become" some representation--to asserting
the presence of some "mysterious" operation or force is a shortcut
around the true marvel of knowing how it happens.
Everything is marvelous.
How is it that I can look at a photograph taken in the 30s or 50s and
recognize my parents or my one-year-old brother? How does our brains
work to cause that? It may be subconscious, in the sense that such a
think happens outside of our conscious awareness, but that doesn't
mean it's invisible or unknowable.
I marvel at number. The unity of one. The duality of two. And then
there is three, and what comes after them.
I marvel at the cleverness of the clinical studies that reveal or
discern behavioral mechanisms.
I marvel at the odd coincidence that the electromagnetic spectrum goes
in a "linear" progression of wavelengths from infrared to ultraviolet,
which is the exact progress of the color wheel **and it circles back
on itself**!! I find that to be such a perplexing recurrence, kind of
like a rising canon in music.
And language. And words. The nature or quality of individual
preferences. On and on.
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Michael Brady
[email protected]
