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The descriptions Percival Everett uses in his poems, “The Dura Mater,” and “The Weight of the Encephalon,” are some of the most accurate descriptions I have read to describe migraines.  I have been suffering from migraines since I was about about 11 years old, and sometimes they can be incredibly debilitating. When I get migraines, it’s as if someone turned up the volume on all of my senses — everything I see is too bright and saturated, every noise grates against my ears, and anything I try to eat makes me incredibly nauseous — all I can focus on is the pain and dizziness. Continue reading “My Head Hurts the Way it Hurts”

“…how strange is it to be anything at all?”

         This quote is a line from the 1998 album In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by the indie rock band Neutral Milk Hotel. Aeroplane is a concept album that draws heavily from The Diary of Anne Frank as well as lead singer Jeff Mangum’s lucid dreams. The album uses extensive surrealist imagery as well as bizarre, eclectic instrumentation, making for a jarring but deeply fascinating experience. When I first listened to this album, I was taken aback as I had never heard anything quite like it and for the next few days, I scoured the internet, trying to learn all I could about this iconic recording. Continue reading “The Strangeness of Meaning”

How should we judge art? More importantly for us, how do we judge whether Percival Everett’s works are good or not? In order to answer this question, I spent some time looking into the philosophy of David Hume. For those unfamiliar with the guy, he was a renown Scottish Enlightenment philosopher that, among other things, concerned himself with how we should evaluate art. He wrote a scholarly essay on this topic titled “Of The Standard of Taste” where he revealed, in his opinion, what constitutes an exceptional critic of art.

Continue reading “How should we judge art?”

Logic must be, even if it is not there.

Ironically, my class after English 203 is always my logic class, so the discussions that followed from Percival Everett’s Logic made me think of how I’ve learned to think of certain things due to the class. For example, a basic syllogism would be “Some dogs have tails, all dogs are mammals, therefore some mammals have tails.” I have always thought of logic as a basis of thought, that was not always applicable to everything in this world. “Constituent parts compose this reality-molecules, atoms, simple X”. I have always believed that the world we know, as well as what we do not know that simply exists, builds our reality. But it is what we do not know, and may never know, that interests me.

The letter “X”. From math to logic, it is one of the most popular letter for an undefined variable, an unknown. This particular part of the poem made me think of the fact that some things that exists, are not applicable to logic or vice versa. There is the X, that exists in everything and anything logic tries to prove or disprove. When one really thinks about it, logic is illogical. It leaves us with more and more questions, continuously delving into an “X” that leads to more unknowns and at some point, there is nothing left we can logically do. There is just “X”.

Some may find this endless cycle of logic to be interesting, but it came up in conversation in our group that Everett might actually mocking the continuous need to apply logic to everything. “Does my memory of you consists in parts? Simple component parts?”. Reading this, questioning it myself, I wonder if we should apply the thought of logic to human beings. We are complex, consisting of parts perhaps we ourselves can never fully know or understand. And do we really need to? Must we be able to break a person’s individual complexity down to an array of simple parts, or can we not not accept them. Is there a reason to logically delve into a person so deeply, and if so, will we not just arrive at “X”? The emotions about us we cannot explain, such as happiness or pain. The things about us that simply are.

Therefore, I end with this thought on logic as a whole. We learn how to logically assess certain aspects of what exists in this world, meaning logic is and always will be, even if it is not necessary or applicable to everything. Even if it will only lead to “X”, and that is okay. Because it is these variables, these unknowns, these endless string of questions with new ideas and “X’s” that arise that drive us forward to learn.

 

The metric system was conceived in 17th century by philosopher John Wilkens, who wanted to standardize the way things were measured.  At the time, almost every country in Europe used its own measuring system. Sometimes, even different regions of the country would use different forms of measurement.  However the metric system was not accepted until the late 18th Century in France, where scientists were becoming frustrated with the lack of consistency in measurement.  Also, because this was during the time of the French Revolution, adaption of the metric system was used as a way to rebel against the traditional way of thinking. As said by Ken Alder, the metric system was intended to be, “for all people, for all time.” By the end of the 19th Century the metric system became widely accepted and was standard in practically all of Europe and is now the scientific standard of how things are measured.  Physical examples of the units of measurement like the meter and kilogram were kept in Paris and used as the standard — a platinum rod exactly the length of one meter and a platinum-iridium metal cylinder that weighed a kilogram were made and protected in Paris. However, scientists knew that using physical objects could be problematic — that these measurements could be destroyed or damaged.  Even when objects are sitting untouched, they will chemically decompose.  This means that even though they are changing their size, they are still defined as either one kilogram or one meter because they set the standard.

Continue reading “Systems of Measurement”