Re: a comment on REM Sleep by mystic enoch	zodiac 209.193.14.10	20-Mar-06/12:07 PM
"Wow, you're starting to sound like Amanda. I wonder what you think god is." I don't see sounding like Amanda. I thought she took issue with me on the same topic last week. God is two things, which is why your conversation on the other page goes around in circles - because you won't make any distinction between the two. The first God is whatever God out of the set of all possibilities for God actually exists. This set includes 0, infinity, and a turnip, among infinite other things. The second God is people's idea of God. People's idea of God is like hearing you got a St Crispin's Day present from an unknown admirer and spending all your time between now and St Crispin's Day trying to guess what it is. The odds that you're going to guess it correctly are virtually nil (hint: it's an infinite number of antique shoehorns arranged in a particular order, but good luck guessing anyway!), so basically whatever you guess, you're going to be in for a surprise, anyway. This even goes for people who guess that God's infinite, or who base their ideas of God on mystical faith-experiences, because the reality of infinity is naturally going to be a big surprise, too. In the meantime, all you're going to have done is annoy all your friends speculating on the 1/10000000000000000 chance that you guess the right present - when, as far as I can tell, you'd get the present anyway even if you guessed wrong.
Re: a comment on Numbers In Heaven by Dovina	ALChemy 24.74.100.11	20-Mar-06/12:00 PM
Some of your best poetry to date.
Re: a comment on Numbers In Heaven by Dovina	ALChemy 24.74.100.11	20-Mar-06/11:57 AM
You two are so god damned adorable it makes my teeth ache.
Re: a comment on REM Sleep by mystic enoch	zodiac 209.193.14.10	20-Mar-06/11:54 AM
You have us backwards. Dovina would never. I would.
Re: a comment on REM Sleep by mystic enoch	zodiac 209.193.14.10	20-Mar-06/11:53 AM
Yeah, I just answered this on the other thread, but I'd rather answer it again here. The other thread gives me a headache now. I believe in happiness - or, rather, the potential for and value of happiness. My wife makes me happy. I believe seeking healthy kinds of happiness is the most worthwhile thing you can do. Yes, I use words like "love" to describe my relationship with my wife, and who knows, I might even continue to be with her someday even if my time with her stops being happy, and maybe that will be love. I also desire to make my wife happy (which also happens to make me happy), and not totally in some mutual exchange-of-happiness way, so maybe that's love. It's all rather wishy-washy and personal, which is why it's stupid to talk about. Talking about it doesn't make either of us have more or less of it. I don't "make more of life" because I don't believe life has base status to "make more of". I make more of my life than most people. I make more of my life than the base assumption about what you're supposed to make of life held by most people. But I imagine that's not what you're talking about.
Re: a comment on Numbers In Heaven by Dovina	ALChemy 24.74.100.11	20-Mar-06/11:51 AM
Wow, you're starting to sound like Amanda. I wonder what you think god is.
Re: a comment on REM Sleep by mystic enoch	ALChemy 24.74.100.11	20-Mar-06/11:46 AM
Are you sure Dovina didn't write this?
Re: a comment on Numbers In Heaven by Dovina	zodiac 209.193.14.10	20-Mar-06/11:44 AM
Talking to you is like trying to talk to a machine programmed to say sensible-sounding phrases utterly at random. I could say, "This thread has never had the appearance of dialogue, even when I wasn't on it," and you're just going to say, "I get a bright shine with Ajax!" The number of times you've seemed to answer sensibly on this site is, like, 5, which is about what you'd expect for utter randomness. I blame myself for believing in those times.
Re: a comment on REM Sleep by mystic enoch	ALChemy 24.74.100.11	20-Mar-06/11:43 AM
What is absurd is why you are even ewith your wife. We fall in love and stay in love to have children and populate the earth. We live with our lovers to have another worker in the home. There's many logical reasons for why we have lovers, none of which involve making a perfect capuccino and running a bath for them. Admit it, you're a romantic, you make more of love than what it really is. So what's so terrible about making more of life than what it really is? Any talk of love, god and art that doesn't involve scientific fact is trivial and obsurd. But who on this site doesn't get romantic about at least one of the three.
Re: a comment on Numbers In Heaven by Dovina	zodiac 209.193.14.10	20-Mar-06/11:36 AM
Oh, because that's like my job or what I like to do? Romance is believing in the capability of human beings to change, to affect their lives. Romance is believing in the potential for happiness, however fleeting, false, or self-deceptive. Happiness is the only irreducible thing.
Re: a comment on Numbers In Heaven by Dovina	Dovina 70.38.78.229	20-Mar-06/11:23 AM
Dovina’s Diary, March 20, 2006: Ah, yes, the morning mail and another dispatch from Mr. Zodiac. The question is whether to answer it, giving the appearance of dialog, (which, if history repeats, will really be two intersecting monologs), or to ignore another assertion of my incompetence as a human being. It is both gratifying to know he cares, and irritating to see it go on this way, with no more apparent understanding of me than he showed in those year-old diatribes of his. He’s very persistent. “Which would you rather be, Dovina, a child caught in a magician’s spell, or the magician casting it?” Silly me, I’ve sometimes answered his questions, knowing he’ll take my answer off on a tangent. It’s sweet, really, the way he keeps on, as if hoping, even after all these months, that I’ll follow him to Arabia on an invitation to Paris. I imagine him telling some coffee-house crony about me, and the crony saying, “Is she a nut?” and him weighing a stack of my Poemranker comments and poems in his hand, saying, “I’m not sure.” When you correspond with someone, you begin to form impressions. You wonder whether the impressions are correct. “Certainly not a beauty. Long, pointed nose? Brown beady eyes? No, I think more . . . probing. Pushy.” I imagine his impressions of me running along these lines, rather than the harsh nouns and adjectives he writes to describe me. No, I don’t believe I’ll answer this time.
Re: a comment on Numbers In Heaven by Dovina	ALChemy 24.74.100.11	20-Mar-06/11:20 AM
Originally it started with me wondering how one can be a skeptic and a romantic at the same time, how we mystify and even deify things like love and art but nobody seemed to get on the same wavelength for a while. That's why we need you here. You keep the dreamers from getting too dreamy.
Re: a comment on REM Sleep by mystic enoch	zodiac 209.193.14.10	20-Mar-06/11:08 AM
P.S. -- EVERYONE'S GIFT Hilda: We shall not go to heaven, and even if we were both to go, we would have no eyes to see each other, no hands to touch each other. In heaven, there is no time for anything but God... Here you are: a little flesh, worn-out, rough, miserable—a life, a wretched life. It is this flesh and this life I love. We can only love on Earth, and against God’s will... When people love each other they become invisible to God. - Sartre, "The Devil and the Good Lord"
Re: a comment on REM Sleep by mystic enoch	zodiac 209.193.14.10	20-Mar-06/11:06 AM
No, I mean if you peel back the layers you've got nothing. That doesn't mean I didn't wake up at 5 this morning to make my wife's capuccino and bath the way she likes them. There is no useful or interesting discussion about love or God except interesting trivia and theatre of the absurd. That's what I mean.
Re: a comment on Numbers In Heaven by Dovina	zodiac 209.193.14.10	20-Mar-06/11:04 AM
Christ. All gears come full circle, Dovina, toothless or not. And what the hell is the issue? Nothing.
Re: a comment on REM Sleep by mystic enoch	ALChemy 24.74.100.11	20-Mar-06/10:58 AM
You mean how if you peel back the layers of hoopla about love you've got nothing but a chemical cocktail and if you peel back the layers of hoopla about God you've got nothing but a space filler for the things you don't know? Personally I like a little hoopla in my life, It spices it up a little. Did you know after about 7 or 8 years couples tend to stop being in love. You may wake up one day soon and realize I'm not in love with her anymore and not have any good reason why or she may do the same with you. So a logical person would start packing their bags around year 7.
Re: a comment on Perils of the Learning Curve by Dovina	Dovina 70.38.78.229	20-Mar-06/10:58 AM
A metaphor if you wish. But to assert a little Jewish mutha or a single doctor who might have tried surgery - absurd!
Re: a comment on Numbers In Heaven by Dovina	Dovina 70.38.78.229	20-Mar-06/10:55 AM
There's a tooth missing in the mesh of our gears. We keep coming full circle on these issues about God, and I can't figure out why. I enjoy dialog more than interslacig monologs, and most of our conversation is dialog, yet we seem unable to get to some key issue. What the hell is the issue here, anyway?
Re: Perils of the Learning Curve by Dovina	ALChemy 24.74.100.11	20-Mar-06/10:40 AM
I really thought this might be a metaphor for something. On the other hand, you met a docta! Is he single? You could make your little jewish mutha so proud.
Re: a comment on REM Sleep by mystic enoch	zodiac 209.193.14.10	20-Mar-06/10:38 AM
The line is where you start talking about God and love unironically. You all ought to be ashamed of yourselves.