To: Doubt(ers)

Q) ....but this fact that art is useless for the majority of mortals - what significance is this, when it has been art and art alone that has saved me many times over from taking my own life...?

C) I give, much more heartily and readily, my trust to those who rebel from with-in a paradigm. Necessarily, I always mistrust they who criticize from with-out.

G) From the San Fransisco Chronicle, Sunday October 28, 2007, A4, Nation and World:

Train kills boy, 5, who fell on tracks

Watauga, Texas - A 5-year old boy playing on train tracks fell and then froze up when he heard a locomotive approaching, leaving him unable to move before the train struck and killed him, police said.

Kevin Bradford and two other boys had sneaked past their grandmother to look for dinosaur bones Thursday, police said.

Workers aboard the Union Pacific train traveling through this small North Texas town saw the boys on the tracks but couldn't stop in time despite breaking, a Union Pacific spokesman said. . . .

As if there weren't already enough proof that god does not exist (philosophers can come up with great evidence for this fact, but it is incidents like these that constitute real proof)

The boy froze up. His 'will' was settled to inaction. This is perhaps the most powerful simultaneous blast to both contemporary neuroscience and christianity that we shall ever encounter. There is no accounting for this terror that condemns. His escape to discovery (his clandestiny) violates every attempt to abstract or universalize human action. We begin to mourn his life because of his will to adventure - because he was willing to break rules to search for dinosaur bones. At every attempt to search farther back than this personable beginning, one comes up against absurdities. No biology can account for both his adventurousness and his terror, and no god can account for both the 'moral' sum of his life and his bravery. In each moment, this boy faces only himself in the world - and with no necessity.

Q) Why does it strike the young mind like a paradox that oxygen actually fuels fire, rather than tame it? Is this the first moment when Nature makes itself known in its incomprehensibility and thus, dominance over us...?

M) We trust summaries and commentaries until we come upon some astounding passage in a classic text and say to ourselves - and what? by god! how has this been overlooked? Rarely, do we allow ourselves a long and slow dialogue with a text, and we have become far too trusting of the university professor. Let us, first, become autodidacts. Then, when we have searched honestly, thoroughly, and sensuously, we may look to the commentaries. This process always happens in the reverse, with the result that the end is never reached - instead, academic study becomes a continuous, endless, self-perpetuating commentary upon a commentary. I imagine my dropping out of college is immanent - except for the social stigmas, the disappointment of the parents, their co-workers, their relatives. I live for the other, no doubt. I am no free spirit.