Thoughts on Sheep Testicles

We took the kids to a ranch last weekend. We saw a bunch of sheep. Sheep have enormous testicles. I had been unaware of that. At first I thought it was ironic, considering how sheep are known for lacking courage while balls are associated with having it. Then I realized that "irony" doesn't begin to capture the sort of linguistic deception at work here.

Of course, idioms aside, balls are quite vulnerable, the sorts of things one would smartly do anything to protect. For example, desperate German shepherd fang avoidance. Off a cliff? Sure, just don't bite my balls.* The balls will control a sheep, or better, they will let a sheep be controlled. To be had by the balls seems a quite accurate idiom, with all it implies.

To have balls, then, is to be easily manipulated into supporting and/or doing things you don't actually want to do, like risking death to fight deeply hued people in the Middle East or working OT without pay;** to submit to leaders who'll have you running all over the fucking place because you're afraid of what they'll do if you stop running; to be always looking over your shoulder, behind, not ahead; to be enslaved, not free. To have balls is to be a...pussy? Sort of.

*I don't know how sheep would actually react to such a choice.
**I understand that sometimes the wolf is literally right on top of you and you gotta do what you gotta do...survival first, no shame in that...but that supports the point. John Steinbeck made this brilliantly clear in The Grapes of Wrath.

For That Friendly Old Woman, One Among Very Many, Bewildered by Sean's Japanese Fluency

from lips framed in blonde
the familiar sounds so strange
the language you speak
comes not from your race, my friend
it's just what you swam in then

Portrait of a Fat Spider on a Sunny Day in Late October

taught silk spans stone path
like a plucked string, the web sings,
"enjoy! this...is...it"

the Heraclitean flux capacitor

So, I'm trying to blow up the distinction between stasis and dynamism. There is no stasis, I'd say, echoing Heraclitus. This means there are no individual objects.

I learned in high school at some point that perfect circles don't exist in the real world. This is true. Numbers can't be found either. If I want to say there are two apples, I need to show that they're exactly the same. Identity is a useful tool. I'm inclined to a call it a fiction, though I'm certainly not arguing against it. The human ability to take two parts of the world and consider them the same thing, so that they may be counted, or to use any abstractions and consider their relations is a product of evolution.

I'm not trying to say abstractions are baseless, that it's all a dream. They're one way the world relates to itself: the eyes and brain relate to the apple. But see there I'm using the concepts "eyes," "brain" and "apple." What exactly can I capture about them that adds to their ridiculously complex non-conceptual relation, which I would suggest includes far more than brains and apples as we know them?

It's emotionally satisfying to understand, it's emotionally satisfying to form and achieve goals. There are ego benefits, there's relief from cognitive dissonance. It's an aid in survival, up to a point anyway (the humans being at risk of self-destruction), to use abstractions. You can say the same about sex.

Temporality, Ontology, 3

Matter is not dead. Not even rocks are dead. Everything that is, right now, is acting. Even the rock is self-replicating and diversifying, throwing itself into another now. This is amazing. What kind of effort does that take? What makes you do it, rock?

Temporality, Ontology, 2

The past is fake. The future is fake. Have you ever seen them? No, of course not. You've only seen now. That's all there is. Believing in the past and future is like believing in unicorns. Well, OK, you saw...what? No, you didn't. You "saw" now. You're now experiencing a simplification, conceptually, and an effect, viscerally.

Temporality, Ontology

It has come to my attention that there are no dimensions. I used to think of space as a three dimensional cube and time as a fourth dimension. Not because it made sense but because it was taught to me this way. Time happens on a line, past on the left, present on a dot, future on the right. Spatial. The question that got to bugging me was how the past crossed over the present to become the future. Past and future seemed simple; present presented problems.

This may not be original, but I've figured out that there is no past and there is no future. All that exists, and has ever existed, is now. The past is a concept in our minds, an unreal, simplified remnant. It is also in the body, in altered form. It does not exist, as such. The future is only a concept, the past re-imagined, visualized, conceptualized. The past in abstract, simplified and projected forward on a spatialized time line. If the past doesn't exist, the future really doesn't exist.

Now is not a passage from past to future. Past and future -- visualized, simplified -- are fictions. Only a human could come up with this stuff.  Now is self-replication and diversification.

I took a walk. I looked at a cinder block wall. I realized that it was self-replicating, partially (imperfectly?) at that very moment. Its changes were too minor to notice. Time is self-replication and diversification. Time, or the world, which are the same thing,  manifests itself in space.