Challenge 375 Response
On the Unexplainable
Tantra Bensko
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My definition of nihilism is just the traditional one, not a person interpretation. But beyond the semantics, yes, I understand what you are saying.
I’ve luckily never had that happen with a student saying everything is equal. Maybe that’s reserved for classes in philosophy, giving them the chance to do that and be backed by nihilist philosophers. If so, they’re sneaky buggers.
What I had was a college football player complain that I made them write about nighttime dreams. I’d let him write every other paper about football. He complained to my supervisor, saying: “I’m a black football player. What do I know about dreams?”
I’ve read books on chaos, not only the kind at the level of physics, but at the level of occurrences on a larger playing field, talking about how the randomness of life allows it to exist. That made me happy. Chaos is used in both those ways in scientifically. But if by chaos, you are referring to the surreal chances that monsters could emerge from the deep, at any moment, in a dream-like way, I hear ya.
I think you may have been interpreting my ideas about life not making sense in a way differently from what I meant, in a pretty dedicated way throughout the discussion.
I don’t think of my life as making sense. One person can say something, and another person can say something, and they don’t reconcile. Maybe the laws of physics make sense. But my experience of those two people saying contradictory things can maybe never be understood. In most fiction, things like that eventually become explained. But in life, they may not. So why not, once in a while in fiction, can they also not ever be explained?
I don’t think it’s only me who experiences mysterious things in life. If so, that’s a mystery in itself. To allow that state of mystery to exist within a piece of fiction, for the characters to never solve a mystery, seems to be true to life. That has nothing to do with saying the laws of nature go awry.
If I could only think in terms of solving everything in life that doesn’t make sense, I’d be crazy. Because some things haven’t been solved yet, and I can’t fix that. I have to be able to accept that.
If everything you have read about, or heard about, can easily be explained by you, then you need to be promoted to God. But I am not there, yet. And neither are most people I know. So, to write from our humble perspectives seems most fitting to me. If I were writing from God’s perspective, then everything could be explainable. From mine — well, some things are confusing, and are never explained.
Copyright © 2010 by Tantra Bensko
If everything you have read about, or heard about, can easily be explained by you, then you need to be promoted to God.
The active presence of Bewildering Stories’ Review Board archangels notwithstanding, Tantra, that’s a need I never feel. Why on earth would anyone want to be God? All the delightful mysteries of existence would be explained, and what’s the fun in that?
In fact, that’s the trouble with anthropomorphized deities, take your pick. I can just hear one of them musing now: “Saying I’m ‘eternal’ doesn’t really solve anything. It’s like the Big Bang: what came before eternity? And while we’re at it: who am I, and what am I doing here?” Those are all human questions, and they all follow logically from the awareness of existence itself.
The scientific attitude doesn’t say that everything is explained or even explainable with the knowledge at hand. It says that explanations can be proved true or false. Unlike fundamentalism, science is quite compatible with mysticism.
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What I had was a college football player complain that I made them write about nighttime dreams. I’d let him write every other paper about football. He complained to my supervisor, saying: “I’m a black football player. What do I know about dreams?”
That would be funny if it weren’t so sad. Here’s the same thing, but funny:
Pearls Before Swine © Stephan Pastis, Nov. 7, 2009
People normally take figurative expressions literally unless they know to do otherwise. In the case of the football player and Pig, the literal is taken figuratively.
Don
