Father's [sic] Day

When Yahweh, the ur-Daddy of us all, informed King James that he (YHWH) would be "visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation", was that moral pre-Lamarckism or acknowledgment of divinely infernal punishments, such as STDs, goiters, and male-pattern baldness?

Another Father's Day and I find myself to be not only a son, father, but a grandfather as well: Father, son, and wholly geezer! Although the end of this tricyclic ride is approaching, I do not fear the inevitable abyss, but a sort of continual effulgence at being able to participate in these facets of existence.

My son, my executioner
I take you in my arms
Quiet and small and just astir
and whom my body warms

Sweet death, small son,
our instrument of immortality,
your cries and hunger document
our bodily decay.

We twenty two and twenty five,
who seemed to live forever,
observe enduring life in you
and start to die together.

-- Donald Hall

Heinrich Schütz

Duke of Deception

Inadvertent Art

In life, as on the Internet, progress by indirection is similar to magic via misdirection: It's the process that makes the initial, essential element possible. Exempli gratia: The random, blind, voracious molecular avarice of one material for the atomic constituents of another (i.e, rust) often produces as much beauty as the so-called abstract expressionism of a painstaking Jackson Pollock or a meticulous Mark Rothko.

Does intent have anything to do with the evaluation of art? Could a cunningly contrived automaton produce an original that might pass as a Klee or a Kandinsky? Probably. How about a Caravaggio similar to Emmaus or a Watteau akin to Embarkation? Probably not.

Desuetude

The universe, they say, is headed for a heat death. Actually it's more akin to an absence of heat, since everything, all activity, will be on an invariant isotherm. There will be no cold to define hot; no up to define down; no black to define white. Without opposites there can be no identities. The universe will just be! A tepid cosmos, a vapid place, if one can assign the word "place" to ultimate ubiquitousness, the mother of all everythings which, of course, will be everywhere, with energy and matter evenly distributed: There will be no differences, every thing will be the same as everything. According to information theory, there must be a varying level of energy (which is just heat, after all) present for any meaningful communication to occur. This is the difference that makes difference possible. Camus was right. It will be a grandly indifferent macrocosm. Vive la différence!

On a more narrowly local level, technology and evolution notwithstanding, things are destined to decompose. We know the gist will wither. All our physical constructs will dissolve into debris and disorder, dust and rust.

It is therefore instructive to view evidence of this encroaching entropy as it manifests itself on a typical traipse through Milwaukee.