only one way, or two, or three

The way up and the way down are one and the same. —Heraclitus

"ONLY ONE WAY"-—fundamentalist brochure ca. 1979

And the way up is the way down, the way forward is the way back.... Not fare well, but fare forward, voyagers. —T. S. Eliot, "The Dry Salvages"


photographs © Seana Reilly 2010. Used by permission.

Why am I doing this? as I do not ask myself often enough, unfortunately

A wonderfully designed chart that all my readers will have seen, but which can be found via the URL below for those who haven't or who need to consult it for some other reason, contains this maxim:

Science fiction deals with improbable possibilities, fantasy with plausible impossibilities. — Miriam Allen de Ford


http://www.bitrebels.com/geek/the-history-of-science-fiction-unfreakingbelieveable-infographic/


* * * * * * *

That being the case, the joculum blog deals with implausible probabilities, some of the time. (The rest of the time, I am either having fun myself or trying to entertain my readership, two goals that seldom overlap, regrettably.)

My task, should I choose to accept it, would be to convince skeptical readers that the probability of some of the things they are inclined to dismiss are greater than they assume...but only if the things themselves are redefined so as to be seen closer to what they actually are, rather than through the distortions that make them implausible. (We never see things as they actually are, which is why we have probability in the first place. Brian Greene points out that probability is only a measure if our inability to measure; if we had all the relevant data on a coin toss, from weight and imperfections of the coin to the amount of force involved in the toss and the exact air resistance and resilience of the surface on which the coin will fall, we could pretty well tell which ones would come up heads and which ones tails. In more complex transactions, the variables become effectively impossible to identify, much less measure or calculate. We have only the crudest understanding of the workings of some very fundamental macroscopic transactions.)

This post started life a few days ago as an epigrammatic combination of the Miriam Allen de Ford quotation with my remark "The joculum blog deals with implausible probabilities." However, it wouldn't be the joculum blog if I had been able to leave it at that, although the inaccuracy for the sake of literature would in itself have been an illustration of the joculum blog, which regularly engages in the paradox of the Cretan liar.

John Yau has written a book consisting entirely of two-line poems, the title plus a single line. (Cf. Guillaume Apollinaire's "Chantre," where the single line contains completely untranslatable puns.) If I ever succeeded in writing a poem of only two lines, it would come with pages of footnotes. I believe five eminently footnotable (but not necessarily notable) lines is as good as I have ever gotten.

One of Yau's poems reads, in its entirety, "Disguise the limit," a pun so atrociously apropos that I want to appropriate it as an epigraph someday.