- Conversation over breakfast of Swiss oatmeal this morning included Alan Watts’ lecture over the coincidence of opposites, Huston Smith’s Zen training, and the metaphysics of becoming (as opposed to the Heideggerean notion of Gellasenheit, a letting be). All this before 7:30 a.m.
- There is no front without a back, no heads without tails, no sickness without health, no I without you.
- Now that it’s almost 9:00, I can also think about bringing in Parmenides’ attempt toward deduction: one can’t make negative existential statements, nor can one make positive existential statements (because by saying what something is, then one is implicitly saying what something is not—if this is a dog, then it is necessarily not a cat—which takes you back to the first premise).
- Therefore (in all of its metaphysical/rhetorical glory), all is one.
- There is no Buddhist monk without a dictator-general.
- And every poet has her other.
- But who is the poet’s other? The rhetorician? The philosopher? The linguist? The poem’s reader? The poem? The poet herself? All and (n)one::all is (n)one.
- It’s now 9:02, and I still have so much more work to do….