Mechanical Issues

Looking for a few good ideas.

I was having some mechanical difficulties, so I decided to do some research. A body with issues of an uncertain nature may sometimes find relief by revisiting certain fundamental tenets of the physical world.

To be sure, greater minds than this one have long considered these questions––which may concern, among other things, the action and reaction of bodies at rest and in motion––not to mention acoustics and optics. Also, heat, friction; details related to magnetism, electricity. Astronomical matters may seem remote, but these, too, are not to be discounted, considering how profoundly any number of factors may govern aspects of the visible and invisible world. 

In conclusion, it’s complicated. 

There are a number of implications for these findings. For example, while I am still entirely unsure about the origins of that squeaky grinding noise that sometimes but not always happens when I make a right turn, it is reasonable to conclude that while the stereo system remains functional, it should be possible to avoid hearing it until a more appropriate time. 

As for this other thing I am trying to write, I am no more certain of my approach than I was before this brief foray into certain essential principles of structure, but at least I’ve found myself in good company when it comes to my ongoing bafflement regarding the proportional significance of any number of factors in a given system.

***

Inspired by a chance encounter with Mortimer J. Adler’s chapter on “Mechanics” from The Great Ideas: A Lexicon of Western Thought. And some other things. 

Straight Talk at the Oasis

As it was in the beginning, is now, and––

Show me a straight line in nature. And yet, this insistence on the fastest means from point A to point B. Not to mention, the idea of this continuum: Then, Now, Tomorrow. As if.

Well, there is the horizon, as seen from anywhere on water.

Touché. 

Come to think, it was the seafaring people, wasn’t it, who so ardently embraced the linear alphabets and syllogisms and systems for organizing space?

True. Inland, its all curves and oases, mountains and arabesques, and everywhere space fracturing into its heavens and black holes, not to mention time and alphabets, and when the temple veil tears the shelter from the old masters, so do notions of antiquity shift away from what is solidly past to include what also was dreamed and may yet be, and there we are in it, singularities before our own consciousness and the moment among us, these mortals chanting to our own heartbeats and also to the the origins of time, insisting at each beginning, World without end.