Tonight saw the return of F.M. DeeMeglio, Cook Liberry's most jovial and interesting looney. He's a courier for a large shipping company and has a bug up his bonnet about dreams and the nature of reality and physics. This is only the second time I've dealt with him (Julia was trying for 30 minutes to help, but begged me to take over), and it was even better than the first. Any conversation which begins with an extended verbatim quote from a Penguin edition of Nietzsche has to be good, particularly when said quote focuses on abysses.
Mr. DeeMeglio was off and running on the topic of redshifted galaxies and how he believes physicists simply misread what a redshift means. "I swear it's diminished energy," he told me. "They think it's elevated energy, and that the Universe is expanding. Well, I don't believe in distance." Instead of explaining the compression of and spreading of waves associated with red- and blueshifted objects, I mentioned Kant and the fact that Time and Space are mere constructs of consciousness. This set him off on a tirade about the heart and how feelings change thought. I told him about Ouspensky and Zerzan, and felt I was perhaps foolishly feeding fuel to an uncontrollable fire. He became red-faced and emphatic about autism and told me about an experience he had listening to Beethoven's 3rd symphony. I whistled the splendid opening--the two mighty chords, the lilting progression--and he wrote down another idea that came to him about mathematics in the sixth dimension. "I've never done drugs," he claims, "but listening to that symphony my field of vision was revealed as a mere construct. Touch and vision don't make sense. Hearing I can understand, and Beethoven used it to send me a message about the sun. The sun is four-dimensional, it's right there and scientists miss it because it's too bright to look at. I've worked out a progression of interesting repititions in the digits of pi; it's complicated, and involves the square root of 31. I was able to calculate the furthest distance across the Universe and it equals 35 kilometers."
This went on for over an hour, until Cha and my in-laws arrived on an evening walk to rescue me.
2 comments:
Yeah, it reads cool but I wouldn't want to be in your shoes buddy. Heh, Fr4ncine from Boreders came into the building yesterday. Surprised myself by recognizing her. Is now teaching Th3ology as an adjunct at L0y and she arsked about yew. I felt like her abyss was staring at me.
Fr4ncine? Honestly, I can't remember her from the name. I find that a lot recently--seeing people I know and can't remember until they tell me whether they were students or Borders staff.
Eh, sonny? What's that you say?
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