pithy preponderances from a friday night.

well, MR, in his valiant efforts to oust RSS from her throne of primary favour for immortalizations of pithy wisdom in my blog of late, proffered four gems for pondering during friday night's dinner conversation. (well, it was very possibly more, but Rebecca and i promptly went off and spent the rest of the evening imbibing just enough to make my memory somewhat short of perfect, coming back to these scribbles two days later.)

things began with a round table discussion over sushi on the nature of true love, and whether or not there actually exists One True Love. i think the consensus was that there isn't just One person. MR proffered the notion that people reach a point and make a choice and both partners make each other the One so to speak, through accomodation and acceptance and Love of that person, and, inevitably, some amount of mutual compromise.
the One, by this description (or my understanding of it anyway), becomes this mutual constantly living creation, and also one perpetually full of surprise and newness in terms of action, reaction and mutual Respect and Compassion, which is a notion i Really really like.

of course love is also the Utter Nimiety of Glorious food we consumed before the topic of conversation shifted to cell regeneration, which no doubt came up after RSS's (true!) tale of the woman who sneezed and misplaced her eyeballs out of their sockets.
in an attempt to blow our minds (as opposed to our eyeballs), MR pointed out that human cells regenerate every 7 years. they are constantly growing and combusting, making it inevitable that any one person becomes physiologically a Completely different human being every 7 years.
of course what happens is that as cells die off they transfer information to new cells to keep it all going, but of course that information inevitably becomes second generation, like photocopies. which are of course followed by photocopies of photocopies, until eventually all that is left is a translation of some prior time, somewhat simplified, exaggerated, the bare bones of what was once a richly detailed occurence.

according to this premise then, history doesn't actually exist. At All.

i wonder if this means that if i photocopy any one piece of writing, any one photograph, any one drawing, any one instance of my life enough, i will have a better sense of what it will look like in the future?
no wonder we're all so addicted to reproducing things in this western world of ours.
and thank Gods it means we are very possibly working towards a simplification of the whole Matter.

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i need, at this point, to digress momentarily and put in a quote from Don Paterson (which appeared in Brick 75...i know i'm an Atrocious bibliographer), i totally revisited it today as a result of this train of thought.

...we close this...gap between poet and reader through publication, a sacred duty and the aim of the poem. The poem starts as wholly yours and slowly ceases to be so; the process is one of gradual publication, gradual exposure - gradually reading the poem as if it were someone else's, because your aim is to make it someone else's.

because publication is not much more than a form of reproduction... that makes it a way of transferring ownership of your own history, non? but also translating your own existence into more universal terms.

okay, back to our regularly scheduled posting...

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somehow the conversation moved onto 20th century painting, which was defined at some point in the past by someone very clever as art is women looking at men looking at women.
this prompted me to wonder what reading today is...is it much the same thing? one of the frequent subjects of discussion at Centennial was readership and the market for books as a product, the fact that little boys don't read, the fact that most females do, and what in fact are we all reading about then, since so many authors are male?

AND, it seems the same is somewhat true of films, since so many "modern female heroes" are in fact men with tits. we aren't glorifying women by making them kung-fu heroines and gun-toting tough broads, we're ignoring the very differences that separate the genders in the first place.

hmm. that's only three pithy preponderances, isn't it. and as i go through my mind i suddenly think there must have been five pithy preponderances, for it really was a Fruitful evening of that sort, my Friday night.
alas much was lost in a cloud of post dinner cigar smoke and queen street meandering.

well, that will do for now, and as MR is now out of town it is RSS's turn to reclaim the crown.

Dear associate writers, clever philosophers, and purveyors of fine aphorisms, places please.