May

19

Twinkle, Twinkle Little Deconstructed Star

So over the last year, I've become quite good at playing nursery rhymes on my guitar--it's one of the easist ways to be able to actually play guitar while concomitantly appeasing the attentions of my two-year old daughter.  On my favorites (because it's easy) is the old-standby, Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. 


Well, this last Saturday night, I did not sleep a wink.  Therefore, all Sunday was somewhat of a daze.  However, somewhere in the midst of it, I was playing this song and was struck by the question posed throughout:  "How I wonder what you are."  Indeed, I thought, how we do wonder what stars are. 


Of course, science tells us that they are giant balls of coalesced stellar gases.  Pa-shaw.  Here's my philosophical analysis.


Twinkle, twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are


Up above the world so high, like a diamond in the sky


Twinkle, twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are


Are you really just a ball of gas, as the hegenomy of science says?


Why should I believe that, when no one's ever seen it, and no one's ever touched it


I know I've never tasted it; I've never had a side of star with turkey on rye


Maybe it's an animal; maybe just a great machine


It's harder to tell what's real, and separate the make-believe


Maybe it's a giant sheet the ancients spread across the sky


And the moderns came in with their sticks, and only poked holes in it...


That kind of makes sense to me, because I have some holes of my own

And you say, you say, you say I'm a star; or at least I'm made of it


So when I pierced full through, with Western epistemology


Maybe I can be one of your stars; reducible to bare phenomenology


And you say, you say, you say I'm a star; you say, you say, you say I'm a star... 

 


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Welcome to my blog. I am often asked what "Exist/Dissolve" means. Well, that is certainly a good question, and I am currently in the process of discovering the answer myself. Prima facie, it strikes me as encapsulating the existensial crisis that is our lives as finite, contingent beings. For a brief moment, we exist, and the next we dissolve into the nothingness of non-existence. From a theological perspective, it is, for me, a sort of ad hoc apologetic for resurrection - i.e., if to exist/dissolve is the human dilemma, there is nothing inherent to the person that guarantees existence, either now or "after" death. Therefore, resurrection is at the same time both the height of absurdity (for it is a notion entirely alien to the paradigm of existence to which we are naturally enculturated) and the only hope for the human to persevere beyond the pale of death.

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