Nemerov's myth revised

World photographer Paul Calhoun recently said that he was "intrigued by [my] New Ten Commandments; do I detect a Wicca undercurrent there?"
    Ah, no, not intentionally anyway. I'm not that familiar with the nature religions. I had to research what a Wicca undercurrent might be. In the Wikipedia's entry for "Wicca," I learned that

Wicca (pronounced [ˈwɪkə]) is a Neopagan religion and a form of modern witchcraft....
    Wicca is typically a duotheistic religion, worshipping a Goddess and a God, who are traditionally viewed as the Triple Goddess and Horned God. These two deities are often viewed as being facets of a greater pantheistic Godhead....

Well, having read that, I'd now say there's not even any unintentional Wicca undercurrent here! Basically, I'm a scientific naturalist; the supernatural is a figment of the evolved brain's marvelous making. Or, as Howard Nemerov's "Creation Myth on a Moebius Band" puts it: "This world's just mad enough to have been made / By the Being his beings into Being prayed," where I understand "Being" to refer to the natural world, the natural cosmos.

My logic there, I see, is a bit convoluted (in suggesting that the world made itself, even in the beginning). Given the use to which I wish to put Nemerov's clever couplet, I see that it needs adjustment. How about:

This world's just mad enough to have done made¹
The beings who their Maker-Being into being prayed.

That's how it stands at the moment. Thank you, Howard Nemerov.

Paul also asked whether I designed this blog myself ("it has a lush, professional texture to it," he said).
    No, it uses a template supplied by blogger.com. I did change the background color (borrowed from Brooklyn artist Matthew Moss's cover art for Jingle Jangle) and arranged the order of stuff in the right column. I put links in the masthead to the current post (for when people come to a specific post by way of its link address) and my sidebar table of contents. And I routinely use embedded styles in posts for certain modest effects (like the lead-in in bold lower caps).
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1. "Done made" is a quotation of two titles: Alice Randall's 2001 novel, The Wind Done Gone (based on Margaret Mitchell's 1936 classic, Gone with the Wind), and Timothy B. Tyson's 2004 autobiographical work of history, Blood Done Sign My Name.

Why is there something rather than nothing?

The question, Why is there something rather than nothing?, has long haunted me, as it has haunted many if not most people. Could the answer be quite simply that the eternal truths of logic, whose nonexistence is impossible, require "something" to exist for them to be about, and "something's" existence as inexorably requires that it inter-react and reform itself, even becoming, over the course of millions and billions of years, creatures capable of being haunted by such questions?
    I'm reminded of my favorite short poem, by Howard Nemerov:

The world's just mad enough to have been made
By the being whose beings into being prayed.

Whether it's relevant or not, it nevertheless evokes a similar feeling in me. Awe at the weirdness of things. The mystery of being.
    Could the story by which to exult, to dance, be written as paeans to the mystery, like some weird novel by Flann O'Brien—say, The Third Policeman, which was written between 1939 and 1940 and published posthumously. In the book's frontispiece, O'Brien "quotes" his fictional philosopher De Selby:

Human existence being an hallucination containing in itself the secondary hallucinations of day and night (the latter an insanitary condition of the atmosphere due to accretions of black air) it ill becomes any man of sense to be concerned at the illusory approach of the supreme hallucination known as death.

As a teenage philosopher, I found The Gospel of John more appealing than the other Gospels. The very first verse of John suggests that existence derived from those eternal logical truths: "In the beginning was the Word...." As Wikipedia says, "The Gospel of John identifies the Logos, through which all things are made, as divine (theos), and further identifies Jesus as the incarnation of the Logos." While most of the Jesus myth simply borrows from the various pagan and other religious mythologies of the period [something I didn't realize as a teenager], logos is borrowed from Greek philosophy. Heraclitus (ca. 535–475 BC) used the term for the principle of order and knowledge in the universe.

"God"

It struck me forcefully this morning that whenever we use the word "God," we really ought to put it in quotation marks, for who has the slightest, vaguest idea what he or she is talking about? Who has any idea at all, really, whoever or whatever "God" might signify?

Of course, those who have a handy "holy book" that for them spells it all out will say that they know very well who "God" is. He's the Being, for example, who created the world in six days and on the seventh day rested, etc.

Well, I formulated my views on that yesterday, in response to Maliha's excellent observation that "We all have our own narratives that help us make sense of the world and help us figure out our own place in the universe." I replied that I guess mine, at the moment, is that man created [the concept of] "God" and concocted a fabulous marketing campaign to convince the masses that it was the other way around. The Roman Catholic Church, for example, has developed a stern regimen of "papal infallibility" to keep the troops in line. I guess it wasn't so much a "marketing campaign" as a political power play.

Maliha also observed that a person's background affects the way he or she perceives the world. I suspected, in my case, that my distrust of authority must be among the most salient factors influencing me. Papal infallibility, of course, works really well into my anti-authoritarian strain.

Ironically (or maybe just naturally) it was the authoritarian weight of the Bush administration's pandering to the American religious right that seems to have provoked my current reexamination of religion and my relationship to it....

Whether or not Howard Nemerov was right that

The world's just mad enough to have been made
By the Being his beings into Being prayed^*

I myself do seem mad enough for something...yet to be determined.
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* That's Nemerov's poem "Myth of Creation on a Moebius Band" in its entirety.

Odd twists

It occurred to me about a week and a half ago that if you unpaste a Moebius strip and twist it a second time before repasting the ends together, the strip again has two separate surfaces. And, if you [unpaste and] twist it a third time [then repaste it], it has but one again.

I wonder, Did God
command that the number of twists
be odd?

Why is there the quirk
that the Moebius band won't,
even, work?

I'd like for there to be some profound metaphysical significance in this, maybe even something bearing on Howard Nemerov's "Myth of Creation on a Moebius Band." Surely there is...or at least maybe I can make up something, cobble it together using my imagination and powers of reasoning? For isn't significance essentially a matter of a person's exercising curiosity and creativity to bring it into being? Everyone has the potential to be a philosopher or a poet.
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Odd twist:one surface; even twist:two surfaces:

1:1, 2:2, 3:1, 4:2, 5:1, 6:2, 7:1, 8:2, 9:1, 10:2...

Sequence of ratios:

1, 1, 3, 2, 5, 3, 7, 4, 9, 5...

Sequence of sums:

2, 4, 4, 6, 6, 8, 8, 10, 10, 12...

Sequence of differences:

0, 0, 2, 2, 4, 4, 6, 6, 8, 8...

Sequence of products:

1, 4, 3, 8, 5, 12, 7, 16, 9, 20...