Thor's Day: What's nihilistic about nihilism?

The meanings of our lives

By Morris Dean

When my views were labeled "nihilistic" by a Christian last year, I couldn't think at the time how to respond. I'd never thought much about "nihilism," and I didn't really know what the label meant, or was supposed to imply.

When you go fishing...

Carl Jung (1875-1961), who
made much of synchronicity
(roughly, spiritually
meaningful coincidence)

On Monday, in my Mad Men post, something prompted me to suggest that the episode (in particular, Ginsberg's jingle)'s theme might be that one of advertising's missions is to persuade us to accept the delusion that we can "truly own" anything we can afford to buy (like a Jaguar automobile).
    And Ken fairly commented, "OK, I'll bite. Why can't I truly own something I've bought? I don't own the computer I'm using?"
    And I replied, "The truth is that my statement expressed a vague intuition I was having at the time, and I can't replicate it at the moment. If it returns, along with some words to express it better, you'll be among the first I'll tell them to."
    In other words, my intuition had told me that there was something illusory (or delusional) about the idea that we could "truly own something"—or "anything we can afford to buy."

"Father and Daughter" was written
for the children's animated film
The Wild Thornberrys Movie

So it was striking today that while watching Paul Simon and Friends (via Netflix download), the 2007 ceremony of performances at the Library of Congress honoring Mr. Simon for the first-ever Gershwin Prize for Popular Music, I heard the following lyrics from "Father and Daughter" (2002):

Trust your intuition
Its just like going fishing
You cast your line
And hope you get a bite [emphasis mine]

    Well, in my case it seems to have proven to be like going fishing, but I'm not sure what, if anything, I was hoping to catch. I'm certain I wasn't hoping to catch a question I couldn't answer. (Ken has asked me a few of those.)

Maybe something of what I "intuited" is suggested by Simon's next four lines:

But you don't need to waste your time
Worrying about the market place
Try to help the human race
Struggling to survive its harshest night

The words even refer to the terrain where advertising reigns, the market place. Simon (the father reassuring and counseling his daughter) suggests that worrying about it—focusing on what we can buy and sell—shouldn't be our highest value. It isn't going to help us survive our harshest night.
     If we think it is, we're deluding ourselves?

Ken, I know that's more like a poem (or a sketch for one) than an answer to your question.
    Now I need to go back and work on the last paragraph of Monday's Mad Men post.
_______________

"If we are to have a religion..."

In his 80's, John Mortimer (English barrister and creator of Horace Rumpole of the Old Bailey¹) published a sort of last will and testament, titled Where There's a Will. Montaignean² in its wry comment on life and culture, it reads as fresh as any of Mortimer's prose published over sixty years. Given my own current dominant theme, I was delighted by the things he had to say about religion, and I particularly liked this snippet from his final essay, "The Attestation Clause":

The meaningful and rewarding moments aren't waiting for us beyond the grave, or to be found on distant battlefields where history's made. They can happen quite unexpectedly, in a garden perhaps, or walking through a beech wood in the middle of the afternoon. If we are to have a religion, it should be one that recognizes the true importance of a single moment in time, the instant when you are fully and completely alive. [p. 180]

________________

1. Rumpole died with the passing of the actor Leo McKern (1920-2002), who brought him to life on British television and for me and many others will always be Rumpole.
2. Michel de Montaigne, by some credited with the invention of the essay, published his first collection in 1580.

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...