Veridical Paradoxes: Playing the Mind Guerrilla

Though I normally attempt to share my ideas, thoughts, and revelations in real time, with real people, I've come to learn that there are some, such as the one you are about to read, which are too obtuse for general conversation, and by this I mean MY general conversation.  Yeah, blows your mind a little doesn't it.  Allow  me to explain:  These said flashes of brilliance (my translation of what Hebb might deem: "increases in synaptic efficacy," or the result thereof) are not without audience, they are merely, if not lamentably, anachronisms -- the passionate conversationalist's l'esprit d'escalier.  Unfortunate casualties of Sir Stephen Hawking's "psychological arrow of time," they fall victim to the human perception of an inexorable passing of time.*  And so, the target audience, whether previously established or otherwise, is very small and proximally (not temporally, one woman's opinion) inaccessible.

However, the lack of an audience could hardly silence me.  So, in the meantime, I shall deposit my comment here.  It goes like this:

I have long since been bothered by many of the philosophical questions posed by Søren Kierkegaard in Either/Or (I'll spare you this tangential minefield, if I ever feel I have the mental energy I'll flesh it out in what is likely to be a three-post series), the front-runner being as follows:

“What if everything in the world were a misunderstanding, what if laughter were really tears?”

Well, last night I came across The Wall, which I've owned for some time in the Le Mur version but never really read (primarily due to the fact that, although I can go page for page in French with someone reading a book in English, that person would have to be reading a selection from the "my first book" collection at a finger-tracking level).  So I read the eponymous story, which ended, spoiler alert, with this line:

"Everything began to spin and I found myself sitting on the ground: I laughed so hard I cried..."

To put a fine point on this particular amalgamation of thoughts, musings, and pedantries, two things: 

1.) Impress your audience into a state of awe with the precision, detail, and control of technical skill, or shock them into it, with the precision of mischievous skill.  But know that a minor digression spent caviling over semantics, Mr. Kierkegaard, accomplishes neither.

   (full transparency, excerpt below.)    

  "laughter first makes its appearance in the child, it is a nascent

  cry that is excited by pain or a suddenly arrested feeling of pain

  repeated at very short intervals. What if everything in the world

  were a misunderstanding; what if laughter really were tears!"

No Sale. Moving on.

2.) For the more mischievous -- the smirkers; the one-eye-brow lifters; those given to juxtaposition, sarcasm, and irony: There are four (or so) definitions of paradox, but this is the only one that matters: A statement or proposition that seems self-contradictory or absurd but in reality expresses a possible truth. (The other three are rendered irrelevant, unless qualified/implied, by the word's own paradoxical definition.)

So I have two words for you: Veridical paradoxes. You're welcome. Now go turn some heads. Shock and awe.


Fun with all things paradox-esque Lewis Carroll on logical paradoxes , Mobius strip, John Barth’s Frame-Tale, Game Theory

*Some fun with the titans of time (Einstein, Godel, Hawking, etc.) in the topics section (See, I care that you had no idea what I was talking about. Mildly. I'd say about a hair above this.)

Full Disclaimer: I found Either/Or an impressionable work and, like I said, maybe someday I'll have the energy to give it the full and thorough critique it (kinda) deserves.