The Cow Paradigm

"Cow [sic.] is a useful animal. It has four legs, one tail. It gives us milk..."

Sound familiar? This is the beginning of the standard essay entitled "Cow [sic.]", which every school student, I think, in India has written at some point in English, Hindi or some other language. The archetypal Cow was a saviour of sorts for me when I was a child. Of course, the whole theory was never really tested, but then we were taught to think first, then act. Thought experiments are important in my home. The Cow Paradigm is a fanciful name given to this theory of Appa's that everything can be boiled down to this one Cow Essay. Pick a word, any word. [Here's what my roommate came up with; this is a real-time experiment] Say the word "lamp": Allora,

The lamp in our room has not been turned on because it has a 50 Watt bulb which can light up a 10 and a half foot by 9 foot room up like an oven on a cold day, and like a blast furnace on a day which averaged 40 degrees C in the shade (of the room!). What I wouldn't give to have no clothes on when I am outside in the sun; like the cows that sit in puddles all day, naked, listless. The Cow is a useful animal...[ad nauseum]

And this, mon ami, is pure poetry compared to the crass ones we made up as kids! You don't believe me? Don't think it's a Universal? It's just the kind of thing the Diabolicals would love! But do try it, I'm just too bored to type one more now; I've done this with too many people too many times!

Joni Mitchellspeak

"And summer goes, falls to the sidewalk like string
And brownpaper;
Winter blows up from the river
There's no one
to take her
to the sea
"

On exercises in Logic

There are people in my life whom I call soulmates. I was told by one of them that my definition of the word itself is something too different from what this world defines as a soulmate.

It strikes me of course, as another, yet another loophole in this theory of mine that this person should be only a few months old. Before that he did not exist in my world at all. In the system that favours the natural selection of the old friend, who is this?

This is of course consistent with the idea that it does not depend on how well you know or how long you have known a person. Which is great, since it makes me consistent (according to Aristotle, I would be a good person then!).

But it also throws up this whole business of soulmates being timebound. For if it does not matter to what degree you know each other, what happens when your soulmate of so long ago (with whom you would, typically, resume the chess game left off many moons ago) is now very different?

This is a problem to love, too, of course. Inevitably, people change. Or worse, we do.

That someone was my soulmate at that time is not dimmed in the least when I say that person is now a stranger to me. It is not even as filled with pathos as it sounds; we know that people change, ok fine. Get over it. C'est la vie, mes ami!

Why this is not something to agonise about is also a subset of why no one is likely to find a single soulmate, the be all and end all of your imagined soultraits (soulmate+traits) [Die, Orwell, die!].

// Ok, time for an exercise in syllogism (or whatever this kind of chain is called)

IF

{

1. Every person is Unique. [Starting here, at a cliché, which can be assumed true]
2. Therefore No one is exactly like you.
3. 'you' can be replaced by 'anyone'.
4. Thus, No one is exactly like anyone.
5. The entities we create in our minds are as real as anyone. 'our imagined soulmate' is an element of the superset {Anyone}.
6. Which implies; No one is exactly like our imagined soulmate.
7. Now No one is perfect. In the Aristotelian sense, 'perfect' can be expressed as the highest degree of 'good', which is the absence of any unresolved conflict within oneself. This, if one is not a purist, is a loaded statement, (perhaps a little obvious, though,) since it implies that perfection does not allow for inconsistency. 'Inconsistent' can equivalently be read as 'protean'.
8. This forms an 'iff' kind of condition which can be summed up as: Perfection, iff Consistency.
9. If no one is perfect and this condition holds, No one is consistent. This sentence poses a problem which will be encountered in the next step, and will be resolved there by changing the syntax to Anyone is NOT consistent.
10. In that case, {Anyone} being the superset, the term 'anyone' can be replaced by 'our imagined soulmate'. [cf. point v.]
11. Therefore, Our imagined soulmate is not consistent. Or Our imagined soulmate is inconsistent.
12. From vii., 'inconsistent' can be replaced by 'protean'.
13. Hence, Our imagined soulmate is protean.

}

THEN the Conclusion (from 1. and 2. respectively,) is:

{

(a) No one is exactly like our imagined soulmate.

(b) Our imagined soulmate is protean.

}

Now the underlying (tacit) assumption in this exercise is obviously that soulmates do exist, but their form was under scrutiny.

If this is in the Aristotelian framework, the underlying assumption to everything of course is that [Assumption 1. :] we are discussing only the properties of rational (good, consistent) beings.

Keeping this in mind,

the only way to resolve [Assumption 2. :] the existence of soulmates with [Proof:] their rather elusive properties which have been delineated above, is to concede that they do not exist as individual (single) entities, but rather are a (heterogeneous) conglomerate of pieces, as it were, of different people.

Dream diary

15.11.07

There is something dimensionless between sleep and waking, which sometimes comes upon me like bursts of colour, sometimes like lucid images of the sort I had never imagined elsewhere, sometimes a shifting, changing landscape of images.

They tell a story. No, maybe that is not right; they speak. Words, but not any kind of story which sounds familiar. In a sensuous game, the colours defy description and taunt me, not vanishing like the early-morning thought which I want to capture, but ever floating before me, creating weird shapes with their rotation, creating multiple dimensions in lazy motion.

There was a tree, black, almost, a silhouette of the darkest green I could think of, until I saw the hill on which it stands, a deeper green than the secrets the earth keeps hidden under generations of time. Behind the tree on the faraway hill, the sky turned crimson, gold, and velvet, a melange woven by some sleeping creature unwittingly; little did she know what it was that was born of her dreams.

Then there was a pair of legs, belonging to a young woman who stood desultorily at the edge of the beach and was not captivated by the navy sky or the surreptitous bushes. She just stood, a pair of legs foregrounded larger-than-life against the outline of the beach.