My Excluded Middle

In logic, the law of the excluded middle states that the propositional calculus formula “P ∨ ¬P” (“P or not-P”) can be deduced from the calculus under investigation. It is one of the defining properties of classical systems of logic. However, some systems of logic have different but analogous laws, while others reject the law of excluded middle entirely. < Wikipedia Where I seem, to myself, squeamishly non-committal, is how I flee from P or ¬P. I do equivocate, P, but also, you know, from another point of view, ¬P. I have a weakness for reconciliation. It is this, I think. Not-P grows monstrously, refuses to stay the mere negation. P is a single small thing, fragile, and not P is the entire rest of the universe, with its...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Mar 21, 2009 | 6 comments

Picture-Mad

Ignoring the long queue of serious things to be written about in my text editor, including the question of how one gently demolishes all of the invisible and unexamined rules one finds oneself living by and blogging by (including one about writing about serious things) — or at least how one examines and sorts out the ones worth keeping — I share with you images of things making me happy today. [Not happy today is that I am still struggling to figure out how to format pictures into blog entries in a way that is not so completely gawkwardly ugly. Long sigh. I appreciate your patience with this...] Starting with the notebook thing. I have a favorite notebook to write in, one I’d found at Target. I just counted, and realized I am filling my...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Mar 20, 2009 | 3 comments

Still Fasting

So, I lament to a friend, my biggest fear about fasting is if I am doing it out of stubbornness and pride rather than being constantly focussed on the reason for doing it, somehow it won’t count. I worry about praying wrong, about fasting wrong. I sat down to say prayers this morning, wanting some sort of purification, and was interrupted by a child needing something and was out-of-proportion frustrated, unable to focus at all from the frustration, until finally I sat down to the journal and this is what hit me. What I have been longing for is less purification than a lobotomy. I have been wanting to be so freed from thinking selfish, self-involved thoughts, freed from confabulation and mixed motives, in a way that was, perhaps, not completely realistic....

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Posted by Mara Collins on Mar 9, 2009 | 7 comments

Uncomfortable Insight

Remember in that interminable last election cycle the period when political candidates would be asked “What is your greatest weakness?” and it would be something totally disingenuous like “I just can’t make myself stop working hard for my constituents?” What I’m about to say may sound at first like that but it isn’t what I mean at all I’ve secretly always relied on self-discipline as the sort of strength to compensate for all other failings. The psychological studies where small children would be tested on their self-control, not eating one piece of candy now in order to get two later? And this trait being correlated with success later in life? Those were my confirmation. What I might not have in talent I have in...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Mar 5, 2009 | 9 comments

Mindfulness

There are certain thoughts that seem to get pulled out every year like Christmas ornaments hauled out from the attic, thoughts that work like the jokes Raven and I make every time we see a particular sign, not new or especially funny, but reassuring in their ritualized familiarity. With the onset of the Bahà’í fast, I always think of the roommate of a good friend in college who had acquired somewhere the habit of fasting for something — something I would never have thought to do. Then, I have always been bad at praying for things, even though I understand it as a perfectly acceptable practice in the Bahà’í writings — I’ll say the prayers from the prayer book from the sections labelled for parents, for children, for husbands, for...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Mar 3, 2009 | 5 comments