Seq 7: Centrism

If one were to live to be 150 (as resveratrol [and here and here; or, in Japan, eating mermaid meat {and see*sequitur 62}] may promise), would one need to actively, artificially create discontinuity in one's own life, with footfalls into the unknown void periodically necessary for variety, fear and adventure, and to avoid the boredom of habitatual continuity (aka the Monotonotonotonous [repetend 0] repetune)? Here and now (presently), at e*sequiturs' midpoint, we are impelled to academically ask such relevant questions: our short time together, and the perpetual uncertainty of our times demand that we do. On the other hand, Discontinuity would seem the default (dare one say the norm?) (take, for example Milton, advocate of freedom of the press {in Areopagitica, in Ga 4.570001644, a period of almost universal illiteracy (and note probable and / or documented historical illiterates: Socrates [agin it, because people would become forgetful and undisciplined], Jesus [Respect; as it turns out, they were taking notes < ;^) {Pinocchio emoticon; whose enticement was promised immortality (= death ≠ death, which greater than googolplexian [= ten to the power of ten duotrigintillion] topic e*sequiturs will not address)}], the rebels who overthrew the biblioclast Qin [see*sequitur 43] and Indian rajahs [left to Brahmins and wives]) (and note that the taxonomy of historical literacy included "dangerous reading" - that done by unworthy "women or commoners" [this view shared by both socialist William Morris {reading individualistic, bourgeois and nonproductive} and the complex Fabian socialist H.G. Wells {reading of trash (War of the Worlds released serially in a magazine called Cosmopolitan... ahem) destroying culture} as recently as ca. Ga 4.570001900])}], whose last years were lived in poverty; his daughter his amanuensis, he, blind, dictated Paradise Lost, the greatest epic poem in the English language, for which [with its sequel, Paradise Regained] he was paid the princely sum of £10): Existence does seem to present continuous discontinuities requiring spontaneous (extemporaneous) recalibration / reorientation and ecdysian recarnation (shedding one's mindset while simultaneously running mostly naked in hexadecimal darkness [six zeros] [modestly, fashionably {sidesequitur: fashion the addictive horror familiaris, sumptuary snobbism and the embedded urge agent for physical appeal through evolutionary experimentation (in this case exo- or extradermically) to maximise reproductive success (the Gratuitous Change on Principle principle)}, clad in fig leaves] from the garden). Is the notion of a continuous life illusory, the thing itself a rarity (If such a life were statistically the mode, what would become of poets and other paranormal parasites dependent upon Discontinuity [Life's Big D] for synaptic [and somatic] stimulation [compared to Asian societies, e.g., China, which had a government poetry bureau ca. Ga 4.570000400-800, and shogunate Japan, where lovers greeted each other in the morning with poems, the current world order is, onethinks, regressive]?)? Is the statistical probability of un-event(as in dis-aster)-ful longevity paradoxically improbable? Must we (thrilled by biographies of Pain and its mutilate relations), in pointedly physical terms, briskly make way?

(Proceeding, we may disquisitely [cf. -quisite corpses in Anapology] inquire:) Granted that maximum longevity is a human goal (Aha! You say... An untested [and probably invalid] premise! Nevertheless, this your correspondent's Weltanschauung [and daily dream] given that there is so much to do and know, so many lives to live and learn about [including those of dervishes, baobabs and {soon conscious? this notion in itself a pathetic fallacy} random computers {anthropopathetic machines}], and to travel in time [as we daily do] into the history of the future! The anecdotal jury seems to be out: One of my 20-year-olds blurted, "Why would anyone want to [live so long]?," staggering me; later a 40 remarked that life to 90 would be "enough"; confidant Jean [echoing hydropist {believer in, and dier from lack of water} Thales, who was said to have said, "Time is the wisest because it discovers everything"], 60, the max [wanting to know "how it turns out" {y a pas d'danger (fat chance), mon ami; the real event of middle age being the real•isation that one won't be around at End's End}]), is the synesthete (colourful, tasty and otherwise endowed graphemes: pursue this, noting ordinal linguistic personification and the Karimojong "yellow" and "red" age sets) Nabokov's Interim (= life, the period between prior- and post-life eternities in Speak, Memory; N himself deserving more than e*sequiturs provides, given Lolita, the summa cum laude of English prose) really so (Please make your contribution to e*sequiturs here: This will be your exclusive edition) ___________?

Discounting organismal senescence (I cannot stress enough throughout e*sequiturs that I'm not making any of this turgid terminology up), why disfavour supercentenarian lifespan? I don't know about you, but I want as much O2 ['luded 2 in Seq 4] as I can get [there aren't enough exclamation marks [grains of sand {later} / stars in the Milky Way {our forebears' minds overwhelmed under the celestial canopy} / fish in the sea {later}, etc., in the universe to punctuate this point]), is continuity desirable? This question goes to the serious matters of art and science and sleep (see*sequitur 87). We may ask and (the animated, [fallaciously reified {or concretized}] talkative words, keenly addressing you themselves,) antiphonally answer with the question:

?*sequitur 50:

bird to beech

why do beech leaves persevere in winter?

for the aesthete, the answer is obvious:
pour emmener les muses à l'école

for the inventive, the difference is imaginary:
beech leaves hear things from small birds

for those who inquire, the reason is rational:
a scientific experiment that thus far hasn't failed

others don't consider beeches
far as I can tell

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Let's indulgently permit ourselves to ask: Are we innately ex-peri-mental? Do human- and self-sacrifice represent natural law? Shouldn't we look forward (this a bit literal, although opposite the view of the bowler hatted Bolivian Aymara, who regard the future as behind them [because it is unseen] and the past / present before them [because these are known / being known] or of speakers of Mandarin Chinese, in whose language, we learn [new window], "the future is down and the past is up") (and in our new and darkling age we can't, to our detri•ment, remember yesterday) to our to-morrows (and Shakespeare's walking shadow in Anapology), unlike the tragic Thane (the Bard again; remembering that it is necessary in theatrical tragedy to present grimnitude)?

While we're in this moment, there is a cautionary tale in the person (and probably wasted life) of Methuselah (either 969 in biblical years or 969/12 = 81 give or take) (and see the day-year principle, the dancin' kinda rationale to which such numbers give rise), who amounted to what, and did what with his extragenerous allotment? His lack of lifetime accomplishments bears study, given the implications of longevity and the possibility of fatigue, overflow or other contraindicated contingencies. Might longevity lead to lassitude, thought-emptiness (zomboid nirgunism) (or efficient thought-wandering, as in cloudgazing (see*sequitur 61), concocting asterisms [viz. the Purple Forbidden Enclosure]), or hammock-rocking in the South Pacific, interrupted inconveniently by ingestive and excretory functions (and the occasional mushroom cloud [see*sequitur 31])? (Or, more probably, by unwanted thoughts invading the privacy of the well-swept mind?) One thinks not. If not for paradise and idle time, we might not have Walcott's Omeros, wherein from Chapter LXIV:I (the best lines of his life):

...let the deep hymn
of the Caribbean continue my epilogue;
may waves remove their shawls as my mourners walk home...
Passing a boy who walked through the ignorant foam,
and saw a sail going out or else coming in,
and watched asterisks of rain puckering the sand....

And now a confession (or, Dorothy, disabused, confronts the Wizard): The mindful reder will remember nonsequitur 21 on the subject of Rot13. You may also have generously suspended your disbelief, guilelessly accepting e*sequiturs' assumedly logical progressions and taking mild pleasure in their discontinuities. You may be surprised to learn that e*sequitry is exquisitely rotable, leading to questions of fabrication, artificiality, manufacture and manipulation. Are e*sequiturs pukka (Sanskrit: genuine)? If they can be reverse engineered, constructed forward and backward from desired starting and endpoints (cf. Aymaran and Tutuolan [see Anapology] timetense elasticity and Möbian Imaginary Time continuity), how might you be able to "tell," and how might your e*sequitrist contrive a meeting in the middle (the highly important [indeed, the key you've been awaiting and so need rede no further] Buddhist concept of the Middle Way, the practice of non-extremism and mandatory [noun] for human futurity [i.e., future reders will be redeing this if we take this path. Shall we?])?

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> Seq 8

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Image: Fagus grandifolia
Marcescent beech leaves, New England, Winter Ga 4.570002006