SERIOUS GRAVITY (A SANITY PRIMER)

Standing on the steps of Stroud Hall,  the epicenter of the philosophy, philology, theology and anthropology departments @ the University of M_____ - the dapper professor in the bow tie and the pointed loafers, with a large tuft of miscreant white hairs wafting across his forehead - greeted us with a look of supreme confidence. His specialty - > that strain of deep thought referred to as natural theology - a conjoining of skeptical traditions (in philosophy) with mystical traditions (in theology) with the stated aim of reaching some absolute common ground between believer and non-believer; this man, so justly famous (among a select group of scholars numbering no more than 17) for his 897 page treatise on the Absolute Mystery -  a large umbrella concept meant to embrace the SET containing all possible speculations whether upon God or gods or higher intelligence/s, or cosmic underpinnings or  "Laws of Nature" or Mind/Matter dichotomies, overarching randomness, chance a...

  In one of my more  manic phases, I ran up to Dr. Heinrich... And I was perhaps out of breath, disheveled, impatient - such is my M.O... panting with excitement: Such files, Dr. Heinrich...One hears stories about your archive and these case studies. I myself was an ARCHIVIST once - as far as memory allows me to recollect. Such amazing specimens all - as you like to say. And what - if I may ask - comprises the organizational underpinnings of all this information? Ah - yes - says Dr. Heinrich - it is a classification of types we are building here - a gradual accumulation of files as you see - of lives and possible lives that a person may live -with special emphasis on lives that go "rightly" (for lack of a better word) and lives that go "wrongly" (same limitation of language). Success and failure - your dichotomy? Surely - this and more... But surely Dr. Heinrich you allow for other/additional principles of differentiation??? Oh - surely - yes - We are not stopping a...

 I t can be a wonderful thing to be a patient, because there at the hospital, the facility as we call it, @  people are there taking care of you; they tell you from time to time that things are "getting better," that a "cure" of sorts is in sight; there are other patients there to compare notes with. Such places can be inviting, or should i say, well-structured, living spaces with white walls, long corridors, vending machines, aquatic prints, fountains and garden paths; the food here is reliable if never delicious, the beds are high-enough off the ground, the ceiling lights adjustable. Coffee is available and with some effort kindred souls can be found here to converse with. That is encouraged in fact. And they promise people like ME field trips - to help jar the memory banks. Although I am quite old (as far as one can tell) I am suffering not from dementia, but from bouts of amnesia - i.e. having trouble holding all the episodes of my life together like a pack of c...