Welcome to Dr Justice’s Petting Zoo ! Admission is free.
In the outermost circle of the petting zoo, visitors may pet
bunnies in the most exoteric, empirical, agnostic sense of temporal rabbit stages -- little
whiskery ripples in phase-space -- tiny lagomorphic slices of spacetime. “Gavagai!” the children cry, delightedly
scurrying among their furry friends, asking no question of what came before, or
what is to come. Lettuce is
provided; photography permitted;
various plebeian refreshments are on sale, and clowns move among the populace.
In the next-inner circle of the petting zoo, qualified
visitors may pet bunnies in their paradoxical yet intimate homoousian duality: Fully Temporal-rabbit-stage, yet fully
Rabbit, existing independently or supernatantly to fleeting considerations of
space or of time.
In the final, innermost circle, dimly lit, and open only to
the elect, the reverent visitor may pet bunnies as incarnations of Absolute
Rabbithood, in all its ultimately unknowable, inscrutable Lagomorphicity -- Yet
so soft, so soft … !
When the children cry "Gavagai", are they delighting in Holophrastic indeterminacy? My sources are unclear as to whether any other words of Arunta are known.
ReplyDeleteI've heard tell that when a Navajo parent is playing with a baby and a ball, they point to the bouncing ball and say "bouncing!", rather than "ball" as an English-speaking parent would -- because Navajo is very verb-oriented, or something.
But if we learned anything from Orwell, perhaps we should remain Plebs, or "Proles" I should say, feeding the rabbits, pinching our women heavy bottoms while drinking the fake beer, rather than stepping into the outer circle, enjoying, or pretending to enjoy the full temporal space, but also standing precariously near the true inner circle, the one we'll never reach, and its never-sleeping Eye.
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