Why E Prime? Well why the hell not?
The guys who use it seem to have developed an entire philosophy on it. Or did the philosophy come first and E. Prime second.
Well I would not want to talk about philosophy (and development for that matter) if I can help it. For very valid reasons if you want to know.
This ‘philosophy’ thing has troubled me a lot recently. It has become tabu or taboo ( or tabu the cine actress) for me. I can’t touch it no way. The fucking infamy of it! In fact I can’t touch most of the other words too. I had a pretty good literary life till I started having certain strange experiences.
Well every one has their own little kingdoms to protect. I too seem to have had one such. But now my poor empire has broken up because of intense ‘terrorist’ activity within it. (Take it very seriously as a joke)
Well as I do not believe in everlasting empires and unending lives I hardly care what happens to my blog. But while it lasts I have to write something on it on a daily basis. That has to do with certain other affairs that I need to take care of.
Bloody hard work, this business of writing, at certain moments your mind would appear like a pot drilled with holes. It appears sublimely empty. It feels as if it contained emptiness from the very start and has held nothing in it at all in the course of its subsequent existence. Mayakovski had observed that ideas would writhe formlessly in the mind before coming out as words.
Well at those moments of blankness not a single idea would arise within my skull. Not that they naturally do before that. No bloody sweat, no such luck for me. I have a tough time fabricating ideas (if you want to call them that) and making them come out in the form of words.
Some believe that logic and facts makes good reading. I think they make stupid reading. Reading as an intellectual exercise bores me, it should seem like a pastime. I had always wanted to break the shackles imposed by them. If you believe it seem easy for a guy like me, think again. It becomes terribly hard to get out of the habit of forming logical ideas based on facts.
Braking from habits appears much harder than making them. Most of the habits attach themselves to us invisibly and unknowingly (right word I assume?)
When you set out to write you start worrying about topic, presentation, style, facts, beginning, middle and end and the like as if you are out to create world literature. If you can write like Umberto Eco you should do that instead of writing a blog.
Come on, how many of you can write or even imagine writing something like ‘Foucault’s Pendulum’ in your lives. I am not saying that you should duplicate it. Think of something on that scale. Let me ask you how many of you can even finish the book once you started on it.
(I despaired at times reading through the massive amount of data the book contained. He seems such a writer; his illustrated novel the Mysterious flame of queen Loana seems more complex Baudolino,and The name of the rose are not bad either. I did not name them to show off; I think sane and insane individuals alike should read him. Try him if you dare)
Well I wonder how many bloggers even glance at classics. Not that it seems required to live our lives at all. But it might make them realize the futility of thinking themselves as something grand and stop raving about logic and facts and reason and such great things.
If you want logic and fact you should be somewhere else than in a blog post at least.
Well all this has nothing to do with E. Prime at all. Why have I accepted this challenge? Well I can’t say I have accepted any challenge at all. People do that to prove or flaunt something. Normally I do not look into any thing very deeply. I just catch on to a word or a name and construct my version of it. To some one like me E.Prime appears like murder.
For instance if I had to rewrite the above sentence like “ Chasing my shadow suggests that to him E.Prime exhibits some of the characteristics’ that the society generally ascribe to the human criminal activity of killing one or more members of its own species” I would not survive the effort for long. Yet I believe that their attempt do not appear faulty considering the inexactness of what most write.
Well any way the effort to clear the cobwebs created by time and people in our modes of communication do seem vital looking from several perspectives. I should admit that I have not wholly grasped the subject clearly as yet. Even formula’s appear in the literature, formula’s my god!
If I abhor anything other than the word ‘abhor’ they come under the name of formulas. I could bear “form’ and ‘ulas’, but not the combination.
My experiment in E. Prime consists of excluding ‘is’, ‘was’ were and ‘am’ from my sentences for this post.
I do not yet know if ‘should’, ‘would’, ‘could’ etc comes within the purview of E Prime or not (dude!). If, only “is” and its other forms belongs to the banned items that would lessen the trouble somewhat. But if there come a need to include more items in the list, well that could bugger up our life to an extent.
Yet it seems a novel effort to get at truth. But truth appears a vague term till one realizes it some including me say!
‘E Prime can distill truth’ appears a little bit tall or long (literally I mean!). Not that I have anything against it. It appears a novel method to say things. I do not know what it could do to language. Certain very shrewd people think it as the only way to kill Aristotelian dummies floating in our intellectual atmosphere.
They might probably have something going for them it seems. It could be a little restrictive, no doubt. But why should we worry about that at all? Take a look around. What do you see? Nothing but restriction everywhere. All seems interconnected and not free at all. We do not normally notice it in our busy lives. Yet truth remains self evident in the midst of our very activities.
Any way I believe in ‘I Prime’.
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