[Newspoetry] Central Tendency Theorems

[Donald L Emerick]

Central Tendency Theorems

Observation:
Congress passed a law to reform Campaign Finance,
but NYT (nit) today says what we always suspected to be true:
the parties have found large loopholes in the laws they made.
Actually, this story does not reveal any new discovery at all:
form of story must exist before its contents could be inserted.

It's not a discovery to the parties since
"it was them that wrote it what done her in"
to paraquote philosopher and fraud Eliza Doolittle,
although her attorneys argue that
she lacked sufficient mens re to comprehend
how posing as royalty could be a fraud,
as "royalty is only fraudulency made lawful."

Doolittle's thought speaks to us today,
when the fraudulency of lawful fictions today
have come to resemble those of a century ago,
but there are no startling new form of writing,
such as muckraking and yellow journalism
that seem to be contesting for our votes --
unless I look to the wrong media for novelty,
and should compare, instead,
say talk radio and its left wing equivalent,
if there were any such thing out there.
(As a dialectician, I have to believe
that there is this other out there;
as a deconstructionist, I have to believe
that the other must presently lack a name,
which namelessness means
that this other lacks the status in consciousness,
that it is therefore underprivileged, disembodied,
a spirit that lacks a body lacks a name,
which namelessness deconstruction tries to name,
to unsay the preferential ignorance of the times
which prefers the named to the unnamed,
and compels us to try to unsay what is
so that we can see what is not --
though we know we thereby would, by such saying,
only alter the what of the way that things are,
if values have no absolute values.)

Every law reflects a certain central tendency,
which is the attempt of the rulers to pretend
that they are in the middle of a unimodal distribution,
or that they are as close to its center as anyone can be,
allowing for the dubious fact that the two sides alleged
of this great myth of a unimodal distribution
themselves have primary intraparty constraints
that pull their "chosen" leaderships off the general center
and toward the party center instead,
which all of them say is fatal to that party's election fortunes
when the public finally perceives how truly radical
one of the parties has become in its positions,
compared to the alleged tendency of the public
toward this self-same mythical center of the political universe,
a belief in the center of the universe that has no more validity
than all of the previous attempts to make some spot stand out
as if it were the central point of some heavenly creation.

Once upon a time, the Pope once said,
The universe must have a center,
and the Earth must be that center,
and thus some Galileans must be wrong,
but it is those followers of the Galileo,
because they vainly take his name as theirs:
he was just a man and not one sent by God,
but we Galileans do not call ourselves
Galileans though we follow the Man from there;
and, though we all name ourselves after our God,
those Galileans are wrong and we are right,
we are the true heirs of the land of Galilee,
which place, as origin, is sacred and holy,
the center of the metaphysical universe --
and thus, also, central to the physical universe.

Every circle has a center that it subtends --
but this is said to state that the points of a set
have some equality under the rule of the set form.
Hence, Cartesians point to utter foolishnesses
emerging from fixing any point as absolute center,
except, of course, for a grounded first person: "I"
which word "I" you would adequately understand
only when you know it lacks a personal referent:
no one in particular is meant to be this "I"
so that anyone, and everyone, could be this "I"
who is this translocatable center of the universe.

Now, I mention these paired processes, in brief,
of the opposing tendencies of searches for centers
for two ways of life, physical and metaphysical,
as fraudulencies of the central way of thinking.
On this, after Aristotelian theory of balanced life,
I have previously declared my own preferences,
except that I am a situationalist, as I think
daily life is generally a minor dynamical cycle
often captured within larger dynamical cycles,
and that, while the middle way is often best,
when taken too far, it is also a way of death
at least as much as it is also a way of life.

"In the long run, Everything averages out,"
says the great philosopher Thermos Dynamics:
nothing endures forever, except, of course,
this way of life that could only be
living toward its own death,
consciously (as, say, an existentialist)
or in conscious or unconscious denial.
Conscious denial happens when you know the truth,
but you refuse to draw out the consequences.
Unconscious denial happens when you madly think
that the truth does not matter
as long as you get what you want in the alleged end of things.
Maybe that is what draws conscious denial
into its catatonic mad twin state of denial,
the relief from any guilt of having knowledge
of a glaring inconsistency in one's beliefs,
one that splits one's belief system down the middle,
the tension of which, as a bridge of suspense, may fail.

I wholly refer, then, to yet more centers
in which to poke the holes for the holy,
so that light may pass through darkness,
by shining in darkness that allegedly surrounds it.

I'm trying to walk a smooth curving path
to form an edge for every circle
by trying to stay out of the middle of things,
by trying to stay equidistant from that one point,
which acts like a polestar for my turning around,
like a shish-ke-bab, en brochette, spit on a spittle.

It's quite impossible to escape from being
a centralized being in the middle of things,
that pretend to distribute themselves about you,
unless -- of course -- you reform
your campaign finance laws like Congress does,
to keep necessary large loopholes in the middle,
to preserve the fraudulency of the present system,
which could be, ideally replaced, and only ideally,
were we to be honestly ignorant,
not knowing which consequences will happen,
but not in any denial, conscious or not,
that consequences will happen --
as in Schelling's Strategy of Leaving Things to Chance
when it is quite impossible to escape their unpredictable character,
or even when it quite desirable for them to be unpredictably novel.

Only then, do we escape the fraudulency of systems thinking?!
(And, say anti-theologians, journeys of escape lack necessary endings,
which claim led theologians to assert, as an article of faith,
that every journey story was ultimately a story of Christianity, and
that every always-already-being-at-home story was a Jewish story,
an ending of plots which I do not like at all and shall thus end.)

Thanks for listening.
Donald L Emerick

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