Steven Parmenius

             A friend of mine recently shared with me her doubts and queries on the subject of mortality and as this is the very best reason to write something I thought I might collect some of my own thoughts on the question to see if I could help. I will go back to the beginning and that is antiquity. In classical antiquity by and large (philosophers excepted) our lives and our deeds were preserved in the collective memory of other humans, as embodied in the family and the city. The Ancients, then, tended to get along with only a vague belief in personal survival after death as, indeed, did the ancient Hebrews. The memory of one’s deeds, whether famous or infamous, would live on in in these collectives. This lent gravity to what a person did in their lives as well as strengthened his or her concern for the collective future. After all, the death of one’s own family or the destruction of one’s city would be personal destruction as well. For instance, with the death of one’s descenda

Weird and Normal             My sister had two categories growing up: weird and normal. Normal designated her tastes interests and those of her circle of friends. I will leave you to guess whose tastes and interests constituted weirdness. Weird and normal are as basic as raw and cooked, cultivated and wild or any other such Levi-Straussian binary. In fact, we can plot a kind of curve ranging from full normality to utter weirdness with various stops on the way. At one end we might posit utter weirdness as the American author and intellectual prankster Charles Fort did. Fort was convinced that reason and science were illusions. We might THINK we see patterns and generalities in the world but this is just selection bias. We constitute ‘science’ and its realm by filtering out vast amounts of sheer noise, noise that would swallow all useful ‘info’ if we were not able as human beings to block it out. Fort spent his life illustrating this lesson by collecting ‘noise’: odd, trivial and sur

             People who know me know now tend to take me for a ‘Cultural Marxist’ or perhaps 'Regressive Leftist' (not quite accurate but I’ll leave that for some other time) firebrand who goes a bit too far in my denunciations of economic liberalism and is a bit too obsessed with ecological pessimism. People who knew me 25 years ago took me for an arch-reactionary ready and willing to wage cultural war all this crazy modern nonsense. Some might ask me how my mind changed though I’m not sure my mind has changed. I have always been these two things in some kind of combination. What happened is that one part of my brain has slowly asserted dominance over the other. Take the issue of same sex eros as a pertinent example. This is an issue I have said fairly little about because my contradictory attitudes towards it long puzzled me and it is only later in my life that I’ve come to a clearer understanding on the matter. Here, if you like, I will reflect on my puzzlement though it