I feel compelled to discuss the previous post a little more.
John and Mary. This is a conjunction, the joining of two separate things, John and Mary. We may leave it simply as John and Mary, or we may go on to create a sentence, for instance, John and Mary are funny, or John and Mary are going shopping.
Now, if you recall yesterday's discussion of the problem concerning the title of this blog, you'll remember how I agonized over the problem of what should come first in the title, Pants or Food. I solved this problem by having both versions in the title, which came to 'Food & Pants/Pants & Food.' I also admitted this didn't fully solve the problem, for it could just as easily be 'Pants & Food/Food & Pants.'
Getting back to conjunctions, one thing always has to come before the other. Perhaps we could solve the problem by amalgamating the words somehow. For example, in the conjunction we're concerned about, Pfaonotds (Pfaonotds). Yet this doesn't solve the problem, for the "p" in pants starts things off. If the words "pants" and "food" shared a common letter, perhaps we could start off with that letter and somehow scramble up the letters, but still, no matter what, a certain letter unique to one of the words would have to come first, thereby creating the problem. And it doesn't even matter because "pants" and "food" do not share a common letter.
The mind of man is limited, and it seems we are stuck. There is a finitude to our language that makes it necessary to have a beginning and an end. Unfortunately in this case, beginning seems to imply importance. In other words, first is best and second is the first loser. But, now that I think of it, there is the tradition of "saving the best for last," in which case perhaps the word in the second position takes pre-eminence. This, however, does not solve our problem but simply inverts it.
The only way out is to transcend our language and begin to view pants and food not as being in competition, or one better than the other, but rather as coequals, two sides of the same coin, interdependent relations, yin/yang, whatever/whatever.
In the Old Testament, one of the prophets, perhaps Ezekiel, sees a chariot that rides in all directions at the same time. This may defy our ordinary perceptual logic, but it gives us an idea of how we have to understand food and pants/pants and food. Our language may restrict us, but, in a way, we have the ability to go outside our language.
Before I close, there's another problem that seems to come out of this, which is how do we distinguish between two things at all? Specifically when it comes to food and pants, both are so important that they seem to flow out of each other, almost as if they are the same thing. The current president of the United States and George Bush are terms for the same thing. Is it that way with food and pants? I'll leave that for another post.
