Incompleteness

I'm with Gödel, said Pliny the Elder. The world is not everything that is the case. I haven't received my book yet, although I've paid for it, and that's a fact.

I don't think Gödel's theorem was concerned with things that hadn't arrived yet, I said doubtfully. I think it was only to do with arithmetical truths. That some things arithmetical are true but unprovable, in any consistent theory.

Well, said Pliny, It's true but unprovable that I haven't got my book. How do you prove that you haven't got something?

You're right you can't, I agreed. But it's not the Incompleteness Theory.

Yes it is, said Pliny. My transaction in buying the book is incomplete without the book. And you can't tell me that a monetary transaction is not arithmetical.

I think you have won the argument, I said. Gödel's theorem is more useful than I thought.

All That is the Case

I'm sitting out the back at a wooden table reading a book. Trying not to lean too hard on my blue and green striped elbows. There's grit on the table.

The wind blows the shadow strands of my hair over the pages. I look up. I see something moving on the low wall near the rosemary and pencil pine, above the black pot. It looks like a tiny white and ginger mouse, or a chicken. I look harder. It's a feather, ginger at each end and white in the middle. The feather is attached by invisible threads to the brick wall. The wind is making it twist and toss and rock back and forth and seem to be pecking the air.

Now I know that it's not alive, it loses my sympathy. And immediately regains it. What makes it not alive anyway? It's moving as though it's alive. What's the difference? It's trapped. But it isn't going to die there. It loses my sympathy again.

I go back to my book, which is about Kurt Gödel the mathematician. I'm reading the words of Wittgenstein: The world is everything which is the case. Kurt Gödel is just about to present to his philosophical and mathematical friends in the Viennese coffee shop, proof that the world is not everything that is the case. I like this.

It's warm. I go inside. There's some orange stuck in my teeth, from lunch. I'm thinking about the feather. I'm thinking: after I've got rid of the orange I'll go and look at that feather close up. I get some dental floss. I walk outside still flossing. I hope no one can see me. I bend down and look at the feather.

It is in fact two feathers, each with a ginger tip, and joined in the middle by white fluffy down. They are caught on a filament of dried grass sticking up between the bricks. This is why they looked like a chicken.

I like this too.

Easter Story 2

After dinner, Jesus wanted to read a book.

How about this? I said, offering him the New Revised Bible. It's all about you.

Is it? he said, that should be interesting. He sat down in a comfortable chair and began to read.

I don't remember any of this, he said after a few minutes. Are you sure it's about me?

Oh sorry, I said, that's the Old Testament. You're in the New Testament. It starts here.

Thank you, said Jesus. It would have taken me ages to find it myself.

He went on reading. After a while he looked up.

Who wrote this? he asked. He seems to be confusing me with Mithras.

Oh surely not, I said, everyone knows it's about you.

Well, I'm not so sure, he said. I have some major issues with it. Look what a muddle they've made of my parables, and as to my cursing the fig tree, do I strike you as the sort of fool that would do that?

No, I replied. I always wondered why you cursed the fig tree, just because you felt like having a fig, and it didn't have any figs on it at the time. It seemed so petty, not to mention self-defeating, to tell it to wither and die.

Exactly, said Jesus. I wonder if it's too late for me to do anything about it now?

Humours, Passions and Tempers

Pliny has just finished her library book entitled Passions and Tempers - A History of the Humours, and returned it to the library.

How sanguine she felt to be shot of it. With melancholy she had plodded through its 300 pages reading every sentence twice. Her choler rose as she thought what else she could be reading. She decided she must be possessed of a phlegmatic temperament to read so doggedly a book she did not like.