peaches and mangoes

I think the main difference between science and art is that science insists on one truth.  Either the atom is made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons or it is not.  Well actually protons and neutrons are made up of quarks which can be either up or down, and then I think there are red, blue, and green varieties, not they are actually those colors, it's just a way of saying they are different.  As of my last reading electrons are still electrons.  Still, since neutrons and protons are made of quarks you could say it's protons and neutrons.  It's certainly not made of apples and oranges. 

But see I can see myself already reading a science fiction story where atoms are made of apples and oranges, and I suppose I could make a painting where the apples circle the oranges, and I suppose Beagles could write a song about that.  Could the book, and then the movie be far behind?  And then how about peaches and mangoes, bowling balls and billiard balls?

So how come western Europe came up with science way back around 1500 and nobody else did?  Well there is some suspicion that it was monotheism.  If there is one god ruling everything and he has absolute power then if we understand him we can understand everything else.  Actually the motivation of those early scientists was to understand everything so that they could understand god. but really, same difference.

If you have more than one god, well they are probably always fighting, or trying to muscle the other guy out, and now you got two guys to understand, or maybe three, or maybe twenty or a hundred, and it's not enough to figure out each one of them, you have to figure out all of them and how they get along before you can understand everything else, and you might as well just go up on a hill and contemplate your naval. 

I don't pretend to understand those eastern religions.  I've read their wiki pages but I expect that there is more to them than that, but let me just say, they seem more like philosophies than what we know as religions.  They seem more like, maybe this or maybe that, unlike the Abrahamic religions, which are more pragmatic, more like a rule book, here is how to lead the correct life, and this is the only way, any other path and you are lost forever.

So anyway that's why some people think science developed first in western Europe.  I'm inclined to think they make a pretty good point.  And I think the main point of science is either something is true or it isn't.

But if art thought that way, wouldn't there only be one painting, one song, one book, one movie, everything else would be, well untrue.  But I think the world of art is the art of the untrue.  It's all made up, nothing looks like that painting, the novelist is making things up from the first paragraph.  Well there is always that thing where they say something like by taking the path of many untruths, or by expressing something in a different way, art is pointing the way to some deeper truth.  I don't really understand what that means and I suspect it is a bunch of hogwash, the sort of thing that artists peddle to make their stuff seem more important.

You know it's like beer.  I love beer.  Some people think the truth lies in drinking a bunch of beer, or what is said after drinking a bunch of beer.  I don't believe that, but that doesn't mean I don't want to drink beer.

I think art is all showbiz.  Shakespeare is smarter than the three stooges, but it's just a relative thing. 

What were we talking about?  Art and science, are they apples and oranges or apples and anti apples?  Well I suppose it is not apples and anti apples, but I think they are closer, or more comparable than apples and oranges.  Mainly I just wanted to run on about scientific and artistic truth I guess.  You know we writers, we just write to see what we have to say.

Well there goes the early morning.  That bread thing sounded interesting, especially after our talk about rules and recipes.  Maybe we can get back to that.

It looked like a big night in Chicago.  We had that big storm, and then the Cubs had a game which was not such a big deal, but the Blackhawks were playing for the Stanley Cup, and if they won, surely they would congregate around Wrigley Field (a more party friendly attitude than the area around the Blackhawk's stadium) and mix with the Cub fans and trash things up a bit.  But then the rain cancelled the Cubs game, and then it kept on raining so that even though the Blackhawks won, the rain put a damper on the drunken celebration so not much happened after all.