'Why Life Is'

Editor:

The ”No on F” editorial in your last issue (Oct. 10) was thorough in its coverage, logical in its argument and righteous in its conclusions regarding Robin Arkley II’s duplicitous, devious and disabling interference in Eureka’s civic affairs.

Then Jennifer Fumiko Cahill delivered deep, mindful and heart-felt chuckles and warm, appreciatory tears of laughter because her “A Villain Intervention for Rob Arkley” (Oct. 10) was the funniest, razor-sharp political polemic I’ve read since Paul Krassner’s The Realist back in the 1960s.

Then, Barry Evans jerked the philosophy-major chain I’ve worn around my neck since college, writing: “As soon as you say, ‘There is,’ no matter what follows, means that something is. And there’s the contradiction: The nothing that we’re setting up as ‘not something’ is now ‘something.’ Sigh.'” (“Plenty o’ Nuttin’,” Oct. 10.)

No! Not “sigh”… but yes! The “nothing” we’re setting up is an absence of “something.”

It is not a material something. But it is an ideated “something.”

Consider: Life is. The contradiction of life is death. Another way to say the same thing is, death is the absence of life. Although life and death negate each other in the material realm both are “something” in human affairs.

Furthermore, wearing the numeral 0 “nothing” is even recognized as “something” in mathematics. Zero is the dividing line between positive amounts and negative amounts. More importantly, passage through the nothingness of zero changes the relationships of numerical amounts. And that indicates that nothing, as the absence of “something,” can retain efficacy to alter material “some things.”

Lastly, the answer to the question, “Why not nothing,” is: “nothing” is an ideation. A “something,” a mind, a consciousness is necessary to perceive it. And to perceive it, it is necessary for the perceiver to precede it.

That is why life is.

Alex Ricca, Blue Lake