What with my lockdown blues and all that, I've started to write to my priest. He's a good bloke. Good to me and my family. Runs a tight ship, baptises our kids and things like that.
Below are my first two emails to him, each of them responding to an email from him to his parishioners, and each of those carefully worded to make it obvious that he wasn't fishing for a response.
Now that the second one has landed, I'm expecting something like: "Ah yes, there you are again, very good. But one thing, I'm changing my email address soon. I'll let you know what the new one is once it comes through from the Archbishop.
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Ah, yes. There's a joke in the first email below about our rooster. Who turned out to be a hen, in the end. But I don't mean anything controversial by it. In fact, I'm omnivorous and a blind Jew from Georgia myself. The joke is there simply because I'm emailing a Catholic priest, who by my calculations must be stuck between approving and disapproving of it, in this day and age.
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Hi Fr. ___!
We are managing very well, thank you. We are well occupied with chickens down the bottom of the garden. Lockdown chickens. One of them is slightly unhinged and fun and the other three are dull, uninspiring mother hens. Good for eggs and that's about it. We thought the unhinged one was a rooster for a while. Until he laid an egg. He would fit right in, if he applied for a humanities course at La Trobe.
I like that photo of you at the start of Mass this morning. The one of you on that rock.
If you'll allow me to be SLIGHTLY irreverent, I can see that Matthew 16:18 might have been lost in translation a touch.
I suspect in the original language it read: "... you are Peter, and on this rock, with some rusty wire leaning up against it, I will build my church."
Peter: "Is the rusty wire canon law, or optional?"
Jesus: "It's about time you started to work out a few things for yourself, Peter."
OK, I'm about to have a look at some of your photos! I hope you are keeping well, and thanks as always for the nice words. Makes a nice change, compared to all the stuff everyone else bangs on and on and on about!
Kind regards
___
Hi Fr. ___,
That's one thing I like about photography. And there's potentially another kind of magic in it, I think? Even beyond that scenery you captured?
(Not directly related to all of this below, by the way, but on a similar theme, I think that it was David Hume, the Scottish Philosopher, who sought to knock off Descartes' "I Think Therefore I Am" on a certain something to do with "time"? I think it was to do with Descartes' idea that you can doubt the reality of everything you perceive to physically exist, but you can't doubt the reality of God, essentially. And Hume (who was more in the Newton / Age of Reason period) sought to argue that the opposite might be true. On the basis that that thought Descartes was having (as in "I Think ... ") occupies a finite period of time. And time brings space into existence, at least. And therefore, just having a thought proves the existence of time and space, at least, and therefore why not matter and energy? ... having said all that, but my guess is that you would suggest that both of them are right - just relax, guys, and let both God "and" his creation exist in peace ...)
Anyway, back to photography, which Hume didn't have, though he could well have been into painting pictures for all I know ...
My sense of this is that in real life, those waves might well have been in that general orientation for only 100th of a second, as you say. But is it true that when you went "click" you kind of captured an instant WITHIN that finite period of time? Or a set of instants, as the photons of light landed on the photographic paper while the shutter was open, making each "spot" in that photo a representation of something that happened in an instant in time, when a photon of light bounced off an atom near the surface of one of those waves, or whatever? Unless that "impulse" of a photon bouncing off a wave takes a finite amount of time ... I actually don't know the answer to that. Hmmm, my brain just red-lined. OK, moving right along, because this email is only for fun anyway ...
Which then goes on to make me think: some people say that a thing doesn't even exist for a true instant in time. Because an instant lasts for zero seconds. And how can something exist for no time? So the idea goes ...
And yet, you have photographic evidence that your scenery there "did" exist for not a vanishingly small amount of time, as the physicists refer to it. But maybe for even a VANISHED amount of time, with respect to each spot on the photo?
In other words, technically speaking even on a physics and philosophy level, you've captured onto a slide ... a miracle? Or a set of miracles incoming on many, many photons of light?
Now all of that could well be a whole lot of rubbish. Still, there "is" magic at the bottom of everything "somehow". Even the physicists say that the origin of things in their origin theory is unnatural. And even when it comes to life, which pretty much everyone agrees came along later on, ... well, from what I've heard, it still blows physicists' minds that a cell nucleus could have formed at pretty much exactly the same time as a cell wall happened to form "around" that cell nucleus. (Neither nucleus nor wall can survive without the other.) A seeming coincidence of time and space that has odds that may be much, much smaller that one divided by however many particles there are in the entire universe!
But if it "is" all rubbish, then ... lovely day today, isn't it! Alex and I arrived back just now from a walk down to Woodlands Park. The redevelopment of that is starting to look great!
Kind regards
___
I "have" actually stumped myself, by the way, on the question as to whether or not a photon bounces off something as a true instantaneous "impulse". I "think" that it may be an instantaneous thing at least when an atom "emits" a photon of radiation via whichever means it wants to do that. But at this point, I'll probably send this email to one of my nerd physicist friends for a couple of answers!
