nothing (inf.)

I missed the exit and ended up having to loop around the collision course.

nothing (inf.)

When my food arrived, I saw it had been peppered with pepper.

Song lyrics: Love Knows How to Fight

Monday I got hooked on M. Craft's song "Love Knows How to Fight." With repeated lines omitted, here are the lyrics:

Love knows how to fight
Like darkness wrapped in light 

And the sky is a roof made of tin with a million holes for the light to get in
Beyond, there's an endless sea of lucidity, and infinity of light
And tonight for the first time in my life I'm gonna believe something is out there
And there's somewhere I'm going to 

Cause all of the satellites which circle way up high won't save me now
And all of the meteorites that shoot across the sky won't save me now
All of the galaxies that turn before my eye won't get me out
Out of this mess I'm in now, no nothing can save me now 

So if you wanna fuck up with a beer bottle in your hand well so do I
And if you wanna cut up the blueprints and the plans well so do I
You wanna get messed up, and make a final stand? well so do I
Cause I look around me and I see, nothing can save me now. 

Love knows how to fight
And fight it will right up until the end
Like darkness wrapped in light
Love knows how to fight

My interpretation:

• First, the singer considers the human-centric view: The night sky and known universe are subordinated by man's conceptualizations of them (a tin roof with a million holes). Everything known becomes a thing to be studied and dominated. This is man's world of self-determination. The singer feels helpless, powerless, and, probably, desperate.

• In his desperation, he feels ready to open himself up to the possibility of destiny or some force greater than himself (I'm gonna believe something is out there) because he has no other recourse (nothing can save me now). When he says "Nothing can save me now" he means literally that no thing in the known universe--not even a meteorite--can help him. Only destiny can help--destiny not being a "thing" so much as the possibility of some thing else, some thing not known that is beyond understanding.

• Being without recourse in the human-centric world dominated by the concept of self-determination, he feels free to act out against the rules, the laws, and the plans set and enforced by other men. So he welcomes the opportunity to act out in defiance ( ...  if you wanna cut up the blueprints and the plans well so do I ...) 

•  At the beginning and end of the song he says the "something" "out there" is love. He sets up a binary relationship between self-determination and love, dark and light.

Honesty!

Just the other day I had been thinking of this passage from On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense by Frederich Nietzsche:

Every word immediately becomes a concept, inasmuch as it is not intended to serve as a reminder of the unique and wholly individualized original experience to which it owes its birth, but must at the same time fit innumerable, more or less similar cases—which means, strictly speaking, never equal—in other words, a lot of unequal cases. Every concept originates through our equating what is unequal. No leaf ever wholly equals another, and the concept "leaf" is formed through an arbitrary abstraction from these individual differences, through forgetting the distinctions; and now it gives rise to the idea that in nature there might be something besides the leaves which would be "leaf"—some kind of original form after which all leaves have been woven, marked, copied, colored, curled, and painted, but by unskilled hands, so that no copy turned out to be a correct, reliable, and faithful image of the original form. We call a person "honest." Why did he act so honestly today? we ask. Our answer usually sounds like this: because of his honesty. Honesty! That is to say again: The leaf is the cause of the leaves. After all, we know nothing of an essence-like quality named "honesty"; we know only numerous individualized, and thus unequal actions, which we equate by omitting the unequal and by then calling them honest actions. In the end, we distill from them a qualitas occulta (hidden quality) with the name of "honesty." We obtain the concept, as we do the form, by overlooking what is individual and actual; whereas nature is acquainted with no forms and no concepts, and likewise with no species, but only with an X which remains inaccessible and undefinable for us. For even our contrast between individual and species is something anthropomorphic and does not originate in the essence of things; although we should not presume to claim that this contrast does not correspond o the essence of things: that would of course be a dogmatic assertion and, as such, would be just as indemonstrable as its opposite.

And then truth becomes a function of power.