SUPREMES

Georg Cantor is on my mind. As forever, actually. And I feel like saying that where his continuum hypothesis is concerned, if you buy it, then it saves you the trouble with doubting either the extent to which numbers are there, where you believe them to be, or their cardinality. Cantor's numbers are large. Infinitely uncountably large. For the weak-hearted, like myself, there is more than enough right there to make you faint. By analogy, if the idea with things unending is to have an application beyond the world of hypotheses, then it can be thought of in terms that mediate between action and expectation. If your action is based on epistemic belief in transfinite numbers (also metaphorically speaking), then the expectance to see the consequences of such action impact on others falls down to zero. Hence, you expect nothing. Therefore, then, the only sensible thing to do where expectance is concerned is not to say that you're waiting for things to happen—as one would if one were part of a religious cult in which belief is tied to the promise of things actualizing at some point; one is still waiting for the Messiah—but to say that if things happen, they happen, and if they don't, they don't. This means seeing everything as secondary to the way in which the continuum itself unfolds. If one can't imagine abstracts, one can listen to Bach and consider his recitative technique in the context of liturgical mass. The recitative ceremonial in liturgy follows very rigid formulas based on repetitions, and yet, for all its objectivism, the recitative is also emotional as it works as a constant recognition of the structure of the infinite. I'm listening to Bach's O Ewiges Feuer, O Ursprung der Liebe, and I feel like thanking Cantor. For the continuum. For making us sing, alone or in unison: it's there, es ist da, all of it, in all its supreme beauty and unending sensual memory of numbers. Numbers played on us. If the music stops for a while when we get blasted, it only does so, because the singer needs to take a breath.