Are Answers To Be Had?

Now that I've purged my system of the question (still unsolved, but I don't feel like beating my head against the wall over it any more) of whether there exists a curse on zero year presidents, I'd like to spend a little time stumbling over what I'd originally intended to talk about before the willful Muse carjacked my rusty little Ford Pinto of a mind and drove it into a tree: what the mechanism underlying such a curse might be.

For the purposes of this reflection I am assuming that the curse does exist; although "curse" isn't really the right word. Curses convey the idea of a spell of misfortune deliberately brought down on someone by another human, like a witch doctor, the priests of Amon, a wizard, or a pissed-off Mediterranean woman or something. I guess some people might say curses can be leveled by a god or demon, but that doesn't seem quite right to me; there must be a stronger word for the kind of magic such supernatural beings can excercise, but if so it slipped through a hole here and I am too lazy at present to get the Thesaurus. But perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself. Suffice it to say, then, that I'm assuming some process other than mere chance is at work.

Not that I'm deluding myself that I'll find any answers. I know I won't. I'm not sure it's even possible to find answers, since a whole lot of people, many of them brilliant even if they were magical thinkers, have been working on questions like this for thousands of years and have yet to find a definitive answer to any of them. Can you imagine the countless hours of contemplation and debate that have been spent trying to figure out the gods since the first troglodyte sensed something unseen moving in the swamp or the dark of the cave? Yet to this day we have little more than disparate and contradictory scraps of perception, that, because they are fragmentary and unconnected and self-negating, are probably as worthless to the understanding as the various conceptions of the elephant worked up by the gropey blind men in the famous fable.

Perhaps trying to find answers is part of the problem. Perhaps it hinders us because it makes us concentrate too much on looking for something that is beyond the reach of our sight. On these subjects perhaps modern humankind, despite the advances we have otherwise made in science and technology, are no more sophisticated than the ancient Epicureans who had to explain the nature of the universe from a few wisps of observation and their own imaginations. Amazingly, with these humble blocks they succesfully constructed the general principle of the existence of atoms, although the world had to wait 2200 years to develop the measuring devices to prove it. When they tried to go beyond general principles to reason out the details, however, they fell into error because they had no means to test their hypotheses.

It might be that the general principles are all that are within our grasp, and the details will elude us no matter how hard we try to pierce them out. Never let this discourage you from the attempt, though, if that's the goal you've set for yourself -- all breakthroughs and advances are made by someone at some point, and you may be the Copernican or Newtonian giant on whose shoulders later pygmies will stand! But my own limitations are such that I can't dive deeply: I have to stick to shallow waters or I'll drown. Over the next few posts I'll be doing my puddle splashing on the possible mechanisms behind the 'presidential curse'.