The Lotus Collection
Stories contemplating lingering philosophical and ethical issues.
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Contemplating Evil
a work of fiction
An elderly college professor contemplates the nature of evil after he finds an old photograph proving that his own father had been an instrumental participant in the lynching of Leo M. Frank, one of Georgia’s most notorious vigilante murders.
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An audio story which includes original, period-specific music performed by: The Howlin’ Wolf, Vernon Dalhart, and Billy Murray
Martin
A work of philosophical fiction.
This fictionalized love story is based, in large part, on the romantic relationship between the political theorist and devoted Zionist, Hannah Arendt, and her university professor, the noted German philosopher (and avowed Nazi) Martin Heidegger.
Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism remains a major work of Twentieth Century political thought.
Heidegger’s seminal work, Being and Time, is often credited as the origin for modern existentialism.
Arendt met Heidegger when she was seventeen and he was thirty-five.
Story is in two parts.
After 47 years in her desert cocoon, avoiding human contact, Dr. Helen Goldman emerges to receive a prestigious award in theoretical mathematics. In her very anticipated acceptance talk, she reveals her own story.
She was a practicing clinical psychologist whose clients included many major television and movie celebrities. At a party, she was introduced to the drug LSD. “Ladies and gentlemen, I had never had a more passionate, a more pleasurable, a more satisfying experience than listening to Wagner’s operas while on LSD.”
The drug also unleashed her considerable (but previously unknown) talent in theoretical mathematics.
She left her comfortable Los Angeles lifestyle for a desert shanty where she was free to do only mathematics. To overcome the prejudices of the powerful “special elect” who control what ideas are to be published and shared, she resorted to deception and manipulation. “Had I not packaged my ideas as I did, they would probably never have been published.”
Her strategies worked. In the introduction to her award, the speaker calls her “an individual of extraordinary brilliance. A mind of unlimited capacity. A master mathematician.”
“He had done this hundreds of times while working on hundreds of cases. The grizzled, veteran, police detective sergeant checked his notepad for details, and then he turned to the eyewitness to confirm the facts. His job was to confirm the facts. “Just the facts,” as the fictional radio detective Sergeant Joe Friday did every week on the show, Dragnet.”
The police dectective believes that there are facts. Discoverable, evidence-based facts. Hard facts, as the detective sergeant would say. Facts. Not fictions.
Facts are as real as bullets, burglaries, bullies, and bastards.
Facts are discovered. Uncovered. Revealed. They are not made up. Not mere possibilities. Not speculation.
Put all the facts together and you have a whole picture. You know what happened. You know what really occurred. You have the facts.
Yet finding the facts is more obtuse than it seems. In truth, it may not even be possible. Determining which purported events occurred and which did not may ultimately prove fruitless.
Moral Obligations
It had been days since either of them had eaten. They were the pioneers sent out by the colony to find the resources the colony needed to survive. They had crossed the vast emptiness and now were in the deep labyrinth where passage was slow.
The smaller one wasted their time talking about philosophical issues, particularly moral dilemmas. “Did you know, “he pondered, “for the price of a special, iced coffee latte in an upscale coffee shop, you could pay for the cataract surgery for someone in the less developed world?”
“So?” said the older, larger one who was missing an eye from a long-ago fight.
“It is a moral dilemma. Buy a spiced, iced coffee latte or pay for an eye surgery.”
“What is the dilemma?” snarled the one with a single eye. “If you’ve got enough crust, buy whatever you want. It is your money.”
“Still, I think it is moral dilemma. What should we do?”
Not bothered with such nonsense, the larger one responded. “I think we need to find something to eat, soon, so we can do what we were sent to do.”
As a four-year-old, every afternoon he would help his grandfather to feed the rabbits. When the man with the big truck would come and take some, He thought the rabbits went away to some happy place to be with their friends. Only later, he learned the truth.
A 91-second story
~ Listen Here ~
Humming Birds
tautologies
By J. J. Mounts-Miller
For Appaloosa Radio
October 2024
I have been thinking a lot about something I read in a magazine. I had read: “Brain waves spike during death.”
Researchers found that in the process of dying, brain activity increases. When it is graphed, it represents a distinct series of sharp, upward spikes. Before these spikes, there is usually a period of low-level dormancy, typically a relatively flat line of limited brain activity. Then, during death, brain wave activity spikes.
This has taken me into an extended philosophical meditation about logical truth and the nature of consciousness.