Dear Joe Fisher,
I submitted an essay in the last competition but I wasn't aware of your trolling but then again I tend to dip in just briefly. I've been trolled on other sites though and I can definitely say it's not a nice experience to be on the receiving end of it.
Still, its important that you have moved on from that attitude, it's not fair on other contributers and you've shown some self-awareness by apologising. That's not always easy, so congratulations on that score.
I have to chime in here with Georgina's constructive criticism in that you begin well. I like the way you repeat visible. It's a nice literary effect. Repetition, however, needs to be used with a little caution as it can get a little grating. The same goes for repeating finite.
The idea of focusing on the visible is a nice idea. After all, that's how physics begins. It begins with the senses. It's a matter of observations which is key to science. And how can we observe anything if nothing is visible? I remember how extraordinary it was to discover that the visible spectrum extended into - for us - is the invisible spectrum: radio waves, the infrared, the ultra-violet. Of course its not invisible to other creatures. Certain animals can see into the ultra-violet and others can see into the infra-red. Perhaps there are creatures on other planets that can see radio waves or gravity itself! There are science-fiction stories that explore this territory.
I also don't think that veering into a list of Google searches was a good move. You're obviously trying to illustrate a point but it just gets annoying. Are you, for example, trying to say something about the use of AI? I mean you subtitle that section with 'Ask me no questions and I will tell you no lies.' Is that a reference to the culture of fake news? It can work both ways. It could be sinister - the Ministry of Truth (rather Propaganda) in George Orwells 1984. Or it could be a man being tortured by the Gestapo who's thinking 'if you don't ask me any questions about where everyone else is I will tell you no lies'.
But I get the impression you merely like the turn of phrase as you don't seem to develop the idea. Writers after all, often look for ways to hook phrases into peoples mind, thats part of the business of writing. But if you want to write, you should ask yourself why was your mind hooked? In writing it's not enough to begin a thought, it also needs to be followed through...
I get the impression that you're aware that what you're writing is not quite worthy of you. I mean after one of your questions into Google you write 'this enigmatic codswallop'.
If you think its 'codswallop', why should you expect other people to want to read it? After all, peoples attention span is finite, their lifespan is finite. You get the picture.
William Blake wrote this enigmatic poem:
O Rose thou art sick.
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night
In the howling storm:
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
It hooked me many years ago. And what does it mean? Is the Rose, Britain and the worm, the blight of satanic mills? After all Blake was well aware of the social problems that Britain was heir to. But to my mind, it goes deeper than that. It's similar to Dylan Thomas's
The force that through the green fuse that drives the flower
Drives my green age; that is my destroyer.
Of course, Dylan was most likely referencing Blake here. But what he's saying is clearer. It's a question of life/mortality. The kind of questions we all have to face and sometimes, outface.
But what was embodied in Blake physically and outwardly as the worm, Satan basically, has become for Dylan a merely invisible force, and something much closer to what constitutes us as a being. He also references the world as duality (a word I notice that you've used). Notice the way he has used repetition and contrast: Green, flower, green, destroyer and force/drive. He's using repetition but changing the way he says it whilst also saying something. It's an art.
Personally I think he was referencing Schopenhauer, the German philosopher as he cut out of Gods Will, God Himself. So everything - including life (My green age) itself - becomes merely an expression of will. That is force.
Blake and Dylans language is enigmatic simply because of a lot of compression. They want to say a great deal in a short space, and say it well. It takes enormous skill to do this well.
You wrote "There have never been three finite length, width and depth spatial dimensions."
This a profound statement, but I'm not sure that you actually know just how profound it is. Aristotle, over two thousand years ago, one of the first natural scientists posed the question 'is space a body?' and 'if it is a body then what space is it in?' and then 'how can two bodies occupy the same space' which led him to suggest that 'these difficulties lead us to the question as to whether there is actually such a thing as space.'
This might seem like a list of random questions but one of the big findings about the nature of space and time is that space dissolves away and we have a network of relationships. In a sense, Aristotle was correct. Moreover, it wasn't just a lucky guess, he discovered it by the logical analysis of the concept of space.
In fact, I think this is why people have misunderstood Aristotle here. They say, he didn't understand space, because he didn't consider space to be volume - that is length, width and height. He considered it to be its boundary. That sounds crazy. So people point their fingers at him - mostly physicists and laugh at him - look at what those ancient philosophers know - they can't even grasp space is volume! But of course space exists, we have it all around you. So if you deny space its volume, all you have left is its boundary - that is its network of relationships ... it sounds unbelievable that they were theorising about quantum gravity two millenia ago, and maybe a bit crackpot. But recall, they did think up what atoms are ...
I tried explaining this to a physicist once. But as soon as he heard the word 'Aristotle' he threw up a lot of barriers. People are mistaken about Aristotle, there's a great deal more to him than the superficial reading given for him by many physicists, it's as though they have been taken in by the scientific myth-making which pits science against religion, and hence against Aristotelianism and hence Aristotle. There's a good reason why Aristotle was taken as a reference point for a long time. He represents the epitome of Greek natural philosophy, what we call science now.
Anyway, I've written a lot more than I intended to. Please take it in the spirit it was written in - as constructive criticism. And I apologise for the literary digression in the middle - I got the impression that you liked writing ...
As Dizhechko says and I repeat ('cos it's worth repeating ;)) 'I wish you successfully overcome your visible surface and enter the road leading to success.'
Warm wishes
Mozibur Ullah