it only occurred to me yesterday that the question if a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? is an ethics dilemma. it’s likely that all this time i’ve been far too attached to a Far Side comic where Gary Larson asks if a tree falls in the forest and no one’s around, and it hits a mime, does anyone care? i read that at my grandparent’s place while going through all the Far Side Gallery books. what i’ve missed, and what i was assured was a silly thing to miss, is that the whole thing is really about getting caught and the moment something becomes a crime or a wrongdoing.
in high school, i could easily be quoted by my peers saying that it isn’t cheating until you get caught: before that, it’s working strategically. it’s a frightening sentiment when expanded past the silly tests they put us through in high school and instead applied to the integrity of academics and how questionable the legitimacy of a degree can be. if a doctor ever told me anything cheating was the way to go on things, i would never be able to visit that person again, or treat them as a professional. it’s a different question entirely when it isn’t asked as a childish-sounding hypothetical. if the setting of the question is changed to somewhere darker, like the mouth of Whitey Bulger depicted by Johnny Depp (who doesn’t say it in the film, but if you want a vision of sinister clichés you can believe in, he’s the perfect villain) , or even someone in a powerful position, like Barack Obama or Stephen Harper, it becomes sinister. That sinister quality though implies there is a sinister action when it could be much simpler and reduced to the act of secrecy, and it becomes a matter of paranoia when you or i are outside the forest and know that if a tree were to fall, it would not be something we could hear. there is no one to hear you scream from in or out of the woods.
it’s the secrets we don’t know, or imagine that we don’t know, that tear us apart from one another. in the horror of uncertainty it is impossible to cope with it while attempting to trust. it saddens me that sometime a message is only clear when it’s written in code.
the gift and the grain 