"Cite your sources like you mean it!" -Parmenides

   Artists and academics today seem burdened with the task of being original, or innovative. To be a breath of fresh air in a world with the approximate attention span of a goldfish is the dream. Yes, there is always a bibliography at the end of the article, or an MTV interview discussing "influences", but the attitude is always oriented toward improving, revising, correcting or disproving those that came before.

    Parmenides, on the other hand, saturates his work with allusions to everyone from Hesiod to Heraclitus. He doesn't seem to take issue with the forerunners of thought that he was influenced by, rather taking great pains to honor and include their work in his own.

    That said, his ideas are interesting in their own right. The relationship between "what is" and "what is not" is simultaneously abstract and familiar. For instance, the idea that what is cannot have originated from what is not is derived directly from the divergence of the two spheres. It makes sense that everything that exists or will exist has to have its origin in what already is, but it is difficult to wrap our head around the concept of what is not. This difficulty arises from a problem with human heuristics.

    We try to learn by forcing things into the cookie cutter mold of analogy. The problem with this is that "what is not" cannot be compared to anything that is, and any similarity must actually be illusory. The difficulty of conceptualizing what is not is exactly the point. What is not cannot be conceptualized clearly, it cannot be reasoned through, investigated, interrogated or made sense of. As Parmenides believes, our limited senses cannot give us the complete picture, even of things that are. How then can we rely on them to fuel our reasoning on a topic even more alien to us?