A quiet notice V2Melody closes at midnight on , Spanish time.

Closes

A note from Richard

V2Melody will close at midnight on 20 January 2028

This site has been a retirement project in musical poetry: poems chosen with care and set to music, offered freely for as long as it felt right to keep the garden open.

The work no longer holds the place it once did in my life. I have gone as far with it as I wish to go. Like a sand mandala, it was made to be completed and then released. I am not attached to its permanence, and I do not believe any of it needs to last beyond the time it was given. The poems were already here before I arrived and began to experiment with them. They will still be here when these musical experiments, and indeed myself, have been swept away, like the sand of a mandala. Nothing has been lost.

I want a simpler end to my life, days of simple love and enjoyment with my wonderful wife of 20 years. The work of maintaining a server, the monitoring, and the residual obligations that come with keeping a site alive no longer fit that life.

From 4 November 2026 I will not be adding new poems or musical poems to the site.

The experimental music I am making now is on my Suno profile. Those pieces stay there, and are not added to this site.

Until midnight on 20 January 2028, Spanish time, everything remains available exactly as it is. That is when my VPS server contract comes to an end, and it will not be renewed. After that, the server will be switched off and the site will disappear.

The Mandala Is Finished explains this more fully.

Thank you to anyone who found a poem, a track, or a quiet moment here.

The pleasure was in the making.

Richard

Home › Glossary › Letter P

Proof by absurdity

Concept
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

A rhetorical or poetic method that demonstrates a point by showing the absurdity of its opposite

Detailed Definition
Proof by absurdity is a poetic method that extends a premise to its illogical extreme to expose its flaws or reveal deeper truths; by embracing contradiction or surreal outcomes, the poet critiques ideology, social norms, or philosophical assumptions, using humor, irony, or shock to demonstrate the untenability of conventional logic through exaggerated consequence.
Example
Example in poetry:
Proof by absurdity: "If death were final, then love would be meaningless— / But love is not meaningless, therefore death is not final"; "Assume silence heals—yet the wound still bleeds; / Thus, silence does not heal"; "If time erased all, I would not remember you— / But I do, so time does not erase all"; "Suppose hope is foolish—then why does dawn still come?"; "If words had no power, this poem would not ache— / But it does, so words hold power."
Additional Notes
Proof by absurdity is a rhetorical or logical strategy where an argument is shown to be false by demonstrating it leads to an absurd conclusion; in poetry, this may appear as ironic exaggeration, surreal scenarios, or reductio ad absurdum to critique ideology—students should link this to satirical traditions and philosophical poetry that uses paradox to unsettle assumptions.
Also Known As
absurd consequence logical reductio ironic extrapolation paradoxical proof Absurdity proof
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