Uncertainty and Continuity

Narrative and continuity are crucial for determining meaning; as such, sequence and consistency are the orbital pivots of logic and truth. However – the moving moment, having happened, moves on and attempting to remain enthralled in its warmly-remembered embrace leads to ambiguous fictional assertions as to its structure, meaning and significance. This is a source of individual, cultural and political pathology; the difference and distance between that idealised Object of Self, of Other (or of World more generally) and the actually-experienced or observed self, other or world leads us into intractable and irresolvable psychological, social and political enigmas. We are the witnesses of our own hastily-gathered and poorly-remembered recollections and in endlessly seeking to retrospectively weave a narrative of meaning from these, we have also (and unwittingly) obscured our own current location and vector of direction. There is a certain existential and epistemological Principle of Uncertainty at work in this: you can know where you are or where you have come from but knowing both is to divide by zero. We generally choose the rear-mirror view; fictionalised self-construction is at least more comforting than the utter existential horror of indistinct and unknowable futures that lie before us.