Enigma

There is an irreducible enigma in this world. To put it more accurately: the world itself is an irreducible enigma. It is an enduring mischief cast upon our understanding that we ever and always clothe ourselves in the contingency and moving frame of reference and endless symbolic metamorphosis that our systems of belief embody. Failing to acknowledge that there is no ultimate truth, anchor of certainty or unambiguous substance to these symbolic abstractions we call belief (and truth or even, under sober analysis, logic and science), we shake the tree of knowledge to see what falls out. In finding little facts like seeds we assume they are axiomatic of the world, blind to the reality that they are in fact axiomatic consequences of our systems of knowledge themselves. This is the true enigma – that there is no “beyond” the systems of explanation and belief, only the sign and reference which points to that beyond and in mistaking sign for reality we quite happily inhabit this mezzanine improbability of half-truth and shadow-play, the dissonant inconsistency of the only world we might ever aspire to describe and this world is wholly and intractably of our own naivete.

We are ourselves an enigma; without external measure or referential pivot beyond the endless introspection of an information and energy-processing system that in every instance and fractal, iterative manifestation of introspective recursion reflects back our own implausible certainty in these partial truths we wave like great bapurning banners of ignorance and stupidity upon the vast darkness and entropy with which this world, at every turn, confronts us. If we might ever infer any great secret or profound truth here it is that there can be no great secrets and profound truths because all of the systems of knowledge and description we inhabit are little more than complex, compound assertions of tautological self-reference, symptoms and hyper-inflating recombinatory patterns of a self-propagating density wave of probability and consequence.