I am endlessly captivated by the many and diverse ways that this world of ours, for all its patterned continuity, already and always bears a certain discontinuous fracture, harmonic displacement and logical dissonance at heart. It is as though all our vainglorious aspirations to meaning as the symbolic mirror of existential assurance and cognitive (or linguistic) self-validation are built from broken, incomplete artefacts and entities that in aggregate cohere together in ways that simulate certainty and confidence but just never quite manage to provide any sense of closure or teleological resolution.
The mystery runs quite deep. Not only is the world fundamentally, foundationally, irreducibly and intractably uncertain and incomplete but even those partial truths and fictional assurances of certainty we inhabit can quite easily be demonstrated by simple methods of self-reference to be hollow, haunted linguistic and logical methods much more aligned to psychological (and cultural) needs than facts.
It is a little like the perennially unpalatable presence of a knowledge of personal mortality that each one of us bear as melancholy badge and tribute to a knowledge that marks (and measures) our entry into adulthood. At the core of these things is an absence, a void and vacuum that stands to life much as does the central singularity of a black hole to an observer passing across the event horizon towards it. Having entered into this game of life, we will always and inevitably, eventually arrive at the naked horror of personal extinction that this life inadvertently encodes.
It is as though, while no one can ever determine the result of any sufficiently sophisticated (i.e. complex) program or coded algorithm without running it, all information and structure inadvertently encodes the inevitability of its own erasure in dissipation, dissolution, silence and death. The purpose of life, if indeed any might be asserted, is this orientation towards death and oblivion but the only sense in which such a direction or iterative and patterned sequence towards extinction makes any sense or presents itself as being even vaguely intelligible is as the journey and patterned winding up of the clockwork as code or language and understanding such that it might then follow its destined decompression into entropy and oblivion.
No surprise that the complexity, entropy and accelerated decay of our all too human world threatens to rise up and overwhrlm us, then. This descent into chaos and dissolution is what the world is coded and programmed for and we are all, willing or not, compoment microcosms sa mere transmission medium for this paradoxical arc and trajectory into the void. Being something always comes at a cost of eventually returning to the nothing that spawned you.
Images: www.gregadunn.com
Daedelus Kite 