Generative Absence in Language

Where we come up against the boundaries and endemic incompleteness of (a) symbolic language, it is art and poetry that might take (and shake us towards) that step beyond. As though the generative discontinuity of indeterminate ambiguities and alliterative insights (like skipping stones) weave a little constructive extra-dimensionality from all this stochastic entropy. Of course, this must be true and intuition as much as higher order logics guide us all towards this form of unguided self-organisation, when we stop to listen and even if it refuses to be tamed by linear articulation. That thing, the silence and the ineffable beyond language and knowledge also lies, with Epimenides’ tesseract, at and as the arc and trajectory of the hole in the wheel that Lao Tzu knew. The metaphysical absence beyond epistemology and definition is simultaneously the generative void within.