Mandala

Metaphysics is an interesting consideration. I wonder if it is only ever and really a problem of words and language. In some senses, it could only ever be this game of words, semantics, of communication. It’s a problem to which Zen applies the kōan, analogous to the Gödel sentence of a narrative mind. It’s actually very clever and while Zen found its own emergent vocabulary of belief, so did the Tibetans.

The Tibetan sand mandala is particularly instructive. After days of hard work to build the intricately iconographic tapestry of spiritual meaning, one grain of coloured sand at a time, there is a ritual and then the beautiful design is swept away with brushes, forever gone.

There’s something deep in this and I think it can be applied back to language, experience and communication. There is always and already something missing in language and communication. I spent a year or so studying this and have found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that describing the inability of language to describe anything beyond its own referential horizons is impossible.

It’s the point at which Sisyphus might just throw his arms in the air and let the boulder flatten him, but impossibility proves to engage language and aspirational consistency as a paradox.