Imagine, if you will, a king. A mighty ruler, a keen follower of Machiavelli and thus feared much more than loved and very clever indeed. Of course, being clever is only ever measured by the breadth and depth in which intelligence is defined and this king had come to live in a half-mirrored world of […]
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 […]
I don’t know if there’s life after death, but I do know that facing personal mortality would be a hell of a lot easier if there was some sense in which we could be certain that humanity was likely to persist in this Universe, that all of our lives and suffering as collective endeavour possesses […]
As though fields of flowers, our experiences are living (and decaying) things and it is indeed in a transience native to all material and psychological things that we come to understand their true value and beauty. The most difficult part of this experience and light of living, of being, is to know that it is […]
It’s curious that the cognitive systems and languages through which we aspire to illustrate these existential intricacies of mortality are themselves so viscerally and intimately dependent upon teleological endpoints as anchors of meaning that when they attempt to embrace the meaningless vacuum and grand tautology at their core, they always fail. Is this failure of […]
“That’s all any of us are: amateurs. We don’t live long enough to be anything else.” Charlie Chaplin Amateurs indeed, and yet – as with so many things – we perceive not only the implicit limitations of our minds (and lives, collectively – of cultures and civilisation) but also intuit the significant persistence of doubt, […]
I recently received several boxes of books that had once belonged to my father. He died around 10 years ago now and these books seem to be the last traces of his life left to touch my world in any material manner. I had the strangest sensation and revelation as I stood there and stared, […]
That boundary between the world as it is and as any of us would rather have it be is a stark cartography of relentless dissatisfaction. The expanding volume and referential space between what is and what might be is that labyrinthine, glorious confusion around which this, our own selves, orbit and upon which the essential […]
In what ways might melancholy and a gradual (or rapid, accelerating) slide into sadness or feelings of hopelessness be the natural heir of organic experience in a material world that is always and already dissonant with energy diffusion and the endemic thermodynamic burden of what amounts to irremediable emotional and corporeal loss and decay? All […]
Nothing kills pain like the opium of blind faith. It is easier to gaze upon death without eyes. What better way to engage with the horrifying fact and material inevitability of your own non-existence than by denying it exists?
Entering into life is always and ever to pass across an event horizon towards a dark infinity; all futures, freedom and choice trace an inevitable arc and trajectory towards singularity and extinction. Entropy provides limited degrees of freedom or choice but teleology binds us.
Travelling into the future is an inverse archaeology of entropy. There is some possible future, a singular branch of most probable outcomes in an undiscovered and unknowable configuration of ourselves towards which we all travel. A small consolation lies in being clever enough to decode this inexorable material process and abstract logical labyrinth of decay […]
Daedelus Kite 