The Ant and The Paperclip

Tag: philosophy

  • book discussion: It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over, by Anne de Marcken

    i’d like to commit to doing something like this more regularly, but here’s a new genre of post where i’ll talk about some book i’ve read recently. don’t expect a traditional review, more a cloud of associations disentangling my overall interaction with the text.

    also, forgive me for not utilizing page numbers in my citations, as i borrowed this as an ebook from the library and no longer have access to the full text. quotations from the book are placed by a book-progress percentage. shameful, i know.

    SPOILERS abound…

    it lasts forever and then it’s over.

    right away, the title of Anne de Marcken’s novella pulls you in with its conflicting temporalities, an inherent conflict embedded in its vocabulary. though “forever,” especially in this phrasing, typically stands to suggest a notion of boundedness by human imagination. for nothing is truly forever, we know now that even stars expire away, matter decays, and entropy is the dominant force of the cosmos.

    what is the true meaning of forever?

    to me, it is an aspirational term. contained within forever is an immutable dream, an ideal immortalized by the reverence that the subjective mind assigns to it. forever is a force sustained by the imagination of the mind that conceives of it. it’s nearly a fantasy— completely untenable—it is a concept that is entirely framed by our bounded subjectivity, as it can only exist so long as we sustain an imagination of its infinitude.

    and then it’s over.

    with how the world appears to deteriorate across scores of existential crises before our own eyes, the idea of ruin is one deeply embedded within our collective imagination. but, like the idea of forever, ruin is an idea that is deeply anthropomorphized, infused with melodrama, and misconstrued as a tenet of existence.

    industrial society raises us on a linear timeline, espousing a defiance of natural boundaries and striving ever-upwards towards an enhanced objective reign over the world. it is from here that the idea of ruin emerges as a natural opposition to the endless push of modernity. ruin becomes something that we carry within us, an infusion of our mortality onto an imagined canvas of infinitude that informs our view of life.

    That is what ritual does. It excuses us. Comforts us. Places us in a context so vast and ineffable we can confuse it with truth because it is impersonal and because it has a lineage and because it extends all the way—but only—to the limits of what we can conceive. (8%)

    our ontology can only expand to fill the boundaries of our imagination, but no further. thus, we imagine ruin as a facet of the ultimate conflict of the universe, the epic clash between life and death, the fate of our existence held in the balance. a grand ending, the antithesis to infinite growth.

    and if we saw the world more like nature? by all accounts, time passes cyclically in nature; seasons depart and return at regular intervals, organic matter decomposes and sustains the next generations of life. even in the quintessential scene of environmental ruin, a volcanic eruption, the process yields rich soils from which new life invariably emerges, foundations to a new ecosystem arising from literal ashes.

    When you have arrived at the thing itself, then all you can do is compare it to something else you don’t understand. (96%)

    we are so firmly rooted in our linearity, in that perennial hero’s journey where we believe ourselves constantly pitted against some existential threat, that we must prolong our value of exploitation indefinitely and ever-outwards into the universe. we are misled by this dream of “forever,” for it is all we can imagine when we reach out into the vast possibility of existence. but it is illusory, because no single state, process, or thing is truly infinite.

    The only things that remain themselves are the ones you can never reach. The things that are too big or too far away or move too slowly to detect… They will always be only what they really are, and you will never know what name to call out to them. (96%)

    we begin to internalize ruin, we grieve the violation of this perfect dream of “forever.” we constantly broach limitations as our existence grows to be defined by aging, loss, and ultimately, our looming, inevitable death. paradoxically, our imagination exceeds the limits of our biological lives while our biological lives exceed the limits of our imagination.

    this need not necessarily be a source for existential malaise. though we are conditioned to search for objectivities within every wrinkle of the universe, there will never be a “theory of everything” that can encompass the entirety of our conscious and unconscious interaction with the physical universe. it’s not something that we will ever grasp in the palm of our hands. we simply have to navigate these unknowable spaces with the support of other equally mystified souls, for to know one another is the most profound action towards making sense of anything at all.

    The space between me and me is you. This is a mystery. (100%)

  • Theory of Every Damn Thing

    Hay everyone. I have torn my Achilles tendon and opted to get it surgically repaired. This means I am bedridden for a week while my tendon recovers from the trauma of 1) being exposed to the outside world and 2) getting stitched back together. I am trying to take this opportunity to deepen my understanding of life. This reflection is part of that process.

    We exist in the margins of multiple worlds, though we labor in pretending not to. Try as one does, we fixate on lifestyles of control, disregarding the subterranean ebbs and flows of the world as it naturally appears. With our endowment of observational capacity, we profanely engage in narratives that champion the dichotomous conflict of individual fate and destiny against a confrontational nature. Life without engagement, growth, and productivity is scarcely considered a life worth living at all. Our experience is that of the waves, the ephemeral motions that rock the canoe of our consciousness on a moment-to-moment basis. These waves carry us onward, and consideration must be made to ensure that they do not cause us to capsize, critical negotiations towards righting the course of our lives. 

    We know the ocean of our existence is much more than mere waves. Below the surface spans entire universes, closed cosmological systems where, for those lurking below, all that ever is and ever will be are contained in a finite space. Sure, there’s inputs from the great beyond. Extra-dimensional aliens may breach the upper limits of the universe and impose their own will. Even the distant moon, pulling the strings of the tides, exerts some influence on the system. Though these factors are entirely external to the undersea itself, they constitute a tangible, shapely influence on the rhythms of the universe contained within. No system is ever completely closed, not even the universe revealed to us from observations of deep space. Incomprehensible forces push apart the fabric of space itself on a large enough scale, forces that we may never be equipped to fully understand. It would be like explaining lunar tides to a minnow. 

    Our journeys as living beings crest upon the rippling surface of another’s universe, a sensation resulting from infinitely complex interactions of elements that is largely taken for granted. What relevance do the circumstances of existence hold to our lives anyway?

    It is not in the nature of our ontological beings to accept the world as it is without some sensation of curiosity. We tirelessly pursue grand questions – the more unanswerable, the better. But the collective with whom we grow to cohabitate tells us to dismiss this aspect of our being. Answers are abound wherever one looks, and dreams of progress fixate on a utopia where there are no longer any questions or mysteries left in the world, all to escape a nagging sensation of uncertainty. 

    Uncertainty is incompatible with the lifestyle of control. To have made it so far in human history only to continue to accept uncertainties in the universe feels unacceptable. Flailing against the lack of an inherent anthropocentric reasoning to the universe, we respond by forcing the world to fit within the predetermined boundaries of our own understanding. We reduce our view of the ocean to one of just its waves, and convince ourselves that this is all it ever was. The ideal life of the technological age is one entirely absent of metaphysical context.

    Despite all this, I don’t think we were ever meant to flee from the incomprehensibility of the universe. To disregard its complexity in the name of an authoritative God or to simply be indifferent would be to dismiss an authentic psychological need innate to our being. We are trapped within intersubjectivity, so we should learn to grow comfortable with discomforting ambiguities and questions with no answer.