It Was Raining

It was raining, what more is there to say. . . . But maybe there's  plenty more, and where would we be if our writers were content to just say it was raining, what more was there to say, and leave it at that?
"Corrugated tears, molten, involate, were voicelessly descending with all the unceasing and pitiless rhythm of an African demagogue, bloated and gorged on the accumulated fats of his tarnished and burnished native lands."
That's the kind of thing you could say - and people would thank you for it. Why wouldn't they? To be honest though,  I admit I'm a bit lost as to the sense of that revised or alternative sentence, but that's just me. And anyway where would our writers be without vagueness, that is I mean the most refined vagueness, and within those vaguenesses lying hidden, or half-hidden, or maybe fully hidden, the most precious metals, so to speak, whose invaluable essences are discovered by only the most civilized and penetrating of readers, who can then reward themselves, if they want, mentally, with the thought that their achievement in the discovering is as, or at least nearly as, great as the writer's who hid them there in the first place. And who's to argue with that.

Life and Meaning Again

There's a couple of issues from Life and Meaning I should maybe look at. One is that this concentration and value judgement on life based on meaning,  and that necessarily being the primacy of words over life, leads back to Plato and his strange idea of the world of ideal forms, and within that intellectual world the absolute primacy of the idea of the Void. To quote from that piece:

The Greek void is specifically a language form, an intellectual creation or form, and revels in the fact of its existence as such. Why are the likes of Plato drawn to this concept of the void as an absolute - the thought which sits atop all other thoughts, the ascendant within the mental hierarchy? It is because, as said, the world of the senses has been decided to be unreal, and so what is most real should partake least of all of the sensory world, and what partakes least of all being apparently an idea. Ideas are stated to be the purest of substances, and the most pure of these substances is an idea which is utterly self-referential and distinct from the debased world of external reality. And so the void: a pure self-contained idea without reference to the debased world of sense perception. Hence through the ages, and still, the exaltation of the imagined holy landscape of Pure Reason.

And so the stress on the meaning of life, and the judging of life on that basis. So this is the historical basis of this false judging of life on the basis of its meaning, that notion of life being debased and fallen, split somehow from the perfectly spiritual, and Reason offers an escape route, though this idea is much older again than Plato, but it is through his  medium that the idea has been refracted on into the subsequent 'European' intellectual tradition, and into such modern inevitable rivulets as material atheism and life's declared meaninglessness.

The other thought to look at more deeply is that of accidental meaningfulness, which I mentioned in the Life and Meaning piece. Evolution is a scientific theory or fact that is falsely imagined to possess of some philosophical significance, that is that it negates the viability of an architect of life and renders valid the judgement of the human condition as being accidentally meaningful. As shown, the intrinsic intelligence of the human condition, as with any structure, cannot be denied, but even this is apparently not enough for it to be meaningful; instead it has to be connected directly to an external element to life, an architect or God - and so the depressing arguments about Intelligent Design. As described one cannot talk of anything as external to life or what is, and so this is invalid discourse to begin with. This is all an existential failure where life is not being accepted as is, intrinsically intelligent. With the evolution argument, and other 'scientific' stances is the attempt to posit the intrinsic intelligence of life as accidental, that things were senseless and unintelligent, and through chance and time eventually structures of accidental intelligence ensued, and so while offering the impression of being 'meaningful' these structures are only accidentally so.

But as written earlier: "Every structure that exists is intrinsically of an intelligent order; if it weren't internally intelligent it wouldn't cohere as a living/real structure. The fact of its existence, be it an atom, a stone, a bird, insect, human, etc. is absolutely dependent on its being intelligent and in itself meaningful."

There is no point within existence where this intrinsic intelligence of life's or reality's structures is flouted. The existence of every millisecond of being and the existence of everything that exists within every millisecond is inseparable and absolutely intwertwined with and dependent on this intrinsic intelligence. This intrinsic intelligence doesn't enter the equation of reality accidentally somewhere down the line of existence. Every atom, every gas, everything that can explode leading to further refinements of structure, an explosion itself, time and existence itself are and can only be because of their being of an intelligent order.

That this intrinsic intelligence is unarguable and present at every point is perhaps best illustrated when we consider what the ground of intellectual analysis or penetration of any 'structure' is based on. In this sense of intellectual penetration of structure I am including phenomena from atomic particles to phenomena like gravity, light, sound, etc. And what this ground is from which intellectual vision proceeds is that the structure observed and analysed is of an intelligent order. If it were not intrinsically intelligent then the discoursing intellect could produce no results.

And so again is shown the falseness of the notion of accidental meaningfulness; there is no point where an observing intellect can declare that this meaningfulness is accidentally introduced into the system of life as there is not and cannot be any point at which the meaningfulness can be said to be absent. The entire basis of the intellect being able to state anything about any system is that of the system's being of an intelligent order; thus it can meaningfully yield meaningful statements. If a system were declared devoid of intelligence, well then it could not be a system in the first place and so the statement self-contradictory.

 Thus anyway, all in all, the obvious truth of WIlliam Blake's line: "Everything that lives is holy" - holy here in an intellectual sense being life's unarguable nature as being intrinsically significant at every point of itself.

[This is all a bit dashed off & lacking in elegance but twill have to do for now.]

Sign

A travelling man came to a sign which said 'Beyond this point you may not go', and so what did he do but he didn't - go that is, beyond.
"'What was there to stop him going beyond?"
 The sign.
"That's all, just the sign, nothing more?"
No, nothing else, just the sign.

Creature

"There was a creature . . . "
"Night or day?"
"Hmm?"
"A creature of the night or of the day?"
"Both."
"God help him."

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Life and Meaning

Every structure that exists is intrinsically of an intelligent order - if it weren't internally intelligent it wouldn't cohere as a living structure. The fact of its existence, be it an atom, a stone, a bird, insect, human, etc. is absolutely dependent on its being intelligent and in itself so, one would imagine, meaningful.

But what are people generally talking about, or think they are talking about regarding life’s 'meaningfulness ' or ‘meaninglessness’?  If 'meaningful' were to signify being possessed of intrinsic intelligence and so internally significant, then every structure, as said above, is in itself meaningful - the fact of its existence inseparable from its internal meaningfulness. Is it so instead the attempt to say there is a greater purpose beyond these things themselves?

The talk of life's meaninglessness seems based on the assumed absence of God, and in this absence life's coherent, intellectually sound structures are then senselessly declared meaningless. Identically life's meaningfulness tends to be seen in terms of the presence of God, and the meaning of life's structures resides in their connection to this external element. 

This is all the opposite of true existentialism; rather than being appreciated as internally meaningful structures, the  meaningfulness of these living elements is perceived as external to themselves and instead dependent on their connection to an absolute, external to life - God.

When using language as an intellectual truth-tool, if that language is to produce the correct results, then it must be used properly, not in a self-contradictory manner. And so it makes no sense to introduce within intellectual discourse elements within life that are external to life. This can only falsify life. Life is what is, and if God is, then God is inseparable from life, or what is. To say that God is external to life and what is is to say that God, being not part of what is, is not, and so does not exist. If something isn't part of what is, then it is part of what isn't! which is to say there is no 'it' to speak of.

So to talk of God or anything as outside of life is senseless language, and so the notion of life's meaning as being dependent on its connection to something external to life is impossible to sustain. This is not all though to say God does not exist, but to treat God as an object of intellectual discourse is necessarily to falsify such an absolute. Firstly as shown above, God cannot be treated as external to what is, and secondly, God cannot be treated as an element within life; this is the attempt to turn an absolute into a relative, i.e. God has somehow become submerged within God's creation, and so is another object of creation and a lesser being than life.

So on an intellectual level is seen the logical coherence of all the genuine religious stressing that God is only to be met with in silence. Language necessarily cannot cross the divide to the absolute, and to think otherwise ends, either by falsifying the absolute, ending in a false, relative concept of God, or in the declaration of God's non-existence; or the two simultaneously, i.e. declaring the false concept to be the nature of God, and then going on to say that this falsified notion of the divine does not exist. It is again an instance of Wittgenstein's line, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent...."

Repeating myself: instead of this 'meaningfulness' external to a living structure, every living structure is a living structure because of its cohering as an intelligent structure, and one does not need to go beyond this existential state to adjudge its meaningfulness. It is in itself meaningful. Consider a crossword puzzle. There is no need when concerning oneself with solving a puzzle to trouble oneself with the historical matter of the author compiling the puzzle as if this were the essence of the matter; instead the puzzle is treated existentially, i.e. one takes as a given the 'intelligence' of the puzzle, considers the given clues and that is all.

We could imagine a sect of puzzle addicts who take to arguing that the puzzles are 'accidentally intelligent'; that given the existence somehow or other of the letters, these letters through some mysterious (but senseless!) compulsion towards order arrange themselves in haphazard sequences, and so on till we end up with these puzzles before us. The puzzles are intelligent structures, it is, as it must be, admitted, but this intelligence is claimed to be 'accidental', and so the puzzles, while genuinely meaningful, are still declared to be ultimately meaningless.

This is all utter nonsense not primarily because of the ludicrous nature of the theory but in its failure to appreciate or understand reality in the flesh, that is, existentially. Accidental significance or meaningfulness is a false category; something either is or isn't of an intelligent order. That a puzzle works is dependent on the fact that it is intelligent and meaningful. If the clues and answers didn't match up then it would not be an intelligent structure, and so wouldn't in truth exist as a puzzle. For instance, a clue went: "Four-legged animal that barks/ Man's best friend' - but the desired answer was Worm, then this would be senseless. Contrarily any structure that truly is must be internally intelligent and meaningful - its meaning being itself. And as an extension of this, a human being is a living structure of more internal intelligence and significance than an amoeba, and within the domain of humans, the consciousness of a Leonardo da Vinci, certainly within certain fields, is far more internally significant than that of an average person. Also a great work of art, say Hamlet, is a structure of immeasurably more internal significance than, for example, Police Academy 6.

But to look closer at this word 'meaning' and its extensions of 'meaningfulness' and 'meaninglessness'. What is it to say something has meaning? It is to say it means something else. The meaning of someone's strange, tetchy behaviour may be that for whatever reasons he or she is enduring a period of extreme stress. To go back to the crossword puzzle: the clues have a meaning, the meaning being the correct answer. Essentially the clues are questions with single implied answers. So the clue's meaning is equivalent to itself but perhaps in more succinct form.

Meaning so is a matter of language; it is a linguistic equivalent to something else. Words mean something - they are purely intellectual entities with reference to a combination of objects of external perception and invisible inner realities. The word 'sun' without a sun to which it refers wouldn't exist in that sense, though it might exist as a word referring to something else. 'Happy' refers to an inner state, and so on. Language can become much more apparently subtle than when not concerned with matters of 'external reality', but the words still always can only maintain their nature as signifiers. Words mean things, they are not autonomous structures. One could say that a colour or sound is sufficient to itself, doesn't refer to something else, but not language. Take a word from a dead language, or written words seen by a baby - here the words do not exist in an intellectual sense, for the baby simply part of the visual field. This again shows how language must by its very nature be insufficient to experience reality in an absolute, naked or ultimate sense; language by its nature must be at a remove from it. And so again one is led back to the importance of silence and intellectual humility. This is very different by the way from saying that language is a flawed tool. It is if used rightly a prefect tool or instrument, but even still it is what it is - a world of symbols.

And back again to the notion of supposed question of whether life is possessed of meaning or not. Stressing that what tends to happen here is to leap to the imagined answers to the question without properly considering what actually is the question. This 'meaning' is to try and say that the living structures of life do not really in themselves matter, but that life means something else, and this meaning is its essence. As described, this something else external to life is a senseless concept. Even with mystical truth, this is still not external to life! (But to the reasoning intellect, of course it will due to the nature of language, remain external.) Then we have the very bizarre thought that with the tautologically inevitable failure of this Something Else apart from life to appear within life, life is declared to be without meaning.

The very wording of the question attempts to deprive life of internal existential significance. Life's significance is instead in its meaning something else. To look onwards a little, a meaning is a matter of words, an idea. And to take from an artistic piece I wrote previously Rooftop:

So the essence of all matter it seems is words, ideas. In the beginning was the word. Matter was behaving in such and such a manner because it was conforming to an idea which was the truth of the matter. But what is an idea but words in someone’s head and words in someone’s head is a very recent phenomenon, so in whose head were these words to which matter was conforming before there were any words? A mystery.

So anyway, interest flagging, the notion again of life's meaning is to say that life's entities are not possessed of primary reality in themselves but that instead they have to be judged according to their meaning something else, some kind of ultimate language equivalent - this being the nature of a meaning, it is a matter of words. But as shown this is self-contradictory as the primary reality is necessarily at a remove from the symbol world of language. As for the idea that the meaning equivalent of life is that it is without meaning! This is simply laughable. Well if this is its meaning - that it is meaningless - then naturally it is not deprived of but possessed of a meaning, and so its meaninglessness a self-contradictory notion.

Enough.

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Dimensions

"Congratulations sir, you are the father of a beautiful healthy boy."
"What are the dimensions?"
"Sorry?"
"The dimensions! the dimensions! I must know the dimensions of the boy-child!"
"Oh sorry, you mean his weight?"
"And the length!"

Encasement

A universe, all of it, was encased in glass. However, those dwelling within a certain world within this universe did not know they were so encased for the glass was perfectly transparent and gave away at a distance nothing of itself. If they had been less unaware, who knows, they might have been blissfully so.

“In glass? Wonderful!”

But if over time, gathering dust and various wandering rubbish to itself, the glass becoming muddied and the universe within compelled to become dimmer, would the inhabitants begin to guess at all the glass? “The light is fading,” some wail. “We must be displeasing the gods!” Others: “We are polluting the atmosphere,” whilst others again, thoughtful, deduce the sun to be consuming itself, drawing low on its own reserves, and so this fading a precursor, in itself harmless, of the real disaster to come.

But it's much more likely I suppose that instead this dimming, if there was any dimming, would be both so slow and so faint as to go altogether unnoticed.

Something though that didn't go so unnoticed was the appearance of a crack in the glass. Why a crack? Because a stone had been thrown from somewhere effecting this crack. Thrown from inside or outside? Outside. The glass was of a scale that anything hitting it from the inside would have been far too weak to have caused a scratch, never mind a crack, and so it must be from the outside it came.

And so a stone was thrown, accidentally or malignantly, or maybe just unconsciously, that is inanimately, an unthinking movement of unthinking matter, and regardless, however, a great big crack appeared, clearly visible from all points within the glass, or at least visible whenever and wherever whoever was looking from was immersed in night and the crack above unobscured by clouds, and so, whatever the source, shafts of light could be seen striking the edges of the crack, creating an incredible, fearful, even mystical effect.

And with this immense, obscure appearance across the night sky, confusion, terror, people on their knees, floods of prayers sent into the void, and amongst whatever else, a great rush to interpret the appearance, but none in their interpreting proving inspired enough to surmise either glass or crack.

“My God! What is it?”
“Nothing to worry about. Something to do with the sky.”

One of the less impressive offerings. And so anyway, there it was, this wild, jagged line, unexplained across the heavens. “Heavens”, by the way, was enjoying a renaissance, and you could even, if you wished, make a case for now dividing people into two halves; one for those still using the prosaic “sky” when talking of such, and the other for those now saying “heavens” when talking of same - this use maybe natural or innocent at first, but pointedly soon enough after, autobiographical. There were also though a few of what you might call agnostics, who found themselves in the awkward position of not knowing what word to use, the use of either seeming to place you firmly within one of the two camps, and so they tried to intersperse both equally, but rather than being applauded for their delicacy, they ended up more or less just annoying everyone.

So the archaic style was back, portentous and poetical; in some hands serious, unforced; in others a fashion accessory; perhaps in others again sarcastic - even if this sarcasm might now seem a bit unsure of itself. Phrases like, “The starry vault has been sundered,” became almost a commonplace; things you might hear, never mind behind closed doors, out on the street in the middle of the day.

The likes of Nostradamus was poured over; lines produced, discussed, even thought about; perhaps the biggest fuss made over the following:

A jug spills, milk disappears.
A horseman descends, fearsome and hungry.

Whatever about the Frenchman's disappearing milk and descending horseman, that this was the kind of thing you could now mention in normal life without fear, or much of it, of being thought mad was, you could say, an emblem of the times, the times distilled.

And so now, on the cusp of these strange times, there they were, waiting.

But what happened in time with this waiting but more or less nothing - no Apocalypse, no dawning New Age, as said - nothing. And back out from the shadows began to emerge the sarcastic, slowly at first and looking about them, but then, growing more and more sure of themselves, in a surging rush. “Go on with your Apocalypse!” they jeered, and began, with an awful lot of noise, to enjoy themselves. Whether there was really any enjoyment at the other end of all the noise I can't really say, maybe just a lot of noise signifying enjoyment; but that's the theory anyway: In the absence of an apocalypse you enjoy yourself. There may have been some still waiting, but if they were, they were keeping their waiting to themselves.

So a return to something like normality; the crack becoming part of the furniture, no longer so novel, soon to be not novel at all; its prolonged existence proof of its banality. Relief, disappointment, a sense of futility and emptiness - all mingled. The coming time hadn't come, the great harbinger had foretold nothing, and the archaic style faded back away. You might still hear something like “The starry vault has been sundered,” but this time in a certain tone, followed by laughter.

Interpretations became more a matter of idle intellectual musing than apocalyptic sooth-saying; money still being poured into scientific alleyways, the crack had become, one was given to understand, the personal property of the learned, debated in smooth, antiseptic tones, and in a leisurely manner. It was, they might concede, yes, for now, genuinely quite interesting; a bit of an anomaly, but we had all the time in the world and there was nothing particularly at stake - or if you like there was something very particular at stake, the anomaly bit, but it would soon be an anomaly no more and no rush about it.

From those exalted and intellectual quarters, stern or amused looks arrowed themselves downwards now towards any remarks about the crack rising up from regions beneath. If someone from below had for instance insisted on the great thing across the sky's still being a deep mystery and was honoured enough to receive in response to these words other words coming back down rather than just a descending look, those words would probably go something like: “A mystery? Only because we don't yet know what it is.” If this someone beneath were stupid enough to persist with his mystery, not realising he'd been crushed, he would probably find himself enclosed in a silence hard to get out of.

And so, all in all, the crack in the distant glass still a riddle, but people a lot less concerned. Many disappointed, many not; tension eased but things a bit boring.

This relaxing of tension was dealt a very cruel blow though when another stone struck the outside of the glass, sending another, but this time far larger, crack scything across the surface. If in their observing our people had been anywhere near the glass, they would have experienced a sharp, very audible crack more or less simultaneous to the appearance of the visual one, but being so far away they didn't. Light informed them of the frightening event long before any revealing noise, but the noise didn't just lie down, and instead rumbled its immense way across space, gaining if anything it seemed rather than losing in mass, before finally rolling hugely over the humble world, flattening all other sound and terrifying everything upon it evolved enough to have got as far as experiences like terror. And, as if this weren't enough, as the huge roar slowly moved off on its way, fading at last to a low rumble, up struck across the continents a chorus of howling dogs, accompanied in places by howls more primal and awful again, human ones, pouring themselves out of abysses deeper than history - pardon the poetics.

When terror subsided enough to allow thought pour back in they tried to make sense of what had happened, to fit it into some conceivable map of existence; many even still in spite of all hoping this map could somehow be a reassuring one. Even the cynics though were shaken very deep.

“Now this is serious.”
“Yes, this time it really is serious.”
“I thought it was serious the first time.”
“But” — some other exchange — “you don't think it could have been some kind of thunder?”
“Thunder? That was no thunder.”

And so religion on the rise again, more floods of prayers, a sense of impending doom, some souls strangely exhilarated, more terrified, some few even trying to let on to be amused by it all - the cracks, the noise, the howls, the terror - but these efforts now all too obviously strained, and inclined more towards the hysterical in the mad sense than the humorous.

“Who knows what will happen next — the sun might explode.”
“Still, we might get a tan. Ha ha!”

And still they hadn't figured out they were encased in glass. But then another stone struck the outside of the glass, and this time the glass shattered outright; great shards descend upon the formerly enclosed spaces, sending everything - suns, moons, planets - that they smash into flying; and finally, the shards descending, the now horrifying, previously harmless truth of the universe's crystal encasement begins to dawn.

And . . . Apocalypse? But the strange truth is, no matter how doomed our planet appeared, however certain various collisions appeared, it defied perhaps all logic and escaped without a scratch. All shards and splinters passed it by.

And so, the danger passed, aware at last they had been encased in glass, they were encased no more.

charcoal

Charcoal Unfinished

The Twentieth Century

"The twentieth century . . . "
"What about it?"
"I don't think much of it."
"But two world wars! . . . "
"I didn't think much of them."
"The Wall Street Crash?!"
"I didn't think much of that either."
"You're a hard man to please."