Question

If I said, God is the spoon in a dish of ice cream and you believed me what would that mean?

The Glass Plate in the Mind of a Fish

An absolute is its perception.

For example, someone who argues that only the material world exists: that is an absolute.  The perceptual infinity is theirs.  This reflexive stance - their world made in this image.

Someone who argues that God exists: the same.  That God doesn’t exist: the same.  The perception is ‘without limit’.

Shopping for Ideas

Sometimes I catch myself thinking, “What am I talking about?  Where am I getting it all from?  Haven’t I just wandered off into some sort of zone of gibberish?”  For am I not saying things that, while they might derive from instances of sense in everyday life, have been re-expressed with such a degree of generality that the words out of which they are formed no longer have any connection with the real?  After all, what do I know about infinity?  I have only the haziest acquaintance with its mathematical expression.  What qualifies me to talk about it in the first place, and anyway why do I put such emphasis on it, what is so important about it?    Really I have no idea …

… Absent-mindedly I go out to buy eggs, dawdling, dreamy, I stare into a shop window attracted by the colours; the reflections that stretch and thin; so I go from one thing to another, buying this then that and I come home mystified.  What prompted me into it?  What have I to do with it?

True = False

“Infinity exists.”

“Infinity doesn’t exist.”

Both statements are equally true, equally false.

The Impossible

It either exists or it doesn’t.  There is no other possibility.

- But some things are only by being imagined.

This imagination forming the context of ‘what is’.

The Imaginary Truth

Even if it is real infinity is not a truth but an imagination.

Even if it is actual infinity doesn’t exist.

Sub specie

Infinity defines the human condition …

There is the moral principle; we exist in the context of infinity.

As too with the aesthetic: that is infinity’s sensation.

If I act, in what context can I act in but the context of infinity?

Thus moral sense is.  Thus meaning.  The sensation exists in us that however small it is as an act, it is a world.

“Tell me the truth!”

… Suppose that “nothing matters”.   Suppose that “God doesn’t exist.”  Suppose that nothing is comprehensible; suppose that in the final analysis it all means nothing.  All the death and suffering.  Suppose that reason is a kind of human fantasy.  Suppose that what we have just disappears.  Suppose all this, so that it is only this that we have: how in the end this is what ‘what is’ finishes in.  It is all just the moment and like that it goes.  As in the moment all is forever past.  Nothing is; so nothing will remain of me or you or anyone else; suppose that one day it will be as if the human species never existed.  Suppose that love doesn’t survive … In each case I can say, what I am supposing is (in effect) a kind of clock.  I am supposing that one day the clock will stop.   “It is a clock; the clock will stop.”  Why?  Because ”Clocks need winding.”

This is a finite view of life but it is the one that we seem to decide on because it seems to answer to reason.  But it situates everything inside the space of a wind up device.

Just as in medieval times they thought the sky a broad arch with holes in it through which the rain would come …

Even though a moral act, the act by which we live, defies it …

Even the least, the most infinitesimal sensation …

A Window into Consciousness

The Night.  The Person.  The Place.

Viewing the ragged horizon from the fifth floor of the Building.

The dark draws in and the lit windows pick out the name zigzag fashion.  A company, ViKor, is spelt out.

The West side advert to the sinking sun; the name blocked in in the black as jewels glass.  The person on the right leg of the K let’s suppose.  What does standing there feel like?

How is he aware of things, assuming that he has been out in the street, arms akimbo, at other times, looking back up? 

Postmodernism - definitions

The postmodernist condition describes our absolute divorce from Nature.  Scientific, technological, cultural.  Religious.

Life moves against no ground.  Where am I writing this?  Only the vague idea of a planet persists.  And that is that, but still it doesn’t say where I am.  Technologically I stand ‘outside’.  I say I am English.  This is English.  Pinglish.

The shopping mall, the tv, the phone: who am I?  These are my defining objects; ’humanising’ my mortal condition - it seems.  But they make transparent my state of actual unreality too: a being of nature but where ‘nature’ has ceased to be recognisable.  Machines that render ubiquity make of the world of ’everywhere’ a world nowhere. 

[Click on Category '1' to the left.]

I define myself by not defining myself.  By ’speaking up’.

A disjunction; for the modernist man is with nature, but the postmodernist only recognises nature by its absence. 

Wilder

Positing the concept of infinity is our way of making a face for the wilderness.  But that articulation is a finitude.