10 medallion of a wolf

MP3:MEDALLION OF A WOLF


So with this in hand, we return to the question with which we began: Why write anything at all? Why fashion poems, stories, histories, theories, explanations... "objects" composed of text...distracting and enchanting others, distracting and enchanting ourselves?

Several of these objects reoccur in my mind- something causes them to be read from memory:"...the reduction of being to having...""...the principle problems in life..." phrases like these return to me throughout the various dead time moments that I am away from following these sorts of inquiry. These phrases: objects made of words, objects behind which there is some sort of comprehension at which I have not yet managed to arrive... If indeed, it does exist. I'm reminded of another yet another phrase at this juncture, following me for a decade: "It may be false, but if so, so is everything else."

In all barbarity, I have to confess that I resent the way that the written word has exerted such a grasp upon my attention. Can you really pull anything through a series of words on a page...grasp something that exists in reality that you were not hitherto aware of? With mathematical symbols, yes, you can manipulate the symbols and foretell the future, the future of moving objects at least. And there is something in this which seems to promise a profound understanding of the world to those who can truly appreciate why it happens to be so: What is the nature of what is real, given that we can construct symbolic systems whose concatenations mirror patterns in nature? What is the nature of this special relation between words and things? What is the basis for it? What accounts for how calculations can be efficacious, how they can possible be applicable to the world?

...but, excluded from an aptitude with mathematical symbols, I'm personally limited only to words and English...and the more familiar with theses that I become, the better that I become with manipulating them, the more I become convinced of their total inadequacy, if not their absolute falseness. A falseness, particularly, with respect to where they derive their origin and how they are supposed true. You begin a conversation, or a theory, an explanation, and the dimensions along which which these linguistic constructions develop seem to follow a preordained path...Certain assertions provoke certain replies...Like "thank you" provokes "you're welcome," on the model of a knee jerking from a hammer or drool from the sound of a bell. Yet: this model that we are drawing from as we perceive and arrange words, this could very well be inadequate for modeling what we really need to understand.

Allow me to attempt my breakthrough from another direction- Consider, the opposition: rational versus irrational. By rational we indicate: something that takes place by virtue of a reason- - - associating from this, we find ourselves encountering various, related ideas: something that takes place according to methods that can be reliably followed...some set of instructions that can be carried out...some procedures or algorithms which can be exactly specified and carried out by a machine.

Now this is not the traditional emphasis when it comes to conceptions of the rational. The rational, ascribed to the mind, was that which was in opposition to the body, which were appetites: thirst, hunger, sex, the comforts of sleep and temperature.

The rational: your deliberate persona with a narrative that others can understand, a narrative driven by desires that they can conceive of. A narrative that weaves through names which are in common and familiar...The rational: words whose meanings are shared because they express common, similar, shared fears and desires. Desires that belong to your persona itself- and therefore words and meanings that belong to it as well.

Words have meanings like effects have causes. And rationality, which all people share, can deduce the former from the latter.

Yet the irrational exists. Is it exclusive to man? Is the universe ran according to intelligible laws and man the only part of it that has within himself the irrational?

Breakthroughs from some other direction: to select words from random and to examine them in such a way that they might convey some meaning. Is this a contradiction? What does it mean, from random? There must be some methodology of selection...this methodology, whatever it is, itself contradicts the very meaning of random. There must be something trying to communicate with you if the symbols are to have any meaning...Meaning on the

...things to consider... firing off in different directions from this moment of the essay: the various ways that have been created to generate phrases by random methods, most especially, computer programs written to do this...the "logic" of projecting a meaning into phrases so generated...depictions of methodologies for using such phrases to deduce, to enter into a relationship with, irrational aspects of existence...the meaning of "irrational"- it's existence limited to animals, or no?...Physical phenomena are said to sometimes follow reason- but they are not said to possess reason. We do not say that a falling object is thinking about the law of gravity.

the meaning of chance versus determinism aka patterns of behavior that are recursive, can be repeated...the idea that words themselves, or something whose nature is distinct from deliberate awareness, could be responsible for the meanings of words...the relationship of this theory of meaning to probability and chance...