On These Shores

Once these waters
pressed their lips upon the
salt riddled shore-lines.

Now these abused depths
toxic
fluid in form
now viscous with greed
this watered ash as solvent sheen.

Brine-bloated
carcasses of fish and fowl
float as oily ruptures
as waves crest and fall
depositing
our final offering
upon the lap of the salt riddled shore lines.

A turtle-ish subjectivity.

The world is oftentimes weirder than the scientific models we use to explain it. This “weirdness” runs deep and perhaps weirdness itself is the nature of reality.

If the foundation of basic matter is supposedly governed by uncertainty and, at best, is only represented probabilistically by esoteric mathematical models understood by only a handful of theoretical physicists there isn’t much hope for any of us, at least, when it comes to notions of understanding, meaning and knowledge.

But somehow, despite this intrinsic weirdness, I am able to sit my a desk, turn on my computer and type these words, and eventually, I will post this statement on my blog and you, on the receiving end will read it and perhaps like it or perhaps not. Who knows?
I was trained both as mathematician and a scientist. But I never really “bought” the whole scientific apparatus with its intrinsic positivism, faux sense of finality and egoistic certitude. We, as scientists, after all, cannot even reconcile the grand physical theories that supposedly govern our universe. The large scale Einsteinian relativity seems to elude a happy, dignified unification with the subatomic Planck universe.

Our earliest societies explained the world in mythopoeic language, we, on the other hand, in the here and now, describe our reality in notions of the mythomathematic. Solving equations concerning the gauge symmetry of simple lie algebras is the new Promethean myth of stealing fire from the Gods. Perhaps the Higg’s Boson is the only god we deserve? And the Large Hadron Super Collider our modern Tower of Babel? What does it say about us when we machinery predict a reality we can never truly experience on a personal level?

And yet, despite this weirdness, here I am, writing this blog post, which you will read, sounding out each word, phoneme by phoneme, each sound meaningful in its own right. Each word meaningful, in some way or the other, to you, on some level. It all somehow comes together, syllable by syllable, word by word, sentence by sentence until it ends. It will either leave a lasting impression or you’ll simply click on some other link or enter some other URL and let it die a neurological death, each word fading into the unconscious, perhaps to rise, ghostly and ethereal, at the oddest moments, in some fit of deja-vois.

All “-isms” when taken to a global, generalized and metaphysical scale are bullshit. Including my own. The problem occurs when we seek to reconcile the galactic scale with the subatomic. Gravity and quantum theory were never good bed-fellows.

“-isms” are only meaningful locally or individually. In the land of the mythomathematic, the subatomic is king. We have a pocketful of lenses we use to make sense of the world, as each experience becomes presented to us. It was never about “truth” but internal consistency and epistemological self consciousness. Pragmatics dictates some lenses are better than others, and rightfully so. But no lens, given these very human limitations of locality and temporality, can ever account for a “grand unified theory.” No perspective can ever fully account for reality-at-large: “-isms” are pure potentiality, merely probabilistic, subatomic, and uncertain.

Sometimes madness is the only form of sanity we deserve.

And to quote the poet Pessoa, “What’s a man who isn’t mad / But some ruddy beast, / A corpse postponed that breeds?” Madness makes us human. For only the truly mad would ever attempt to make sense out of this chaotic mess we call reality. Only the truly mad would postpone the urges to breed in order to wax philosophic on the nature of the ontic fallibility of human method. And only the truly mad would bother to call themselves scientists.

Sex.
Science.
Madness.
In the end, it is nothing but turtles all the way down.