Neither map nor signal

26 Jun 2025 / Counterpoint

Neither map nor signal

This should be an unabashed confession. In saying what I want to say, I shall embrace the default option and say it like it is: you, as much as I, my very scarce and indulgent reader, have had the deliciously seditious idea to play hookey with life. To escape like the painter Gauguin, dropping all the stuff that seems so important for what is more sustaining – restoration, solitude, quiet. A move towards crafting a new world altogether. One, which we can design with the wisdom and the centering hindsight provides. A move to simpler, gentler days. Even if I excise the roughage of time, recalled with nostalgia for a pace which was not overbearing. With the passage of time, I have come to realize that there always are amiable, if ominous and binding warnings about the septic follies of civilization. Follies exacerbated in present times to the point of shrillness, the response to which can be nothing, such is the heaviness of the situation. An individual has no escape except on a microscopic personal level. The idiom of our age is revved by a great kinetic force. A stunning and inexorable force which pushes on several simultaneous levels. In my case it benumbed, then petrified me enough to leach away my life.

To the exceedingly few you indulge or suffer me, I may appear to be my own man (in degrees, yes) but the longitudes of my inconsequential life have been drawn and driven by others. As this has built out, it has had to do with scale. One cannot quell scale, neither does one have agency against aspect ratios which are completely awry. Septic follies are ignored, therefore. In the first place, they are unrecognizable and even if recognized, are shuffled and shrugged away as par for the course. One goes about one’s business until one is weary of it. At such a bend on the road one might realize that there’s a hidden network which traps the world and its events, that nothing is ever innocent or without consequences. Until such time that I may escape to my pared down version of Brigadoon after settling and squaring the debts I still service, I have created a time shelter of sorts. I re-visit to take bites from my early years. A time of vanished worlds which I could not make any sense of, just as I have never understood life and therefore have existed on its outer peripheries, away from smatters of society. While pretending to be in the mix, I have never been in it. The condition has been manufactured as much by design as by default. This was a quirk I came into the world with. It is unintelligible and I don’t bother with it. The few times I have, I have been scathed and saddled by a heavy pall of despair. I escape, run away to my landscapes resurrected by mind and memory. It must be a rather circular landscape I suppose created from recollections, situations, old images and sounds and smells brought into the present after decades of burial, after circumvolutions, neurons and folds and veins which technically are my brain {the mind and sense of self must lie elsewhere, I don’t know where}. All to be extinguished at the time of my death, as they are with everybody. If there were a phrase, it would be gentler days. More than bad, it is very restricting, this ingrained habit, a reflex of names, words, explanations which are desperate to wrap everything. Not everything can, or should have terms of reference in verbiage. There are stronger, sharper saliences in mental audio-visuals. These are reels of reality, as real as real can be. They may be summoned at will. ….I don’t know how to say what I want to. Paralytic inability between agency of thought, recollection, expression and conveyance is frustrating. It is rendered hopeless by the impossibility of transporting not just zeitgeist, but the many, many layers immersion, flavour, scent, sound, habit, routine, fashion…of time gone by. Every age has its fingerprints, these smudge minds and as the patinas of time coalesce before eventual collapse, the fingerprints are un-seemingly schematic lines. As I prepare to retire to a life of solitude, I am confronted by the shadow of yesteryears --- unexpected visitors, these. They appear suddenly and challenge me to remember. Should I ask “Why have you come looking for me?” they seem to say “Because you must settle us first, provide an account of the life and time you spent and assure us that you gained something. Something more than mere yarns and tattles.” This silent exchange fuels rising anxiety and delight mixed thoroughly and heavily. Frankly, I have nothing to offer except, perhaps a lesson in what not to be. Always poor vectors of thought and experience, words collapse completely. But then, let me try and balance the strange book of accounts the shadows demand be settled.

Like you, in my elongated life, I have met with/endured/loved/enjoyed/abhorred many individuals. In full-final measure, all are incidental (some exceptions). I navigated my floundering course in inspiration from the Platynereis dumerilii. Scientists study it for the sake of its eyes. Evolution/ development of its eyes, that is. They are the simplest amongst all animals and consist of only two cells in this oldest species which exists. In my estimation, studying this ringed worm’s eyes also means studying the developmental evolution of eyes in general. Interpreters, reflectors, transmitters and transducers; eyes and sight. Eyes are many things. In my case, dubious reflectors of the state of Being. Dubious, therefore almost entirely extraneous. I supplement them with feelers. It helps somewhat. And that’s the rub. I should think it a fair paraphrase to say that this asserts a constant and unending progress from lower to higher in nature. Herbert Spencer may have believed something of the sort. I do not believe in anything of the sort. Since I shall never know the truths, certainly not in absolutes, I don’t worry about truth or lies. I get by making sense as best as I can of everything I encounter. I know I have no counterparts in an objective reality. This also means that I have no beliefs, none whatsoever. I consider belief as a wall, an obstacle, a hurdle. Belief is also, and very often, a myth and a disappointment. A parent of hubris. It benumbs more than one actually is already, congenitally stupefied. Belief, therefore, must be excised, and very quickly at that. Must be removed and banished wholly and fully.

This leaves a man without any crutch and saves one from disbelief. It introduces one to starkness and a full monty of the necessary, therefore the appropriate and by inflection, the possible. Unbelief is the key, one of the keys at least. In my confounded experience, all I learnt was that reality is an impossibility and everything I think I know, is deeply fractured. Object Oriented Ontology is a strange thing, it takes Socrates at his word, and literally at that: no one can be in possession of the truth or even knowledge, for that matter. There is, therefore, no bulwark against anything. The world indeed is floundering sea, we flap about without knowing that we do. An experience of being cast-about the deep, dark, overwhelming choppiness. Under and within this Sol Niger is my ectopic condition as much as yours. The darkness – of myself, the cosmos, the violence written by evolution. As for existence, its price is terrible and nothing can improve the exchange rate. All these material aspects, here and beyond, I seek no redemption, I don’t know what it may bring. The things we can’t control are beautiful. The problem arises because we are all resulters at heart. One must not be haunted by results, but one is, because the mind does not like uncertainty. It seeks to know, it wants a clean story. Enlightenment is realization that the things we can neither control nor understand are infinitesimally beautiful.

My belief in the fifth quadrant tells me that the only take on terrible reality should be a promiscuous one, this helps cope with what is. It also prevents a surge of what could be. Any take on existence and/or consciousness is just a rubric guide akin to a beguiling lantern. The most essential contexts therefore may not be illuminated. All of the landscape must remain in the dark. It is a weak, inconsistent wobbling lantern, its light shows bits and pieces; fragments really, of no mean value. All and everything, all and everyone revealed, is confined to this hazy lantern light. Never full, therefore impossible to call definitive. Its only emblematic value lies in garbles of gibberish.

Why are there beings at all instead of nothing? That is the question. Presumably it is not an arbitrary question, “Why are there beings at all instead of nothing”- this is obviously the first of all questions. Of course it is not the first question in the chronological sense [...] And yet, we are each touched once, maybe even every now and then, by the concealed power of this question, without properly grasping what is happening to us. In great despair, for example, when all weight tends to dwindle away from things and the sense of things grows dark, the question looms.”

- Martin Heidegger, Being and Time

And now dear reader here are my takes on more grounded plane: