Behind it all is Weber's polar night, and we are supposed to pretend for the sake of building solidarity that the paralyzing chill blowing off the the frozen waste is really a utopian summer breeze?
Of course it's a gamble. When the hall of mirrors shatters once again there is no telling in advance what will happen next. Certainly after the US electorate re-installed a known fraud over a suspected fraud, I was breathless at the spectre. The Gaussian hump had bared its teeth. Now it seems to be growling at its own tail.
My own impulse is to let it growl, let it bite, let it chew.
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The situation -- seen completely (or as near as we come) -- is much stranger than we can dare to admit on a workaday basis.
Only a few people, nearly all artists, try to get a handle on it. I've mentioned the names before: Gibson, Sterling, Butler, Ellis...others....trying to describe the free fall that's modernity.
Once, years ago, Sterling tagged it all as a glacier, 'moving with sinister majesty' across the surface of everything.
I feel this and sometimes, like that fleeting moment, if you're at all a Trek fan, when Picard was able to live in past, present and future simultaneously becoming more than just a guy with a hot career but something...other (but unsustainable, too much for minds wired like ours to hold onto) I feel I've got it -- the whole data stream seems wide open and I'm icily comfortable with this unrest.
But of course, we can't dive in too deeply and continue to believe in, well, anything. Better, I think, for our tenuous sanity to give M. Pollack's ideas (for example) a try.
We need structure, goals, and various sorts of hope (hope we'll get laid, hope we'll live well, hope those ICBMs will remain dangerous works of un-used cosmic art).
So we defy, in a way, the universe's lack of concern (and modernity's shapelessness that comes as a result of knowing this) by filling in the gap ourselves.
So as long as we're recognizably human, this will be necessary. If anything like the imagined post-human arrives...the game changes. But that's speculation of the wildest kind.
.d.
-- http://monroelab.net/ <<<<<>>>>> giving up our tears to a neon sky