Chimera
So what happened to him?
He sits there and thinks. Sometimes he writes; his
thinking leaves a trail. (His thinking disappears.)
What does he think about?
Philosophy. He thinks about philosophy. He thinks it's
an open field. (He hopes he's not a fraud.)
Please go on.
Cosmology, biology, physics, for examples. The fields
are changing so quickly - there are constantly new models, new
discoveries. It's impossible to read an useful book that's more,
say, than five or six months old. Philosophy is different; it
seems to be an organization of material that's underground - not
fundamental exactly, but looping through different kinds of
narrative structures.
How does he feel about this?
He feels that the aphorism, the short text, is the way
to go, that its tethering to the world is fundamentally
different than longer works that attempt coherency and world-
building of one sort or another.
And his position? What he believes in?
His belief is a desire to believe, nothing more; with
knowledge advancing at such high speed and the abandonment of
religious belief (deities, afterlife, and so forth) - not to
mention ethics itself - whatever's left is a chimera. (He
worries his belief will get in the way.)
And this chimera?
He thinks of this as entangled, uncanny surfaces and
volumes, almost like the branes of string theory. He's unsure of
the ontology and epistemology involved (and unsure of ontology
and epistemology in general), but feels these and their objects
should be farmed out to the technical disciplines, the
relativism of research programs notwithstanding. So the chimera
might be thought of as a virtual/real what is, something behind
the fractured vision of the cosmos, which can never be healed or
sutured again. There's too much knowledge, too many variables,
too high energies to be considered, distances far too great to
produce even the semblance of experimental signatures and so
forth. In other words, we're reaching a horizon of knowledge and
the exhaustion of knowledge, and the chimera is the remnant of
that. (He worries about the virtual/real but sees no path around
it and no reason to worry any longer. So he thinks about culture
and returns to philosophy through detour.)
What about political economy, semiotics, social issues,
issues of (biological) extinctions, and so forth?
He signs petitions and speaks about these issues at
every opportunity, but it's not his concern when he's there,
eighty feet above the pavement, writing away. (He worries it's
only a peripheral concern at best.)
What is his concern then?
His death, his quickly shortening time on earth, the
curtain closing in. At that point - this point then - he thinks,
things turn towards issues of ultimate knowledge - something
he's considered for decades, something always eluding him. (He
worries about his own naivete and his elision of 'that' point.)
He's waiting for what then? His death?
He's waiting in the midst of abject death, tawdry death,
meaningless death. Except for his partner, he feels disconnected
from the world around him; the sounds of his breaking body are
louder than ever; they are entering stages of interference. (The
sounds interfere with everything, his death is still not _a
death,_ but a clumsily perceived horizon.)
And he thinks?
That such interference is the only true-real character
of the world, striations across and within the chimera, clouded
vision - a cataract world, what we are living within and among,
a world of lost clarity, hopeless for the organisms within it.
The chimera?
The only hope, the last of the animals themselves.
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