The eternal moment is always present if we only choose to look...

Flower (Photo credit: @Doug88888)

Life is an infinite collection of connected moments. There is, however, only one of those moments which lasts for an eternity, that being the final moment where we pass from being to nothingness. From dust you came and to dust you shall return...

And post-modernists argue that there are no absolute truths...

Whatever. We are born from nothing, we live, and then we die, passing to another realm perhaps, being in the warm loving hands of a power greater than ourselves, we return again to the bosom of the universe, the nothingness leaving behind an ever decreasing pile of matter. Entropy in action. We are at rest; at one with the cosmos.

My father died recently. He had a smile on his face. All around him were the signs of a man, a little boy who had grown old, pushing on. Slippers placed neatly under his bed, toothbrush next to the basin, razor sitting next to the taps. I cried knowing that he was not going to be there any more for me and also because my own life had suddenly become foregrounded against the background of his mortality. He smiled back at me and I kissed him. The warmth had left his skin as he lay there perhaps having answered the call to come from his mother.

So he lay there motionless and in a matter of days his body, having been embalmed and prepared for its final resting place, he would be lowered into the ground in his coffin. A priest would sprinkle some holy water onto the coffin and throw a few clods of earth on top once the casket had been lowered into the grave. Flowers and a crucifix were then thrown in for good measure and now it was again a game of the living.

Keku sarcophagus (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I turned and walked silently with my partner towards our car. It was a nice funeral everyone agreed. In a way a celebration of having reached peace, an end to agitation and the beginnings of serenity, a stillness undisturbed beneath the grassy fields above.

I shook the priest's hand and thanked him for the serene way he had conducted the mass and burial ritual. The present is always already there right before us, if only we dare to look...

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The myth of Narcissus and Echo

The story of Narcissus and Echo has a pervasive presence in Western cultures. The essence of the myth perhaps gives us a clue as to why this story has intrigued many artists and philosophers over the millennia.

At the heart of this story is two lovers. Narcissus who can not return love as he is enamoured by his own self-image, and Echo who can not express love as she can only repeat the last words that are spoken to her by another, i.e., she cannot generate her own expressive language.

Narcissus can be seen as withdrawn from reality. He is locked in his own head so to speak, and is driven by an extreme ego. Echo, on the other hand suffers from a complimentary condition, in that she can only reflect what others have already spoken to her.

Narcissus enters the scene after her jealous mother, Hera, has already struck Echo speechless. He cannot relate to Echo’s amorous advances towards him, and eventually scorns her. She wanders and fades away only ever being able to repeat what others have said to her. This ability survives on after she has finally faded to nothing. He, on the other hand, continues to roam unawares that he too has been cursed, so that on seeing his own self-image he too will perish.

I am intrigued by this failure of reciprocity of the sense. Echo is too obsessed with the other; she has become totally reliant on the other to reach any expressive potential at all. Narcissus, because he is so self-obsessed that he fails to respond to the human expressivity of her advances, rejecting her out of hand because of her lack of articulateness.

Finally, upon seeing the ‘real’ Narcissus reflected in the pond, he is overcome by shock at his own image, having only ever seen himself before in his vain mind’s eye. His egoism detaches him from all of his sense of the world around him making him incapable of reading the advances of the beautiful Echo correctly. He dies and turns into a flower, a symbol of female sexuality reminiscent of the vulva (after Gidé).

Echo can also overcome the one-way street of her senses. She can only receive but not give, or rather can only return after she has first received. Narcissus can only give but cannot receive, so that a co-dependency is established in their meeting and with disastrous consequences for bot male and female protagonists.

The senses in a healthy human are both reciprocal and reversible (after Maurice Merleau-Ponty). Reciprocity occurs when I touch in that the very act requires that I am also touched; when I speak I also listen; when I see I am seen, etc.. These are the reciprocal nature of the functioning and aware human senses.

The senses are also reversible. I can touch with my words and with my sight. That piece of cloth looks woollen or silken. That food looks and smells as if it will taste good. This chiasm of sensation is absent at least on one level with these mythological characters.

For this reason, over the coming months, Samantha Thompson and I will be exploring this absence, looking for its implications in the telling of this story in pictures and words, and hopefully, contributing to our understanding not only of the myth, but of ourselves as fractured human beings.

What is post (post) modernism?

It's been a beautiful Melbourne day. Grey skies accompanied by a fine drizzle with an occasional gentle gust of wind. Just magic. So, why considering all this, am I feeling not quite up to my usual self? Perhaps, there is not an answer to the question why? Maybe, I just need to accept that I feel as grey as the weather and the intermittent showers and breezes. The answer might only in fact be superstitious, but then an irrational answer will often suffice in the absence of a better explanation.

I plan to meet up with my peers tomorrow. We are the core group of post (post) modernists. The group consists of a semi-retired Professor from Malta, an Italian PhD student and a picaro. I'm not telling which one I am, but I the term came to both the picaro and the Professor last week. An example of Jungian synchronicity. Over a coffee or two no doubt,  I expect that post (post) modernism will again be discussed. The Professor will say that 'two negatives make a positive' and the picaro will say that we are past what in fact never existed in the first place. All of us are excited to finally find our way past this aberration of Western thought, which was only ever really a watered down version of modernism proper in the first place: (post) modernism.

Even the post-modernists always accepted the fraudulent nature of their claims. 'Post-modernism is really only exists as a subset of modernism and doesn't exist separately to it' there foremost proponents  such as Lyotard seem to argue. This was all bad enough until butterflies  in Upper Mongolia started causing bushfires in the outer suburban Sydney, and dolphins actually attained an intelligence level greater than the average human: Whales became sacrosanct. The truth was, as Holmes told Watson, that fact is stranger than fiction; Crows were found to be in the same group of intelligence as these sea-going mammals, and whats more, they didn't even need to get their feathers wet to be so.

Ah, yes! But there is no truth, they would no doubt argue. Well, that's a truth statement if I've ever heard one. That sounds like a universal claim to an absolute truth to me at least. Post (post) modernism would rather, from my point of view at least, maintain that there may very well be absolute truths, but that we as humans can not know those truths directly due to the very limitations of our mode of perception and the limitations of language, our sole method of expressing any truth with any foundational accuracy. Art, of course, with its recourse to more subliminal meaning, may express these truths, but again, only in an interpretive and not a direct way.

From one cold winter's morning to another, this idea develops with a mixture of jollity and perseverance. That is the way of the post (post) modernist intellectual.  Over a coffee or two in a cafe in Heidelberg, far from Paris' left bank <> ,  these ideas develop one day at a time into questioning the very bases of modern thought. Language does not permit an escape from the modern, and no amount of grammatical tricks will allow one to free oneself from the bondage of this idea. Just writing the present in the past tense is nothing but a cheap trick advocated by some postmodernists.

So, what is Post (post) modernism.  It is pure and simply an acceptance that human thought consists of rational and irrational components. That science and religion are equivalents just as are order and chaos. It rejects the notion that one is better than the other, accepting Maurice Merleau-Ponty's assertion that human consciousness is composed of perceptible and non-perceptible occurrences, The Visible and the Invisible being the seminal work in this area. It's basic tenet was written and described by Albert Einstein over a century ago, that matter and light are equivalents.

Furthermore, it is a proposed that human perception of the physical world is essentially dualistic, and while the physical world may or may not be so formed, it remains integral to our understanding of the world that we accept these opposing forces as a unity, St Augustine of Hippo was the first scholar of note to point this out nearly 2000 years ago.

The world at first appears Newtonian and well ordered. The deeper we look , however, he more this order seems to break up into disorder or chaos. If we go deeper still, chaos seems to give way to the extremely ordered world of the atom only to again resume its chaotic appearance at the sub-atomic level. The point being, we can never really know, because once past a certain point we are no longer directly perceiving phenomena but rely on intermediary devices.It becomes simply a matter of whatever works.

In any case, why should we expect the world to be one or the other? Since ancient times, order and chaos have been constant themes delimiting the way we see the world. Certainty and mystery  are intertwined and inseparable, and there is no escaping that. Absolute truths may or may not exist, but our limited positioning and the fact that we are confined to a body ensures that there can be no reliable omniscience in our knowledge. It can only be developed through discursive activity. There may  or may not be an omniscient view point but that view point is beyond the human realm.

The rain is pouring now. Who would have thought. The wind has ceased. Tomorrow is another day, and I expect it to arrive just the same as it did today.  The sun will inscribe its path across the sky, and the stars will go into hiding again. The wind and rain will do what they do. It will be cold because it's winter. What exactly will happen in detail is another point entirely. And of course, I am relying on my memory of the past to predict what tomorrow's present will be. That is a process that has worked for me and other bodies like me in the past, and I expect that it will work just as reliably in the morning. Who knows, I may very well be wrong.

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