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earlier described eighth-century Tibetan “Lotus Born,” and others, perhaps with the
single exception of the “sky-clad” Digambara monks in Jain tradition, who have
never wavered from what can be rightly characterized as the highest form of known
human abnegation and ecological restraint. But taken together, all these algorithms
in human form, without overwhelming redemption, court every ecosystem of angst,
are the (statistically) very problem of thought, filling libraries with the most uneasy
of silences, a near cry to final occasions, crepuscular biologies, the past tense, occlusions, and doomed causality. These are the records of a consciousness whose legacy
will read of life in absentia, the full emergency of human occupation; of mathematical cessation. Such final numbers, permutations of oblivion, handwritten notes to
ourselves are, ultimately, as useless as the building of Bangkok on a distant planetoid. Better, clearly, to simply carry on, in spite of ourselves.
Fig. 55.2 Stray Cat in Damascus. (Photo © M.C.Tobias)
55.3 The Strange Dramas of Human Apperception