760
This is the logic of comfort in evolution that manages to perpetually re-invent our
lives and expectations over the course of 3.8 billion+ years of cellular experimentation, mutual tolerances explored to the exponential ends of the earth.
How remarkable that we could come to behold and feel this reality amid so much
suffering. That is fundamentally paradoxical, and radically troubling. It is, at once,
an apologia that skirts courtrooms and rhetoric, science textbooks, and the crowdpower of human causes that insists upon itself. The proportions of a village, village
life, all the priorities humanity clings to will demolish the least contrarian view in
terms of species etiquette and superiority, as we have reiterated.
To behold the sublime is not easily abetted by abject pain, or the insights into
injustice. In the much-aggravated congeries and conurbations of our dense truancies
as a collection of population centers—taken in a philosophical light—the lone congress of one, a parliament of the Self, vibrates according to the rules of energy
transformation. Some specialists might attribute the religion of a Wordsworth aglow
with its intimates of immortality. Or the quirky, strange attractors of electromagnetism, of Planck’s Constant, or of any of a jumble of laws in physics. But ultimately,
this vibrating essence rebuts all assertions of truth or accuracy stemming merely
from universal laws. Even gravity, as tested by a feather in the stratosphere, obeys
no predetermined flight plan. Darwin’s The Descent of Man, and Selection in
Relation to Sex
1
recognized at once that his application of all matters evolutionary
to human beings would cause a rash of awkward connections, particularly for other
primates. When two of us fall in love, there is no certain trajectory or translation of
that emotional itinerary. The science falls short. The calculus lags behind. A linear
or multi-dimensional depiction must suffice. It might be an octagon of smooth surfaces, or the National Library of Belarus, a rhombicuboctahedron.
85.2 Much Like Those Portraits by Hans Holbein
the Younger
Much like that series of portraits executed by Hans Holbein the Younger, in 1527
and bringing to somber still-life the court of Henry VIII, we are each of us amalgams of identity absent all meaning but a dog tag
2
. These elegant showcases by
Holbein illuminate a heartbreaking clarity which tenaciously informs all future
pairs of eyes with a sensate apperception traumatized or enlivened—by the ineluctable mortalities, a fact, a sensation of irreversibility first grasped by children at
some point between the third and fourth year of life. Prior to that epiphany, imagine,
re-imagine what the world must be like.
1 John Murray, Publisher, London 1871.
2 See Holbein and the Court of Henry VIII, by Hans Holbein The Younger, Published by Queen’s
Gallery, Buckingham Palace, London, 1978.
85 The Final Hermitage of Ideals
This is the logic of comfort in evolution that manages to perpetually re-invent our
lives and expectations over the course of 3.8 billion+ years of cellular experimentation, mutual tolerances explored to the exponential ends of the earth.
How remarkable that we could come to behold and feel this reality amid so much
suffering. That is fundamentally paradoxical, and radically troubling. It is, at once,
an apologia that skirts courtrooms and rhetoric, science textbooks, and the crowdpower of human causes that insists upon itself. The proportions of a village, village
life, all the priorities humanity clings to will demolish the least contrarian view in
terms of species etiquette and superiority, as we have reiterated.
To behold the sublime is not easily abetted by abject pain, or the insights into
injustice. In the much-aggravated congeries and conurbations of our dense truancies
as a collection of population centers—taken in a philosophical light—the lone congress of one, a parliament of the Self, vibrates according to the rules of energy
transformation. Some specialists might attribute the religion of a Wordsworth aglow
with its intimates of immortality. Or the quirky, strange attractors of electromagnetism, of Planck’s Constant, or of any of a jumble of laws in physics. But ultimately,
this vibrating essence rebuts all assertions of truth or accuracy stemming merely
from universal laws. Even gravity, as tested by a feather in the stratosphere, obeys
no predetermined flight plan. Darwin’s The Descent of Man, and Selection in
Relation to Sex
1
recognized at once that his application of all matters evolutionary
to human beings would cause a rash of awkward connections, particularly for other
primates. When two of us fall in love, there is no certain trajectory or translation of
that emotional itinerary. The science falls short. The calculus lags behind. A linear
or multi-dimensional depiction must suffice. It might be an octagon of smooth surfaces, or the National Library of Belarus, a rhombicuboctahedron.
85.2 Much Like Those Portraits by Hans Holbein
the Younger
Much like that series of portraits executed by Hans Holbein the Younger, in 1527
and bringing to somber still-life the court of Henry VIII, we are each of us amalgams of identity absent all meaning but a dog tag
2
. These elegant showcases by
Holbein illuminate a heartbreaking clarity which tenaciously informs all future
pairs of eyes with a sensate apperception traumatized or enlivened—by the ineluctable mortalities, a fact, a sensation of irreversibility first grasped by children at
some point between the third and fourth year of life. Prior to that epiphany, imagine,
re-imagine what the world must be like.
1 John Murray, Publisher, London 1871.
2 See Holbein and the Court of Henry VIII, by Hans Holbein The Younger, Published by Queen’s
Gallery, Buckingham Palace, London, 1978.
85 The Final Hermitage of Ideals