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Sitaram
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Joined: 14 Sep 2005
Posts: 1079
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 Posted: Sun Sep 18, 2005 6:28 am Post subject: Finding Lasting Meaning and Purpose |
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Finding Lasting Meaning and Purpose
How do we find lasting meaning in a world where nothing lasts?
What role may art or fiction play in our search for meaning?
The alembic, which distills the essense as gradual droplets, filling
a flask, Gideon's dew upon the fleece, moisture on a web, diaphanous,
a flash of brilliance from a ray of sunlight chancing by....
Such distillations collect from year to year. Wish them into oceans.
The Vedic imagery of churning the ocean of milk for nectar, churned
by deities and demons alike.
The alembic is the reverse, to fill an ocean of nectar, drop by drop.
As droplets? Pieces of straw and string that birds weave into nests.
Socrates loom with warp and woof and shuttle as image of dialectic.
The churning of the ocean is serendipity and synchronicity of the
subconscious; meaning where none was meant.
The loom is intentionality design and craft.
Where loom meets mist, where tapestry caparisons the crashing waves.
Venus is born in the sea foam on the shore.
One reader responds: That's a very big question, but I'll try a short
shot at it.
Our writings may become a virtual person. A corporation is a legal
fiction on a piece of paper with a seal, which has the status of
person in civil law.
I am an illegal fiction, unsealed, but civil.
I am playing on the notion of a Corporation as a virtual person
having rights, and me as a fiction which is not legal, having no
rights in posterity, yet I remain civil.
There are lines of poems that immortally wound the soul. - Frost
This is not cryptic at all. The collected dialogues are a virtual
Plato. They are my only means to access Plato, and Socrates.
My own writings are a virtual version of me. My words may live on
after I am gone. A Corporate entity is a person with rights, under
the law.
Seek and you shall find. Ask and you shall receive. Knock and it
shall be opened. Nothing mystical or cryptic about that.
Another reader remarks:
This is a loaded question. It assumes nothing lasts. How is it, then,
that I have read the Odyssey, or Sappho's poems, or Sumerian
documents 5,000 years old? And why does meaning have to be lasting?
Bang! Here is my loaded answer.
I too once thought as you, of lasting posterity.
Then I felt that our sun would end one day in a supernova.
Then I learned that our sun is too small for supernova.
Then I though of technology planning an escape, a Noah's ark of
genetic labs, piloted by immortal cyborgs, in search of fresh world.
Then, I read Isaac Asimov's "The Final Problem" about the
thermodynamic heat death of the entire universe.
Sitaram - Eternal Be His Memory
Is immortality anything more than lasting memory....
But, I would settle for a thousand years...
Take a look at the battlefield dialog between Gaukos and Diomedes in
the Iliad, about generations of people as leaves...
"The loved that ended yesterday in Texas began 4,000 years ago in
Egypt" - Tom Wolfe "Look Homeward Angel"
Big Questions and Big Answers
I just realized that, whenever we say that something is a big
question, what we really mean is that it is that it is a question
which requires a big answer.
Someone recently asked me, "What is Zen?"; a small question requiring
a big answer.
I suppose a question might be big in the sense of the large crowd of
questioners asking it, clamoring for an answer.
Or big might be an ironic way to imply that there are no good answers.
A really good answer should make the question go away, in the sense
that it is no longer a question in anyones mind, for all minds have
been satisfied.
A good answer slays the question, like the fabled knight who slays
the dragon. Dragons are always guarding treasures. Dragon questions
guard hidden answers. The answer is both knight and booty. Questions
are like dragons because we say, "I shall take a shot at answering
that!"
I suppose eternal question can have only mortal answers.
In college, I wondered if the unanswerable question is the unmoved
mover of the soul.
Language has an odd habit of saying what it doesnt really mean and
meaning what it hesitates to say.
I was once seated in a waiting room so crowded that only one empty
seat remained. Someone entered the room, approached the seat
hesitantly, looked about and everyone and asked, "Is anybody sitting
here?" Now, of course, all could plainly see that the seat is empty.
After a while she stands up, announces "I shall be right back", and
steps into the hall. A new person enters and approaches the now empty
seat, but what do we all say? "Someone is sitting there!" Now,
everyone can plainly see that no one is sitting there.
Rhetorical questons never wait around for an answer, for, being
rhetorical, they are always on the move and flowing, like Heraclitus'
river. We might all very well be seated around a large seminar table,
but our leader says, "Let's move on to the next question." Naturally,
we all remain seated.
Someone will complain, "This discussion isn't going anywhere! What is
all this leading to?"
We are anxious to embark as knight errants on our quest for grails,
holy or otherwise, and ready to battle any dragons we meet along the
way.
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SFG75
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Joined: 14 Sep 2005
Posts: 133
Location: Nebraska
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| Posted: Sun Jul 23, 2006 8:39 am Post subject: Re: Finding Lasting Meaning and Purpose |
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| Quote: | | How do we find lasting meaning in a world where nothing lasts? |
The short answer? I would say that it comes along with people finding meaning through their various roles. "I'm a father," "I'm a good worker," "I'm a volunteer," etc. Some hope to leave a lasting impression in that regard. Faith and contemporary christianity picks up the slack where these things fall short, that is, "I'm a father and I have a cancer."
| Quote: | | What role may art or fiction play in our search for meaning? |
one definite role is helping us to realize that we are not immortal. John Keats wrote On Seeing the Elgin Marbles. I read this when I was a sophomore in college and I've never forgotten it. When one is in their early twenties, it's easy to feel immortal. You are young, have no physical problems, and can lift and run to such an extent that you swear you will be able to do so forever. The poem reads:
| Quote: | My spirit is too weak--mortality
Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,
And each imagin'd pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship, tells me I must die
Like a sick Eagle looking at the sky.
Yet 'tis a gentle luxury to weep
That I have not the cloudy winds to keep,
Fresh for the opening of the morning's eye.
Such dim-conceived glories of the brain
Bring round the heart an undescribable feud;
So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,
That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude
Wasting of old Time--with a billowy main--
A sun--a shadow of a magnitude. |
Source for the poem/
| Quote: | Our writings may become a virtual person. A corporation is a legal
fiction on a piece of paper with a seal, which has the status of
person in civil law. |
The amazing thing, especially when it comes to the arts, is that major works, paintings, poetry, novels, etc. often times take on a life of their own after the death of the given artist. And in some ways, perhaps it is a curse, to be a writer or mathematician and to make a famous discovery when one is young, only to live to a ripe old age and never to be able to replicate another example of greatness again. I'm not certain that I would want that. But the person has permanence, perhaps that is better than never knowing success at all. Forming a corporation is perhaps another way to attain immortality. One can see Standard Oil, Wal-Mart, and other companies, and know immediately who startd them. Even if Ford goes bankrupt, they will be remembered for ages.
| Quote: | Another reader remarks:
This is a loaded question. It assumes nothing lasts. How is it, then,
that I have read the Odyssey, or Sappho's poems, or Sumerian
documents 5,000 years old? And why does meaning have to be lasting?
Bang! Here is my loaded answer.
I too once thought as you, of lasting posterity.
Then I felt that our sun would end one day in a supernova.
Then I learned that our sun is too small for supernova.
Then I though of technology planning an escape, a Noah's ark of
genetic labs, piloted by immortal cyborgs, in search of fresh world.
Then, I read Isaac Asimov's "The Final Problem" about the
thermodynamic heat death of the entire universe. |
It is true that humans are social creatures. It's also true that we are historical creatures. We like to learn about and from others who came before us. An Epic of Gilgamesh, the Odyssey, or other such works lead us to examine our collective unconscious. If there ever was an argument for such a concept, it is the study of history and how we are so drawn to it.
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