[22.xii.25.b : lundi / 7 December] to find (in this case) is not a matter of chance, but of formulation … after a period of reading, meditation, prayer, composition, and contemplation : just at the point where the growth of my private library has been limited by material concerns, that is the moment when the ship can drop anchor, I can suit up, and prepare myself for a descent in the abysses. Fiction is an ethical expression, a way of living in the world, distinct from the strictures of realism. Fiction is the world in which we practice the art of escape, but not escape from, but an escape into the innermost, the highest. Just as I don’t need anyone to witness my reading, my meditation, my prayer, my contemplation, I don’t need anyone to witness my composition : but when taken altogether, the object is to reach a reader, to make contact : the symbols work both ways. When the Parson says, “Contact has been made,” he could be speaking for the Zebrafish and not on behalf of the Nucleus of the Swarm. What the Story shows is the defeat of “I see evil everywhere”. Some call it surrealism, but it’s good old fashion true fiction.

It’s funny thinking about V.W.’s anxieties, concerning the value of her work, I mean. Looking back … who knows what the future holds? V.W. writes:

“Robert Bridges likes Mrs Dalloway: says no one will read it; but it is beautifully written, & some more…”

better to be beautifully written than to be read … still it’s worth reading, esp. in that beautiful annotated edition.

Here’s the beginning of V.W.’s theory about fiction: “I don’t think it is a matter of ‘development’ but something to do with prose & poetry, in novels … Reality [is] something … put in at different distances … One would have to go into conventions; real life; & so on. … And death—as I always feel—hurrying near. 43: how many more books?”

I take “development” here to be progress in the sense of new approaches, new techniques … like what scientists & technologists are always going on about, what’s new! coz new sells. Just read Don Quixote. That could have been written yesterday. Not that I don’t think Anaïs Nin’s critique of the novel, her desire for a novel of the future, is on point. Novels are just a concept. Why should we buy their distinction between prose & poetry? Why is this not a poem? Is it that the one with the largest collection of the tiniest boxes wins? What kind of game is that? Not to mention the strain on the eyes.

Death. Death? Where is your … ding! time’s up!

Keep the books comin’ I say.

They called me the Ice Queen:

a framework of discarded beauty
     hung on a battered shape
     with firmness of flesh & blue of eye
the formidable manner has gone

the sun coming out
               having had my cry
     now, to write
            a list of Christmas presents

Good and evil are very powerful concepts, and they can slot themselves very eagerly at the centre of anyone's system of ethics, making them profoundly important to have a good grasp on. Generally most people's view of ethics aligns with either the solid absolutism of divine command (the way eg. of Abrahamic religions), or similar universalism (see: Kantian ethics), while a different take (eg. postmodern ethics) poses a more fundamental relativity to ethics, which necessarily take different faces with different cultures or even with different individuals. While I'm generally supportive of a position of ethical relativism, in itself it is a vacuous take, and it requires more nuance, or at least some heuristic model, for actually orienting ourselves in the daily life. In the interest of providing one, I'll take the long view.

We start out with simple matter: plasma was one of the first products of the Big Bang, its mere existence a miracle compared to what preceded it—nonexistence. Something from nothing. Being instead of non-being. And yet, such conditions of extremely hot and disordered matter are antithetical to all earthly life, and even after the cooling down it would become mere inanimated matter, the existential baseline that we call death. A miracle of miracles at the time, and yet things have moved so much further from there.

Eventually Earth developed life on it, starting with the unicellular being, capable of the basic life functions of eating, reproducing, and spreading. And its uncontrolled and global spread meant that Earth finally managed to get colonized by life! If such a thing happened today, such an overbearing spread would be called a plague.

After life on Earth got its wish to widely exist fulfilled, it then moved on to grander aims: no longer to merely exist, but to coexist! Life diversified, single cells gathered together to live as one greater whole, more complex beings emerged time after time, and more complex systems and ecosystems with them. Driven by the external factors like survival, competition and efficiency, life ever grew more complex, more organized, more interwoven. Across countless species, life on Earth self-organized not just to propagate but to regulate themselves and other life forms around them and the system as a whole (like lichens slowly turning stone into living matter, plants anchoring the earth to prevent landslides, or beavers slowing down the waters' flow to create widely accessible wetlands).

And all throughout, the old has not been subsumed: matter remains the foundation of existence. Unicellular beings remain the most prolific on Earth. Every next phase builds upon the last, not replacing but integrating. However hard-won, each piece of progress brings a greater, more complex harmony, taking the existing voices and weaving them into yet more intricate compositions. Notes into chords, and chords into symphonies.

As humans, we have picked up the very same torch—we call it by names like evolution, progress, advancement—and we've added layers of our own to the system, one after the other. We can see the same patterns at play in our technological advancements: each technology has empowered us to live in a more complex and refined way, and it has also in turn allowed us to achieve a yet further advancement, previously out of reach.

And each time this happens, we see the previous achievements as crude, wasteful, obsolete. The first car was steam-powered! Imagine the scene it would cause to stroll atop one on modern streets.

What we eg. understand nowadays as an universal good (access to internet) was not just unachievable, but unthinkable a mere 100 years ago. As times changed, we've adjusted our lifestyle, and with it our expectations and our dreams both. We change what we think is reasonable, and we change what we dream of to move yet further.

And this is recognizable as a fundamental quality of existence—we do not only merely live, but we reach for more. In Tarot, it is the fundament, the card zero: The Fool. Some term it the unstoppable march of progress, some the indomitable human spirit. Terence McKenna put it as the Universe's inexhaustible search for novelty, acting as a universal attractor towards some future point/state of being. This force we recognize as common to all of us, in our capacity to wish, to dream, to want, to pursue.

But, even though as we can be said to move in a single general direction, as much as we possess one broadly common goal, the process is still not obvious, and it doesn't happen all at once. Progress/evolution is a careful and gradual coaxing of the future out of time, and it happens piece by piece. Leonardo da Vinci dreamt of the helicopter, but only in the XX century did we become able to bring the technology to actually etch the dream into the concreteness of matter.

Not all dreams are suited to all times; life was unachievable shortly after the Big Bang. Same-day shipping of global products was a hard sell at the time of horse-drawn carriages. Each goal must be filtered through the bottleneck of present reality and tested through the limitations of current space-time. To the forward force of progress is paired its necessary nemesis: the attrition of present circumstances. This takes on many forms, such as material possibilities, tradition, conservativism, fear for the future, and the inertia present in both matter and souls.

This is a necessary counterbalance, for dreams can be excessive; they can be anachronistic; they can be misshapen. Or, they can be taken not seriously enough, for to condense a dream into reality is hard, long and laborious work. Dreams can be overvalued and they can be underestimated, and each of these situations makes them dangerous, for to bring an unfit dream forward is an act of violence, that takes apart the past to build something worse in its place. To pursue change for its own sake is mere disruption, and I bet most people in the tech space have gotten sick of the term by now. The forward march of progress is more like a game of attack and defense, a counterbalance between the impetus for the new-or-different and the resistance to change, which in its healthy functioning serves as a filter for worthy dreams.

As progress draws on, some dreams become too obsolete, too small to count as actual progress. To make an example of this, we can look at the modern economy. To chase the dream of individual profit and personal power, some people have ammassed power unto themselves, and used this power to make it easier for them to ammass more power, in an upwards spiral that reached modern heights of entire branches of present-day economy being dominated by monopolies, or more commonly organized oligopolies, where they are the only game in town and they have the power to keep that being the case, and such they decide their product quality not based on what can be done for the customer, but what the customer will not reject; and their prices not based on the manufacturing cost, but based on how much can be extorted out of each buyer. This has generated a global malaise that we all recognize, out of a dream that we can understand being unfit for our times.

Some dreams are too small for a circustance, and some are too big, and both are, in that moment, to be discarded. Good and evil, as such, become a matter not of what must be achieved but what can be achieved. Which, at the end of the day, is one of the most obvious moral concepts, that of doing one's best; however, it must be guided by the presence of mind that is able to tease apart the Possible in each singular circumstance. As it is called sometimes, such presence is the practice of truth seeking.

The propelling force behind the forward push for progress is the force for integration, for weaving parts into a coherent whole, pieces into a new machine, to order sounds into music, libraries into a tech stack, individuals into a community, a union, a family, a collective, a movement. “When two or three are gathered in my name, there I am,” where that “I am” was not about the man but the essence of the man: the common cause, the harmonizing factor; the divine amongst beings, resulting by the mere coherence of intent.

To bring about this further integration is the work of our highest faculties: consciousness, creativity, imagination and love; and it is a work that is always going on and never finished.