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Note on Being Here 

If we could ever model ultimate reality, I don’t see how we could visualise our model. It would be so complex, mathematically, that no modeller would be able to envisage what his own equations described. We’ll never get to the ‘end of things’, never quite say what ‘being here’ is about. ‘A world that was simple enough to be fully known would be too simple to contain conscious observers who might know it.’—John D. Barrow, Impossibility (Vintage, 1999).

My own recourse is to make up myths, yarns based on creatures whose remains I find ‘in layered cliffs’. With myth I fill in the gaps in my knowledge, the ‘faults in the cathedral dark’. My myths, and whatever fantasy creatures are in them, are based on actions I’ve understood, like family feuds, as I’ve suggested.

Even if I give my creation-myth some kind of mood that hints at an approval of life, it’s still be little more than the mood of a comic opera, ironic.

If I ease my frustration concerning not knowing with a limited, knowledge-bound method of analysing my myths, I may learn not to care about unreachable answers. The analysing game might be pastime enough. But is it really possible not to care, feeling like ‘a maggot dreaming in abstraction’s core’?

Far better than analysing is to open myself to feeling the world afresh ‘like a new child in a garden’. Easier said than done. After a life of feeling and analysing, I just may get a little deeper and ‘see a world I had not recognised before’. I can do this, my best, until the end of life, when ‘cliffs of mud come boiling to my door’. The alternative is not thinking at all, which is not an option.

Opera buffa: comic opera, especially of the 18^th century. Isis: in Egyptian mythology, goddess of fertility and motherhood, skilled in magic. She was sister-wife of Osiris, ruler of the dead. (See also the note on Iron Age). Urizen: In the mythology of William Blake, the Miltonic story of Lucifer’s expulsion from heaven is altered, and it is Urizen, the perverted, repressive reasoning of moral and scientific law, who is expelled from the abode of the Eternals and obtains control over the human world. Hamlet: the resemblance between the stories of Hamlet and Oedipus have made it tempting, since Freud, to imagine an assemblage of attitudes, a psychological ‘complex’, founded on family jealousies.

Alan Marshfield

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