Words, Concepts, Being

Language and the ouroboros

Exordium: a text born out of death

I’ve been reading Cormac McCarthy’s final work, which consists of the sibling novels The Passenger and Stella Maris. They were published only six months before the writer’s death, and so it is a work of his that is particularly interesting to me. What happens to you when you begin to realize I’m about to fucking die?¹ What becomes important? What ideas drove Cormac McCarthy to finish two more novels, when he’s already written a few of the greatest American novels of all time?

The books are cosmic, terrifying, and beautiful.² They feel like a sweeping exploration of nothing less than humanity itself; from our ancient dreams to the frontiers of our discovery, from the agony of love and friendship to the turmoil and insanity of an individual’s inner experience. They ring with echoes of Schopenhauer. They are dripping with morbidity, and cloaked in fear.

They follow Bobby and Alicia Western, whose father worked on the development of the atomic bomb. Much of it is the characters discussing science, math, and philosophy. The Passenger follows Bobby as he travels and encounters old friends, discussing life, belief, death, and fear; and Alicia as she holds discussions with the hallucination which haunts her, “The Kid,” a fast-talking, bald, and generally wretched dwarf with flippers instead of hands, who is constantly spewing urgent philosophical/scientific-sounding nonsense³ that seems as if it is almost getting at something true and important, and might be the entire point of the book. Stella Maris consists entirely of dialogue between Alicia—who, though insane, is a veritable math genius—and a psychiatrist, who struggles to understand Alicia’s exploration of esoteric mathematical truths.

Throughout, the books are fixated on death. The title of The Passenger is never fully elucidated but is suggestive of the passage into death, or the unequivocal transience of life. There is repeatedly the suggestion of a longing for death—Bobby gives up an academic career for racecar driving, and after that earns him a brush with death he transitions to salvage diving even though he is terrified of the depths. Alicia waxes romantically about “never having been” to her psychiatrist before she kills herself.

Part 1: reality can’t be grasped

Many of the questions explored in these novels echo Cormac McCarthy’s only published work of nonfiction, written during his time at the Sante Fe Institute. “The Kekulé Problem” is an essay about the unconscious mind and language; how powerful the unconscious mind is, and how bewildering and obscure it is, and why it must be non-linguistic, dramatic, and mystical. I find it oddly compelling that this is the only essay he ever published, as if this question consumed him so severely that he couldn’t help not writing it.

He names the problem of the non-linguistic unconscious after August Kekulé, the pioneering chemist who is famous for discovering the structure of the benzene molecule by way of a dream in which he sees the ouroboros—the ancient alchemical symbol of the snake eating its tail. The problem is: why was the solution revealed to Kekulé through arcane symbolism in a strange dream? Why couldn’t his unconscious have simply told him what the structure of the molecule was?

To further motivate the Kekulé Problem, consider how language processing happens unconsciously. For instance, reading happens automatically and effortlessly. You cannot help but comprehend these words. You cannot see the word “chair” and not immediately obtain the concept of a chair. And when you speak or write, you are manifesting language, harnessing your thoughts, but the workings of that process are completely unavailable to you.⁴ You cannot explain how you convert the thought into language, because you are completely unaware of this process. How does it occur? You might misspeak, mispronounce something or fail to recall a word, or you might not communicate what you’re thinking so perfectly. But the mechanisms of these failures will also be a mystery to you. 

Language feels automatic and fundamental, but there is this mystery lurking beneath it, one that also implicates all problem solving and creativity. “The core question is not how you do math but how does the unconscious do it,” says Alicia Western.⁵ This is the Kekulé Problem. McCarthy’s essay is short and easy to read, but I’ll summarize it here for our purposes. He explains the non-linguistic unconscious by first acknowledging that humans come from a protozoic lineage.⁶ Our minds were non-linguistic, but still complex and still effective for a very, very long time. The unconscious mind is powerful but non-linguistic, and at odds with the conscious mind,⁷ simply because it is much older.⁸

From there he moves to the nature and origins of language. He explains “the central idea of language”:

that one thing can be another thing. It is the idea that Helen Keller suddenly understood at the well. That the sign for water was not simply what you did to get a glass of water. It was the glass of water. It was in fact the water in the glass.

I am reminded of two works of fiction which play with the relationship between words, concepts, and objects. The first is Don DeLillo’s White Noise, which revolves around a drug, Dylar, which has the fantastic function of curing the fear of death and the unfortunate side effect of hindering your ability to separate words from the things they represent—an abuser of the drug hears the words “hail of bullets” and ducks for cover in terror.⁹

Then there is, of course, Borges’s “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” The story describes the meta-fictional world of Tlön, created by a generations-old secret society called Orbis Tertius. On Tlön, subjective idealism is true, meaning that subjective consciousness is the only thing that is actually real, and objective reality is a mere fabrication of the mind. As a result, concrete objects and their associated abstract ideas are inextricably metaphysically linked. Imperfect copies of objects can be created by simply thinking about them—such objects are called hrönir. Valuable and archaeologically significant objects can even be wished into existence on Tlön—these objects are called ur. Objects will also vanish if they are forgotten.¹⁰ The story takes what McCarthy says is the central idea of language to the extreme—there is no distinction between words and the things they represent, no distinction between concepts and objects.

In “The Kekulé Problem,” Cormac McCarthy arrives at what he is sure is the origin of language, something akin to the arrival of the monolith in 2001:

That some unknown thinker sat up one night in his cave and said: Wow. One thing can be another thing.

It goes without saying that this was an important event in human history.¹¹

The simple understanding that one thing can be another thing is at the root of all things of our doing. From using colored pebbles for the trading of goats to art and language and on to using symbolic marks to represent pieces of the world too small to see.

As it turns out, Werner Heisenberg was also obsessed with the Kekulé Problem. Or a generalization of it: “How does language both enable and interfere with our grasp of reality?” is the way the problem is framed in an essay by William Eggington titled “Quantum Poetics” that juxtaposes writings of Heisenberg and our friend Borges.

Heisenberg was thinking about the difference between the way scientists use language and the way poets use language. While scientists are constantly wrangling language into something objective and static, throttling its fluidity, so that meaning is perfectly concrete; poets are constantly playing with language, letting it flourish, taking advantage of its fluidity.

What is sacrificed in “static” description is that infinitely complex association among words and concepts without which we would lack any sense at all that we have understood anything of the infinite abundance of reality.¹²

Heisenberg realized the same thing as McCarthy: that the power of language lies not in its meaning per se, but in its fluidity of meaning. The way it liquifies reality. We can harness phenomena by naming them, and we can bring things into existence by merely describing them. These things are called ur. I mean theorems.

Heisenberg did a similar thought experiment to that of Borges’s story “Funes the Memorious,” which is about a man with perfect perception and memory. (Alicia Western also has some Memorious qualities.¹³) So complete and raw was his perception that he refused to identify a dog viewed at one moment in time with the same dog viewed at another moment in time. Similarly, Heisenberg wondered what it would mean to perceive perfectly, and this is how he arrived at the famous Uncertainty Principle.

Perhaps more importantly, as a consequence of the Uncertainty Principle, Heisenberg concluded that “a complete and exact depiction of reality can never be achieved.” A few years later Gödel would prove the incompleteness of mathematics, cementing Heisenberg’s realization.

But now we’ve generalized again. We’re talking about something broader than how language modulates our grasp of reality—we’re talking about whether reality is something you can grasp. The Passenger happens to agree with Heisenberg:

She knew that in the end you really cant know. You cant get hold of the world. You can only draw a picture. Whether it’s a bull on the wall of a cave or a partial differential equation it’s all the same thing.

You can’t get hold of the world: this, I feel, is one of the main things McCarthy wanted us to take away from his final work.

Part 2: the symbol of Kekulé’s dream

And yet humanity has been trying to get hold of the world since the invention of language. Such was the effort Kekulé was undertaking when he dreamed the ouroboros, and the ouroboros itself is an indication of this effort, speaking to us across millennia. It appears as early as the 14th century BC, in the Ancient Egyptian Enigmatic Book of the Netherworld, a yet-undeciphered text buried with Tutankhamun (“King Tut”), presumably meant to aid his transition into immortality. In Ancient Egypt, the ouroboros represented death, the beginning and end of time, and the formless disorder of the world. The ouroboros also features prominently in Norse mythology, most notably as Jörmungandr, the undersea serpent which encircles the world holding its tail in its mouth. The myth states that when he releases his tail, Ragnarök will begin: the battle that will end the world and submerge it underwater, from which depths it will begin anew.

The ouroboros appears in association with Gnosticism—a broad group of loosely cohered religious sects that stemmed from Christianity and Judaism in the early common era—in texts like the Pistis Sophia (circa 4th century AD), where it could be said to represent the belief that “the so-called ‘dualism’ of the divine and the earthly is really a reflection and expression of the defining tension that constitutes the being of humanity—the human being” (IEP). Gnostic cosmology holds the entire physical universe as inherently evil, created by a malevolent demiurge or lesser god. A similar cosmology is suggested in The Passenger and Stella Maris;¹⁴ there are frequent references to the horror and evil of the material world, and Alicia Western has a vision of a being she calls the “Archatron,” which could be interpreted as the Gnostic demiurge.

Gnosticism revolves around a disdain for the material world and a belief in salvation through mysticism and esoteric insight. As a world lacking material reality, Tlön would be something close to the Gnostic conception of heaven, and Orbis Tertius, the secret society which created the world of Tlön, is described as being concerned with “the cabala,” which in context could be interpreted as Gnostic study. It is also said to be concerned with “hermetic studies”—Hermeticism is a religion related to Gnosticism and also associated with the ouroboros, based on writings (circa as early as 3rd century BC) attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, a deity which is the amalgamation of the Greek god Hermes (the guide of souls into the afterlife) and the Egyptian god Thoth (god of wisdom, writing, science, and magic).

Hermeticism is in turn closely associated with the ancient art of alchemy, one of humanity’s earliest systematic efforts to get hold of the world. Alchemy is the subject most closely associated with the ouroboros, where it represents “the unity of all things, material and spiritual, which never disappear but perpetually change form in an eternal cycle of destruction and recreation” (Britannica). The ouroboros is depicted in ancient texts like the Chrysopoeia of Cleopatra the Alchemist (circa 3rd century AD), along with the words “all is one.” Later it would be depicted in manuscripts such as the colorful Aurora Consurgens (15th century AD), where it is a visual metaphor for the cosmic principle of unity. 

For the alchemists, the ouroboros symbolized their view of reality as something unified and fluid. They imposed this view on the minutiae of substance, and this is what gave them the belief that lead could be turned into gold. As it turns out, the alchemists weren’t that far off in their understanding of the material world; substances really are quite transmutable—after all, this is what chemistry is all about. Kekulé himself was an alchemist. I mean a chemist. And what the alchemists failed to understand was only that the transmutability of the material world is limited, as substances are divided into 118 untransmutable elements. 

Well. Mostly untransmutable. Stars transmute hydrogen into helium and helium into the rest of the periodic table through iron and beyond. And here’s another alchemical formula, one that was known to Heisenberg and the Westerns: combine some uranium-235, a burst of energy, and a medium-sized city; you get some barium, some krypton, and a plane of glass death.

Illustrations from the Chrysopoeia of Cleopatra the Alchemist.

The alchemists were influenced by Democritus, the pre-socratic philosopher who named the atom in the 4th century BC, and conceived of matter—indeed, the material world—as something which is never created nor destroyed, but perpetually in motion, changing form, over 2,000 years before the first atom bomb transmuted the sand in the desert. Some of the earliest alchemical writings, the Physika Kai Mystika, are pseudepigrapha attributed to Democritus. Democritus was probably influenced by Heraclitus, who conceived of the world and matter as something that is constantly in flux¹⁵ in the 5th century BC. What survives of his philosophy resembles the Zen Koans.

All things come into being by conflict of opposites, and the sum of things flows like a stream.

Heraclitus was nicknamed “The Obscure,” and mocked even by his contemporaries for believing it was possible for two contradictory things to be true simultaneously. An affront to logic for thousands of years, but something science has had to confront ever since Schrödinger named his cat.

Part 3: all nouns are verbs

One of the greatest philosophers of our time, Michael Stevens, asks: Do Chairs Exist?

Of course chairs exist. A chair is an object composed of atoms. But, which atoms? If I removed individual atoms from a chair in sequence, at what point would it stop being a chair? Even harder, at what point would it stop being the same chair that we started with?

And what are you? You are something made out of atoms, right? But which atoms? Do you count the atoms that compose the bacteria in your gut microbiome? No? But you wouldn’t survive without them. And what about the fact that you are a Ship of Theseus, have you considered that? All, or nearly all, of the atoms in your body are different from the atoms that composed your body 10 or so years ago. If what you are is a thing made out of atoms, what if someone followed you around for 10 years, and collected all the atoms that left your body, all the oxygen and all the skin, and they reconstructed a perfect copy of you? Would that also be you? What identifies you with the person you were 10 years ago, or the person you will be 10 years from now?

If you actually try to reason about identity, or even the ontology of simple objects, you find yourself twisted up in all sorts of logical paradoxes. Here too, reality refuses to be grasped. I think this was the knot Plato was trying to get himself out of when he came up with the Theory of Forms. He got around these paradoxes by positing that the material world is less real than the world of concepts, which existed as a realm independent of mind and matter. A chair is a chair because it embodies the concept of a chair. It contains the chair essence, the ineffable thing which makes a chair a chair, the thing without which a thing would decidedly not be a chair. Because otherwise, you simply can’t say what makes a chair a chair. Therefore all concepts must exist in their own realm, and all objects must be imperfect replicas of the perfect forms which exist in that realm of ideal concepts. All objects are hrönir.

Besides that, the least logically offensive position is that all that really exists is stuff, perpetually changing form. Says Democritus:

That atoms and the vacuum were the beginning of the universe; and that everything else existed only in opinion.

The existence of concepts, or of objects as self-contained things that can be distinguished from other objects or the atoms which compose them, is merely a fabrication the mind imposes on reality.¹⁶ It may be useful. But it’s not exactly real. So Borges isn’t just fabricating an interesting fantastical reality in Tlön, he is saying something about our actual reality,¹⁷ because in fact all objects of our world are ur, wished into existence by linguistic minds in an attempt to get hold of the world.

As for yourself, the best you can do is say that you are a continuous transformation of matter, memories, and conscious states. What you are is not a noun but a verb. A process, like a wave in the ocean. And as Carl Sagan said, “you are made out of star stuff;” you are composed of the same atoms transmuted by stars eons ago, and those same atoms will scatter after you die and become something else. So it goes, as all things exist in unity, perpetually changing form. The same thing was taught by Alan Watts: “the universe doesn’t contain people, the universe ‘peoples.’” A chair isn’t a chair—it couldn’t be—it is reality chair-ing. I am not Dawson, I am reality Dawson-ing. “We are not made of atoms, we are performed by atoms,” says Michael Stevens, and: 

We are not the universe seeing itself—we are the seeing. I am not a thing that dies and becomes scattered—I am death, and I am the scattering.

This way of being is immediate to the people of Tlön because of their languages. There are no nouns. In the southern hemisphere, the people speak Ursprache, a language that describes reality only by way of elaborate constructions of verbs.

The world for them is not a concourse of objects in space; it is a heterogeneous series of independent acts. It is successive and temporal, not spatial. There are no nouns in Tlön’s conjectural Ursprache, from which the “present” lan­guages and the dialects are derived: there are impersonal verbs, modified by monosyllabic suffixes (or prefixes) with an adverbial value. For example: there is no word corresponding to the word “moon,” but there is a verb which in English would be “to moon” or “to moonate.” “The moon rose above the river” is hlör u fang axaxaxas mlö, or literally: “upward behind the on­streaming it mooned.”

This is also part of the symbolism of the ouroboros, the way in which reality is fundamentally and always in motion, and it appears in The Passenger, too.

There were no starry skies prior to the first sentient and ocular being to behold them. Before that all was blackness and silence.

And yet it moved.

And yet it moved. All things are processes; all nouns are verbs; all objects hrönir; all thoughts, concepts, theorems, dreams, desires, and wishes ur.

This was taught by the Buddha as anattā. Anattā is usually translated as “non-self,” and commonly interpreted as the assertion of the illusory nature of the experience of self, but it’s better interpreted as the assertion “that no unchanging, permanent self or essence can be found in any phenomenon.” In other words, anattā is the assertion of non-essentialism, of radical anti-Platonism.

Anattā wasn’t taught by the Buddha as a mere philosophical conclusion, but as an empirical truth; a facet of reality directly observable by the mind.

(I remember a particular moment, early in my mindfulness practice, when something like anattā bared itself to me. I was in the shower, not making any particular effort, when the whole world was suddenly immediate, making its way through me, articulating me, so that I was nothing but the water running over my body, the white noise, the droplets running down the glass, the heat and the steam; all very much a unified flux, a single verb. The illusory noun-ness of moment-to-moment experience evaporated, just for an instant.)

Normal experience is so bound up with concepts that they actually get in the way of your connection to reality. As a simple example, consider an object, any object currently visible to you, like a chair. You see it and you think: chair. If not the word then you think the concept of chair. We comprehend reality much in the same way we comprehend a text, that is, we are helpless not to understand the concepts immediately. You can see how Plato’s essentialism was compelling. But with proper interrogation the actual experience of anything is so much more than that: it is bright and clear and textured and infinitely interesting. Pay attention and no words will bear the fullness of experience.

This was a constant state of being for Funes the Memorious, and it became a curse. One way of describing him is that he gained perfect perception and memory, another is that he lost his grasp on concepts.¹⁸

This is presumably how an infant experiences the world. No concepts have been developed, and so life is just this cascade of undifferentiated experience. The first two years of your life are mostly an agonizing psychedelic effort to organize all of experience into something with which your brain can tango. I like to think that this is why they cry all the time.¹⁹ Erich Neumann uses the ouroboros as a representation of this “pre-ego dawn state” (perhaps as fitting an English translation of anattā as any) of infants in The Origins and History of Consciousness.

The Zen ensō. I can’t help but notice a resemblance to the ouroboros.

I take a sip of this esoteric soup and I taste the ouroboros, my own personal interpretation of it. I see it as representing the syncretism of all of these myths, religions, and philosophies—the centroid of all attempts to grasp reality. It is hard not to when it exposes all of this overlap and recurrence across ages and cultures.

The point of myth is to grasp the mystery of being. It is a project that is doomed to fail—even with our modern capabilities, being remains mysterious. Materialist descriptions can’t explain identity, let alone consciousness, and present ontological paradoxes. Even without paradoxes, if you try to get too precise you run into the limitations of static language that Heisenberg described. Much like objective reality, subjective being cannot be grasped.

We can only point to components of being. For instance, memory is a crucial component. It certainly seems as least that if you had no memory at all you would scarcely be. But does that make Funes the Memorious, with a perfect memory, a more whole human? If you read the story you will come to the opposite conclusion. He is a shell of a person.

Language is another component of being we can point to. Somehow human experience is tightly bound with language. A writer can string words together and beam a unified experience straight into your skull. So what is language, where does it come from, and why and how is the unconscious non-linguistic? To me, these questions seem relatively easy to answer, at least provisionally. Language is something that bridges islands of consciousness. And the unconscious is, rather than what Jung would like you to believe, simply that in the mind of which we are not conscious; it is necessarily non-linguistic because language by its very nature is a thing of consciousness. If we were hypothetically aware of the unconscious precursor for language, well then that thing itself would be language, and what we call language currently would be superfluous, and never would have developed. If the unconscious were linguistic and we were by that instrument privy to its machinations, well then it wouldn’t be the unconscious—it would just be another part of your conscious thinking mind.

So the Kekulé Problem isn’t really about why the unconscious is non-linguistic—that much is necessary and obvious—it’s about the question of why the unconscious is so powerful, and how terrifying that is. And language, I think, did not come from the moment some unknown thinker sat up in his cave and realized one thing can be another thing, it came from the moment he, for the first time ever, experienced the very human urge to tear down the walls around his mind—perhaps that moment was the birth of humanity—and so he inflicted language upon his contemporaries.²⁰ From that moment on the mystery of being was not something isolated and introspective, it was something shared and imperative, and the conditions were then ripe for myths to be born.

One thing all myths share is they all grapple with death. Because death is another significant component of being. It permeates it and surrounds it all,²¹ it is mixed in with the elixir of life. This is a big part of The Passenger and Stella Maris. Cormac McCarthy is pointing to death as a component of being. “The liquor of being is leaking out onto the ground,” Alicia Western says, contemplating death, and:

You need to hurry. But the haste itself is consuming what you wish to preserve. You cant deal with what it is you’ve been sent to deal with. It’s too hard.

Excursus: the mark of great writing

David Foster Wallace said that “fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.” This is why there will always be fiction to write and even more to read. It’s not written in what Heisenberg called static language, so it will never converge on an “answer” to the mystery of being. But that’s okay—that’s good—because there is no answer to find besides the bold fact of being, which is reified by every myth and every good work of fiction.

It is obvious to me that The Passenger and Stella Maris are examples of great writing. As always when I read something like this I got to wondering what is it that makes them great. After all, the examples of truly great writing are wildly different in so many ways. They must not all be sweeping explorations of humanity. Great writing can be complex or simple, grand or pitiful, long or short, pleasurable or painful, emotional or contemplative, beautiful or grotesque; and it can be many of these contradictory things simultaneously. There is great writing that you like and writing that you don’t like but that you must acknowledge is great. For me, Cormac McCarthy himself is an example of this: I read Blood Meridian,²² widely regarded as one of the best American novels ever, and I didn’t like it. Still, I knew that there was greatness in it, and I even felt that I would have to return to it eventually.

As I was writing this exploration of Cormac McCarthy’s final work, and I was continuously returning to all of these excerpts and was continuously stirred by them, I had the thought that the mark of great writing is that it rewards paying more attention.

Literature promises understanding and insight in return for attention. It is both the opposite of—and the cure for—those technologies that exist today which demand your attention and give nothing in return.²³ It is the mythology of our time, mythology refined to a cutting edge.

Of course, there is no single criterion for something as complex and mysterious as great writing; any attempt to characterize it will surely fail. All I know is the feeling you are left with after reading something great: the feeling that you could have paid better attention to it. The longing. You wish to return to it.²⁴ This is the feeling I was left with when I put down The Passenger, and then again when I put down Stella Maris; that I wanted to pick them up again. Like a snake eating its tail.

---

I feel such gratitude for Brian Leli, who pointed me to “Quantum Poetics” and gifted me the Jung material, and also provided feedback on a draft of this essay; and Henrik Karlsson, who graciously read multiple drafts, gave advice, and pushed me to work harder on these ideas.

I dont think there is some way to prepare for death. You have to make one up. There’s no evolutionary advantage to being good at dying. Who would you leave it to? The thing you are dealing with—time—is immalleable. Except that the more you harbor it the less of it you have. The liquor of being is leaking out onto the ground. You need to hurry. But the haste itself is consuming what you wish to preserve. You cant deal with what it is you’ve been sent to deal with. It’s too hard.

1. Stella Maris.

Here is a story. The last of all men who stands alone in the universe while it darkens about him. Who sorrows all things with a single sorrow. Out of the pitiable and exhausted remnants of what was once his soul he’ll find nothing from which to craft the least thing godlike to guide him in these last of days.

2. The Passenger.

He gestured at the black and lapping sea. Suppose the floor gave way and the whole fucking thing drained off into some unguessed world of caverns deep in the earth? Vasty and black. You could walk down to the bottom and have a look around. Just a huge great chowder flailing around in the muck. Whales and squids. Your plate-eyed krakens with their eighty foot long testicles. Then a big smell and then nothing. Whoops. Where’d everybody go?

3. The Passenger.

Talking is just recording what you’re thinking. It’s not the thing itself. When I’m talking to you some separate part of my mind is composing what I’m about to say. But it’s not yet in the form of words. So what is it in the form of? There’s certainly no sense of some homunculus whispering to us the words we’re about to say. Aside from raising the spectre of an infinite regress—as in who is whispering to the whisperer—it raises the question of a language of thought. Part of the general puzzle of how we get from the mind to the world. A hundred billion synaptic events clicking away in the dark like blind ladies at their knitting. When you say: How shall I put this? What is the this that you are trying to put?

4. Stella Maris.

The core question is not how you do math but how does the unconscious do it. How is it that it’s demonstrably better at it than you are? You work on a problem and then you put it away for a while. But it doesnt go away. It reappears at lunch. Or while you’re taking a shower. It says: Take a look at this. What do you think? Then you wonder why the shower is cold. Or the soup. Is this doing math? I’m afraid it is. How is it doing it? We dont know. I’ve posed the question to some pretty good mathematicians. How does the unconscious do math? Some who’d thought about it and some who hadnt. For the most part they seemed to think it unlikely that the unconscious went about it the same way we did. What was surprising to me was the insouciance with which they greeted this news. As if the very nature of mathematics had not just been hauled into the dock. A few thought that if it had a better way of doing mathematics it ought to tell us about it.

Well, maybe. Or maybe it thinks we’re not smart enough to understand it.

[...]

And the deeper question, which we touched on, is that if mathematical work is performed mostly in the unconscious we still have no notion as to how it goes about it. You can try and picture the inner mind adding and subtracting and muttering and erasing and beginning again but you wont get very far. And why is it so often right? Who does it check its work with? I’ve had solutions to problems simply handed to me. Out of the blue. The locus ceruleus perhaps. And it has to remember everything. No notes. It’s hard to escape the unsettling conclusion that it’s not using numbers.

5. Stella Maris.

Just as the human body represents a whole museum of organs, each with a long evolutionary history behind it, so we should expect to find that the mind is organized in a similar way. It can no more be a product without history than is the body in which it exists. By “history” I do not mean the fact that the mind builds itself up by conscious reference to the past through language and other cultural traditions. I am referring to the biological, prehistoric, and unconscious development of the mind in archaic man, whose psyche was still close to that of the animal.

6. Jung, Man and His Symbols.

In everyday life one thinks out what one wants to say, selects the most telling way of saying it, and tries to make one’s remarks logically coherent. For instance, an educated person will seek to avoid a mixed metaphor because it may give a muddled impression of his point. But dreams have a different texture. Images that seem contradictory and ridiculous crowd in on the dreamer, the normal sense of time is lost, and commonplace things can assume a fascinating or threatening aspect.

It may seem strange that the unconscious mind should order its material so differently from the seemingly disciplined pattern that we can impose on our thoughts in waking life. Yet anyone who stops for a moment to recall a dream will be aware of this contrast, which is in fact one of the main reasons why the ordinary person finds dreams so hard to understand. They do not make sense in terms of his normal waking experience, and he therefore is inclined either to disregard them or to confess that they baffle him.

7. Jung, Man and His Symbols.

It solves problems and is perfectly capable of telling us the answers. But million year old habits die hard. It could easily say: Kekulé, it’s a fucking ring. But it feels more comfortable cobbling up a hoop snake and rolling it around inside Kekule’s skull while he’s dozing in front of the fire.

8. Stella Maris.

I said, as a test, “Falling plane.”

He looked at me, gripping the arms of the chair, the first signs of panic building in his eyes.

“Plunging aircraft,” I said, pronouncing the words crisply, authoritatively.

He kicked off his sandals, folded himself over into the recommended crash position, head well forward, hands clasped behind his knees. He performed the maneuver automatically, with a double-jointed collapsible dexterity, throwing himself into it, like a child or a mime. Interesting.

[…]

I said to him gently, “Hail of bullets.” [..]

He hit the floor, began crawling toward the bathroom, looking back over his shoulder, childlike, miming, using principles of heightened design but showing real terror, brilliant cringing fear. I followed him into the toilet, passing the full-length mirror where he’d undoubtedly posed with Babette, his shaggy member dangling like a ruminant’s.

“Fusillade,” I whispered.

He tried to wriggle behind the bowl, both arms over his head, his legs tight together. I loomed in the doorway, conscious of looming, seeing myself from Mink’s viewpoint, magnified, threatening. It was time to tell him who I was. […]

9. DeLillo, White Noise.

Centuries and centuries of idealism have not failed to influence reality. In the most ancient regions of Tlön, the duplication of lost objects is not infrequent. Two persons look for a pencil; the first finds it and says nothing; the second finds a second pencil, no less real, but closer to his expectations. These secondary objects are called hrönir and are, though awkward in form, somewhat longer. Until recently, the hrönir were the accidental prod­ucts of distraction and forgetfulness. It seems unbelievable that their methodical production dates back scarcely a hundred years, but this is what the Eleventh Volume tells us. The first efforts were unsuccessful. However, the modus operandi merits descrip­tion. The director of one of the state prisons told his inmates that there were certain tombs in an ancient river bed and promised freedom to whoever might make an important discovery. During the months preceding the excavation the inmates were shown photographs of what they were to find. This first effort proved that expectation and anxiety can be inhibitory; a week’s work with pick and shovel did not manage to unearth anything in the way of a hrön except a rusty wheel of a period posterior to the experiment. But this was kept secret and the process was repeated later in four schools. In three of them the failure was almost complete; in the fourth (whose director died accidentally during the first excavations) the students unearthed—or produced—a gold mask, an archaic sword, two or three clay urns and the moldy and mutilated torso of a king whose chest bore an in­scription which it has not yet been possible to decipher. Thus was discovered the unreliability of witnesses who knew of the ex­perimental nature of the search… Mass investigations produce contradictory objects; now individual and almost improvised jobs are preferred. The methodical fabrication of hrönir (says the Eleventh Volume) has performed prodigious services for archaeologists. It has made possible the interrogation and even the modification of the past, which is now no less plastic and docile than the future. Curiously, the hrönir of second and third degree—the hrönir derived from another hrön, those derived from the hrön of a hrön—exaggerate the aberrations of the initial one; those of fifth degree are almost uniform; those of ninth degree become confused with those of the second; in those of the eleventh there is a purity of line not found in the original. The process is cyclical: the hrön of twelfth degree begins to fall off in quality. Stranger and more pure than any hrön is, at times, the ur: the object produced through suggestion, seduced by hope. The great golden mask I have mentioned is an illustrious example.

Things become duplicated in Tlön; they also tend to become effaced and lose their details when they are forgotten. A classic example is the doorway which survived so long as it was visited by a beggar and disappeared at his death. At times some birds, a horse, have saved the ruins of an amphitheater.

10. Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.”

The actual issue is that someone a hundred thousand years ago sat up in his robes and said Holy Shit. Sort of. He didnt have a language yet. But what he had just understood is that one thing can be another thing. Not look like it or act upon it. Be it. Stand for it. Pebbles can be goats. Sounds can be things. The name for water is water. What seems inconsequential to us by reason of usage is in fact the founding notion of civilization. Language, art, mathematics, everything. Ultimately the world itself and all in it.

11. Stella Maris.

Alright. It’s not just that I dont have to write things down. There’s more to it than that. What you write down becomes fixed. It takes on the constraints of any tangible entity. It collapses into a reality estranged from the realm of its creation. It’s a marker. A roadsign. You have stopped to get your bearings, but at a price. You’ll never know where it might have gone if you’d left it alone to go there. In any conjecture you’re always looking for weaknesses. But sometimes you have the sense that you should hold off. Be patient. Have a little faith. You really want to see what the conjecture itself is going to drag up out of the murk. I dont know how one does mathematics. I dont know that there is a way. The idea is always struggling against its own realization. Ideas come with an innate skepticism, they dont just go barreling ahead. And these doubts have their origin in the same world as the idea itself. And that’s not something you really have access to. So the reservations that you yourself in your world of struggle bring to the table may actually be alien to the path of these emerging structures. Their own intrinsic doubts are steering mechanisms while yours are more like brakes. Of course the idea is going to come to an end anyway. Once a mathematical conjecture is formalized into a theory it may have a certain luster to it but with rare exceptions you can no longer entertain the illusion that it holds some deep insight into the core of reality. It has in fact begun to look like a tool.

12. The Passenger.

I dont have the luxury of forgetting things. I was probably eight or nine before I realized that things went away. When people said that they didnt remember I thought it meant that they just didnt want to talk about it. Where I live things dont go away. Everything that has happened is pretty much still here.

13. Stella Maris.

I had this recurring dream of you. […] Alone on the ocean floor in your indiarubber unionsuit. Fleeing some yawning subduction. You struggled in those hadal deeps like a man wading through mucilage while the pugs of your leaden shoes closed slowly in the loam behind you. The plates creaking. The clouds of silt rolling slowly up to engulf you. Your lamp had eked out and you were left to make your way in the eerie light of the ancient fumaroles smoking in the distance like standing candles. There was something more than poetic in your flight before those hellish sealamps out of whose sulphurous womb it well may be that life itself was brokered in the long ago.

You told me.

Did I? I forget. In their recollections dream and life acquire an oddly merging egality. And I’ve come to suspect that the ground we walk is less of our choosing than we imagine. And all the while a past we hardly even knew is rolled over into our lives like a dubious investment. The history of these times will be long in the sorting, Squire. But if there is a common keel to our understanding it is that we are flawed. At our core that is what we know.

You think that we loathe ourselves.

I do. Insufficient to our deserts, of course. But yes.

So how bad is the world?

How bad. The world’s truth constitutes a vision so terrifying as to beggar the prophecies of the bleakest seer who ever walked it. Once you accept that then the idea that all of this will one day be ground to powder and blown into the void becomes not a prophecy but a promise.

14. The Passenger.

You said once that a moment in time was a contradiction since there could be no moveless thing. That time could not be constricted into a brevity that contradicts its own definition.

15. The Passenger.

Perhaps it may be easier to understand this point if we first realize the fact that the ideas with which we deal in our apparently disciplined waking life are by no means as precise as we like to believe. On the contrary, their meaning (and their emotional significance for us) becomes more imprecise the more closely we examine them. The reason for this is that anything we have heard or experienced can become subliminal—that is to say, can pass into the unconscious. And even what we retain in our conscious mind and can reproduce at will has acquired an unconscious undertone that will color the idea each time it is recalled. Our conscious impressions, in fact, quickly assume an element of unconscious meaning that is physically significant for us, though we are not consciously aware of the existence of this subliminal meaning or of the way in which it both extends and confuses the conventional meaning.

16. Jung, Man and His Symbols.

“Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” is a good short story not only because it opens reality to other ways of perceiving it but also because it provides an outside view of the way we see it now: the notion that we are living in a reality whose fundamental premises have been laid down by a secret society through its descriptions of the world is not as far-fetched as it seems at first glance. For what are Isaac Newton, Carl von Linné, Immanuel Kant, Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel, Marie Curie, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Albert Einstein, and Simone de Beauvoir if not a society whose writings not only influence but perhaps even constitute our way of perceiving and understanding reality? If we were to remove from our culture the insights that Newton, von Linné, Kant, Darwin, Mendel, Curie, Freud, Marx, Einstein, de Beauvoir, and other hegemonic writers have put forth in the past centuries, not only would our thinking change, so would reality itself: it would come to resemble the world as it appeared during the sixteenth century, interpreted in light of the Bible and its teachings, with a history dating back only a few thousand years, where the forces to which human beings were subjected belonged in the realm of the divine. The people who lived during that era also inhabited a space in which the world appeared in ways agreed on by all, and the question is whether their world was any less true than ours.

17. Knausgaard, Inadvertent.

I suspect, however, that he was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions. In the teeming world of Funes, there were only details, almost immediate in their presence.

18. Borges, “Funes the Memorious.”

I would suppose that the reason infants are not more horrified at being dumped into the world is simply that their capacity for horror and fear and outrage is not all that well developed. Yet. The child’s brain the day before its birth is the same brain as the day after. But everything else is different. It probably takes them a while to accept that this thing which follows them around is them. After all, they’ve never seen it before. They have to hook up the visual to the tactile. The newborn are probably not that quick to ascribe reality to the visual. And ascribing reality is pretty much what they’re being called upon to do.

[…]

Why cant they just be wet? Or hungry?

They can. But these are normally just things that you complain about and not things over which you scream in agony.

19. The Passenger.

I got to wondering why they cry all the time… Animals might whimper if they are hungry or cold. But they don’t start screaming. It’s a bad idea. The more noise you make the more likely you are to be eaten. If you’ve no way to escape you keep silent. If birds couldnt fly they wouldnt sing. When you’re defenseless you keep your mouth shut.

Stella Maris.

But you have to understand what the advent of language was like. The brain had done pretty well without it for quite a few million years. The arrival of language was like the invasion of a parasitic system. Co-opting those areas of the brain that were the least dedicated. The most susceptible to appropriation.

A parasitic invasion.

Yes.

You’re serious.

Yes. The inner guidance of a living system is as necessary to its survival as oxygen and hydrogen. The governance of any system evolves coevally with the system itself. Everything from a blink to a cough to a decision to run for your life. Every faculty but language has the same history. The only rules of evolution that language follows are those necessary to its own construction. A process that took little more than an eyeblink. The extraordinary usefulness of language turned it into an overnight epidemic. It seems to have spread to every remote pocket of humanity almost instantly. The same isolation of groups that led to their uniqueness would seem to have been no protection at all against this invasion and both the form of language and the strategies by which it gained purchase in the brain seem all but universal. The most immediate requirement was for an increased capacity for making sounds. Language seems to have originated in South Africa and this requirement probably accounts for the clicks in the Khoisan languages. The fact that there were more things to name than sounds to name them with. In any case the physical facility for speech was probably the most difficult hurdle. The pharynx became elongated until the apparatus in its present form has all but strangled its owner. We’re the only mammalian species that cant swallow and articulate at the same time. Think of a cat growling while it eats and then try it yourself. Anyway, the unconscious system of guidance is millions of years old, speech less than a hundred thousand. The brain had no idea any of this was coming. The unconscious must have had to do all sorts of scrambling around to accommodate a system that proved perfectly relentless. Not only is it comparable to a parasitic invasion, it’s not comparable to anything else.

That’s quite a dissertation.

20. Stella Maris.

Mortals are immortals and immortals are mortals, the one living the others’ death and dying the others’ life.

As the same thing in us is living and dead, waking and sleeping, young and old. For these things having changed around are those, and those in turn having changed around are these.

21. Heraclitus.

The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.

22. Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian.

Our intellect has created a new world that dominates nature, and has populated it with monstrous machines. The latter are so indubitably useful that we cannot see even a possibility of getting rid of them or our subservience to them. Man is bound to follow the adventurous promptings of his scientific and inventive mind and to admire himself for his splendid achievements. At the same time, his genius shows the uncanny tendency to invent things that become more and more dangerous, because they represent better and better means for wholesale suicide.

23. Jung, Man and His Symbols.

The problem is that what drives the tale will not survive the tale. As the room dims and the sound of voices fades you understand that the world and all in it will soon cease to be. You believe that it will begin again. You point to other lives. But their world was never yours.

24. The Passenger.