s/Mattering
1. the only thing that Matters is understanding the universe.
1a. this is a matter of connoisseurship as well as 'ultimate questions.'
1b. every ultimate question is not ultimate and all questions are the
wrong questions.
2. arts and humanities are no use whatsoever in this regard. at best they
may pander metaphors; embody them; critique the embodiment.
2a. yet any understanding is a prior a misrecognition, false translation.
2b. we are not equipped for anything more; we are equipped for survival,
not comprehension.
3. Lyotard never went far enough; it's not the sun's death which is
paramount, but the dissolution of a universe so utterly alien as to resist
both hermeneutics and phenomenology.
4. human culture is fluttering among the surfacing of the skein. culture
is all the way down; every organism is cultured, historic.
5. the future of the surface of the planet crudely parallels universal
dissolution; one tends to construct rear-guard defenses for this or that -
anything to retard decay.
6. from the moment of birth, decay begins; later sight and sound diminish
in amplitude and bandwidth; the world with draws to where it always was.
7. withdrawal from the world is impossible; instead, the body moves from
subject to object along a broken trajectory.
8. heaven is impossible because only the injured and traumatized blindly
arrive there.
9. understanding the universe, no matter what strategy is employed, comes
down to mathesis increasingly cut off from the everyday; ontology shifts
accordingly, subtlely, until one is as ignorant as ever, even with
conscious assimilation of equation, structure, fact.
10. facts are not all that contestable in the small.
11. one is increasingly led to believe in roiling heuristics, anthropic
probabilities (miniscule in the large), and an utterly deep inelegance -
perhaps including the abandonment of Occam's razor as well.
12. what is simple falls through itself, crosses epistemologies, ontolog-
ically slinks elsewhere.
13. what is simple is false.
14. what is inelegant is glorious.
