I'm still here . . .

When I began this process of blogging, I indicated that if I found that it was ego that was at the root of it, then I would abort the whole thing. But even in writing that I was being dishonest, and knew I was being dishonest—because the very fact of writing at all (or of doing anything) is ultimately informed by ego.

Blogging consists in giving one’s opinion on things. An opinion is at best a partial truth—when it is a truth at all. And a partial truth bears the same relationship to ultimate truth as a photograph of the north face of the Eiger does to the reality of the mountain it claims to portray.

And this is unavoidable. Ultimate truth is forever beyond us. We have no capacity for apprehending it. At best we can now and again take hold of the shreds of its coat-tails and then only for the briefest of seconds. It is possible to sometimes catch and relay a fragment of truth or reality—in this posting, I am using ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ as synonyms of each other—as reflected momentarily in some limited situation. But it is not Truth—it is only a local truth, a contingent truth, as short-lived in its beauty and duration as the rise and fall of a starburst rocket at Halloween.

The relatively few people who foresaw and warned against the economic disaster now swamping us comprehended, in their various ways, just such a corner of truth. But the world moves on—and the fact that they were right last time does not mean that they will be right next time or, for that matter, ever again . . . notwithstanding the strange human tendency of slavishly latching on to so-called ‘winners’ as though there was no possibility of their ever again being wrong.

Now if people who were right last time have no guarantee of being right next time, then the argument is logically capable of being turned on its head in favour of people who were previously wrong. Next time, who knows, they might be right. But in saying this we can see the native sense that underlies the popular faith in ‘winners’. It is a matter of pragmatism: the fact that someone has been successful in calling the toss in the past, while not guaranteeing that he will be equally successful in the future, at least proves that he is capable of being successful. Whereas with failure, no such signpost to success exists . . .

But this is all by way of digression . . .

But to get back to where I was originally heading . . . If we take the example of the Eiger, it is possible to postulate a process by which the ultimate truth about the mountain might be achieved. One could set up an archive involving all the scientific knowledge available about the mountain—its geographic details, mineral composition, dimensions etc.—together with an exhaustive set of photographs taken of it from every possible direction and in every possible weather condition. Add to this everything that has been written about it—together with a comprehensive hands-on experience of the mountain on the part of the student—and arguably you have the possibility of approaching the Eiger in its overall truth, its overall reality.

Except, of course, that you don’t . . . have such a possibility, that is.

Immersion in such a process of learning—a lifetime’s immersion—would no doubt produce an almost exhaustive knowledge of the Eiger. But it would still not represent, or even begin to represent, the ultimate reality of it. The sense of it gained would be akin to one of those old slot-machines that were still around when I was young—you can find the same mechanism, too, sometimes built into books—where a moving image was broken down into a sequence of still photographs and a mock animation produced by flicking through them at speed.

The thing is that the ultimate truth, the ultimate reality of anything, is not a cumulative or sequential or composite process. It is awareness—in a single intuition—of everything to do with the matter or thing in hand; everything known and ‘unknown’, lost or found, that has happened or has yet to happen. It is the phenomenon viewed within the setting of eternity . . .

And as such it is forever beyond us as human beings.

[For anyone that may be interested—that is, if there is anyone interested—the hiatus of almost a fortnight since my previous posting has been due to my being busy with other things. A situation likely to continue at least until Christmas—so that for the time being postings are likely to remain somewhat more sporadic than heretofore.]