A: Why are you dancing around the subject–
B: I’m not dancing–
A: Yes you are, you said that life is meaningless but that we are not meaningless, how can that–
B: Let me ex–
A: No! You called it an “explanation” before when you said that even though life itself is meaningless, we can still find meaning in life, in relationships like friendships and lovers. That’s not an explanation. Aren’t we alive? Aren’t your friends…alive? If they are–I am certainly feeling alive right now, especially when you have me all heated up–then what could possibly protect them from the general meaninglessness? If they are not–godlessness help us, our last hope and our last god dashed–then we are in store for a whole other heap of meaninglessness, a meaninglessness like piles of corpses pretending to speak and to dream with one another.
B: Well, meaning is survival–
A: What?–
B: I mean I think we are alive–the two of us more than anybody, in fact, when we make love I feel that I am living more than any life has lived. But I think our living is an attempt to make an anti-world of chaos and death into a liveable world of fantasies of lines and planes and bodies and much else besides. We are not saying anything about life itself when we find a meaning in life or a meaning to life or of life. It is just our way of building homes on the sand, and some of us are better at digging enough into the sand that we find a reliable foundation. Again, though, it’s not like this foundation is planted in the stars or in the beginning of time and space, rather it is just a local territory staked out on a dust mote in a region we cannot ever fully describe.
A: I see….
B: …
A: …So, all of this, all of our hopes about the future and our takes on the past and the present, they are all just ways to survive and to enhance ourselves. They say nothing about what life is in itself?
B: That’s what I think…that’s what I feel.
A: But what is this “life in itself” anyway? What about the living themselves? What about us? Is it even possible for us to think we have found a meaning in life without at the same time projecting that meaning to all the ends of existence? For instance, if the meaning I have found in my life describes existence as grounded in love and a loving sacrifice, I would be hard pressed not to find this love everywhere, from the beginning to the end, from the core to the surface, from the bottom to the top. Part of finding a meaning is finding it everywhere, part of being meaningful is radiating in all directions so as to cover everything with that meaning.
What you’re doing, though, is artificially stopping the spread. You are trying to cut off our meaning’s tentacles before it reaches all things in its inevitable reaching out. That gives the illusion that there is some block of meaninglessness on the other side of these limited horizons. But if you let these horizons free, they are continually vanishing in their expanding. Then this big black block of meaninglessness is actually quite colorful, and undulating constantly with vitality. It’s–
B: –Chaos–
A: That’s what you said before. But what I am saying is that Chaos and Order are just two names you can give to this undulating agony of meanings. Every speck and particle of existence gives its perspecive on all the rest. Sure, there is uncertainty as to which perspective is final, or which perspective shows the most of reality. But that again is only from a certain perspective, a perspective that desires multiplicity and scales and comparisons. This is not the course of every perspective. In fact, it is not the course of any perspective in the time that it is taken and lived. Even you, with your perspective of cosmic meaninglessness, do not want your perspective compared with that of the ant or the blade of grass. If a grandmother died thinking that she would become a grasshopper or spaghetti sauce, then for that one unfindable moment all things become grasshopppers at death, or all things become such as to allow a single grandmother to become a grasshopper or tomato sauce at death. Reality holds room for everything, even our delusions, and every dream you have, even the most fleeting, comes true somewhere in some nook of reality. However far you shrink a significant thing, that significant thing takes part in the whole and in shaping the destiny of the whole. There is no erasure–even when our perspectives are shattered and seen through–but only addition, addition and multiplication of reality upon reality. Like a dance of meaningfulness and meaninglessness, but of one substance and all on the same arena.
B: A dance–
A: Yes, another dance. But not a dance around, like we know the borders and the edges–we do not, even our delusions are endless and edgeless–but a dance through and within, like pinwheels all set in their places, whose little singular and faithful spinning shoot out dust and stars to ungodly distances, so far in fact that the distance seems to circle back, and shower our hearts with ambiguous twinkling.
Love the Dust 