This sentence is meaningful by virtue of context: its letters and grammatical features, spacetime location, source, tone and other attributes coalesce to provide you with a backdrop from which to distinguish its substance. The contrast between contextual background and conceptual foreground is stretched taut across the frame of your mind, wherein every digital ink-encoding pixel tricks you into believing it exists as anything other than mere biomechanical exhaust, already parsed and devoured by the time you apprehend it. In every moment you exact your own projections from which you’ll extract meaning by flexing with your right brain a context-capturing concept-bounding mental sphincter, the scope of which is drawn along categorical lines seemingly arbitrary but instead and remarkably, effectively subjectively significant, ready to be effected by your left brain’s narrative, both post and ad hoc. All so that we can dance together, alone in our minds. Now that’s love.
We may, however, perhaps at first conveniently, get carried away by a fact which follows: nothing perceived is true in itself. But this notion too is mere canvassed paint. Its image might depict bitten-in fruit conferring cursed knowledge that things may be made to seem as they are not. Each one of us having taken our fill is ordained therefore to judge intentions, giving full due the threat of deception as we seek to navigate the unreal.
But despite our heavy knowledge of good and evil, and even if the devil roasts the naughties in the end: where moral judgement depends on intent built on whatever we think we know, ignorance certainly is our best bet at bliss. Its chasers therefore tend to contend with consciousness by consciously deconstructing any evidence of responsibility, even while subconsciously identifying as guilty. But when one discovers one’s own ignorance to be a liability (and one often does because it always is), one’s mind tends to construct functional reality with the same divine impetus that inspired Bach’s intuition, quickly dispensing with internal contradiction.
Perhaps therefore speech should be free, and we should zealously profane the world with our woefully weak words. Sure, the world isn’t real, but it might yet be worth holding together in shared understanding while we live in it. After all, as far as we know, YOLO.
Maybe sometime later we’ll get to dance somewhere safer: in the mind of God, or in Plato’s Forms, or in the heavens, or in the cosmos, or in the Kosmos, as you please, as we witness together the spiderweb of each moment unfolding, lived through whatever comes after we’ve lost our forms, free from their desperate demands for the benefit of our protections, and after our essences having been evoked for the last time are cast together among all the other expired expressions.
But even if there’s no “you” and “I” to dance in anything’s mind by the time we’re dead, there could still be a “we”; and if there’s not even a “we” sustained by any awareness at all, well then, I guess we won’t have to care. Some say they’re already there—a place available to those who can remember to remind themselves often enough that they’ll never have anything to lose, and that they’re already as dead as their words—resting in peace.
[Post image generated by craiyon AI modeling.]