I can’t be alone in thinking this, and I have mentioned the Eco quotation aside, but at certain points in my life I have felt like the entire world is, indeed, an enigma; a bucketful of words, musical notes, paintings, pictures and ideas all jumbled up, weaving mixed metaphors, assorted similes, rhythms, rhymes, images, silences as hypothetical postulates and endless ellipses… into a web of complete incomprehension. Thus when I began writing this blog I thought I would be able to begin unravelling this web of mystery - what after all is so enigmatic about such an idea? But thus far, all I feel have to offer are the scraps, a fragment, a glimpse, a trace of an incomplete story that goes on indefinitely. That is essentially where the idea for this blog comes from. It comes from a voyage, a journey, a quest to try and collate those fragments, so that others may try to comprehend and make sense of them as they go about their own quests and journeys. Can any any of us do anything else? What I have tried do so far in my life is make a few connections, forge some links… which in the end amount to a kind of sense that allows me to maintain the enquiry, because the full sense itself is ever changing, always elusive and just far enough away to remain untouched (or untouchable). And things I read and pick up along the way encourage me to keep my channels of enquiry open, for example, G.H. Hardy once wrote, "I can remember Bertrand Russell telling me of a horrible dream. He was in the top floor of the University Library, about A.D. 2100. A library assistant was going round the shelves carrying an enormous bucket, taking down books, glancing at them, restoring them to the shelves or dumping them into the bucket. At last he came to three large volumes which Russell could recognize as the last surviving copy of Principia Mathematica [written by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, 1910]. He [the library assistant] took down one of the volumes, turned over a few pages, seemed puzzled for a moment by the curious symbolism, closed the volume, balanced it in his hand and hesitated...." This says a lot about the how of choices without really addressing the why; the randomness is intriguing; what to include and leave out; what to keep and what to ditch, do we keep what we understand and discard what we don't, or do we keep the book to learn what we don't already know? But just when you think you have sorted it out, still doubt remains - and then along comes Albert Einstein saying, "Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." Which in turn pointed me to that reluctant philosopher, gagster and deeply unpleasant politician, Donald Rumsfeld, who told us, "There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know..." and there is no way around that (to paraphrase Tom Waites in Nighthawks at the Diner). As I say - life is a bit of an enigma but all the more colourful for it. And talking about colourful - here is a Tom Waites clip of him intervening on an older song:
I can’t be alone in thinking this, and I have mentioned the Eco quotation aside, but at certain points in my life I have felt like the entire world is, indeed, an enigma; a bucketful of words, musical notes, paintings, pictures and ideas all jumbled up, weaving mixed metaphors, assorted similes, rhythms, rhymes, images, silences as hypothetical postulates and endless ellipses… into a web of complete incomprehension. Thus when I began writing this blog I thought I would be able to begin unravelling this web of mystery - what after all is so enigmatic about such an idea? But thus far, all I feel have to offer are the scraps, a fragment, a glimpse, a trace of an incomplete story that goes on indefinitely. That is essentially where the idea for this blog comes from. It comes from a voyage, a journey, a quest to try and collate those fragments, so that others may try to comprehend and make sense of them as they go about their own quests and journeys. Can any any of us do anything else? What I have tried do so far in my life is make a few connections, forge some links… which in the end amount to a kind of sense that allows me to maintain the enquiry, because the full sense itself is ever changing, always elusive and just far enough away to remain untouched (or untouchable). And things I read and pick up along the way encourage me to keep my channels of enquiry open, for example, G.H. Hardy once wrote, "I can remember Bertrand Russell telling me of a horrible dream. He was in the top floor of the University Library, about A.D. 2100. A library assistant was going round the shelves carrying an enormous bucket, taking down books, glancing at them, restoring them to the shelves or dumping them into the bucket. At last he came to three large volumes which Russell could recognize as the last surviving copy of Principia Mathematica [written by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, 1910]. He [the library assistant] took down one of the volumes, turned over a few pages, seemed puzzled for a moment by the curious symbolism, closed the volume, balanced it in his hand and hesitated...." This says a lot about the how of choices without really addressing the why; the randomness is intriguing; what to include and leave out; what to keep and what to ditch, do we keep what we understand and discard what we don't, or do we keep the book to learn what we don't already know? But just when you think you have sorted it out, still doubt remains - and then along comes Albert Einstein saying, "Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." Which in turn pointed me to that reluctant philosopher, gagster and deeply unpleasant politician, Donald Rumsfeld, who told us, "There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know..." and there is no way around that (to paraphrase Tom Waites in Nighthawks at the Diner). As I say - life is a bit of an enigma but all the more colourful for it. And talking about colourful - here is a Tom Waites clip of him intervening on an older song:
