An ouroboros of chaos and design: a manifesto for the celebration of paradox

The real can be both real and illusion. Reality can be joy and sorrow, sacred and profane, trivial and significant through the illusions we make, the stories we tell: all coexist as true expressions of humanity in relationship with the universe. Physical indifference, human desire to find more to life than that. Humanity is a quintessential paradox: selfish and hateful, yet also selfless and loving—not in fragments, but in all of us, all the time. That is our hard reality; we determine which by the shadows we cast on the cave wall of human existence.

Clouds Water Light John Rux-Burton 2011

Lear was wrong, something does come from nothing. The presence of humanity in the universe is (even if the rest of the universe contains not one sentient species) a metaparadox… that in nothing something, whatever the something is… whatever is may be.

I can accept a Buddhist take on life, that the self is the fount of suffering, yet I still see the self as one of the great treasures of eternity: that dim, fleeting stab of ontological desire which dares to stand against cosmic indifference. Which like a pre-linguistic infant is already mouthing a metaphorical ‘why’.

We live in an endless moment of destruction and rebirth, infinite possibility and infinite loss. That is the universe. If not for the cacophony of the human heart, then its not that “the rest is silence” - it all is. But it is not; that is the stake humanity makes on this blue blob a million light years past the middle of nowhere.

Nothing might seem to come from nothing, but that it isn’t how it feels it ought to be. And if it isn’t how it feels it ought to be, perhaps we can pretend—and in that pretence discover, that the paradox of failure and success, failing and looking more, meaning sought in the face of indifference, of nothing and something, why, that it is life itself.