Dark Matter, Language,and the Buddah

What if language gives us the delusion that there is a conflict between free will and necessity? Between predetermination and a future open to possibility? It is logically impossible for the future to already have happened and to be altered by our actions. Much ink has been spilled to reconcile these opposing ideas. But these are only ideas, not things, like the idea that there is an infinite space between the number one and the number two—infinite because it can always be divided, because the chain of numbers used to mark it is infinite—which is nonetheless easily crossed. The infinity of numbers is an illusion made by an overly precise means of measurement, means that does not stop functioning when it runs out of possible representation, something to measure. There is a point at which the halving of a number does not halve any actual space. In other words, the lesson of the debate between determinism and free will is not that if one is true the other is false but that language can only go so far in representing reality.

Were the unliftable veil of language lifted, and were we then able to (in any sense) see the dark matter of the gaps our words had papered over, we would see that dark matter is 90 percent of our perceptual universe just as it is 90 percent of our physical universe. This is the insight of Keats in “Ode to a Nightingale,”

Though the dull brain perplexes and retards: 

Already with thee! tender is the night, 

         And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne, 

                Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays; 

                        But here there is no light, 

         Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown 

                Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways. 

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, 

         Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs, 

But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet 

         Wherewith the seasonable month endows 

The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild; 

         White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine; 

                Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves; 

                        And mid-May's eldest child, 

         The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine, 

                The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves. 

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time 

         I have been half in love with easeful Death, 

It is also the condition of the dwarfs in the barn in Lewis’ The Last Battle.

The false reassurance of language that gives us something to argue about, to fight about, even to war about. The trivial “will to power” Nietzsche was obsessed with is really a distraction. The fundamental human will is the will to meaning. We see it in the empty “why?” parents scream when children die. We see it in the imperfect ways they slice away at the totality of the absence of meaning afterwards, setting up a scholarship fund in the dead child’s name. As though the name were alive.  

Once you have meaning, the will to power vanishes. This is how we know that fundamentalists never believe what they preach. Their rage is a rage of despair. They scream about infidels’ false gods so they don’t have to face the horror of conflicting ideas whose basis and justification is indistinguishable from their own. Their deep deep fear that their meaning is false, that their story is entirely fiction, drives all their actions. (The story may be true, insofar as stories may be true, but the fear that it is false drives their will to power, their resentment of weakness, their willed blindness.) The true religious people are the monks of any faith, their best may be the Buddha, who accepts nonmeaning as meaning and who rejects striving, or perhaps whose enlightenment, which is beyond categories, can only be put for us, unenlightened souls, in these terms.