In the distance, look! Out across our desolate land—though some would say it is desolate only behind my eyes—a shining city! How wonderful its steel spires! Those that reach up, intertwining, to touch the sky and brush their fingers against the belly of the clouds. Separated from the heavens themselves by the mere act of reaching out. Such beautiful and majestic sky-scrapers; certainly the most incredible things in all the land. Always making life better, more elevated, freer! Can anything else compare to the divine perfection of reaching for the open sky?
No. Look again. It is a conniving castle that sits there, squatting like a toad under the frowning brow of the cloud-line. Only the annoyed expression of the heavens makes them seem near. Those high spires—can humans even use them? Or are they spires for spires sake, as you are you for your sake? A city that would rather draw you up into its architecture than really provide for you…sucking you in as material for its ends, rather than being a means for yours. Whose blood and bones are reincarnated in its building materials? How much suffering, how much person-destroying, is in this very thought of elevation? No, but first—Come, come, to the base—let us look for that forgotten artifact.
Grab hold, and pull! Pull as if from the forgotten depths of your own heart! Out from the soul, up through every subconscious and barely conscious layer we must go. Pull!
See now what is free? That crystalline chain! The root of the metropolis, yet also the greatest defense of humanity. It makes that gleaming city function, yet also makes it fear. The chain that, like a visored-helmet, like horse-blinders, like the most wonderful weapon in all the world, lashes tight your wrists and ties you down—as it always has—so you do not drift away into empty space. For all around lurks the meaningless void of infinity—the nothingness of everything—, that in smaller quantities the soul can swim and in larger ones it will drown. “Into which I could go if it was not for those damnable chains!” the voices echo across the city from the tall spires. Into which they would not wish to go, if not for those chains. And should we even wish to join them?
These oh so lovable chains. Without them, without the tether to a single living thing with a single perspective, infinity and consciousness would have nothing to be about. Abstract thoughts, limitless notions, endless discovery, without something to have meaning about can have no meaning at all. So we must have these chains to lash us down, as much as we try to break them for power, knowledge, freedom… as much as chain-breakers come and seek to suck us up into their towers, these crystalline chains remain—as a defense, a weapon! Against both nothingness and control!
And printed on the side of every link? Two words, limited set. Let us peer inside them a moment. What does it mean that limitation, spoken of in the same words as the boundaries of every scientific study, can be found here at the human core?
It means, in human terms, the middle-aged couple that lives down on the corner in a small town. Who go to work, make money, come home, and spend it on food, light and entertainment. Their world is as small as the farthest hill to which they travel during the day, and the views of their windows during the night. Yes, they may now motorize their way to a farther hill, or have more colorful windows than before—televisions, computer monitors, phones—that can see farther, but in principle their lives are the same. The world ceases for them past a certain point, and what is farther can only be seen in miniature, or through the distorted lens of media, word of mouth, or perhaps a telescope… Is it not the same for you?
When you walk outside what do you see? Does your gaze stretch out past the horizon? Does it penetrate to every detail? No? then there you have it, right before you, the limit of existence, and beyond it—just barely—the limit of knowledge, of what can be imagined! To think you can go further than this? That is to forget the human artifact… to ascend with those tall spires upwards…and to what end?
Are those spires any less limited than we down below and our chains? Are their hallways, windows, and rooms any less constrained? There is the place of science, governance, ethics and their vast bodies of knowledge reaching out towards infinity—yet does this make them the masters of infinity? Or do the words “limited set” still plague their search for conclusions?
So when they come to hack and saw away at our crystal chains, burying us under a deluge of world-expansion, what comes after? Once the soul is free to fly—or as I see it free to drown—where does it go? Does it fly up with those spires to reach out elegantly for the perfect future hidden amongst the clouds? Alas, no. If their architect’s efforts are successful, the soul will be caught right up into a maze of thoughts, walls, doors and rooms where it quickly gets lost. And with any luck does not recognize its new prison until it is already absorbed into its walls.
But what if the architect misses the mark? They break the chain but do not have their new snare readied properly. Well then, the soul will fly off into the stratosphere, assaulted by so much everything there is no longer anything.
Yet here our artifact is of great use! Limitation, not as an enemy, but as a tool. A weapon to strike against the oncoming rush of information, preventing it from overwhelming us. A single solid object to hold on to—ourselves. By this guide, we can take on infinity by tiny digestible sips and gentle swims, and hold fast against the clutching grips of that city of assimilation and beyond it the vast abyss of everything. Chains that let me ask such questions:
“Those things beyond my life, that bring nothing back to it, what good are they to me?”
“All that knowledge, which bits of it are cogent for myself?”
“In the limited place in which I live, and beyond it, what do I treasure?”
