Meta-Patterns: Visions at the End of the World
Coping with uncertainty: the fractal recurrence of the void within us all.
History never repeats, they say, but it always rhymes. The vicissitudes of this world are animated by these ineffable contours that always remain just beyond, beneath, and above our comprehension, some primordial God of gods, Law of laws, ultimate and penultimate arbiter of relation. I am not the first to try and show it to you, but the way things are going, it looks like I might be one of the last. I could bore you with the names of the philosophers and the mathematicians and the physicists and the mystics and the mavericks and the poets who tried to lead us to understand, but it is perhaps better demonstrated if I do not, by that hesitation that always arises when you so wistfully long for perfect communication, but realise the best we have is in the imperfect gaps in speech, the silence in contemplation of our unbearable separateness. I could inundate you with an intricate description of the doubt and furrowing of the brows and the racing of my heart as I observe my fingers in motion, tapping these words out onto the screen, but you know it already. Well enough, anyway, that any false imagination would not be a lie but simply a broad stroke for the sake of convenience.
There is an awful stillness to the witnessing of the void that our souls reveal so candidly if only we are willing to look. It is in the songs that we sing, songs that we wish we could sing, songs that we wish others would sing with us, for us, against us. There is an awful stillness to the witnessing of this witnessing, and I lie here, wondering if I should invoke a cliché or an aphorism or describe it bluntly like a hammer on a nail. Here, let me look up a word in the dictionary. It’s… consternation. That works. But how can one feel consternation at something so basic, at the trivial observation that one and one make two, that we observe that one and one make two, that we attempt to codify our observation of our observation that one and one make two, all in an endless flood of arcane symbols? And really, how can we be sure that one and one make two for everyone everywhere, that is, if there even is an anyone else? Maybe it is in this flailing for a solid foundation that we find the source of our consternation. But whence draws the stability of this confoundment, so anchored in our witnessing of the world?
It is this very stability that makes it impossible, in truth, to ever say anything new. Once you have read your first novel, seen your first sunset, felt your first heartbreak, you have seen it all. Let me tell you a story. One time I was walking around in the city, lonely and bored as ever, and I strolled into a bookstore, and playfully asked the girl working there to recommend me a book, a weird one if you like. It was a story about grief, about a thing with feathers (possibly a bird), and I sat there for hours in the corner of a quaint little bookstore in the middle of nowhere, turning the pages until I broke down in tears, and by the time I got up to buy the book, because how could I not, it was evening and the one who recommended it was gone. I have since lost the book. It must’ve accidentally been thrown out. There are perhaps crucial points of interest I have elided in this story, but then again, perhaps not. Perhaps you already know.
You know how it is. A seedling of connection blooms into a flower, but it is well understood by now how painful it is to look at flowers, even and especially at their best and brightest. There was this French guy, and I’ll pretend to have forgotten his name, who wrote something about the time wasted on flowers. Well, in the original French, it was closer to the time “lost”, not “wasted”, but perhaps that got lost in translation, transmuted from a meaningful uncertainty into a dull coarseness. History is a neverending ping-pong between too much and never enough, stasis and chaos, ecstasy and grief melding into the same vibrating wave of light. Ping, too far, pong, too far in the opposite direction, but don’t worry, the next ping will solve everything (at least until the water starts leaking). Ah, darn it, we should never have pinged the second time! Whose idea was that? (But it’s too late to go back to the first pong.)
There was once a boy who felt broken and lost, and a charlatan came to him in his darkest moments and promised to show him the secret to happiness. You just have to follow me, he said, and do whatever I say. Don’t worry, you’ll make friends there, maybe even find someone to fuck fall in love with. The boy lost everything. In another time and place, there was once a boy who felt broken and lost, and a wise man came to him in his darkest moments and showed him how the charlatan preyed on other boys at their most vulnerable, luring them into a cult of smoke and mirrors. The boy, upon seeing this pattern, suddenly recalled the other silver bullets he had been sold that turned into poison pills promptly upon his touch. He dolefully retreated into his misery, and there he found his enlightenment. It is up to you to decide whether I am the charlatan or the wise man. Sometimes, I am not so sure myself.
We went to a place she loved. I told them in the car on the way that I realised I had been an unusual dad since Mum died. They told me not to worry. I told them that all the nonsense about Crow was over, I was going to get a bit more teaching work and stop thinking about Ted Hughes.
They told me not to worry.
We parked the car and walked diagonals into the wind.
We pissed and the wind blew our wee back against our trousers.
While the boys were digging in the shingle I dozed off and when I woke up they were asleep, next to me, like guards, with their hoods up. I was warm.
I didn’t wake them. I walked to the shoreline. I knelt down and opened the tin. I said her name. I recited ‘Lovesong’, a poem I like a great deal but she never thought much of. I apologised for reading it and told myself not to worry. The ashes stirred and seemed eager so I tilted the tin and I yelled into the wind
I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU
and up they went, the sense of a cloud, the failure of clouds, scientifically quick and visually hopeless, a murder of little burnt birds flecked against the grey sky, the grey sea, the white sun, and gone. And the boys were behind me, a tide-wall of laughter and yelling, hugging my legs, tripping and grabbing, leaping, spinning, stumbling, roaring, shrieking and the boys shouted
I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU
and their voice was the life and song of their mother. Unfinished. Beautiful. Everything.
— Max Porter, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers
There is an unassailable kernel of the Real that resists both symbolisation and mutation. It is this kernel around which all good works coalesce, why all good writing is rewriting, why it seems like after you’ve read your first hundred books, it often feels like you’ve read them all, just in slightly different configurations. If you keep chasing a totalising masculine symbolisation, a complete framework, an understanding of every meta-pattern that structures our phenomenology, you will forever feel frustrated and inadequate. Your narrative scaffolds will be rigid and brittle, and you will be perennially vulnerable to extended Dark Nights that refuse palliation. This is the consternation, the void at the core of our being. It is only through accepting the non-totalising feminine position—that most phenomena will not fit into a coherent pattern—that we reconstitute an incomplete security. Lyricism, musicality and rhetoric surpass sterile intellectualisation for this reason, for writing is simply the impossible art of decorating the void more virtuosically. (Of course, this is also why AI writing is useless.) There was perhaps a simpler time when there was less to contemplate, less information to symbolise, and the void could either be mythologised away or ritually faced in its utter heartbreaking ecstasy, a natural self-regulation of epistemic greed and domination. Somewhere along the way, we lost this state of affairs.
We can only ever see contours of the Real, parts of the whole picture, thin slices of the hyperobject. Once in a while, we can synthesise the meta-patterns underlying the patterns we glimpse; most of the time, the first-order patterns have to do. Sometimes, we don’t even get that. The Langlands program is what happens when you try to take meta-patterns too far, and you end up studying absurdly niche mathematics for years trying to confirm in a totalising fashion the underlying forces you already knew were there. String theory is what happens when you start hallucinating meta-patterns out of forced extrapolations. There is a certain point at which there is no longer any meaningful uncertainty mitigated, any real utility gained—only a desperate neuroticism fed in its attempted suppression.
This is the fundamental idea behind postrationalism, that reality cannot be captured from within reality, only a caricature. It is neither a unified movement nor a defined framework of thought, but rather a vague attitude of femininity, one that accepts that identities are real but somewhat fluid, and that in an increasingly complex world, we need to make do with the terrifying uncertainty of the not-all-knowing. Contradictory frameworks abound, each incomplete, each provisionally explaining fragments of fragments of the whole picture. Evolutionary psychology competes with random chance, exaptation, psychoanalysis and everything in between. Sometimes, we poke at confusing phenomena to see if they make any more sense from a different angle. We read more books, try on exotic fits, feel an infuriating sense of envy when we see someone else tame the void slightly better. This is the mark of a good artist, a perpetual low-grade envy, for it means we are forever in admiration of the infinity of perspectives and experiences we could never come close to emulating, the books we’ll never read, skills we’ll never learn.
The resolution is to let them map their corner of the void, and continue to map the corner that only you know so well, in full knowledge of its futility, and in fear of being exposed as the naked emperor that we always-already are. Normally, everyone else is too busy noting the parts of the void they’re missing to notice yours anyway. And maybe drop the books and the music and the contemplation once in a while, and go outside, and let the void rest. You can’t enjoy the little things if you’re always frustrating yourself trying to grapple with it. Your soul needs time to rest. The void will still be there when you get back.
Thank you to Simon Pearce for inspiring this piece. For a more elaborate exposition of meta-patterns and postrationalist thought, see Epistemic Entropy. For a short exploration of epistemic rupture, see Controlled Chaos.
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