Thursday, May 9, 2013

Missives into space

They say no information is lost in the turbulence of the universe, not even when things are gobbled up by a black hole. Hawking thought otherwise at some point, but this was a signal mistake of his early on. He has since recanted. We must be thankful. So nothing is wasted. Radio signals keep traveling on forever, sounds and voices also, hopefuly to be picked up by whatever receivers might be there on the other side when we are long gone. We are all stored as some kind of unique code in this colossal data bank. Existence is self-enclosed in its mathematical eternity. Quite a strange, nay incomprehensible, thought, but also quite comforting. It seems that immortality after all is on offer by pure objective science itself; one need not have recourse to delusion or runaway fantasy to secure it. God, or at least God as various perverted minds have posited him through the centuries, is indeed an "unecessary hypothesis" as Hawking also, correctly this time, asserted (except that this is not logically equivalent to the proposition that "there is no God"). This was a notion that occurred to alert minds very long ago. The finitude of absolute Being was the ingenious insight of Parmenides, the eternal conservation of material existence Epicurus' stupendous contribution to rationality (Epicurus' thought was after all a logically rigorous extension of Eleatic doctrine).

Why is all this relevant? Because when one lives in a society where communication has broken down, one needs some inner theoretical conviction upon which to ground the usefulness of writing and talking. I must confess that I have been going through such a crisis for the past few months, hence my inability to wield the pen -or to be more precise to hit the keyboard- after the thoughts I registered at the end of last year. There was a dismal closure there, a conclusion very much of the nature of a black hole that swallowed all of my expressive faculty -language itself kind of withered within me. I still stand by that conclusion: namely that what we have gone through in this place over the past three years is akin to the death of a star, the forces of entropy having finally suffused the modern Greek national project which for the past two hundred years has been desperately trying to discover or concoct some essence for itself. Well, it is now manisfest that it has failed. Of course, the debris is still burning away, but this weird flame is fast tumbling into terminal darkness.

The most egregious symbol of this is the current Greek parliament, which is the worst in history, a pathetic aggregation of corrupt old hands that actively caused the present implosion together with a bevy of new-fangled extremists of the left and right spouting ideological balderdash and enchanted by violence. The funny thing is that this putrescent set up is still able to express itself (it's not really expression, but a form of grunting and screeching) in the time-honored language of nationalism. The chief motif in this discourse is the hoary myth of malicious "foreigners" conspiring to wipe from the earth the "chosen race". It's the kind of declamation that surged mightily forth from the recent wreckage in Cyprus. The Cypriot situation is another sorry sight that one must dignify even with a passing comment. Still it is another eye-opening symptom of the cultural and ethical decomposition affecting today's Greek-speaking world (I wish we were dealing with Greekness and I wish we were dealing with sensible speech). The Cypriot ruin is entirely of the Cypriots' own making. They joined the EU under the solemn commitment that they would accept the UN plan for the unification of the island -a commitment they promptly and provocatively broke. For them the EU was nothing more than a stick to beat Turkey with. Their joining Europe was a pretense. The Ponzi-scheme of an economy that they erected, sucking in all the dirty money of the formerly communist Russian mafia, was also a deliberate enterprise. Then they affected surprise when the whole thing came tumbling down over their heads. And their first instinct was to fight tooth and nail to protect the Russian oligarchs by massacring their own small savers and nationalizing the working people's pension funds, a scheme that Merkel was right to castigate as the most shameless attempt to expropriate the little man's future ever attempted. Still, they excoriated as "usurers" the Europeans that advanced a 10 billion, 30-year loan at 2.5% and lauded the Russians as "brothers" from whom they had received 2.5 billion for five years at 4.5%, with nothing more forthcoming. In fact it was the Russian governement itself that had to remind them that they were EU members, and that their prime obligation was to strike a deal with the Europeans. And now AKEL, the pseudo-communist party that ruled Cyprus for five years to 2013 and presided over the economic and other disasters (such as the lethal explosion of the confiscated Iranian munitions meant for Syria which crippled the island's electricity grid), is loudly propagandizing for the country's exit from the Euro! How sick can you get.... But you see I broke my promise not to comment on this sordid, little affair.

The upshot is that in this whirl of nonsense and depravity there is no point in arguing, or talking even. The media and the universities are abuzz with anti-European, Stalinist and racist clap-trap. With the result that about 75% of the people believe that the proper way for Greece would be to follow the Cypriot example of rushing headlong into isolation and destitution to save its "national honor". Yet something inside will not let go. Thought is silent and that is as it ought to be. On the other hand, one ought not to be doing any favors to the baying cadavers of perdition. In the immense empty spaces of the cosmos a dissenting cadence ought still to be registered. But with no illusions, of course, as to its effect.

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