Of Nothing, Uselessness and Pointlessness

Looking up the Painted Lady life cycle I thought about something unusual...

http://www.ukbutterflies.co.uk/species.php?vernacular_name=Painted%20Lady

No Painted Ladies survive the winter is UK and apparently few return to the continent... it is a one way ticket for most...

In biological terms this is quite logical they escape densely populated continental ecosystems to exploit the free system here in UK; the winter having wiped out the population...

But in terms of "meaning of life" do we say that the Painted Ladies are a failure or a waste of space in biological terms? They won't breed successfully and will pass no genes onto the future... yet their "time" spent in the UK is not a non entity... it is certainly a highlight of the summer here for butterfly lovers.

IF ever I needed a demonstration that human life (at least) escapes the confines of biological determinism here it is. There is no fundamental imperative to breed, or be successful or even to live when it comes to Humans. We have at our finger tips an absolutely incomprehensible freedom which we try to indoctrinate and enforce a shape upon so that we don't have to grasp the meaning of NULL.

It appears more and more with each passing day that the answer to everything is ... . We may fill that space with anything and nothing... it actually makes no difference because if it did then our freedom to determine what filled that space would be limited. If Life has one characteristic it is this indefinable freedom (both empty and full at the same time, both everything and nothing: because if it was otherwise it would be definable; how else can we speak of the indefinable?).

In our current capitalist system built upon a protestant work ethic in which the universe was "made" and time divided into work and rest, we have ample definition of what Life is about. Yet it is relative and arbitrary. There is no rule which says we must live, there is no rule which says we must die. Some people chose life, some commit suicide, but most just let it happen without overly defining what is what. It is Ego which becomes self empowered to chose life or death, but this is not actually life or death which it choses. Life and Death as they truly are, neither come nor go, are neither made nor unmade and there are no rules upon which they are built either. Our existential dread only arises through our persistence in defining ourselves as something made or unmade. Sartre is a name on a book - if he had existential dread it is because he wanted to be famous and so thought of himself as a name on a book: how ironic ;-)

It is certainly a new step for me to synthesise all this recent "work" like this. Looking back: the contemplation in the shower of the relative wealth of receiving a swift death compared with a painful one is the turning point: that even upto death all things are relative pulls to rug completely from any vestiges of absolutism remaining.

A similarly important step was the realisation that production and consumption are exactly the same thing in reality, we only provide these labels relative to our desires. Thus what is production for one person is consumption for another. The example given was building a house. It is consumption because of the use of raw materials. It is production because a house is made. If you built a house for enjoyment - like building a model kit - then we term it consumption and we need to pay for the pleasure. If we did it to produce a house it is production and we would be paid for someone elses pleasure. Thus a foundation stone of capitalism turns out to be a phantasm. What is really going on is that social structures of class etc are informing our view of Human Life to produce a more clinical image of workers and non-workers.

So for those who are ready, it seems the sky of the mind is the limit and for those who are not ready the office or house roof is the limit.