I am small and the world is great and beyond my comprehension right now. This at least I can say without doubt. But here is a dream.
Once there was a fish in a fishbowl. There were pebbles on the ground, water all around, a toy castle, and a filtration system of some sort.
Every so while food would fall from above the water, from where there was no water, a place of nothingness except pain of breathlessness, and from whence food traced its origin.
One day the fish had a dream. There was a great being that came and pressed its terrible visage against the wall of the bowl, which hitherto the fish had considered (in moments of speculation, soon forgotten) to be the cosmos, or at least the limit of what it could know (which a moment of inspiration declared the fish to be a grand Copernican revolution, and another moment dispelled in a cloud of dissipating confusion). The being said to the fish,
“All that you see was made for you.”
And the fish did not believe it. For it had conducted forays into atomic spectroscopy and theoretical organic chemistry, and had concluded that the castle proved itself to be made of polymers, themselves derived from compressed carbon-based structures over some spans of time (geological, the fish called it) that defied the mind.
The being brought a terrible vision to the fish. It saw dinosaurs, and oil, and refineries, and plastics, and markets, and governments, and men, and their desires, and plethora trinkets, and a mould for a castle. It saw collapsing hydrogen and stars, vast spaces that barely existed but for their space, nuclei and nucleating planets, and a sublime geology (that surpassed that ream of time the fish had attempted to count in its measuring of its castle), and rocks and oceans, and waves, and pebbles, and children with their curiosity picking them up along with shells on a particular summer morning. It saw war and death and disease and bacteria and microscopes and curiosity and hope and consciousness and psychological forms impossible to pronounce. It saw stone axes and fire and rocket ships and fish bowls and filtration systems of all sorts, along with their blueprints and mechanisms of action and principles of operation.
In a moment the fish had forgotten (not because of a poor memory, for this belief was an illusion and relative to the fish’s being, patently false), but because its mind was small and the world was large, and the being who had spoken to it (in its dream), had intended to say that,
“All that you see I bought for you,” but had known that the fish could not conceive of the elongated depths of its life’s narrative, which transcended its own life, let alone its own speculations.
It is true, the being thought, that everything in the fishbowl was there for the fish. It is also true, the being thought, that everything in the fishbowl emanated from a world that existed by its own momentum, and consistent with its own sublime and fathomless logic and conversations of matter and energy and first principles unpronounceable except by a secret mathematical formula that cannot be known by any that cannot look down upon it all.
The fish was just a story, written by a man who had a dream. One day the man had a dream, although he knew himself to be awake. He called it a dream because its contents surpassed his mind, and its details necessarily compressed themselves into generalities and memories of an impression, of a terrible beautiful and perfect thing that he wished to see once more.
The man forgot the dream: Every day and night, as he occupied himself in the way of the men in the world who swore that they were most certainly awake, tendrils of doubt cloaked in mirrors reflecting reason and intellect and recollections of the heart, would erase a detail from the dream as the man could remember it. Until one day the man awoke and laughed, because he had not doubt that this world was most certainly not made for him and that meanings were like clouds’ transient constellations. His reason and intellect and heart assured him he was wise enough to know this. Surely.
But he was not. He was small and the world was great and beyond his comprehension at that moment. This alone he should have claimed without doubt. But he had returned to a dream which (ironically) was his creation (so small as to allow plans of circumnavigation).
“Wake up man,” lucid stirrings called to him.
Perhaps I should approach this world like an ant colony responding to the entire history of mankind, unfolding at every moment, and dazzling the colony’s biological semiotics and homeostatic computations. The man thought, but thoughts come and thoughts go, and the man was not wise enough to know which way was truth.
Perhaps I should approach this world with humility, for I am small and the world is great and beyond my comprehension at this moment? Perhaps I should approach this world with hope, that there is meaning and purpose, for without these there is nothing? Perhaps I should carry so much hope, as to balance the doubt that I am already carrying with me? Thus with humility and hope and scepticism (channelled from doubt) perhaps I should see my place in this world that is so great and in which I appear so small.
Without humility I would confine the truth to my comprehensions. And besides, such humility is a synecdoche for a certainty: that I am small and the world is awesome in contrasting me.
Without hope, I should plan for death (for even if I seek pleasure and happiness, I might not know their limits, and seek something that causes its opposite due to lack of understanding). At least I can hope for comprehension, and more than that I can hope for meaning (and what, I thought with a final bulwark against resignation, is the purpose of a limit to metaphysical desires).
Without scepticism (which must be intellectual, not instinctual I remind myself, for the latter is nihilistic and tends to suffering as a blind man beside a cliff tends to fall as if by purpose), I would have no bounds to my wishes (perhaps some metaphysical desire for eternal gratification or powerlessness or hedonistic art by way of stepping into a flowing river only once) and delusions, and everything and everyone would appear to me as an eternal master, whose oath I would swear as if drunk and without self-consideration. (But one day, I hope, I shall discard even skepticism, and depend only on my confidence in inspiration and revelation and meaning that I shall nurture as a faith. Still an incomplete understanding, but I do hope, born of sufficient joy and inspiration and revelation and meaning to sustain its own self-promoting pursuit).
And these words keep coming and coming, and I don’t notice whether they’re a dream. I can only watch them appear with humility (for though the witness is mine, creativity may germinate wisdom that supersedes the mortal author), and hope (that I may find wisdom through creativity and intention), and scepticism (that anything of mine could remain untainted by the ignorance which is my living birthright, right now).
When they stop, I wonder, will I have awoken or fallen into another dream?
