In the beginning there was the Logos and the Logos was… messy, very, very messy. In the end, however, there is chaos, and chaos always wins, despite how hard we try to clean it up. We even have a category for the disordered, a phantasmagoric law, the second law of thermodynamics, which simply states, no matter what, after awhile everything just gets filthy again. A neat desk is a sign of … a wasted morning. A clean house is a sign of …a wasted day. Cleanliness is next to… impiety. Anything worth doing is worth doing badly and doing badly a lot. Heraclitus is right, “The human character does not have insights, but the divine does. To the god all things are beautiful and good and just, but men opine that some are just and some unjust.” Some filthy and some failing.
Logos isn’t neat, and it troubles us. So we pray to our therapy gods and take Paxil and Prozac liturgically hoping to get order back in control. But order is hubris, and we suffer the tragedy of continuously turning the compost heap. Ah new Sisyphus. We great creatures are earth worms, lowly and blind pulling stuff out of the earth and littering it upon the earth, pulling stuff out of the earth and again littering upon the earth, burying what last we littered. From dust to dust, working diligently to box it all up, mountains of boxes of dust. Desperate to control Logos with our categories and our successes, and Logos laughs at us. We are an arm of chaos mixing and mixing all into humus, skyscrapers, truth, concrete, glass, plastic, philosophy and back. Such noble creatures are we. “The beginning and the end are the same.”
So failure is the light of Logos — the realization that we never control anything with our pretensions to success and cleanliness. Nothing, that is, but our own fantasies within our own compulsions. The only escape is to fail often and fail big and fail happy and keep on failing, because failure is the god’s way of letting us in on this one simple trick: lust for a place for everything and everything in its place, for the one true truth is the ultimate arrogance. And arrogance surely is one sin that never goes unpunished.
Article comments
1 - Keith
Even if you are right, that man is but an insignificant flame, flickering in the midst of some illimitable darkness with no thought or reason or entity beyond us to give us hope and meaning, man can never fail. The spark of creation, the breath of defiance in the face of that immense darkness"the last clear, definite function of man"all comes from the brevity of that flame. In the words of someone infinitely better than me (Hemingway?), “Man can be destroyed, but not defeated.”
Of course, if you’re just saying that my mom should get off my back me about cleaning my room, I wholeheartedly agree.
2 - Victor Plenty
One of the most interesting definitions for life was coined by the atmospheric scientist James Lovelock, who calls life "the localized reversal of entropy."
One way we know Earth is a living planet is to measure our atmosphere's chemistry. All other planets we know of have air mixtures dictated by the second law of thermodynamics, the law of entropy. Earth does not.
Only Earth has reactive gases, such as the oxygen we need to survive. On other planets, any oxygen would soon react with other elements and be used up. Only Earth has life forms that keep the oxygen supply constantly renewed.
Every breath we take, we owe to our globe being a location where life temporarily holds entropy at bay.
From these observations one might surmise that defeating entropy on an ever-growing scale might be the ultimate goal, purpose, and destiny of life.
Such a project might be doomed to failure, as Dr. Carmine claims here, but it is inherent in all living things. Rejecting a quality we have in common with all other life may be even more arrogant than supposing life can one day triumph over the oppressive dictatorship of the second law of thermodynamics.