The more closely you look at grammar, the more precisely you
attempt to formulate language regularities, the more your list of “exceptions”
grows. You are forced to face the fact that no system of grammatical
regularities covers the whole system. It cannot ultimately be reduced to laws.
The grammar of the universe is written in math. And apparently the same thing
applies here: the better your math, the more closely you observe, the farther
away the total system gets. (Paradoxically the more you cover the less gets
covered, or is it just that the further you spread you tarp, the larger the
field is revealed to be?) It is the familiar problem of the particle and the
wave or of general and special relativity. Reality, to follow and perhaps
expand the metaphor of Schrodinger’s Cat, does seem to exist not only when but
also only as you look at it. (It’s not just neither alive nor dead it’s not
even a cat until you open the box.) A word gets its meaning from its use, from
the context of other words, at the moment when meaning is inscribed or
extracted. Between times there is no meaning. There aren’t even any words.
Think of sticks, which are just sticks (sticks that are just sticks do not
exist, but you can still think about them) until they are contextualized in
some way, as indicators of arboreal infection or the skeleton of an artist’s dog.
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