Meaning

Metaphysical Grilled Cheese

“The ultimate neurochemical drug hit for the terminally stale, meaning is as perfectly insubstantial as the last cigarette of the night, but even less satisfying.

The most laughable delusion of this or any Modernity to come is that a lack of meaning prevails. Humans are so casually and reflexively productive of meaning that their symbolic activities can only be likened to an uncontrollable vomitory excess. The stars are stories, rutting hominids are soulmates, weather patterns are divine moods. From the imaginary friends of childhood to the last rites of world religions, scarcely a second of human experience passes that is not styrofoam-packed with overabundant and exhausting meaning. And similar to the familiar packing peanuts, there is always MUCH MORE MEANING than is strictly necessary. You’ll find stray bits of meaning under the couch for weeks. You’ll step on meaning on your way to take a piss in the middle of the night.

To discover more meaning, Viktor Frankl only had to reach into his back pocket. Meaning was hiding in his coin purse, his left sock, anywhere he chose to turn his gaze. Like a performing street magician or vaudeville clown, Frankl had meaning up his sleeves the whole time.

Meaning is cheap, filling, and extremely basic, like a hastily-made grilled cheese sandwich, and its purveyors resemble insanitary roadside vendors uncontrollably dispensing hot Kraft-filled slabs to hungry, addicted proles. Why settle for the raw phenomenological chaos of unfiltered sensory experience when you can have marriages, ethnostates, community bonds, graduate diplomas, plenary indulgences, even your own name, background, and social security number?

An ‘absence of meaning’ is often taken to be synonymous with depression, despair, personal inertia, etc. We find this entirely to be the opposite. The buildup of meaning is a bit like plaque on your teeth; in the long-run, it can impede the strength of your bite. While an array of professionals of differing talents is always on hand to remove dental gunk, few qualified meaning-removal specialists would seem to be readily available. Can our critics ever really use precise dentistry-style rhetorical tools to scrape meaning away from everyday life? We suspect they can’t, although it would certainly come as a relief.

Many interpersonal relationships are eminently enjoyable—until they become meaningful. Once this deplorable condition has been reached, it becomes very difficult to return things to their original, liberated condition.

Poor people love meaning because it provides them with the illusion that events are taking place. Rich people love meaning because it provides poor people with the illusion that events are taking place.

Meaning’s forays into figurative language betray its sloppy, childish, fundamentally low class nature. This INDISCRIMINATE and UNDISCERNING quality is apparent from a survey of metaphors, where it becomes clear that meaning is convinced EVERYTHING IS THE SAME AS EVERYTHING ELSE. The sea is dark wine, all the world’s a stage, electronic digits in a computer are surplus labor value, a Chinese mother is a tiger, a heretical rabbi nailed to a tree is a Transcendental Ideal, Juliet is the sun. Even the hoariest psychoanalysis reveals that any random peasant’s mind is a Kabbalistic maze of correspondences, a tedious meaning factory running day and night. As enjoyable as it would be to gate-keep or otherwise limit meaning, no human institution has truly succeeded in removing meaning from the lives of the uneducated.

Meaning sees no difference between black and white, up and down, abstract and concrete. In this sense, meaning is like a lazy screenwriter who relies on ‘multiverses’ to produce more stories. Don’t like a particular referent or connotation? No problem, just switch to another context. The ultimate ‘woke relativist,’ meaning sees no problem with contradicting all standards, all values, all consensus reality. Even that supreme annoyance, suffering, can be ‘a source of meaning.’ For sheer disgusting democracy, meaning has even the herpes class of viruses beat.

In its promiscuous obsession with correlating all sensations and occurrences, meaning resembles a deranged club promoter whose event is an embarrassment, however well-attended.

Even more irritatingly, critiques of meaning from outside meaning would seem to be impossible. Wittgenstein certainly failed in this regard.

The abundance of cheap meaning is a cause for concern. Can truly meaningless art ever be produced? Judging by Dada and other failures to not mean, it seems unlikely.

Unlike almost all other fields of human endeavor, adults are not necessarily better than children at producing meaning. This alone should make us consider meaning very carefully.

Terminally meaningful people are impossibly boring to be around, given that meaning is like a busy, chirpy salutatorian who is constantly reminding you of upcoming events requiring your immediate attention. Meaning is the girl who will never be on the prom court despite vast effort, while, somewhere in the corner, meaninglessness takes off its intellectual spectacles to reveal the classic beauty beneath.”
—Justin Isis

«And crawling on the planet’s face

Some insects called the human race

Lost in time, lost in space

and meaning.» —Richard O’Brien, “Super Heroes”

“The search for meaning is closer to superstition than philosophy. What is superstition but the belief that the world has been arranged with special reference to our needs and anxieties? Surrounded by narratives, we have come to assume that existence itself is one, and as such our individual lives must be provided with an arc, a climax, a denouement and, of course, an ultimate point. Some devote their lives to religious, political, or corporate institutions—and how violently they will defend these constructs when questioned or challenged. We have turned meaning itself into something sacred and untouchable because it shields us from the horror of confronting our condition as mere expenditure, a temporary arrangement of matter that helps dissipate energy and is destined for decomposition. Purpose becomes placebo against the recognition that we exist without justification.

But much worse than that, the search for meaning or purpose has become a profitable psyop rife with life coaches, self-help authors, financial gurus, TED talkers, spiritual guides and the like. They’ll sell you a map to a treasure they buried themselves, then charge you for the shovel. They’ll promise a universe that cares and provides in return, but deliver you into a feedback loop that numbs but never soothes. Meaning is now a commodity available in affordable packages: Basic (forty-five minutes of guided gratitude), Premium (a weekend of ayahuasca and artisanal tears) and Platinum (a catharsis retreat where you get to rebrand your entire childhood).

On the same path we find the cult of ‘finding yourself,’ an industry of comfort and consolation prizes that trade the palaces and gardens of your soul for pre-fabricated homes with standardized floorplans: here is the chapel for family; here, the closet for all suppressed desires; here, the small window through which to glimpse a vacation twice a year. They want this home to shelter accountants rather than friends or lovers.

Neo-Passéists cling to the idea of legacy in a desperate attempt to etch their name into the annals of history. But all information will degrade, all monuments will turn to dust, all energy will eventually dissipate into a uniform but sterile warmth. If the ultimate reality is an entropic imperative, then the most profound act is one of pointless expenditure: the peacock’s tail, the courtesan’s jewels, the poet’s overwrought metaphor—these are the true sacraments, for they are elegant accelerators of waste converting energy into fleeting beauty.

Rather than rage against the inevitable, we choose to choreograph our own disappearance. We reject the moralizing impulse to ‘make a difference.’ Instead, we advocate making a spectacle—a temporary, glittering disturbance in the flow of energy, worthy of nothing but its own fleeting brilliance. We are the universe’s most ornate heat sinks: let us be the most inefficient, most decorative, most splendidly impractical catalysts for the slow march of entropy as we radiate in glorious indifference.

Let meaning be swallowed by its own absurdity. Let purpose be devoured by the very entropy it seeks to deny. And when the sirens of meaning come calling and try and tempt you with telos, answer with silence and your stubborn resumption of ordinary kindness.”
—Ramon Alanis

“Interpretation is a human habit, almost always automatic. We hear a pop in the night, and immediately distinguish fireworks from a gunshot. A quiet acquaintance speaks and we arrange the susurration into the most likely words. To interpret is to assemble that which we encounter into sense. Often, an orgasmic rush of surety accompanies our interpretations. This is meaning latching onto understanding. Imbued meaning warps interpretation into a static guidepost, creating a parasite that spreads from encounter to encounter. A single interpretation, now infested with meaning, can go on to infect an entire life, creating a rigid and immobile being that can only shamble along, hoping to settle into a community of those similarly infected. Like the false thrill of off-hand masturbation, imbued meaning seems to originate beyond the self via some genuine interaction with a hidden collaborator. In actuality, the assignment of meaning is blatant onanism, often completed in public, with the results proudly displayed.”
—Siobhán M. La Grippe

‘I . . . I . . . thought I was part of the grand story . . . the story that . . . that would at last give meaning to this senseless trajectory . . . the loop and spin of being . . . instead . . . instead I have learned a horrible truth of . . . existence . . . some stories have no meaning. Oh, bugger . . .’ —Red Jack

“To properly address this issue in an informed and intelligent manner one must needs be a philosopher, a psychologist, a linguist, or a semiotician. Unfortunately, I am none of the above, being a mere bookseller and self-styled amateur medievalist/Egyptologist, with retro-Decadent pretensions. Also, despite being a confidant (and occasional conduit) of that 5th-dimensional Surrealist eyeball-headed dodo farfadet known in some recherché circles as The Fabulous Mr. Meaningless, I am not specifically antagonistic towards the individual designation of meaning to the events that occur in one’s temporal span on this mortal coil. Indeed, the assignation of symbolic meaning to even the most commonplace affairs is very emblematic of the medieval mindset as a whole, hence my general sympathies with the concept. And truthfully, for whatever reason, I’ve never really even giving the matter all that much in the way of deep thought, preferring to dwell on other issues of dubious import, for truly meaning is one of those abstract concepts whose number of lapidary definitions rivals that of the forests of statuary found at the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Chartres.

I do however feel that trying to attack it is like tilting at windmills, as futile an action as the twink Caligula’s declaring war against the English Channel, and having his men steal seashells in a vain and impotent attempt to demasculate the god Neptune. And as some of my more learned brethren have pointed out, the creation of a truly meaningless art is all but impossible (and it could be argued that even a work of art that claims to have no meaning still has meaning after all, in that its very lack of meaning is its meaning). On the literary front, I suppose one could compose a book made up of nothing but random jumbles of letters, but would such a ghastly chimera be a work of art that anyone would truly want to read? As human beings we need meaning in at least some capacity, if only for the sake of the communication of ideas and comprehensibility, or for the aesthetic enrichment of our own lives, and when we open a dictionary we expect to see all words in their proper place, perfectly defined and with their meanings intact, not some Tohu wa-bohu of primal chaos. And certainly subjective meaning is an important object in the poet’s toolbox, for without its transformative ability to deepen the nature of things via alchemic symbolism, how else could the poet transcend the literal and the mere surface-level, and thus turn sunflowers into drunken jesters mocking a solemn sky? Meaning needs not replace; used correctly, it enhances, or put another way, it is like viewing one thing from a number of different angles, opinions, viewpoints, and phenomenologies, as if through the collective compound eye of saint and satyr, monk and madman, angel and demon. Meaning does not remain static; it dances on the harlequin dancefloor between the taciturn faces of Order and Chaos. Properly understood, then, meaning is a transsexual werewolf, and what are similes, allegories and metaphors but meaning queered, the heraldic beasts rearing up rampant on the oriflamme of my astral haus in digital Nuremberg?

Having said that, I also advocate a cautious and conservative measure to this manner of personalized application of meaning (at the very least, outside the arena of the arts, where a certain degree of stylistic pomp is to be expected), to avoid falling into the pit traps that the general populace of medieval Western Europe succumbed to, in which the numinous becomes formulaic from overexposure (remember that Johan Huizinga, in his book The Waning of the Middle Ages, complained about ‘The depreciation of sacred imagery resulting from its hackneyed use.’) For make no mistake, the Divine does reach out to us, but oftentimes obliquely, in subtle whispers heard only by the ears of the soul . . . most assuredly it does not stoop to mere babbling, like some overbearing fishwife at the market.

And sometimes, in certain situations again outside of the realm of art, there may not even be a need to categorize or assign meaning. By way of illustration, what follows is an example from my own life, which I first related in my debut collection Grimoire. Over 15 years ago, on a spring afternoon, I stepped into my local supermarket, to cash a check at the bank located within the store itself. As I passed through the vestibule, I noticed there was a big butterfly trapped inside, trying desperately to escape through the glass window barring it from the outside world. It had a black body, and its wings were black and blue in color. It was one of the most beautiful butterflies I’d ever seen in my life. After cashing my check, I returned to this vestibule. Gingerly, I reached out to the butterfly and carefully cupped it in my hands. It was the most delicately I had ever handled anything. When I had it cupped safely within my hands, I took it back outside and released it. I then watched it fly upwards, into the cloudless blue sky, and it kept flying higher and higher until I couldn’t see it anymore. But watching that butterfly fly away, I felt an indescribable feeling of peace and joy wash over me, and it was as if my spirit was flying out of my body, following the butterfly into the heavens above. I expect that there are many different meanings one could attach to my actions that day, and the resulting feelings and sensations that it had on me; for example, the late Colin Wilson might have classified it as a ‘Peak Experience.’ But why taxonomize a pulchritudinous memory? In my passage through time, I touched beauty. What does it matter if my only witness was the Almighty Aignoz? The rest is silence…”

‘From time to time a tiny yellow butterfly would flit past, like a little yellow leaf shed by one of the birches; and now and then one of the bleeding, tortured looking liege-oaks would drop an acorn, with a little flop—just to remind you, as it were, that it was leading its own serene, vegetable life, oblivious to the agony ascribed to it by the fevered fancy of man.’ —Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist
—James Champagne

art by Dan Heyer