Descent into the "schlock" of despair

"Man is a tragic animal. Not because of his smallness, but because he is too well endowed. Man has longings and spiritual demands that reality cannot fulfill. We have expectations of a just and moral world. Man needs meaning in a meaningless world".
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"The immediate facts are what we must relate to. Darkness and light, beginning and end".

- Peter Wessel Zapffe

Okay, here's where the experiment starts to get interesting. What if you see how far into madness you can descend in a controlled way. You can reason your way out of madness, Nash proved that. Imagine something like a madness "reactor", instead of a madness bomb. Let symbols be like the fuel rods you inject to get a controlled reaction. When it gets too "hot", you pull some symbols back to their groundstate.
Of course, the only thing that makes this madness interesting is how gauche and protracted it is, especially with all of the hack poetry and everything else. This may be it's major appeal: the number of things that are done poorly at the same time. You've heard of polymath, call this polyhack - shameless drivel, therapeutically designed to fight off the insignificance of being a polyhack. One advantage: the polyhack is much easier to understand than the real thing. The mirror neurons have to be kept from trigerring the action, but if they are released, what amusement in the flailing. If a fool, then a grande, or at least loud, fool.
The longest and most shameless dance, at the end of a rope, is the one that makes the crowd feel grateful.

The inner (left) house -

Plain as Sandburg,

a bed, a dresser, a kitchen chair,

a wooden floor, bare walls

An elephant stands against its massive door.
This house is out on a limb. It is a chamber. It is a tomb. It is a sarcophagus.

In the sitting room, a night-lite changes colors, neon red, neon green, neon blue, red, green, blue, yellow, violet, white, endlessly repeating the same rosary.

In the darkness of that room, now neon red, now neon green, a

deer with a womans head;
its body

a quiver

of arrows

floating up and down like wings in take-off

red, green, blue, yellow, white.

It is all madness, except in the moment.

"Huck hung himself when he heard about Jim."
"Apparently, Jim finally went back to Miss Watson and allowed his self to be sold off, said freedom was too unbearable lonely."

Countless ways of measuring are on the walls and on the shelves. They can all add to zero or to 1. It depends on the weights, and the permissions, and the logic, and the facts. It depends on the s,p,d,f of it all, and maybe it all comes down to one electron in my brain.

The frog can not help but jump for blue by jumping away from green.

There are the "charming" coincidences, predicted by Ramsey's theory.

If there is (complete) transcendance from the physical, then meaning reigns.
If there is no transcendance, if life is purely physical, then existentialism reigns.
Any philosophy that tries to establish either case is a botch.

If we were immortal
what would we know
after a million years?
We might know that
we forget most of what has happened,
and are but a suggestion to the future.
We might realize that all we ever have
is the moment.

Why must we be immortal in order for there to be meaning?

When the beautiful construction is shown to be a hoax; a corny trick, the workers, that day go home in shame.

Zappfe's four mechanisms:

One hides from the truth.
The lies we tell ourselves.
The distractions from the paradox.
The sublime.

This can be a lie we tell ourselves
climbing mountains.
We climb to climb. And if we should fall,
we will surely die. So we shall climb and think of
nothing else.
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I have no need of infinity,
no room for it. I can take this interval
and make it real.
Here is where left and right are naught,
and blind with eyesight, faint of heart,
we pester ourselves with dreams.
Gaze headlong at the possibilities,
and weep.