LITERATURE & NEW MEDIA: The Consolation – Final Finale

Happy news: The three a.m. dark garage spirit  has returned with some of its meandering sometimes deep and sometimes ridiculous ponderings.  Besides Boethius’ explanation of the senses picking up empirically on the things around us, he points to reason and intellect as that which will know all these things and more from its lofty position (viewpoint).  I am still fascinated by those two conclusions in Book V:  the hint of an ongoing spirit, and the Divine Knowledge of seeing past, present and future unseparated by man’s perception of time.

"Eternity is the whole, perfect, and simultaneous possession of endless life.  The meaning of this can be made clearer by comparison with temporal things.  For whatever lives in time lives in the present, proceeding from past to future, and nothing is so constituted in time that it can embrace the whole span of its life at once.  It has not arrived at tomorrow, and it has already lost yesterday; even the life of this day is lived only in each moving, passing moment.  Therefore, whatever is subject to the condition of time, even that which–as Aristotle conceived the world to be–has no beginning and will have no end in a life coextensive with the infinity of time, is such that it cannot rightly be thought eternal.  For it does not comprehend and include the whole of infinite life all at once, since it does not embrace the future which is yet to come.  Therefore, only that which comprehends and possesses the whole plenitude of endless life together, from which no future thing nor any past thing is absent, can justly be called eternal.  Moreover, it is necessary that such a being be in full possession of itself, always present to itself, and hold the infinity of moving time present before itself.

(…) For it is one thing to live an endless life, which is what Plato ascribed to the world, and another for the whole of unending life to be embraced all at once as present, which is clearly proper to the divine mind."  (Book V, Prose 6, p. 104)

Previously I likened this concept of Divine Knowledge to a panoramic view of a flowchart, or collage of images in frames.  This morning I see God sitting at his computer studying life on earth as a maze of Storyspace rectangle events connected by lines of free will.  While as Boethius has warned, what is inconceivable to the human mind does not mean it is not possible or does not exist (think airplanes in 1500 a.d.), and that Divine Knowledge may not be achievable by man but should be aspired to, it is easier to relate some sort of knowledge and experience to the unknown to at least simulate a concept.  God or Nature or, if you like, Grand Order, is not keying in the information, not clicking on boxes to follow the paths, but rather watching the whole plan laid out on some giant plasma wall screen as each man chooses his own pattern and hops along from box to box, sometimes able to explore many paths at once–though not on the same decision or topic, but rather the different demands of life, i.e., family, job, chicken or beef for dinner.

It’s sort of a neat idea, isn’t it?  We sometimes live a life unattached to reality in gaming; we open the door and find an weird raw-skinned creature with a stick coming at us in a video game such as Silent HIll.  We make decisions.  The game is the visual result of the production, based on decisions; the layout, such as in Storyspace, is the great plan or map.  Grand Order writes the code. Man writes the script.

"No!  Don’t go there; that’s where the Shaleheads got you before… No, stop, turn around…Holy Shit."