Affirmation

Why? What's it for? What's the point? What's it worth? These are the questions science is not good at answering, the more so against need, greed and an ever climbing spiral of utility and exploitation. Pure art doesn't need to justify itself. Art is, self-assuredly, for its own sake, until it grows foolish, then we can smile, or frown, shrug and walk away.

Science, since it seeks whys, must present its own reason also. It turns the tool of reason on itself, and draws spinarettes, spirals and towers of ideas from thin air, or, at least, thin grey matter. It uses reality to build reflections of reality, that it cannot prove even exists, perhaps being no more than mathematics expressed.

Science is the universe looking at itself.

That is the awful wonder, that the universe can even be such a mirror of itself, build these reflections, theories and models of what it finds, repeating them, testing them, refining them, occasionally rebuilding them, ever comparing and refining the representation, ever approaching the inescapable, purest truth, but never, ever quite reaching it, because then it would be the universe itself, a perfect copy of itself, being everything there ever is, and we cannot make two of something from just one. (Can we?)

Why not participate in such a dance, paint a small corner of the grandest canvas, sing a single note of the song of the universe? Sing, and realise you are one of the notes, you are part of the picture you are painting, you are a single brushstroke, exactly in place, exactly in time, you cannot be anything else, in the dance that never began and will never end.

To know this, is to understand, to understand you must explore, to explore you must shed your preconceptions, see the world anew, test each idea for prejudice, your own, or others, until you find yourself, looking out through your own eyes, down upon yourself. The self cannot be escaped, but it can be accepted, harnessed, controlled and ridden, understood for its limits of understanding, defined by the terms it defines for itself, choosing its own expression and expressing its own choice, declaring "today, I shall stand here", because where else is there to stand?