Burning the library of Alexandria

~detritus

Every now and then, something gets hold of me and I go ahead and wipe the big collection of books that I had collected up to that point. Why do I do that? Of course, I could always point to the stuff that happens at home, maybe even try to blame my partner for it. That would be completely unfair of course. It is true that usually a domestic discussion is the catalyst that leads to this "great cleansing", but it is by no means the ultimate cause of it. So why is it then? Why, after all the time spent looking for, selecting and cataloguing books on many different and interesting subjects I go on a whim and with a single command delete everything that I have so far collected?

In ecology there is this notion of periodic events of "frenzied consumers" devouring all the diversity that had thus far accumulated in the environment, leaving it in a state of /tabula rasa/, for things to start and develop again almost from scratch; such is the nature of the current situation with humans and their environment. Outside of ecology, I can think of a number of similar examples. In the sphere of "current events" comes to mind the current situation in Argentina, where a similar phenomenon is currently unfolding on the institutional context. On a broader scale, cultures and empires also see this periodical collapse of the established order returning to a more or less disperse social order. A familiar example, of course, would be the end of the roman world into the 'middle ages' and a distributed feudal order. Closer to our topic can be the burnings of the alexandrian library, or the great burning of books by Qin Shi HuangDi in the late third century BCE.

What do these all have in common? Am I just trying to abstract some semblance of a pattern in what are really isolated events without any relation? At first glance, it may seem so, I am sure some would readily dismiss my meditations as such and quickly forget about it. Such is the mentality of materialists, the dominating paradigm of our time, after all.

But I am not of that persuasion, and I do indeed believe there is a "force of nature" operating here, a pattern that repeats itself in just about every natural process (and by natural process I mean a kind of _metaphysical_ natural process and not one strictly in terms of mechanistic atomic interactions!), and which we can strive to understand, if just a little bit.

But I am not going to analyze such complex matters here and now, I will be content with supposing the existence of such a pattern and elucidate as to it's significance and not it's causes. Again the strictly material mechanics of these wildly different events is less important than the interpretation of what it means for me, or for the entities experiencing such a breakdown.

Incidentally, the words "breakdown" or "collapse" may suggest a negative connotation, but just like the Tarot cards of Death and The Tower, things are not good or bad per se. Nature indeed operates in cycles and change, and every part of the process is a necessary element of the general unfolding of this thing called "Life" (with a capital L because we are talking about one of the Great Mysteries for which all our rationalising understanding is quite insufficient.)

But that is the need for wiping all my books, or burning the library at the cultural centre of the ancient world? Certainly, great losses were incurred in the latter, how could anyone benefit from that?

I can only speak for my own case. Here is a likely cause: After I have accumulated so much, I find myself overwhelmed with material, gigabytes upon gigabytes of material I will likely never read, and which is both disparate and redundant at times. Say, do I really need 10 books on the Kabbalah (insert whatever spelling you favor here, idc), especially if it is only ancillary to other topics in which I am actually interested? Am I going to read them all just to be able to follow some other book on, say, hellenistic astrology? It is nice to have as much information as possible on a topic, so reading becomes a lot more pleasurable when I am able to understand more and more of what is not explicitly told in a book. But I wouldn't want to drown in trivia either, so that I can never get to my destination because at every step, like Zeno's paradox, I have to first get halfway there.

Similarly, a great burning of books is certainly a regrettable event, as is the mass extinction of species. But whereas knowledge (or biological diversity) is potentially infinite, material resources are not, and from time to time, resources have to be freed for new developments to be made, a "metastable" ecosystem has to (and indeed will by it's own) be thrown off balance, in which the continual struggle for survival continues to be an operating force driving things forward (for what sake? that is not my place to say!), and out of which will emerge hopefully the best, at any rate the most fit, the ones that distill the essence of the lessons gained in the previous generation, and the big deck of cards of available information shuffled to allow for more fruitful interaction.

Simiarly when I wipe my books (they are not really lost, dear reader, for I try to keep a backup, knowing all too well I'm going to wipe my data sometime in the future!), I get rid of maybe those 10 books of Qabala which I meant to read at some point, but of which I need, at the present at least, only a passing acquaintance. How I wish I could be a scholar and read all those books and more, and all primary sources, in their original language, and all scholarship that has revolved around them. But from time to time I need to choose what I am really going to focus on, and forget about all the rest, and burn the library to the ground, leaving just those few resources which I know I will want to keep using for the time being.

Whether that is a healthy or even at all productive modus operandi, I will leave for you to judge; right now, I can start all over again with the never ending quest to learn more about the world and to acquire skills that at least I consider useful (even if the rest of the world would disagree!)

If you got this far, I both thank you for your patience and apologize for the brain dump. Most of all, I hope my introspective thoughts give you some food for thought about our psychology, or about the world at large. If all that fails, I hope I have amused you for a few minutes.

~bartender, I'll have a tall espresso, please, I will be busy with the few books I savaged from the big fire.

Ultimately none of the abstractions we hold in
our head about things that we perceive as
reality are real, if all that is real is the
atomic interactions between them, but I'm
suspecting even those atomic interactions are
not real, indeed they are less real as they
are abstractions of our minds, which are
themselves just emergent properties of neural
synapses, which are just an idea that we
abstract in our brains and....

*proceeds to eat his own tail*

>> a being whose presumed existence constitutes flat out
>> denial of the truth.
>
> Why would the subject's existence presuppose a denial
> of truth?

> Ultimately, you are right, pretending to apprehend the
> "truth" is afutile endeavour, much like trying to cup your
> hands and hold water in them.

> I hope your, em, procedure went smoothly, and that you
> can join us for more drinks!

> ~bartender, get this man some naproxen.

> I will have another bourbon so he can watch me drink while
> he cant >:)

>> Because existence of free-willed agents separate from
>> [god] denies the truth of the matter,
>
> Mystical traditions seem to point to the fact of the
> matter being that us entities are not at all separate
> from <ineffable>. I guess the "fall" and all that amounts
> to ignorance of this fundamental unity, the "illusion
> of separation". A subject's existence is not a denial of
> Truth but a confirmation of it. And entities are not fake,
> if we are integral parts of what is true and real.

> I'm quite unsure whether you're denying what you call
> <ineffable> here.

>> there'd already dozens of scoffing objections
>> representing people tripping over their own private
>> meanings/understandings. <shrugs>
>
> Yes, that's the problem of talking with other people about
> things. Everybody makes a million assumptions they are not
> willing to notice, and thinks everybody else mean the same
> things merely because they use the same words.

>> you seem sincere
>
> thank you I guess, the truth is, I don't know what I'm
> talking about.

> I am glad you came out of that fine. ~bartender, two bloody
> marys, please. ;-)

> I am not an agnostic, however. I have been trying to get in
> touch with mysticism, I don't think we are supposed to be
> completely ignorant of the only reality out there. Though
> the dominant materialistic stance of my surroundings
> would point entirely in the opposite direction. I do
> believe words have a purpose, and whereas we tend to
> think of words as merely empty representations of reality,
> I think symbols hold a lot more power than we give them
> credit for. The illusion of separation also applies to the
> separation of the phenomena we perceive in our reality,
> whether they are of a physical or psychological nature,
> or a purely "illusory" one rooted in our own vantage point.

> One interesting example is astrology and the
> planets. Educated in the doctrine of material
> cause-and-effect I was always a skeptic of astrology. Only
> recently I've been trying to get out of that limiting frame
> and try to understand how and why the ancients considered
> the influence of distant luminaries in the happenings of
> the world.

> That's a very interesting analysis. If we merely afford
> words the place of superficial, imperfect representations
> of an otherwise continuous reality, we will miss the fact
> that our very brains are an extension, and in a way, a
> "fruition" of such representation under the consideration
> of interpreting entities, and that the mappings they
> develop, further expressed in mappings of a broader, social
> interpretation, then the whole analysis would (and by
> materialists certainly is) be dismissed as fruitless. And
> yet such etymological glosses do a decent job at untangling
> the development of our current modes of thought from that
> archetypal source which we all ultimately share.
>
> I am not sure the preceding paragraph makes a lot of sense,

> so I will proceed and draw an analogy with an area of
> computer programming.
>
> Image based, object oriented systems, the prime example
> of which would be smalltalk. There aren no classes or
> class inheritance here, as in more... degenerate forms
> of OOP. A single object or a small number of primitive
> object types from the basis for everything else. Whenever
> we need a new object that's slightly different from the
> ones in existence, we "clone" them and then proceed to
> make adjustments: change their state, add methods to them,
> etc. In that way we may end up with a very complex system,
> but where every object in a way shares a common ancestry,
> from which they all derive their truths through much
> differentiation. That is more or less how I imagine
> the human psyche and all the human systems of thought,
> especially those devoted to what I call systems of 'mystic'
> knowledge, The underlying truth behind every and all
> such systems remains the same, for there can be no two
> of them. But each culture has tapped into that source and
> differentiated according to a myriad of necessities due to
> the context of their development, be it climate, challenges
> presented by their environment, or social happenings such
> as the recurring political movements by masses of people
> with particular ambitions. This differentiation may mean
> words develop in strangely different ways, but the kernel
> of truth from which they all stem remains there hidden
> behind much refinement, and can potentially be traced
> back, although always imperfectly because of our vantage
> point, thousands if not millions of years removed from
> the starting point.
>
> I don't know if any of this makes sense, I am not in
> my most eloquent moment right now. I just don't want to
> stay silent for a week trying to find the best moment to
> ... explain myself.