Monday, March 14, 2022

Luminiferous

 


Literature always attempts to answer the riddle of life. Not that there is a riddle of life ... it's that life is the riddle. Unfortunately, the answer--as well as the riddle itself--is different for each human being. Which means that the universe is filled with the cacophany of everyone shouting answers and no one listening.

Luminarium tries to tame the whirlwind of chaos and present it in a meaningful way. Which, of course, is impossible. Chaos tamed is no longer chaos. Pandemonium (from the Greek for "all demons") has no structure, while meaning is nothing but structure. At one point, in order to sugar-coat his narrative in familiar terms, Shakar suggests that the universe is the ultimate computer game. The idea is facile and hackneyed, applicable only to our cultural milieu, itself grounded in an illusion of shifting electrons and strobe-light impermanence adapted from television and movies.

Shakar addresses the ontological dilemma by positing the idea that the existential symmetry between virtual particles is actually our inability to perceive higher dimensional reality, an intriguing idea which is immediately lost in the narrative.

Maybe that's the basic point of narrative in the first place: to show us things which we might not see on our own. But if it is, what do we do when the light at the end of the tunnel turns out to be an on-coming train?

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