The Museum of Eterna's Novel

FOR THOSE NOT EXPERT IN METAPHYSICS

I can’t give the anxious young person what he longs for: a certain understanding or a certain power to achieve an ambition, or a steady, secure direction in the darkness of Being, nothing concrete, just a sign in the sky, a tree in Africa, a strange affinity, a turned stone, a shadow profile that, raising or retaining itself in the mind, will signify to him that the act or intuition that he had in his mind in the moment he found it must continue on, and is in fact what led him to the attainment of this desire. But I can send him down the path of such promising thoughts, so ripe with the totalpossibility that is eternity, so heady with mystery, that they will create for him an interior world so strong that no Reality can have the power of sadness or impossibility or limitation for him that it has over someone who hasn’t managed to construct thought-fascinations to accompany him always.

We can all cultivate this constant and powerful daydream that dulls the sharpness of an adverse reality. Religions, patriotism, humanism, all do this in some way; most of all religions. The notion of honor is perhaps a voluntary combination of an anti-Reality analgesic.

But for someone who has not obtained Totalove, which is the Highest form of Daydream, because it is hedonic in two senses: in itself and aesthetically (which is to say in thought, in what appears to it when we contemplate it in ourselves or in another) — there is a still stronger base than these analgesics for construction of Daydream: the mystic’s attitude — the opposite of the religious attitude — which is only achievable by touching the limitation of the Intelligence on all of its limits, the unthinkability of Being, not the small-minded unthinkability of antonyms — a prolific emptiness — but unthinkability itself.

While we await Totalove, let’s emancipate ourselves from the absurd notion of the Unknowable, which is a vestige of that infantile veneration of Reality, the vague fear of Man faced with the World (physical and psychical) derived from a vulgar conception of Intelligence as just one tool among others, just as incapable as any of them of perceiving causes and effects and formulating causal laws for well-being and eluding, anticipating, or preventing good or bad things. And let us emancipate ourselves from the Impossible, from all that we search for and sometimes believe does not exist, and, even worse, cannot exist. Nothing, therefore, should detain us in the search for a full, unrestricted solution, leaving no irreducible remainder.

Because psychical or spatial¹ Reality is full, just as full as its correlative certainty. Up to a certain limit, Certainty and Reality, despite the Error associated with them, are synonyms. It’s not only that Reality is full, familiar, and certain, but also that our Certainty and Familiarity, the aplomb with which we manage or judge it, and all of the metaphysical jargon, cannot vary our conduct, whether or not we feel certain. Example: A worker who puts in eight hours a day breaking glass lands one thousand hammer blows during a given period, always with the fulfilled certainty that the blow of the hammer will break the glass: one thousand instances of Certainty in an hour. And if we put in his place a top metaphysician, the same thing will happen to him (although no metaphysician can clearly tell which is the Fundamental of Induction). Certainty, Fullness, Familiarity of Reality.

The theory of Eternity demands suitable exercises of Emancipation from absurd limitations. And for only one prologue, that’s quite enough metaphysics. To each prologue its own speciality.

1 I don’t say external because everything, psychical or spatial, is exterior to the attention or interest with which we perceive it. This attention can’t go with every perception, not everything is double — subject and object — and that which was in the mind or sensibility without being noticed can be, later, in the image that it leaves behind.