The Knight of the Sad Countenance

   

To live like the character of a book, by an inspiring myth, to die if needed. This narrative of domination which ties us to a foundational myth and is enacted socially as love for the Mother-Father Land, for the ancestors, prophets and messiahs of the group, becomes at once a critique of the social values when the totem is called Dulcinea del Toboso. Like a theorem proven from wrong assumptions, but reaching the right conclusion nonetheless, Alonso Quijano’s crusade against injustice, dullness and hypocrisy of life is still today a lesson on the value of ideals: to transform the world through love for the receding horizon. Dulcinea might be ugly and rude, with overnight onion-salad breath, but when surfing the sunset colors, as she constantly does in Don Quixote’s eyes, no other Queen or divine entity compares to her. Dulcinea is indifferent to us, and so it is with the rest of our ideals; they are simply our wonderful madness or innocent interpretation of the received myth. To realize this was the sadness of Alonso, my sadness, my joy; for only by realizing it we become free of the unreasonable weight that we put in our hearts by loving the non-existing ether. And yet, this craziness cannot be renounced, for it is how life surmounts itself and how another day can be worth living. The moment we don´t, we sink to the bottom of Sancho’s deluded dream of golden shitty Baratarias.

Universal Plans

   Could we understand the universe without thinking in terms of a planning intelligence? Such question is rather tricky for a representation of order is already at work in the synthesis which implies our notion of universe, a unity of pluralities. The pluralities are given by common experience, the unity is our addendum, a mimetical projection of our thinking unity at work (cultural and mythical more that individual). We impose the need for a global and unified representation of order and in the process find ourselves with two alternatives: it is a blind order, a gigantic machine at work, or is a purposeful piece of art. A third possibility: the universe is a mere random play, would contradict the concept of universe, for the union of a plurality implies a principle of order for the synthesis. Therefore, we are either part of a cosmic machine or of a cosmic piece of art. In both cases intelligence is at work and the idea of a plan.

   What happens if instead of a universe we speak of apeiron, an undefined referent reality which only takes shape in the representations of life, which can only have a representation in relation to life processes? Our universal myths become projections of life. In fact, in the myth of universe, of order, we find how life projects its automatic proceeding, and its inventive-adapting craft, giving a meaning to our experience of life. Then, even randomness becomes nothing more than a particular a-representational experience, liminal landscapes waiting for an endomorphic work to turn them into machine-like representations, or either a masterpiece of order and purposefulness, if we prefer to emphasize the adapting poiesis of the living.

   Life orders and plans, and wonderfully discovers itself doing it, the reflection in its thinking action, and like the animal which does not recognize its image in the mirror, realizes the overflowing complexity of its own doings which goes far beyond the thin veil of past narratives which created reality, a surplus of intelligence (and of life) which seem to point out to mighty universal plans.