Sign Wave (1.29.25)
Life is a highway.
Richard Ankrom is a street artist and sign-maker. In 2001, he observed that a sign on a Los Angeles freeway was confusing in failing to direct cars to the correct lane to exit onto the Northbound Interstate 5. He took it upon himself to surreptitiously modify the sign, in the exact style of the original, to provide the appropriate guidance.
When officials discovered it, they recognized it as an improvement and, astonishingly, left his unauthorized modification in place. Years later, they replaced the sign with a new sign which preserved his vital addition.
In my last three posts, I made some observations:
Truth.
We confuse truth-seeking process, which is fallible, with truth, which is sublime.Beauty.
Our thirst for validation through superficial beauty renders profound things utilitarian.Goodness.
Subjective conceptions of “goodness” lead to reductionism and ultimately, division.
In each instance, I describe how a transcendental quality (truth, beauty or goodness) has been displaced by a self-centric distortion of that quality.
As postmodernists, we tend to re-orient the world around ourselves because, famously, God is dead. But Nietzsche’s quote, so often mistaken as declaring the triumph of reason over spirituality, was in fact a lamentation of the decoupling of the transcendent from the transcendental:
“God is dead…And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? …[W]ho will wipe this blood off us? …Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”
Friedrich Nietzsche (1882)
As observed in my trio of posts, the noble things of the world (the transcendentals) no longer point to something incorruptible (the transcendent). Rather, as Nietzsche observed, in its place, we have inserted the crudest, most defective counterfeit: ourselves.
It would be sufficiently tragic if this were mere conceitedness. But the reality is worse. Deep inside ourselves, we recognize our insufficiencies. We know the taint of our motivations, the impurity of our deeds, the triteness of our efforts.
The vengeful self-castigation that such cravenness yields knows of only two outlets: ourselves, and others. Multiply by seven billion souls and you have the breaking of the world. Against this desolate and desperate backdrop, consider the counterpoint offered by the 20th century scholar and writer, C.S. Lewis:
“If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”
C.S. Lewis (1952)
We live our lives driving down a highway of calamity. We can’t find the exit, because we made the signs, but we have no idea where we are going. But every once in a while, there is a glitch in the matrix. We stumble upon an otherworldly fragment of truth, beauty or goodness.
If we are so wise, we may recognize that these do not point to ourselves, but to something pure and incorruptible. If so, perhaps if we follow, we might yet find our way home.
- J
Uplifting read. Thank you!
Here’s a passage below from a book by John Gray you might like called “The Silence Of Animals: On Progress And Other Modern Myths.” Gray is one of my favorites on human nature. I used to be an atheist but this is much better. The “nothingness” here is not the nothingness of atheism but the “Absolute Nothingness” of mystics such as Meister Eckhart and Simone Weil. Gray says as humans we live by our stories. I agree.
“Like the golden bird singing in the palm in Steven’s poem ‘Of Mere Being’, they come: at the end of the mind, Beyond the last thought…The bird sings. Its feathers shine.”
“The mere being of which Stevens speaks is the pure emptiness to which our fictions may sometimes point. Emerging in ways beyond understanding, our most important fictions are a kind of fate; but not a fate that is the same for everybody. No fiction could be supreme for everyone or even a single person, for ever. The supreme fiction is not the one idea worth having, for there can be no such idea.”
“Admitting that our lives are shaped by fictions may give a kind of freedom - possibly the only kind that human beings can attain. Accepting that the world is without meaning, we are liberated from confinement in the meaning we have made. Knowing there is nothing of substance in our world may seem to rob that world of value. But this nothingness may be our most precious possession, since it opens to us the world that exists beyond ourselves.”