Page 102 - The Irony Board

Into the Cosmos

In darkness watch
A firefly:

Continuum
You must imply.

Now I am returning to Gluckman’s favorite topic: philosophy, as
described in the first section. The goal is to gain an understanding
not available through the senses, but nevertheless as true as the
reality of those physical organs. His method of boundary analysis
provides certain metaphysical truths; they have little value or
meaning in themselves, their virtue being primarily in testing the
validity of other propositions. The idea dealt with in this poem is
that of the seamlessness of existence, the actuality of boundlessness:
are there pockets of nothing interspersed with packets of something,
or is somethingness total? This is the problem of dualism, of
discontinuous types of being.
We are in darkness when we try empirically to examine the
microcosmic and macrocosmic edges of our world; physics, in this
century, has hit the limits of observation. So how can the question
of continuum be answered, if not empirically? Gluckman’s answer is
that given any inside (by means, at minimum, of self-consciousness),
the issue is immediately resolved: since boundaries are fictional, that
inside is continuous with its outside. It is not possible for a “real”
boundary to impose itself anywhere within or without the given
inside. Only two metaphysical cases are possible: nothing (which
would be permanent, not having any boundary) and something (also
endless, for the same reason). Which of those cases is actually in
force is self-evident; nothing is not, therefore has not been nor ever
will be. This is known through the implications of the principle of
boundedness, a topological restatement of the “Law of Excluded
Middle”.
Observing the bioluminescent flashes of an airborne insect is
analogous to imperfect empirical knowledge. In the dark, how can
we know the firefly continues to exist between our separated views
of it? Only through a process of implication similar in result to

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