Page 9 - The Irony Board
P. 9
Into the Mind
I’m empty
Like a bag
Full of bags.
If a symbolizer knows itself through symbols, it runs the risk of
getting lost in the loop of infinite regression. The mind can look like
the reflection of a mirror in a mirror, endlessly transcending itself in
a self-concept inclusive of its immediately prior self-concept.
Boundary analysis eliminates this problem from individual
consciousness, as it does from similar paradoxes in set theory and
theology. Symbols, like bags, are empty containers; it is by
convention that they refer to their contents. The mind may confront
its emptiness by recognizing this fact. The presence of conceptually
subordinate emptinesses has no meaning; none of the symbols filling
a person—Gluckman, for instance—exists more substantially than
the others, no matter how they are nested.
7
