this incessant finding, the soul of science, part 1

It sounds like an allegory, a description of something we feel is there, but could never actually be there.  It sounds like a personal experience, but it is only as personal as any scientific discovery, as when a boy named Ronald Mallett lost his father and began working on a time machine in his basement to find that father and finally found, in an official laboratory, a way to send a particle slightly backwards in time.  He didn't get far enough to find his father, but he made him proud.  

The quest for the dead does not just trigger such a quest, the dead guide the quest all along the way, the quest is the art, essence, and soul of science, the results are just the pay off.  In science today, one seeks verifiable results and dismisses, even denigrates as something embarrassing or ridiculous -- listening to ghosts, trying to build a time machine to find one's dead father, and then the drudgery and the calculations, worthy of a lowly accountant, it's a hopeless mix of high mysticism and high rationalism with nothing between -- the process that finds them, but the process is the real gold.  If the process were not so valuable, it would not produce such valuable results.  Or contrariwise, if the process is debased, this debases the results. If the result is noble, and the process is an untouchable who needs to walk around with a bag on its head like the elephant man, despite its kind intentions, well it's high time to remove the bag and applaud the elephant man.  

One need not pretend that the elephant man is not sadly deformed to applaud him and allow him to breathe the air.  The rose both is and isn't the compost.  The product, yang, is different from the process, yin, yet the same, as in the zen koan of love.  One may be more equipped to husband the other, but the served must never lord it over the servant, always cognizant that this difference is an exigency, whereas the likeness of the two is an absolute.  Every violation of this nuance in common speech and intellectual discourse is a feather in the cap of all the world's injustice, and a punch in the gut of being, which eats and is nourished by organically grown, rooted words, but can't get them down without a grain of salt.  

If that sounds like a (consummately rare) reasonable human being, well that's a fortuitous coincidence isn't it? Perhaps it's allied to the fact that human being is the only being we'll ever know, and every grain of being we have ever so much as cogitated passes through that lens.  Philosophers go on and on about being as if it's something out there, and they have managed to remain aloof.  Ironically they do this even when they conclude it is impossible.  All they can do eventually is deconstruct everything including the things they're saying finally literally crossing them out.  Anything but dive into the ocean at whose shore they finally arrived.  

All suited up to surf, they stand there and stare, waiting for a tidal wave to put them out of their misery. While thanking them and kissing them for leading us to the water, it's time to strip off their title -- philosopher.  They never were lovers of knowledge, they were lovers of the idea of it, and now that they've found where to find the real thing, they're lovers of filibuster and obfuscation.  Philosophy is the call and destiny of all homo sapiens.  I cannot control the way you use your arm, but if I see it's fallen off and I have the means, it's my call to re-attach it. 

Titled philosophers, restore your dignity and earn the honor of that cap and gown.  Remove the bag from the elephant man of finding, let the process breathe, applaud it, kiss its burning lips, take on its shame, which always was yours for abusing it.  This far more gigantic step for all mankind than walking on the moon will be accomplished in these very pages, your job, if I speak the truth on close inspection and considered reflection, is not just to read them, but to spread the news.  We are each responsible for the protection of the elephant man everywhere, obviously.  Signing petitions to save the elephants in Africa is your business too, but a house without foundations will collapse or blow away, however much cash you come up with to pour into patching the cracks.  Honoring the finding of finding underlies the valuation and protection of all that is gratuitously, avariciously undervalued and unprotected, of all workers and makers of what others cash in on. We don't need to find anything, we need to find finding.  and I do!  Once one finds finding, one is not only showered with shiny results, one shimmers autonomously multiplying the shine of all that shines.  Yet the world makes one feel one is caked with slime that won't wash off.  Oh the human mind is a machine for projection and displacement, until you switch the default to admitting it's your fault, not theirs.  Even their fault is your fault.  and if you find out it isn't, you can switch off the default, but be sure to reset it.  Your mind will solve many more problems much faster that way.  

Finding the finding!  Why didn't you think of that?  I don't know, but let's move on.  You don't want to wonder yet another thing -- why didn't you stop and listen, do you?  And if you make it past that roadblock, be prepared for the one ahead -- you don't want to wonder why you concluded by saying, I came I saw, but I did not conquer, I let the angel beat me back and did not climb the stairway to heaven, do you?  And I'm not talking to you privately.  I'm talking to everybody.  This isn't a personal epiphany.  This is a cosmic event.  One lemming can do nothing if the mass is headed over the cliff.  Something must explode in the sky above all of them and wake them up.  Keep your eye on the philosophy department.  That lovely little colorful chirping bird is the canary in the coal mine.  You can save it if you pump in a LOT of this air when it starts sounding terribly off key. 

True I'm speaking perhaps a bit more poeticalish than literalish -- when you start honing in on the clusters of elementary particles, the lines can get blurred -- but please, dare to kiss my burning lips.  Yes I'm laughing too, as it's all so absurdly impossible, so cmon, let's laugh all the way to the bank. You don't want to say, when it's too late, that you didn't dare to, do you?  You do dare to look through the microscope, however the lines dissolve so deep inside of things, don't you?  However what you might see might threaten your well funded hypotheses in a most inconvenient way. The complaints and the positives are now a symbiotic system, best leave well enough alone.  Not.  

You have taken the anti-hypocritical oath required to sustain a scientific paradigm, haven't you?  You worked your fingers to the bone your whole life to arrive at this amazing new instrument with this unprecedented level of resolution.  Look through the lens!  If science is a Faustian bargain, you already signed your name in blood.  It's not a Faustian bargain, though, we bit the apple, we pay the price, to stick our heads in the sand at this point is adding insult to enough injury, foolishness to wisdom, which we have whether we own what we own, or not.  Homo sapien means wise guy, including the irony, a gentle prod or a self-disemboweling sword, your choice, human.  The evasion has lasted long enough.  Finding will no longer play the scapegoat, the untouchable residue of all that it finds for your pleasure and use.  It is revolting against there being anything revolting about itself or its just revolt against being called revolting, it's revolting against that abuse of the word revolting -- what could smell sweeter than revolt! -- mainly in compassion -- as the abuser, hounded by guilt and estrangement from the source of all, suffers more than the abused, whose soul is protected in all the lacerations of its flesh, keeping that soul, at least for the duration of all the laceration, out of the trouble that tempts all souls.

continued in part 2, see index above and to the right