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Clouds of Unknowing is a weekly (?) newsletter by @original_chills, mining the present for unserious sermons, other worlds, and little rituals.
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The Lesson
As a seven or eight year old I used to reel at the dizzying infinitude of the universe as I understood it, felt the almost physical pressure of all that never-ending space. But the same kids’ encyclopedias and basic science intros that got me going also helped me to come to terms with infinity. The idea of scale, the various forces and structures that shape our universe from the micro to the macro level, provided an odd kind of comfort, and helped me find a place for myself in that vastness. [See this wonderful 70s video which zooms out from a picnic in powers of 10 every 10 seconds, before zooming back in to the sub-atomic level].
The macrocosm embedded/hidden/revealed in the microcosm is a common enough idea, and was particularly popular in medieval thought, as well as being associated with the Hermetic dictum ‘as above, so below’. We want the structures to rhyme, to believe that we resonate with something larger, be it God’s image or something less humanoid. The post-war scientific interest in cybernetics and systems theory found a respectable place in modernity for this discourse, whose strongest modern proponents might be James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, co-developers of the Gaia hypothesis.
My own idiosyncratic attempts to bend the micro to the macro usually involve time, and my own situatedness in history. I like things that rhyme through time, moments where one era seems to break through to another, like pairing the hippie utopianism gone sour of Illuminatus with the rave bricolage of 1992, its similar breakneck pace, dreams of happiness almost drowning in the undertow of paranoia, but never quite.
One such rhyme, or maybe synchronicity, that came to me on the 3rd of January this year, was a trifecta of 1 per cents, probably inspired by David Chapman’s ‘Three per cent of the dharma’. As it stood, my own time on earth had reached about 1% of the history of Buddhism, I’d spent about 1% of my probable lifespan under Covid restrictions of one sort or another, and I was choosing to spend 1% of my year, 3 days, on a virtual meditation retreat at home. This doesn’t have to mean anything in particular, but it seemed noteworthy, so here it is.
The Logbook
While we’re on a 92 tip, a warehouse of people swaying to the beatless bit of this track is what set me on the path to actually writing anything today.
And here’s something I’ve been up to, a mix of tunes from last year. Only one person has spotted the easter egg so far!
It’s been a while since I wrote anything, partly because some of my other worlds haven’t been as accessible as usual lately, but the little rituals are helping to put that right. Stay safe.
Obviously, the very act of making up […] is displacement activity arising from avoiding one’s own problems. But the hope is that in the process of pretending to help others, you accidentally help yourself. Actually helping anyone else is always a bonus.
Venkatesh Rao, ‘Boilerplate Advice’