2.107
Things open to each other metaphorically. This means that things open to each other across a distance that’s ‘bridged’ metaphorically. Distance is essential. Communication is only ever temporary, contextual, relational, fleeting, and like a miracle. Not because it surmounts all odds or requires supernatural intervention, for it’s common, but because two things, differently enworlded, turn to face each other. In the pile of leaves blowing in the winds, a connection is made for a while.
Uexküll was close to many of these thoughts, but he held that there must be something that holds the various divergences together: there must be Nature that guarantees and ensures commensurability.[1] So, the world of the owl, interlocked with the world of the mouse, interlocked with the world of the insect — are all held together in a big picture view of Nature, which is, of course, a stone’s throw from God. God is the deus ex machina that guarantees commensurability (and hence full visibility, communicability, meaning and transference: full confessionality — fully stripped, fully naked, fully seen).
Without, and despite, this centre and guarantee, meta pherein carries beyond, across, over towards the other and back, without reducing itself or the other in the transference. Thus, we’re going to spend the next layer thinking through the onto-theological dimension of our existence. For our conception of a unitary onto-theological principle prevents us from grasping metaphoric ontology, where there’s a divergence of principles.
Things can’t actually be reduced because they shine from themselves. Like suns without fixed orbits, they shine and affect others around them. Unlike individual atoms, they shine as constellations, tracing throughout their relations. They call one another, seductively. This shining is a way of crossing gaps and gathering things temporarily: all things are related to all other things, in part because all things are gathered for each thing.[2] All things are situated in arrays, reverberating out from each thing in a nonlinear, non-reducible, and ultimately unknowable way (there’s no full transparency from an onto-theological whole).
Loss is stitched into the nature of things. Things shine only because they’re burning off themselves, diminishing, exhausting themselves. They lose and find themselves in others. Things shine, never fully foreseeing their meteorite, their supernova.
[1] “And yet, all these different environments are fostered and borne along by the One that is inaccessible to all environments forever. Forever unknowable behind all of the worlds it produces, the subject—Nature—conceals itself.” Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds and Animals and Humans, p. 135.
[2] Though, a thing in one world may not be ‘a thing’ in another (§2.5).