And that’s the thrust of this blog. It seems more and more self evident to me that meaning is connected to resonnance. That I matter here–wherever that here is. That there is some way (call it tao, or now, or love, or the accumulation of capital–not that I would call it that) of living that centers us with a resonant space where we experience meaning in life.

I asked myself a simple question this morning: What do you want to do in your life? The answer was also simple. I want to write a treatise on domestication, I want to finish the science-fiction series that I’ve started, I want to finish the novel that I’m working on… And part way through the list I saw a couple of patterns emerging.

First, I like writing. And writing is somehow connected to the way I think about meaning in my life. And second, none of that writing involves the living of the life that I want to have. Where are my wife and my unborn child in that list? Where are my friends and family? This social matrix is my meaning in life. I am not only defined by it in practical terms (who am I?), I am defined by existentially (what do I mean?).

Then it hit me. The first list left me thinking of life in terms of moments that I could parcel out in order to accomplish everything that I thought defined me. It’s very human of us to think that way. “How am I useful to my tribe?” is so deeply ingrained in us that we often tend to think of meaning in terms of punctilliar accomplishments. And this is not untrue. Social matrices, at least the strong ones, the healthy ones, are predicated on reciprocity.

In a capitalist culture where Nietzsche’s will to power (secure and enhance in Heidegger’s terminology) is not only inherent to our being but extrinsically reinforced as well, it is easy to expect meaning to follow from usefulness. But our existential anxieties run deeper than shelter and calories.

It strikes me that our decisions in life, though often couched in terms of meaning, are counterproductive because we fail to realize what actually matters. I would love to write books. And hope to throughout my life. There is a significant part of me that finds fulfillment through the process of writing (and hopefully publishing). But when that desire is placed within the larger context of me, it becomes a part of life rather than its sole trajectory.

Choosing meaning, choosing to live a meaningful life, is terribly difficult because we are so often deeply conflicted about the way of it. As I said at the outset, it strikes me that act divorced from symbol is part of the trouble. Meaning is predicated (yes I used the word twice in one blog, sorry) on having acts centered within their symbolic resonant space. That means coming to terms with culture. It means knowing yourself. It means paying attention to your larger social matrix and the affective ties therein. When these “means” start to make sense, meaning–at least the way of it–starts to become self evident.

But, I tell myself, these are the best times of all. If you’ve got the guts to savor the dregs, you end up in interesting places. That’s what I tell myself. I begin to wonder how much of the city is in me. The concrete and glass, the contours of its hills and shoreline, the rhythm and the pulse its traffic. And then I wonder how much of me is in the city. Is there an iteration present here? Like Rilke says, does the world want to resurrect invisibly within me? Is that why it turns to us, “the most perishable,” as Rilke calls us?

There’s the desert of the real for Baudrillard, the map of the hyperreal. We’re responsible for the divorce of substance and symbol in the progression of our ontology. But aren’t we also responsible for its resurrection? What happens if we enervate the world with our presence? Is that just crazy talk? The metaphor of some romantic poet?

I don’t know. All I can say is that I hope its not crazy. The hope that we can repopulate Baudrillard’s desert of the real with symbol is a tangible hope for me. I’m still trying to work out what that all means. But I think it starts with preference given to the unconscious, to symbol, and to what has been called the ‘dark side’ of human being. To transform the contours of the world invisibly within, to marry act to symbol, and replace the simulacrum of the desert of the real with an existential map of that same real. In short I think the resurrection of our ontology begins by paying careful attention to what Heidegger called the essence of a thing. And that, in short, starts by paying careful attention to what a thing means, not just what a thing is.

Seattle is concrete and steel and noise. It means something entirely other than that. At least, it means something other when I’m willing to savor the dregs.