Power beyond Ozymandias

When entropy binds all, what is power?

The only real power in the universe is that which lasts, withstands time, the great leveler. Power against entropy, decay, dissolution. We value the ephemeral, the fleeting and intangible, as humans, embodied creatures in a lively and enthralling spectacle of life, and this is natural. But if we get ambitions, begin to think ourselves more than that little flickering light show in some odd corner of a galaxy, and imagine ourselves to be of some consequence then, well, we must look up. We must begin to contend with much larger ideas, to recognize the transience of most all our affairs, our offenses and our prides, and look at the mighty ruins beneath our feet. Even those things which seem greatest and strongest in our lives will by the next be gone, left to only memories. What then, thinkest we meditating on the bones of our ancestors, is to truly last, when these corporeal things small and large go so easily away? When so many men better than we have bent their entire beings to the creation and sustenance of empires, only to be undone by the errors of others or the cruelty of the human condition, what is the value of their power? What does it amount to, to triumph over another man who will die in equal time, and whose works will wind away just as rapidly? All these questions eat at us, our image of this world, and make the nights cold. So we set down the skull with reverence in its niche, and return back down to the minute affairs of life, sorting and selecting among its little pleasures, bothered somehow in the back of our minds the while that we are too much for this, too much of a brain to simply live. This gap, this insecurity, disrupts our sleep and our peace, and hollows out what happiness we can win, ringing always specters of nihilism, the presentiment of the bones within us, and those within the earth.

So after a time, we end up back upon the hill, talking to the graves of those gone by as if they were ourselves, commiserating on transience, the passing of seasons. The skull is a good listener; it does not interrupt or chide us for our indecision. We pray aloud for something, a real cause, a purpose to die for; our deaths our assured, so it might as well matter. Let me die for my fellows, but they too will pass. Let me die for my country, but its rule is only so long in any form. Let me die for my faith, for my ideology, but it will fade into history with the period of its relevance. Let me die, in the name of all that have come and all that will be, for something! The plea freezes in the empty air, falls dead to the ground. The wind whispers something unintelligible; it has heard many such prayers, and dispersed them to nothing. Lashing out, we carve into stone and iron, anything that seems lasting, and affix them to mountains or squirrel them away in caves, secret words to be never read or lost, and destroyed by blind nature in due course; it is something, but not so satisfying. Our ghost, our name, will linger only so much longer for it. Again to the skull, now polished by careful handling, its niche a fenced altar, hidden from the elements. The skull too will be gone some day, and then you will be alone, with only the pantomimes of fleshy life about you to waste away the rest of your time with. Why not be happy? We ask ourselves desperately, tenderly, yearning after the simplicity of youth.

But it isn't so simple. Once we have looked beyond, seen the stars, and asked these questions, they will not vanish without answers. They, seemingly, will not wash so easily as our memories, our passing mentalities. What makes them last so well, what makes them a perennial trouble for man across the ages, for each of sufficient intelligence to discover reliable as clockwork, hiding quietly like a magician's familiar in everyday things? And there the epiphany begins. All seems to pass, yet some things external remain, beyond our eyes or our ability to project; we can see the next turn of the stair, but an idea is opaque until it is there, alive and waiting, with no clue of what is to come after. Here, yes, in the hidden things of the mind, there is meaning, purpose, in what seems the most temperamental medium of all. Elements, we can see, barely perceive, irreducible and durable things within; emotions, half-thoughts and subtle patterns, small bits that persist when the glue binding them into a coherent image, sentence, logical proposition, has gone. These, yes, last, and are discovered anew by everyone; look and you see the marks, like primordial memories engraved into every man. The flesh of the mind itself may waste, but these things... Surely if we were to know them, to look and see what lives beyond us, then we would know something real, something of absolute import. So we coax the mind, meditating for long hours to reduce whatever passes to its constituents, and those to theirs, analyzing the substance of every thought, until we reach an impression of the fundamental elements of thought. These are meaningful, we are sure, even if I am not. And, as a desperate man finds water, we immerse ourselves in them, saturating our awareness with what finally soothes the yawning hole within us. At last, here is a real thing, to believe in and understand while all the rest around us changes.

And after a time, we understand by virtue of their salience, their regularity and constancy, that we cannot change them. They are beyond us, beyond any man or collective of men, and we cannot carve our names into these secrets. The victory, the relief, becomes melancholy. We again walk by the shrine, pondering our commonalities with the skull, the sense of defeat which has replaced insecurity. But after a time, perhaps a very long time, with those primal elements still swirling about our minds in a restless dance, we become familiar with them, at peace. Satisfied, in a strange way, to at least know of them. In humility, we shrug and bow, content to follow the arc of our lives knowing what there is to know, having approached what ultimates lie there to be discovered. When what is knowable is known, and what is beyond we are aware of, then what struggle is there at last? None; we are happy, and living in acceptance of death we can be so despite the travails it wreaks about us. For the things we have come most to know, most indeed to love, will remain after us, waiting for another mind to live in again.

Perhaps we show them to others, to propagate them directly, and ensure there is no gap of embodiment between the idea in your mind and its following in another, indeed teaching them so as to be sustained in a series of men into the future. The details may shift, but if it is a good enough idea, its essence will be passed on and on, important enough to each that follows for it to be imperative to pass it on to the next, so dearly is it loved. Something to hold close amidst all-covering storm, a set of things for our children and theirs. This way we pass down in a more living, assured form that which was alive in us; this is how we impart our values, our virtues and some of our beliefs onto those that follow. And should we think on this, we realize this is what it means to last. Not to last in any single form, any collection of atoms in any arrangement, but the abstract and embodied ideas in the minds of sentient beings. Irreducible to finite form, and thus beyond the touch of entropy, able to pass from hand to hand and mind to mind without diminishment or deterioration. These, to guide us and aid us in our thought, our affairs in life, are the legacy of humanity to all its sons, a gift beyond culture and history. We keep it alive in its more complex, interwoven form through our records, and foremost our arts, across the span of time, though any one of these individual articles will fail the net remains. And there is a thing to believe in, a thing to serve, this formless human legacy, which has wrapped in it no temporal weaknesses of context or motion, manifest direction or compulsion, but floats across and beneath the mind as a divine tapestry of things beyond our ken. If there is anything joining us, as wider humanity, it is this tapestry, this greater legacy, and the greater our liberation from the chains of our own experience the more we can appreciate its scope and its richness. We become enlightened not by reaching some particular maxima, completing this path or that path, but by through whatever means more dismantling the boundaries of our individual life, its surpluses and deficits, its cutting lacks and scarce joys, and realizing what we have inherited from the constant brush of a sea of embodied life, ideas and forms, since we were very young. Existence, truth, becomes synonymous with this unassailable fabric, which only the passing delusions of ideology and dogma can even partially obscure afterwards, and no longer do we need to puzzle at whether this is anything that may last, or anything definitively worthwhile, indeed anything worth *living* for. We have found all the answers, in a place that offered to give us none, with no face or front to meet us with. No, in sensing the borders ever onward, ever out of sight, we are assured of its infinity, and its impersonality. And this at last lends the skull some liveliness, some contiguity with ourselves, and some warmth to the passing day.

Perhaps in time we realize that this is the only power man may have, that he may touch and perhaps shape, and may hold against all-shifting time. If man should survive, he can survive not merely for himself, the commands of his guided genes and greed for more life for the individual, but with a charge of real character, real essence, to bear forth in time. The things which man has now need not die, and there is a potential power wrapped up in that beyond expression. The only true power, and only sentient man can see it, appreciate it and carry it out. Should we seek it, it is our birthright and our domain.