The Dust of the World, Part 5

Back to the original two sentences, which I will bring together again, just to save time:

The dust of the world (will) fall(s) on the world itself.

We have doubted the ability of this metaphor to tell us of the present moment, or to be some kind of universal truth. We have not looked beyond the metaphor itself, so it is time that we do so.

Firstly, we must go back and ponder upon the notion of this line popping into my head. For there is a genealogy of some description laying in there somewhere. It is not conscious, or at least was not conscious for that moment, after I read the essay. And yet, as I have said, it seems to be a kind of coalescing of a number of thoughts, conversations, writings that I have been having and doing lately. That it came to me, out of the blue, speaks perhaps of a genealogy of metaphor that I had been building up. That it happened somewhat unbeknownst to my conscious self enforces the power of metaphor. That is, we ought not to dismiss it in some nihilistic way as something that will never bring us to truth, to pure universality. Rather, we should recognise its power, a raw power, of and beyond the conscious mind. Or, to put it another way, we make connections, shape metaphors, coalesce them in stories. And sometimes we do this without us even knowing that we do it.

Perhaps this is what literature can teach us about ourselves - it makes conscious unconscious processes.

The mystery of this process, however, remains. The very fact of coalescence is itself somewhat of a mystery. It works like the present, perhaps, something that slips away as soon as it seems to have been revealed. And so, you will recall, I am not sure of the tenses I originally used in the sentence, "The dust of the world (will) fall(s) on the world," nor am I sure if I originally thought of the word "fall" or "settles."

It is here, then, that we must examine further. For it is here that carelessness set in on my part, or that the thing slipped away from me. A comparative analysis might be worthwhile; to compare the two separate tenses to one another, and to compare the two words. These things stand in for one another, are interchangeable, circling around that thing, that sentence, with a past, certainly, but with an inexplicable origin. It has history; to say exactly what that history is, though, may not be possible.