It Just Is: The City, Life

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Late night, looking at the S.F. lights (for the “millionth” time, from
my spot in the Berkeley hills), I realized again that there never was any Purpose to It All.

No news here. The City—the urban kluge—gradually emerged (like brains in nature) for specific functional efficiencies: roads, lights, buildings, which altogether implied no conception of aggregate consequentiality (e.g., neighborhood, traffic congestion, inspired community, crime, deterioration of infrastructure, spectacular architectures oblivious of adjacent ugliness).

Unlike nature, which adjusts itself ecologically, the structural City forces upon itself unadaptability to consequences that its opportunistic humans are compelled to face.

Again, no news here.

Days go by, centuries go by. Members of now forgotten empires never saw themselves emerging as empire, never saw the slow motion of decline as transition to a new era by default.

Centuries later, the historians that came along—writing about mere decades earlier—are overridden by conceptions of trans-historical evolving that never knew itself until storied.

Tomorrow sees another episode in an indiscernible self-storiation of humanity, of Earthanity that has no plot, no expectable ending—save that the Sun will inflate, four billion years away, to engulf Earth, eons after the Sun’s inflated heat burns away all prospects of life (Mercury everywhere), before consuming the remains.

“The post-humans left Earth”—Their post-biological story will recount—
to wherever it is that The Story of a “little” region of the galaxy allows continuing Self-design.

Always, the purposes of life are merely those we make, which aggregate without design, except inasmuch as We set parameters on interplays of purposes.

All sense of ultimate Purpose is merely a “higher,” telic cohering of those we make, which sometimes appeal widely enough to become sacred, firstly by supernatural fabulation, then by creative conception of Our evolving.

The truth of intelligent design creationism is that Our intelligence may creatively design Purpose and Value and Meaning—which, by the way, makes the shimmering pointillism of City lights and towering designs beyond black Bay water spectacular.