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Chapter 12
THE KALEIDOSCOPE THAT INSISTED ON BEING OPERA GLASSES
When the Things Spoke, you
could scarcely Blame them!
It was of course called a kaleidoscope. Anyone could see that. It box-like format, its coloured beads and its provisions for scatter. Things however do not always act as intended or even as directed. This is not the exclusively special province of human persons, or even animated life. In fact, many inventions seem to shout 'foul play' and ply themselves to tasks other than those intended.
This is because inventors are neither angels nor geniuses, and even some who are the latter, for all their prowess, make hideous mistakes, err in conception, execution, in hope or methods.
Thus it was no great surprise when this kaleidoscope to which we have been making reference, began to act as if it had been programmed. It seems there may be a species of integrity in some inventions which even when not specifically intended, in some way works out from the heart of the inventor.
Every time a shaking of the kaleidoscope occurred, which should theoretically have brought on a scatter and new arrangement of non-purpose, but secretly organised beauty, since the scope and mode of the thing had been artfully invented in the mind of the maker, beyond the scenes, what happened ? It was this. There came something so different that the theory of poltergeist arrived in the minds of some observers.
The apparatus was shaken in the arena of some tigers, and instead of a new arrangement of beads, there came on a screen which had not even been noticed before, a series of classificatory sketches, each one showing the particular system in view. Thus the eye of the tiger sported on the screen the ophthalmic model, plan, performance criteria, materials used, special chemical compounds, means of making these, the genetic instructions ordering it, the interface arrangements for orders to become operative and the provisions for the operations to have the raw materials needed.
It is not enough to have orders and methods; you DO need the raw materials in the right place at the right time if you are not going to intervene yourself personally, in any system, and getting that straight means yet more organisation; and then there is the key, which like the mind of a director of a company, has to ensure that all the sub-systems are integrated in one schema so that it actually does achieve what was first intended. In the case of the tiger, it takes no great genius to perceive the thing in view here: it is sight. The animal needs to see and this complexity of code, command, chemicals and industrial method of the most artful sophistication is integral to one result, and one only: sight.
It has it inherently, procedurally, sequentially, conceptually and this as part of the whole; and when all the provisions of a given work are present, and these in multitudinous and cohesive, consistent and persistent perimeters, then denying it is like shutting your eyes. If you then see stars, then signifies not your wisdom, but your substitute for sight.
However the instrument in my hand did not stop at this.
It was not as if this prodigious undertaking on the part of the kaleidoscope thing was enough. Did it not have to do the same for every organ, liver, kidney, central nervous system, sympathetic nervous system, blood circulatory system, cranial nerve connective methods, plan and result and on and on, to fill thousands of encyclopedias! It had to show how the whole as one unit operated, just as the material and modi operandi for the eye, for the life. If the schema for the unit was amazing, that which linked it with the whole array of units left this as if a primary school introduction. The realms of thought and contrivance, conception and inception, code and characteristic mounted as if to the skies.
This integrality is boasted as the "ectype" (see Life, What is it ?)*1, or what was coming out of all the preliminaries. It did not seem to mean that anyone specifically typed it, although the millions of units of code-comprehensible instruction were of such a type as might be typed and needed no less wit for the performance, but rather it had been imprinted by chemical means into an operative situation where the 'reading' was itself a chemical contrivance, all very hi-tech and remarkable, exhibitive of the utmost imagination and sophistication of thought.
With this all done, the 'kaleidoscope', apparently either in riot, rebellion or under some constraint from its own source, or the Source of that source, the epitome of wisdom and contrivance, creativity and conception, which sources man himself, began on the mind of the tiger. I must say, it was not the sort of mind that one would mind missing. It had various instinctive primary desiderata, certain maternal ones, some tender, some solicitous, some scouring. These were all exhibited in a sort of plan, with the priorities specified, and the purposes stated. It reminded one in part of Romans 8:20ff..
Then there came onto this kaleidoscopic screen, a plan of relationships, modes of communication to meet these, modes or reception and expression, of gaining information and dispersing it, modes of planning for action and of surveying scenes in order to grasp 'meaning', all contained in coded potentials, which moved past the arrangements of structure, into the sphere of function at the mind's own level, just as a pianist moves past the notes, although they are all you hear (the echoes and resonances apart) to deploy them at will. This brought up the mind of the tiger, in its individuality and in its commonality, in its reflective capacity and in its creativity of method.
When this was all analysed, and it took of course a number of years of hard mental work to envisage and understand all the subordinate and then co-ordinate and eventual inordinate desire structures, one could only marvel at such a strange kaleidoscope.
One would suppose that in some exotic and esoteric way, the thing had rebelled against the pretence that it was a sort of type for the typical, a sort of jumble this way or that. While it may have appreciated the sheer beauty which so often came, at its own kaleidoscopic level, since the constraints of the system relative to the spirit of man were specifically coded by man for this, yet this seemed merely a beginning.
It insisted on action at the level of the tiger, and on specifying and imaging on its screen, the coding in the inferior systems, and the capacities enabled in the higher elements of the tiger's mind, enabling review. It insisted on specifying and articulating every aspect of all correlations, and assuming nothing. Everything, it had printed on the bottom of its screen, has a cause, and no system begets creativity. Creativity begets system.
It is all profoundly obvious of course, since this is in fact the empirical situation in this world, and aetiological facts are always ahead of magic in any account of anything, so that creation for creativity is always to be preferred to pretences and magical 'arisings' from irrelevant systems which do other things and are not skilled or styled in these.
However, the kaleidoscope was having a field day, and wagged its wiggly tail; or if you prefer, grabbed autonomy from some secret source and just did things. I MIGHT AS WELL, it screened, since what is sometimes called 'science' does just the same when it is in the materialist mode that ignores the problem and the question, and inventing what is not found, founders amid many words and no deeds.
I, said the kaleidoscope, in one of its more amazing explorations of coding and communication (since getting some autonomy seemed to have gone to its head), do not skip things. I face them. That, it said is science, not this thingummy guesswork which wants intelligent work to 'arise' from sourceless silence and artless contrivance.
it did not apparently think this enough, and so involved itself in direct speech. For one's own part, one could only have sympathy. When a false argument is used for the first few million times, one may have patience; but eventually it is time to act. It seemed to think that way, not just in any antilogous ways, and to involve itself in a combination of mutiny and mockery. Well done!
It is, it proceeded, a question of opera glasses not a kaleidoscope; for 'opera', plural form of the Latin 'opus' for work, is what abounds and resounds in the earth, the opera of God, the works of the Lord God Almighty. You see works, as in Mozart, Beethoven, Back, machinations, marvels, efflorescences of brilliance, contrivances of skill, penetrations of depth, conceptualisation of genius, and in this world for man, much more than is ever made by man.
Therefore I had to act, it continued. Used as a kaleidoscope, after carefully weighing the options, I took a quick course in communication, and decided to say what is to be seen: not jumble and tumble and rumble and bumble, as in 'self-made' nature, but the designate works of the Designer: this is the verifiable evidence. Designers ALONE CAN do this; and non-designers by nature do not have it. It does not happen that way: only in the dreams of man is it seen, sometimes called theories, and even confused with fact, in the clown of the century crusade for priority, it seems.
Their 'results' to the point do not 'arise', and stimulate them as you will, as in fast-breeding Drosophila*2 for 50 years bombarded with X-rays, you do not get designs, but as in any design, crumples and crimps, arrestings and deformations, less viability and vitality. What do you expect! Something for nothing!
Away with all this chatter and clatter, it seemed to be willing. Let us look at what is in fact there and stop this childish no-interface fiction. That was its message. At this, its screen seemed to twitch, an interesting side point.
'It is ALL interface,' it then wrote upon it, 'it is ALL integration, it is ALL plan, and it is ALL purposive and functional in the most intimately scheduled, maximally correlated way conceivable. In fact, one found that secretly the kaleidoscope which seemed to be assuming some sort of what you could almost call a personality, was preparing to do the same for man, with the whole realm of analysis, co-ordination of mind, body, spirit, and the significance of spirit and its necessary creative basis.'
What that would mean if one had to do a job on it, would be many more years of work. I decided it would be better to wake up.
Unfortunately, this world never does.
NOTES
Light Dwells with the Lord's Christ,
The gods of naturalism have no go!
See TMR, Chapter 1, in these sites (the former moving on to point 10).