Ahhh … tasting the infinite … taking the cup, the chalice to one’s lips and first smelling then imbibing the infinite, that boundless liquid, tumble of colours shapes, all creatures, all thoughts, ideas, huge architectures of the imagination, fractal ferns and patterns, crystalline structures stretching as far as the eye can see and beyond, pulsing with life and shape shifting, the endless drink that is not a drink, making you larger and larger, better and better, hinting at the taste of everything that can be seen, heard, touched, thought, imagined, recoiled from in fear and pain, drawn towards in love, desire, wanting, feeling, compassion and unification.
Images of the chalice, the holy grail, the cup of experience, Omar Khayyam’s cup of love, laughter, wine, communion, togetherness, living intensely in the moment, Here and Now! Here and Now! Yet the cup also fills you with the vastness of the past, delightful and haunting images of special moments, haunting memories, streaming through your consciousness, and the open-endedness of the future, those paths not yet taken, those feasts not yet tasted, those walks in the garden, with the blackbird singing Here and Now! Here and Now!
Tasting the infinite, sipping from the chalice, the holy grail, are images of consciousness, that unique quality we award ourselves above all creatures and creation. Today my mind was aswirl with images and these and many more thoughts as I rose up in the dark at 6:48 am in Exeter, England on Wednesday 26 November 2025. That time before rising is special, all the images, memories, chains of logical thinking, recipes I will try out (I was imagining making a sauce to go with my venison fillets using the fried meat juices and oil adding finely chopped shallots, garlic, chestnut mushrooms, and some corn flour stirred into cold red wine to make a sauce – not cream – too unhealthy).
I am reading The Death of Virgil by Herman Broch, one of the unsung classics of modernism. One that captures in multi-page long sentences the currents of thought about life, meaning, beauty, truth, failure, the cosmic joke of existence in lapping waves of prose, that suck greedily at the sands of sea and time, and build up like the oyster from repeated lacquering, layering, licking – for the whole oyster is a tongue – the pearl of shining truth about consciousness. How it is a ceaseless and boundless current of ideas and chains of thought bearing the flotsam and jetsam of past life and the unbounded reach of our ideas and hopes and feelings and images. How it hopes for truths but tells you lies about what you are and what you have done.
Truth is not that cold hard stone facticity they sell you in mathematics, philosophy or in courts of law. I cannot but admire how Nietzsche cut truth down to size when he said “Truth is a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in short, a sum of human relations which were poetically and rhetorically heightened, transferred, and adorned, and after long use seem solid, canonical, and binding to a nation. Truths are illusions about which it has been forgotten that they are illusions.”
Truths are not only the thoughts that we have about the world or universe, but claims that the self-same consciousness that manifested them declaims that they have eternal validity and life. It is like a thief who expostulates that his pile of misappropriated gains are not the result of theft and his word must be taken as law because he is the leading expert on what stealing means. Are we conscious of our consciousness, and do we have the right to say what is, might be or can be? Is the polished pearl of our consciousness Truth?
Truth is not just “2+2=4” or the “sun rises in the East”, for truth also contains laughter, love, imagination and death. To truly know what it is to be human you must not only be and live your human life but walk in a hundred peoples shoes, share and look through the eyes of a thousand others. And this you can only do through conversation, literature, art, poetry, love, all blended through introspection into a burgeoning and shape-shifting awareness; warm, cold, sweet, sour, bitter, salty and above all umami.
In The Death of Virgil by Herman Broch all of human experience, all of the elements of consciousness are caught – like a butterfly – fluttering beautifully in our cupped hands. Our hopes and dreams, that vastness of feelings and understandings of life and death. Well, not death really, just our ideas of death, ideas that have obsessed us for scores of thousands of years. Death as the end of life, the full stop that interrupts our unpunctuated sentence mid-verb, mid-adjective, mid-utterance, mid-truth. Death, like God, like Truth, is just one more figment of our imagination, important only because of our inflated sense of worth. But we are just ants on our nest in one corner of an infinite universe. We pick up a pine needle or a particle of food and carry it home thinking we have a piece of that great puzzle of being. But as Newton said “I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
Herman Broch reminds us that the highs and lows of consciousness, the being at one with all of creation, the golden blissful glow of compassion for all living things that can flood you for a moment, or the abject feeling of failure and worthlessness, devoid of hope of future or of value that can also overtake you for a moment or longer, are just part of the infinite palette of colours of consciousness that can paint your imagination in the neverending lightshow of being human.
Great art can open up huge vistas of the imagination. Dante’s vision of heaven, Milton’s dark depths of hell, Blake’s visions of truth from hell that is heaven, all these and more point to some of the neverending perspectives where parallel lines meet. Or the everyday – Joyce’s one day of Ulysses, Virginia Woolf’s one day of Mrs Dalloway, Broch’s one day of the Death of Virgil
That moment when you are blessed
To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.
That day which symbolizes all days
Every night and every morn
Some to misery are born.
Every morn and every night
Some are born to sweet delight.
Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night.
Blake’s Auguries of Innocence complement his Songs of Innocence and Experience, and his vision in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Each day we can imagine and live bliss and damnation, the highs and the lows, and I won’t even mention politics through which we condemn so many have-nots to the never-ending struggle to survive so that we can philosophise about human consciousness and human existence.
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Paul Ernest
Picture Alex Grey
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