It’s all interconnected. If you could but suspend the moments of disbelief and incredulity that arise, you will see it’s all interconnected. Breasts is to woman, referenced by carnality. Woman is to child, referenced by gender associations. Child is to man, referenced by form, or child is to human, referenced by form and substance.
So, breasts to woman, woman to child, child to man, man to warrior, warrior to kings, kings to wars, wars to news, news to shit, shit to toilet paper, toilet paper to trees, trees to nature, nature to mother, mother to breasts. It all confirms itself, but reveals in the associations your own prejudices, your preferences.
And leaving it as it is is all fine, since none of us don’t do it everyday. But when seeking after truth, with the capital “T”, one set of associations aren’t enough; no, we must seek the universal, the Idea. From the particular we must find the general. So like ants we double back to our homes, we return and start all over again: breasts is to milk, milk is to cows, cows to meat, meat to bread, bread to wheat, wheat to farmers, farmers to farmgirls, farmgirls to porn, porn to a vapid desire for the unattainable.
All I’m left with are meanings. What is the greater truth? That words and associations slip past our petty prejudices? Sex and blood - an association. Sex and shit - another association. Mud and clowns - yet another. Or genteel and rape - an odd association. Or the classic: typewriter and umbrella. In any case, all confirms each other, all associations make sense because I make those associations with schema in mind.
I know how I will associate them, I know which associations seem strange, and which seem shocking: but my schema is confirmed in my interpretation of those associations, which in turn confirms my schema. It is a circle with no end, each confirming each other, each associating with each other, and therefore not holding an ounce of revelation except in meaning. But no truth.
It’s why I admire onto-teleological systems of belief. If you were Christian, all meaning is grounded in Ultimate Being, the singularly most incomprehensible set of words ever. But what greater truth is there than rooting all petty truths in the ultimate mystery?
If the truth of a text must be divulged by applying the schema of the author’s life, then text has no meaning outside the bounds of an author’s world. Late 19th century hermeneuts and thinkers thought so. There is no understanding David Copperfield without wading through his extensive Bildungsroman, and still more, no understanding is achieved without understanding Charlse Dickens.
It’s still onto-teleological; the meaning of a David Copperfield, or an Anna Karenina is grounded in the Being of their authors or, until recently, in monolithical History.
But a text is a matter of words arranged just so to evoke an emotion, to tell a story or to hide a presumed truth. Or maybe it’s not all those things at all. Maybe it’s just a cosmic joke; each author is the universe’s own cosmic joke: to arrange words just so by a confluence of chance and human agent.
Whatever wisdom or truth we find there is self-reflexive; it is not truth, it is just mere humanity we find within those pages - or choose to find… and worse, mitigated through the particularity of an author.
If authors all died.. If God were truly dead. Dead, as in, erased from memory, erased so completely we won’t need a succession of Germans lamenting His absolute necessity. If meaning was not grounded in Ultimate Being, if reality only had as its rudder its ownmost possibilities to contend with, if wisdom was merely the repetition of meaning upon meaning.
Of course, that isn’t possible; we wouldn’t be human otherwise.