20150130.0823

It is once again payday, which means also that it is once again bill-pay day. I think I am coming out slightly ahead this time, though, which is helpful. I could still stand to have more on the income side than the outlay, but that is more or less always true; I ought to be used to that sensation by now.

When my alarm clock woke me this morning, it was from an odd dream. I was sitting somewhere and discussing medieval scholarship with a flautist with whom I went to high school. (No, not that one, those of you who know about such things. And not the other one, either.) It took me a while to remember the name, annoyingly enough, and I remember little else of the dream, as usual. And, also as usual, I am sure that there is some meaning to be taken from the dream, although I do not know that I want to explicate it myself or to do so here.

That I would suggest doing such a thing with incomplete information will doubtlessly strike some as odd. How, after all, can meaning be ascertained from only a partial report? And while there is some sense to that, the simple truth is that none of us ever have access to the full set of information. It is, in effect, infinite, and finite beings cannot take in that infinitude. More locally, more concretely, though, we often work with incomplete data. Those who investigate crimes move forward from partial information, expanding and refining it (admittedly often with biases in place that lead to some evidence being ignored and other evidence that should be suspect being taken as true). Those who will study written works do not always or necessarily often have access to early drafts of the works they treat, limiting understanding of the compositional process. Those who study older written works routinely have to negotiate the decay of the physical objects on which the text appears; the "original" Beowulf, Cotton Vitellius a.xv, notably suffers from fire damage. And even when such is not the case, as with, say, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the texts studied may not be "finished" as we understand the term.

The Work concerning such texts continues even so, just as the work of day to day life continues. We do what we can to develop our understandings of our surroundings even though we do not know the fullness even of the smallest things we encounter; there are levels of reality that surpass our ability to perceive them, aided or unaided, and few of us turn our full and undivided attention to any of the many tasks we undertake in a day. Not really. We are distracted by one thing or another, we remain attuned to the outside world. Yet we still function (some of us, anyway). We still make meaning and sense (some of us, anyway). And it is enough--or it is for some of us, anyway.