In The Hunting of the Snark, nothing is finally secured.
And yet something profound has occurred.
Across the series we have traced:
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The blank map → structured potential.
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The hunt → activation of that potential.
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The cut → local actualisation through construal.
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The Boojum → catastrophic threshold of over-determined density.
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The elusiveness → structural inexhaustibility.
What remains is to name what all of this implies.
The Snark is not a creature within the system.
It is the mythic condensation of the system’s own generativity.
1. Myth, Not Allegory
Allegory translates one domain into another.
Myth does something else.
Myth compresses structural truths into narrative form.
The Snark does not “stand for” meaning.
It enacts the law of meaning:
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Potential precedes instance.
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Construal actualises locally.
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Surplus remains.
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Closure destroys generativity.
The poem stages these relations without ever abstracting them.
That is why it feels inexhaustible.
2. Why Meaning Requires Elusiveness
If meaning were capturable as object:
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It could be stored.
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It could be completed.
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It could be finalised.
But meaning is not an object.
Meaning is relational potential structured for actualisation.
Every instance depends on a field that exceeds it.
The Snark’s elusiveness is therefore not narrative teasing.
It is ontological fidelity.
The poem refuses capture because capture would falsify the structure of semiosis itself.
3. The Boojum as Warning
The disappearance of the Baker is not absurd decoration.
It is the system enforcing its own limit.
When the drive for totalisation attempts to eliminate surplus potential, instability follows.
Meaning cannot survive complete determination.
The Boojum is the mythic figure of that truth.
4. The Reader as Participant
The final movement of the myth is not in the crew.
It is in you.
Every reading:
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selects,
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stabilises,
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differentiates.
You make cuts.
You actualise local coherence.
And yet the poem continues to exceed you.
This excess is not failure of interpretation.
It is the condition that makes further interpretation possible.
You do not extract meaning from the poem.
You participate in its activation.
5. The Snark and the Becoming of Possibility
Now we can state the structural condensation clearly:
The Snark is the mythic figure of the inexhaustibility of structured possibility.
It is not hunted because it is an animal.
It is hunted because systems of meaning are drawn toward their own horizons.
And horizons cannot be captured.
They recede precisely because they orient.
Final Compression
The Snark is:
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Not a theorem.
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Not a particle.
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Not a joke.
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Not merely nonsense.
It is the poetic crystallisation of semiosis as becoming.
The hunt continues because meaning does.
And meaning does because potential always exceeds instance.
The Snark must remain free.
Otherwise, nothing further could happen.
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