Other than the awareness of my ultimate demise, I have no episteme (certain knowledge) of nearly anything. Not knowing allows me to harness the fluctuating effort to learn and, in turn, find surprise after gathering hints that I might be starting to know something. When people stumble into knowledge and ascribe the progress to harnessing reality and demonstrating it through the function of the machine or device, we move further away from our place within the biome to somewhere within our egos. We, humans, have reveled in our sense of superiority while taking the ideas of balance between arrogance and blunt stupidity with a grain of sand. With our determination to understand, we move closer to defining the parameters of reality and how our species can wrest control of that direction from confusion as if that were truly possible. We are not interested in symbiosis; we require enslavement to our will and are afraid of losing control.
I refuse to have lived without living a life worth respecting. I am not an animal in a machine but a creature manifesting love out of complex pattern recognition. I am not a homogenous object; I have all the potential of a dynamic individual flirting with self-awareness. I am not so much random as I try to be deterministic. I am not a thing assembled by media constructs as much as I’m taking form from my relationship with nature, discovery, and deep curiosity.
And God said unto the people of this world, “You must repair your ways and leave the earth as a healthy ecosystem for the rest of this planet’s life. As the failed children of my son, you have one last opportunity to atone for the vulgarity of your arrogance; sadly, I do not have faith that, as my creation, you have any collective sense among you.”
Recently, I experienced a death long in coming, one that surprised me due to the perceived maturity I’d reached; on that day, philosophy presented its corpse. I was shocked as I thought it had a long life ahead of it, and although I couldn’t find those who’d carry its body forward, I believed it was simply me not looking hard enough for signs of life. Nope, it died silently some time ago; I can’t say precisely when, but it is gone. In its stead, a relationship with hopes for wisdom is rising, but it’s an infant nearly without form, or maybe it’s a seed yet to materialize as matter. Maybe it’s only a shapeless amorphous ghost of a fetus waiting to be slung onto the cross, into the wind, or on a trajectory towards the heavens. The potential of this new body is only hinted at by loose ideas, fragments of letters, and still-assembling thoughts.
If writing emerges from seeing that death is on our horizon and reading arrives from our effort to deny that ultimate fate, exactly how then does the narrative keep death at bay? How does the writer execute a story that would lay bare the need to walk into the fire in order for the reader to embrace the opportunity to learn of what arises from the ashes of their own little death? The fear of the unknown encourages people to cling to the murky light barely visible in the fog of ignorance, as becoming alien (enlightened) to those familiar to us is as frightening as joining the league of zombies eating their own. The story thus functions as Kafka’s axe, able to chop into the frozen sea, freeing us from our grave.
Words emerge from the darkness of my skull in which they were stored temporarily, locked in the wet, inky mass of my mind before taking form in an instant and being directed to my hand, where they’ll convey messages to me after finding shape and sequence on paper or screen. I read these strings of hopeful meaning, which, if I’m fortunate, will carry some small amount of poignancy, but more often than not, I discover stumbling blocks in my intention to share inspired clarity. Sorting the myriad of potential images that exist in the near infinity of an evolving mind, hoping to direct relevant meaning into reality, is a daunting exercise. It is easy to fail to recognize the impossibility of finding sense out of the mayhem, but that’s just what we must do. So I back up and correct the lines/places I’ve been and adjust the future I’m trying to navigate in anticipation of those who will one day read the thoughts of someone unknowable. I leave these fragments as a trail into what has fed me though even I cannot identify where the simplest of words or their basic forms populating this head were first encountered.
When I look into the sea, I’m looking into the souls of my wife and me. Out there in the tumult of the liquid expanse, chaos holds the promise of washing over everything and consuming the entirety of all that has ever been. Our souls would be wise to take inspiration from that watery realm as this is what time is doing to us every moment of our lives. Of those around me, I fear their complacency to be but a leaf falling to the dirt below, unaware of the sky, stars, sea monsters, the abyss, or the fragility of their current situation. So, we thrust ourselves into the waves, splashing in anticipation of encountering a kind of bliss and an unfolding story being shared with the fish out of water.