Reader, a moment of your time...


“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
-Carl Sagan

IT is impossible to say what I mean- that is, without first laying any sort of mutual understanding to begin with. This is the trouble with the human species; we have acquired reason at so quick a pace and so uninterruptedly for these past few centuries that a moment's reflection appears superfluous; a glimmer of calm on a tempestuous ocean. For instance, what makes more sense: to read a newspaper quickly and efficiently, as to communicate these ideas into society as soon as possible (or even to forget them in an instant, as some do), or to lift these ideas from the paper they are typed upon, sift them through imagination and belaboured understanding, and acquire a true picture of what the words in reality mean?

But pause for a moment; reflect. It is human to contemplate existence, and in looking at the world around and making an attempt to gather its meaning and purpose, the world not only becomes more tolerable but it's limitless reality might remove that sense of structure that is so limiting, such a fraudulent perception. Reader, I require you to look up at the sky, I insist that you paint it with possibilities for it is an expanding canvass. The memories once forgotten, like the unfinished portraits of an artist's studio, are still there and still carry the youth that inspired them. It may not appear so, but the inward horizon is also limitless; we have yet to fashion that telescopic understanding that leads us out into unknown space into ourselves; an even greater unknown, it would appear.

Who will fashion that "Opticks" of looking into the self, not mechanically, but with great unified purpose? We have discovered, what, a universe that we occupy, and it occupies us even more, and some manner of surviving within it. But how will it last if we maintain this structure which does not apply by any means? Sustainability and inward vision turned outside once it is complete; is the universe really the only universe? There seems to be a universe within us as well, but we have not that lightspeed of understanding to explore it.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Delirium and Drift

“I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort”  - Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star It is so unnatural to even return here, after so much. One might question returning to an old haunt, where everything has been so long dead, but there is a debt which cannot be forfeited, a collapsing star back then that went unnoticed. These past years have passed by in such an unclear manner that I may even have forgotten that I was living, merely existing in this loose fabric of time, stuttering out the minor parts of a much longer story. Ever since I can remember it was this way; losing footing, losing my way because of some underlying suffering that I could never resolve. It expressed itself uncannily, through a high bound empathy with all suffering, it brought me down, it dictated the terms of a reality that was incompatible with actual reality. Two worlds; that of the impossible dream and the actual realities where emotional resilience is not so commonplace. So let me be v...
Read more about it »

Memory

An exquisite memory, elegant in how even it remembers its tangents, its dreams upon waking. Just as in literature there are not only words on the page but words between words, tiny effervescences and ruptures as an unlikely pairing signifies deeper inwards. Foster Wallace on the novelist Marcel Proust: "Over the next four summers I got to see way more of the state than is normal or healthy, albeit most of this seeing was a blur of travel and crops, looking between nod-outs at sunrises abrupt and terribly candent over the crease between fields and sky (plus you could see any town you were aimed at the very moment it came around the earth's curve, and the only part of Proust that really moved me in college was the early description of the kid's geometric relation to the distant church spire at Combray), riding in station wagons' backseats through Saturday dawns and Sunday sunsets." - Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley , David Foster Wallace This caught my eye, n...
Read more about it »

"Are All Humans Hedonists?"

Before I settle into something different, read some Francois Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel and hope from the same or similar experience as when I read Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote, there's a question to be answered which sent me to sleep the other night with the question: Why speak? I had written elusively on this epiphany the other night whilst watching Oldboy, a film about repressed desire, desire repressed from the outside, through hypnosis and through diminishing the reality of the prisoner, this constant repetition of two dimensional television avatars suggesting escape, but actually reinforcing the repression, actually offering a sort of imprisonment.  And why speak? was a question that seemed so significant, though it fades through thinking, especially with set vocabularies, rhythms of speech, even stylings that permeate the way the written word presents itself. But loosening its meaning is of incomparable value: before we speak, we think. We think and...
Read more about it »