I find myself trying to understand the nature of value, of right and wrong, of truth, life, and death. Of time. In the past several weeks, as my migraines have improved, I've been making observations about human and animal nature, from coping and survival and the nature of pain to communication and orientation and desire. Is "keeping" an illusion? Why are we the way we are, what's the point of wanting to hold on to something, like a friend who dies or an experience of clarity, when we lose it anyway? Wouldn't it be more efficient to not spend any energy, any moment on a twisting heart or the kind of despair that takes us close to death (which is always close to life)? If we're designed to strive to flourish as a species, why are we equipped with both cognitive and emotional consciousness, when the two things often work against each other? It's a silly question; I know the answer for myself, but I abandon the answer and cling, closed hearted, to the question when I despair. For example, a couple weeks ago, when the horse I was working with, learning from, slipped on the ice and fractured her leg, severed the artery, went into shock, and died in my arms. When, one moment she was alive, and I was holding her head, and then she was dead. My heart broke, it broke open, letting in all this sadness, and everything else, too. I was happy, incredibly so, to be there with her. But why, what's the point of all of that? Why is life so simple that it can disappear, but so complex that it can't be retrieved, and that it always remains connected with the rest of existence (through at the very least some physical impact that it had on its environment, if not in other ways that we might consider)?
And what is time's role here? The only "moment's difference" between alive and not is the term we give to the difference, the change... Are moments like dominos, separate and individual but connected by movement and the presence of another domino? Like individual life forms? But if so, if moments are separate, individual, then what lies between them? Space? Is physical space between moments? I guess I feel like it would be a moment, what lies between moments. The moment between. But that doesn't make sense. If you keep adding moments, dividing a long moment into smaller moments, it becomes exponential to a point where you lose orientation and relativity, you get lost and can't compare what has become an incomprehensibly tiny amount of time with, for example, the endlessness of how tiny it can get.
Anyways, I was there, with that horse, while she was between dead and alive. I was with her between. And I feel between worlds all the time, between dreams and not-dreams, between old and new, between wanting and not wanting, being complete and incomplete, and always in reality. It's as if the world we live in, and time, are somehow like a möbius, each in nature resembling a fabric or flow that's two sides in one, and (perhaps) in turn together, combined, another möbius. A half twist that makes for a seamless trip around the dichotomy, makes each trip the same never the same, as it combines even change and no-change. An exponential growth, impenetrable (and yet inclusive and therefore shaped) by relativity. A movement through which there is no unreframable point for orientation, a network composed of framable and reframable everything, anything, something, even nothing. Could the strange loop be allegorical of the nature of the relationship between matter and energy? Time and space? Of relationship between things and/or non-things in general? 'Intertrinsic' emerges from 'inter' meaning 'between' and 'trinsic' meaning 'in.' Maybe a relationship emerges by interaction, as a phenomenon might by interference, and emerges 'between-in' things instead of between them, like in the domino scenario above. Does change come from half twists?
So I'm always getting caught in an endless loop of endless loops, of paradoxes. And ironically, I'm always far enough away (that is, not caught in the loop enough) that I can SEE myself looping, and I can be both. Living.
For a while now, I've found myself incredibly far away from things I used to be apart of and things I used to do automatically, and incredibly close to things that used to be hard to look at, things that can't really be explained (even though humans have come up with thousands of ways to explain them). And time, which can be understood in many different ways; because of time, things that seem transient can feel eternal. Because of time, or partly because of it, there can be paradox, perspective, and possibility.
In the past several weeks, I've tried to understand all of it. I've read about it, thought about it, wrote about it, dreamed about it, laughed and cried about it, asked again and again about it, and I'm still living it. All of this. But what I haven't done is articulated it specifically in a way that seems appropriate for school. Sometimes I feel so IN it, that I feel in between wanting to articulate it and not. I feel paralyzingly far away from the kind of writing that one does for school, and rooted in a space that makes me feel like the only language I've got, and the only way I can use it, is this---my own. I know that it's a place I put myself in, and I've got to get over it, that in the real world according to real world values I have to suck it up and develop the skill to write for other people and institutions, in a way that fits the bill. I just can't help but push myself farther away by questioning why I have such values, and why I'm not fully accepting them, and why instead of making the choice I stay between.
If I've lost you by now, I'm not surprised. I'm pretty lost myself. But that only means that I've got something real to write about, right?
[The above is an expanded-upon excerpt from a letter that emerged last winter when sitting down to write to a teacher. Never did get a reply.]
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