On Between Again

12/15/2006 7:59 AM – 8:21 AM

If you ask what it means to be better than this, eventually you arrive at impossibility, eventually, you arrive at a Xeno’s Paradox. But the paradox does not exist on a living level. There is a point at which half of a half of a half is overcome by practical existence. There is such a thing as better.

Existence lies somewhere between absolute skepticism and pure forms. The nice of absolutes is that it lets you laugh at human foibles, the bad lies in having a reason to forgo action. And so I’m back again, somewhere between Pharisee and Fool, between fundamentalism and agnosticism. We can know something; we just can’t prove it, not even to ourselves. So you get up and make coffee. You get up and write. You get up and go to work. You exist as a functioning human being, something like a photon - both energy and matter but never both at the same time.

When the clouds drop down the rain, I found myself torn between wishing I still loved it as much as I once did and being happy that I don’t. Would that one could love the whole basket. Her light is on, somewhere in the world, and I am somewhere between hoping she exists and being relieved that she doesn’t. What is it then, to want something that will be taken away from you? Hell, to love something. And is love just a myth we hold to propagate propagation? And yet there we are, looking at the world and thinking that the only thing that it’s missing is love. Love never fails, but it fades. And what we talk about when we talk about love is not affection or habit. It’s an unforced and sudden euphoria, it’s just a “yes” that wasn’t in there a second ago. Oh, Epictetus, so solemn and duty bound. But there you are. You lived and died and said wise things that we still read today. Lift up your eyes. Be lifted up everlasting doors. Where are you, oh, Xeno? And where is the god that can move between halves? Doesn’t matter. Between one and the other, we close our eyes and jump.