#62

It is so laughable that we seek to know, and even funnier that we declare what we think we know to be correct and permanent! I realize I've started a post this way before, but I cannot care and will very likely do so again. The vanity is endlessly baffling, and so hugely absurd--the joke never grows stale.

There is no end to thinking. There is no end to thought. As long as there is life, it will communicate with life and with the incommunicable beyond, which will tend to life as even life tends to cease being life, to go beyond communication. So what is preserved? And what is the value of preservation, and how long can a memory last? Questions are always alive, answers are always dead. Yet it is through the answers that we seek to build our lives.

What is human existence as an unbroken stream of consciousness but a few sentences, a brief snatch of bloodied song? How much of the universe has every person that has ever lived seen? Expressed? Set down for posterity?

Nothing! It is nothing! One big guess! Unclear in the particulars! And soon, we will forget, blinded by our new versions of old stories and distracted by the fresh contours of new guesses, for which we will scream and kill and die.

If the universe is a forest, all humanity is but stepping underneath the eaves at its edge, and looking around. Briefly, in fear, squinting through shadows.

Speaking in personal, more quotidian terms, if the universe is a forest, then our lives--every thought we think every tree we see, every step we take between the trunks--on paths or through the undergrowth--with guides and partners or all alone--is knifing blazes into the bark, etching markings into the surface of things to show ourselves where we've been, how we got to where we are. 

Collectively or alone, it all comes down to a little patch of "familiar" ground; growing a little every day, maybe, but never more than the most infinitesimal before the incalculable spread of the universe, of time.

Can't go back. No unmarking a marking. No unpathing a path, no unreading a word. No shortcuts, either. Can't get to the edge. Can't read ahead. Can't force static--as if it weren't enough that the trees don't end; they never stop changing, either, and the markings that we make change too; fade, become grown over, lose their meaning, go abandoned and become rediscovered. 

Always, always, the threat of fire, of flood, of blight, of unstoppable decay, of becoming totally lost--having all that we have come to think we know, all that we have come to hold dear torn away from us, violently or through senescence. Death might tear us by the roots or creep in through the leaves, but always, it roams the woods, and how can we object? Every throat alive is bared to death, and if it swept through like a shadow and took its due all in a day, and the human story ended all abrupt mid-sentence as it was just beginning, all the knowledge we pretended meant so much would be lost as if it had never been gained--and so what?

Knowledge may last longer than any one of us, but it is more mortal and less significant than even the meanest life. Knowledge serves life, is subordinate to life. And life is in the heart. 

A single heart has more value than the entirety of human knowledge. Offer me the choice between them and I will not hesitate for a fraction of a second--I would eliminate all living memory for the sake of a single life. Knowledge, thought, wisdom: these are toys, at best. Usually, chimeras. 

What matters is the seeds.

To live among trees is a gift. To walk and breathe in an uninterrupted flux, moving through the flesh of a great rushing wind--what else is there? The whole point is to be a tiny vantage in a vastness, to be a dancing particle, to see what there is to see while we have eyes to see it.

Feeling our hearts. Feeling through our hearts. Our hearts, knowing nothing, present us with the true nature of our world, with the full meaning of the universe.

Dying senselessly in the woods--the very best that we can hope for.


--JL