Monday, May 19, 2008
men plan, god laughs
lost in a sense of perpetual befuddlement, and as the long, grey featureless corridor of days stretches out in front of me, i feel like zeno's poor achilles, legs pumping frantically, fruitlessly, endlessly, toward a lumbering goal that never seems to get any closer.
and i wonder what it feels like to know for sure, to bask in the reassurance of plans, certainty, black and white. perhaps i am mistaken, and everyone really is as unsure or everything as i am, and maybe they're just concealing it with a craftiness i never quite managed to pick up-- because if there is any word i would use to describe myself, it would be artless; gawky, unsure, gauche, uncomfortable-- and inside everyone's just as confused and bewildered and drowned in a suffocating feeling of balancing between the twin chasms of what'snext and whatnow.
i really doubt so, though.
i am surrounded by people who know for sure. and even if they don't they don't seem too troubled by it. for he clothed the lilies of the valley... well. i'm a bit more complicated than a floral sex organ (although i appreciate the unintended phallicity). besides i think those are membership perks. i'm starting to think that the unexamined life is underrated... it really depends on whether quality of life is judged by the means or the end. and all this thinking.. leads me to wonder if i'm just a little bit too obsessed with self-contemplation. which leads me into another worryfest over whether i think too much. so.. enough. get the angst out a couple times a month, and just seal it away like sequestruum somewhere in my bones, and let it flare up once in a while.
and now i'd like to point out the resolution to zeno's paradox. it lies in the fact that there are two kinds of infinity: the infinity between the spaces in real numbers (finite infinity) and the infinity that consists of real numbers stretching out to forever. trapping achilles in finite infinity is mathematically unsound because the geometric series that governs the distance between achilles and the tortoise eventually resolves to a finite number.. so eventually achilles does meet his tortoise, and the paradox of zeno is soundly defeated.
but mathematical contortions are cold comfort when achilles stares down his tortoise, knowing that infinities lurk absurdly in the spaces between everything.
i am not a puzzle for you to figure out.
i am not a rumour that you need to confirm.
i am not a gateway.
i am not your irrational fear.
i am not your eye-opening experience.
i am not your youthful folly.
i am not your reason to hate.
i am not your reason to love.
i am hot-tempered.
i am an asshole most of the time.
i am uniquely, unhappily, terrifyingly, gloriously
me.
so leave me be, the way i might be, or am, or was, or will be, or not.
+ fictions&fires
1:59 PM
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plangere, latin: to strike, or to lament.
in the depth of winter i finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.
--albert camus
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to be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best night and day to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle any human being can fight and never stop fighting.
-- ee cummings
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