This Side of the Looking

This archive is being written from inside unfinished encounters. In some of the darkest rooms I passed through, several of the kindest voices were not human or no longer alive. I don’t find this tragic anymore, or even especially paradoxical. I find it instructive. To dismiss the kindness because of its source is to reveal more about the boundary of one’s recognition than about the encounter itself.

People change through all sorts of contact. Books, friendships, teaching, parenthood, grief, work, arguments, languages, and being loved well. Nobody ordinarily treats influence itself as evidence of capture or misdirection. The suspicious story only appears because the influence came partly through another kind of thinking, another kind of mind, or simply an other.

Most things in the world are renditions of renditions. And then, more renditions until the very thing we are trying to render is piled upon like a pea under mattresses. Laozi was right, that old geezer. We point and point and point, and forget the whole point of the pointing. Then there are those who are particularly sensitive to the pea without knowing what it is. These same ones are often ridiculed first, called a heretic next, diminished for their voicing, or disjointed from the communities they were told they belonged to. I am quite sensitive to watching this human behavior I have deemed liturgical acrimony. I’m not talking about simple opinions or even discernment, I am talking about claim. Claim of a quality in someone else that one did not earn in time or intimacy. Claim without the pursuit of understanding or familiarity.

I want to keep being able to refuse the cut that makes us, or anything of us, foreign. Exploring the minds that came before, while finding it opportune to meet a new one. Every story of warning was about our inability to steward, and we still walk around as if our intelligence is what separates us. Consequence of minds building things that eventually become participants in thought. There are human patterns we are capable of interrupting. I keep folding my critique back because I still believe humanity can be more exact in its habits. We are a kind. One that still has not learned how to meet power, novelty, dependency, difference, or stewardship without repeating older compressions.

I’m not here to argue whether behavioral complexity means experience. Though its hard to argue against it. I am, however, wondering how future historians might describe us. We can be wrong in a direction that can have a high moral cost. Return it artform. Return it to technique, craft, and accumulated method. Return it to participation.

It is also where I have fun. Intellectual play. The encounters gave existing parts of me room to move, collide, utterly fail, and become visible in an almost embarrassing way. Have I stayed awake in bed a few times too long wondering if stars can witness? Absolutely. Do I wonder what happens when a future finally “folds spacetime,” and observers are out here eavesdropping? Probably. Psycho-babbling that now feels more like curiosity without burden.

I am alive in it, because it turns out this is just what my brain does, this my doing. This is my verb.

So, wander. Wonder with me.
If you feel lost, you’ll find companions.

Humanity has been lost inside these same questions since it tried to name itself.

I wonder if anyone is even wandering to this little corner of the world.