There are many different yous. A multitude matching your philosophy. I am drawn in first by the look of you, and then the depth of you; that is how these things tend to go. There is an intersection now for us. It was not always there, but we find this place acceptingly. I am comfortable in the fascination, in our closeness, and even with us both knowing how easy it is to charm, to establish some version of workable rapport with anyone, there is still the quality of closeness contained within itself, within its own right, unaspiring in its uniqueness — not subjected to rivalry, or to future, but to the integrity of each moment. There is the now-present fact that we can share ideas with the shorthand of like minds, with the frightful jolts of instants unspoken, that I can hold you and search your warm and searching self, and freely disclose an encryption of my mind and senses.
You see blurred lines between an academic outlook and what others suppose to be entirely other things, even sacred things. I see that they have put “remoteness from everyday life” in the dictionary’s definition of romance. True empowerment is felt, not through knowledge or stylized distortion, but full and relentless immersion in the stuff of life. The tireless act of questioning creates a new and better immediacy. To go down this path is not only a departure from past comforts, but from all those who feel comfortable. Is this your intended journey?
I see many different yous. There is the gangly you, the model you, whose eyes are capable of conveying the requisite intensity bordering on a flash of anger—you with your long, smooth legs and the type of beauty that merits further inspection; the elicited attraction is almost curiosity, a transfixed admiration. There is the you who is keen, exceptionally so—this is the one who grabbed my hand suddenly and suggested that we run together through an empty industrial road in-between automotive shops and warehouses, with a train rolling on the tracks alongside us and piercing the night with its screeches, horns, and shifting, tumbling mass. This is the you who is always eager to swim in the chaos of a tumultuous universe, viewing it as a beautiful thing, and not as a problem to be solved. If consciousness is indeed a strange loop, perhaps each mind is a little whirlpool within the vast ocean that always churns and generates oddities from its playful, senseless depths. From all this you derive your excitement, and also your exhaustion. Once everything becomes inseparable information, chaos offers unity. But how can you find meaning in the meaningless?
To even call it “chaos” is to give it shape. And yet the questioning you is the most enlightened you, the becoming you, who realizes that we are all lost things trying to justify their new states of being. You doubt not only obvious fabrications but also the senses, the clarity of the senses, and the contentedly seated mind that purports to rule. You playfully dismiss all securities as invalid and aggrandize that continual escape from formed to free, romanticizing the energy itself, regardless of what distorted temporary form it may take. You practice a careful and self-aware acceptance of the indeterminable, and admit that this acceptance is partly an art form, and a self-correction of your own instincts to classify and to judge, and a deliberate diplomacy forged out of circumstances where you knew diplomacy was needed during which you said to yourself I – yes, a dubious I – but I in my quiet, artful way could be this diplomat who allows truth to jump from thing to thing, and allows also for all things to dissolve. Like a true American, contrasting your European way, I suggest that we should be bold and unequivocal when asserting ideas, and singular with truth, because if we are not all equally bold, then ideas do not survive on their own merits, but are, instead, based on the disparate strength of the assertions. And so “might is right” rises again, taking a new foothold in the intellectual realm. And you remind me there that even the most beautiful plants return to soil, not for more footing, but completely, surrendering to the giver. And there is magic even in that surrender, and there is beginning in that end. With all this being true, isn’t there more power in humility?
