The power of contradiction. Contradiction shows not only the power of the thinker, in saying against, or turning against, whatever before was an unacknowledged certainty; it also shows the power of life itself, that it is not contained within a scheme or anything like final coherence, where all the elements of it are fitted together for our admiration or for our employment. The words come to refute what was once standing on its own, to present the counter side of something, because already there is a movement within the living to contradict and to be contradicted, as the virtuous is contradicted by the vicious, as the thought of this morning is contradicted by the thought of tonight, as life is contradicted by death and death by life, as sense is contradicted and swallowed up by senselessness, by the unthinkable, becoming a mess of fragments butting into one another, sparks of interpretation careening into one another, to finally crash–it’s a living thing that crashes–into incommensurability.
Love the Dust 