We were all disappointed with how things turned out in our lives, each for his own reason. Some thought the choices they made in life made all the difference, that they had made the wrong ones, made wrong turns, and spoiled life thereby. It made sense, because decisions accumulate like a residue or like a tar, like a thick paste, over the agent and leaves him stuck in a certain groove from those decisions on out. It’s hard to transform when the very fibers of your body have been trained and habituated to just this route of accomplishment, just this way of managing things. Some thought differently about their lives and about what went into composing them, feeling, instead of decisions and spells of willfulness, that fate and its sweeping of them to and fro had decided their course. Mistakes take on a different color and texture in this case, as they turn out to be mistakes of life, as it were, and not simply mistakes of an agent. Life itself has made a wrong turn, has grown askew or has wilted into an insignificant fragment of itself. Disappointment takes on a different character in this case, too: it is disappointment not with a portion of the scheme of things but with the scheme of things itself; disappointment takes on a cast of the irrecoverable, unmitigable, and cannot be transformed, by whatever amount of heavy lifting, into its opposite, satisfaction and affirmation. Some could not decide for themselves which types of injustices they suffered, and simply complained that they were too many and too harsh, too many and too severe to bear. These fared best of all in their way, as they could change their response to their troubles depending on their mood, so that when they were not feeling up to transforming their lives, they could blame life’s indifference, and when they felt more empowered and surer of their forces, they could bring in the reigns and try as hard as they might to take a different route to their glory. But, at bottom, it was all the same, whatever conception of it we were moved into taking: disappointment, a growing, in fact sedimented, long-sedimented sense that life had not turned out the best for us.
The wisest among us, however, those for whom the things of life could never really be so simple and straightforward, what did we do? We could not complain with the same excuses as our comrades, not even when moods of powerlessness struck us, because we were privy to how our powers could be harnessed, could be employed in the direction of our growth and proper development. But neither could we give these powers full dominion over our lives, and feel that no matter how bad things have become, we may always pick ourselves up and start anew. Both horns of the conception of what had caused our disappointment with our lives dismantled, we took a new course altogether, a course altogether removed from the war within ourselves between either assenting to our (total) vulnerability or to our (again, total) invulnerability. It was a course rooted in a primal gratitude, rather than a course expressing any dissatisfaction with life for whatever reason, whether for our own lack of trying or for life’s curses, a gratitude for life in its givenness, in its simple being or manisfestness, a gratitude for there being anything, anything at all, rather than nothing and darkness and oblivion. How did we reform this bedrock comportment towards life, our dissatisfaction into gratitude, when the dissatisfaction is equiprimordial with the gratitude? What miracle had to erupt into our lives in order for us to leave behind this our endowment of being buffeted by life as we must? Was it a miracle, or was it simply this, that we were transformed, perhaps by life itself, because of some wish or intention of life itself? We–converted, in the most significant sense of that word? We sort of fell or stumbled into it, as we had before, supposedly, stumbled away or fallen from grace. We were suddenly–or after a long time, it only seemed to occur suddenly–afflicted by a grace of the opposite sort than we were accustomed to, and recognized the benefits of living, despite its failures and disappointments, living at all and taking a certain pride in life. Life itself has given us access to seeing life differently, to living life differently. WE, the wise among us, at least, are doorways to those still living here on earth to enter into the promise of life, to enter into the possibility of life’s having any promise.
The wisest among us. For us the road is easy, even this road less traveled, it comes to us as naturally as our next step or our next breath. We are at home in this newfound world of ours, as though we were born there and it is our motherland, we breathe it as our most hospitable atmosphere, the pleasure of simply living. The rest of us–the many-too-many, the great and heavy majority–they–are disappointed, continue to be fraught with a sense that life could be more, could be better, could be more fulfilling or significant. What do we wise ones do, what could we do, for them, for these our friends and neighbors, for the throngs surrounding us on all sides asking us for a taste, if not a share or a portion, of our joy, of this joy we enjoy so thoroughly? We remain doorways…open or shut–we remain doorways, and invite these others, at any time of their hard lives, to join us and feel the breath of lightness and gaiety come over them. We see how hungry they are, how they are starving after this joy more than for any food, how in need they are of this nourishment–which is plentiful, by the way. Whether they take this passageway, whether they turn the knob of our doors, whether they even knock at them…that is an altogether different story. Whatever they do, slam it shut, run away from its winds when it opens, we–we–are satisfied with life, even with these lives joining us on this earth, a hemisphere abutting our hemisphere, a clime among climes, a door among doors.
Its eyes followed me through the shadowy brush like two hidden orbs behind the black clouds, but I was nevertheless determined and, afraid as I was, walked on through where I would surely be pursued and not back to the clearing and the open field where the beast would no longer prowl after me, where, if anything, he would stop in midstep at the border of his realm before entering and there exposing himself to light. What I was looking for was the same as what any human being looks for in a dark place: not light, an opening for the moon or for the sun through the thick canopy, not exactly light at least, unless light it is when you, groping along in some hellish place, your hands as lost as your eyes, chance upon some undeserved security that you are still properly wedded to the road, although road there is no more, only the trackless dense meanderings of growths you’ve never seen before.
What I was looking for was not a voice, nor was it a light, but inner confidence like being struck in the head that there happened to be, if I just kept on in the manner I had been for some blind weeks now, an abandoned cottage, or a cabin or whatever, some shelter in store for me and me alone, where any predator, not to mention some unblinking eyes staring through every flower, every shrub and every long branch, could no longer reach me, or at least have to struggle and scramble in order to get a taste of me. Without a pinch of effort on my part, and with no obsession either, I imagined being caught by my shirt sleeve or the hem of my ill-fitted pant legs by ancient-like teeth then feeling the teeth on the surface of my skin, after they pierced through my garb, then feeling the stained ivory beneath the surface, burning the inside of the flesh like the outside, turning the whole body to boil until, unbearable heat everywhere, the grace of numbness sets in and there is no more pain, no more pain of being prey to predator nor of anything else.
Still one set of terrible eyes saw everything I did and every direction I moved, even though I could not for the life of me see myself and the world was like a mirror showing and reflecting me but a mirror in the dark. What else could it be, I whispered to myself, the dark returning nothing of my voice, the horizon like no horizon, the woods like a dark enclosed room of arms reaching out from the dark into the dark, but Pijo, whose only streak of brilliance comes from his eyes as he charges towards you, those eyes that are always the last flint from the brush the unaware, because you are always caves and a whole nightlong trek behind Pijo, cannot see, in fact prays not to see, before he closes his eyes to the dark and to the magnetic lights and for good? Pijo, the locals would say, with nothing short of gossip, all of them like old women and men, or children, going on about some forbidden magic or legend the children now have heard a million times and grew close to boredom in hearing yet again, he’s not after you to make of your flesh a meal. I would have done anything to believe these elderly and childish people; thrusting myself ahead as I was, I was still scared, and lost because of how many times I had to turn around, in my fright, hoping not to see Pijo’s eyes through some tree’s broken limb or through the vines of the berries sprouting here and there throughout the darkness, it was as though I was turning but in one direction, but so often and with such slippage of my heart that I grew dizzy, so that the darkness spun round and round around me when I finally came to a halt. What a stupid man I’ve become, I thought while the shades and shadows danced, these last weeks in the woods, in effect calling the beast over to me to have his way with me; he would find the dizzy one gawking at him like after some vague wish, then tumble into his mouth and stop the gaping mouth from laughing in the dizzy man’s dark-spinning face. Pijo would say, if he ever talked, My, you want to join the others, and make a home for yourself here? Here with me, and become the first thing on people’s tongues but the last thing from their thoughts and careful consideration? He would question me like so if he came upon me, I thought, and if he could speak, if he cared to speak.
Then there wasn’t a clearing, it was still purple like a cloth dyed and re-dyed for days on end, but there was a house, a house so small it fit between the shadows, a house like the mere dream of a house, and on the other side of the thickness, and though my eyes were as though covered in mud, there was Pijo, his yellow unflickering eyes making it seem, in their darting course above me, then at my level, then somehow below me, that he was tracking me like a good hunter from this, then that vantage point until, two points on the same plane as my eyes were then, they stop, as I stop and somehow see the spectral house, though there were no lights to speak of, no lights on through the slit curtainless windows or through the four places where the door cannot bear to meet the frame. And then they rushed and I rushed too, they making a stunningly accurate line for an object in movement, I almost reaching the first cramped room leading to the narrow hallway to the miniature stairs, all dark and painted in dark but somehow there, but I was like an outsized and angered doll when I reached the door, I couldn’t fit, not the least of myself through it, I took one last breath, as though a little girl had squeezed me and wanted to hear me sigh, as the lights approached me without delay, until I felt the beast on my thrashing leg, not biting and piercing and eating, but licking and lapping and as though nursing. It was funny, really, the sight of us two tangled up with one another in the thick and wrangling dark on all sides; anyone who came upon us then would think that I, a darksome thing myself, were fondling two floating, glowing, menacing, while tender, eyes, that the dark and the light were in love this way.
Pathei mathos. Great questioning brings with it great peril, great disaster. But it is not to be avoided for all that; even more, it need not fail to give the questioner a certain confidence, no matter how shaky his knees and how fumbling his resoluteness. The questionability of all things, quicksand that it is and no place to stand, no sure place at least, gives us the confidence that grows out of liberation; for it is liberating, to see everything, even the clearest, bluntest and hardest things in our lives, as marked by a question, as ever leading out into the open-endedness of a question…. All the answers we could possibly give in relation to ourselves, all the definitions and charges of this or that, are all so many blocks along this road, this open road we are, along with all things. Despite the horrors of certain of these answers, the shame, the prison of shame they might give the one labeled by them, the overall stagnation with which they infect the judged life, or the sense of being utterly lost, without the slightest signs to lead you back to anything recognizable, anything like a home or worth calling home; despite these and other horrors there is a comfort in having some answer, or some amount of answers, to the question of who and what we are and what, or who, all things are around us. Rafts for the frothy waters, blankets for the frozen temperatures of analysis, shields for the winds and blows of doubt, an answer now and then has saved not just a good many of us, not just most of us, but all of us from the agony, the agonizing, the unacknowledged suffering that goes with asking a question, asking questions, and continuing to ask, despite answers.
Not only peril and agony mark the road of questioning, however. We have already said that a confidence, confidence rooted in liberation, rooted in the very movement away from a firmness of ground–so no confidence in something forthright as in an object, say a pole, a person or a god–this confidence of liberation is the gift given the questioner. Not for his efforts, but by his efforts; for the only way of liberating, of truly liberating, is to soar with questions, to dig with questions, to demolish with questions and, if possible, create with questions too. Questioning creates, we may say, insofar as it creates, is the condition and proper source of, this confidence; questioning is this confidence. It is no small gift to the human who chances upon it or to whom it is bestowed, this confidence, this great questioning–whether accepted or not, no small gift. But accepting it is one thing, refusing it another, and to accept to be confident questioningly seems the hardest of all maneuvers of the heart, hard because impossible, impossible precisely because questioning seems ever to poke holes and ram and batter and belittle confidence; for any structure of confidence it has ready its dismantling tentacles. Impossible–so, despite the magnificence of the gift, magnificence verging into, becoming paradox, it remains a kind of agony, perhaps a deeper agony, to go through the world questioningly. The joy of the confidence that is questioning, that is born and becomes of questioning, is also the agony of vulnerability, of being just as much one as none, of having nothing, no answers, no solace, no rest. Questioning as joy must be equivocal in this way, ambiguous, since otherwise it would cease to be itself, questioning would be an answer as well as joy, like a rule to follow. But questioning is questioning, questioning is the questioning of questioning, so it goes in and out of answers like garments or skins for a being with layers of skin, staying awhile–perhaps longer than ever imagined..!–on the raft of sorrow and complaining and drudgery, then moving on–for a quick or a long visit, no matter–to the bank of joy and cheerfulness, getting along with others and affirming things. Questioning moves snakelike through all avenues, but at some points we rest our slithering and dart in a sharp line for the nearest prey to our desire to be satisfied, dart hastily, eagerly and hastily at some nearby tasty morsel. Part of questioning’s–questionableness, its questionability, its twisting and making all sorts of self-devouring loops in this way! Turning its back on itself in this way! Questionable–indeed! During some ages of its sinuous course, questioning makes us believe that it has all the answers….
Inescapable, endless, interpretations. That we interpret the world does not entail that we must interpret it in one fashion rather than or over against another, even if it means that we must continue interpreting, in some fashion or other. At least Nietzsche realized that his position was wide open to the attack of being his own, or a single, interpretation among many, his interpretation of the world as will to power and nothing besides, his interpretation that all life, all living, is interpreting and being interpreted, instead of holding that the flux and ocean of interpretations was reality itself, the ding an sich or the–paradoxically–uninterpreted essence of things. The flux, the stream, is as much interpretation as the static and the coherent, the well-formed and the ordered. Will to power, or the most thoroughgoing hermeneutic standpoint yet, is a leveling of all appearances to appearances of appearances, it is the leveling of all things to a common or shared field, what Deleuze so provocatively and as if hitting the fist in the eye, dubbed the field of immanence. We cannot escape interpretation and the wheel of interpretations, that much is certain; this does not mean, however, that we may not be quite episodic, quite haphazard, even chaotic, in our interpretations, in how we come to meet the world and share with all the things of the world, all interpreting and interpreted things, an encounter that makes a jumble out of everything, and is the last thing from linear or teleological or being in any manner constructed with an end in view. We might never escape interpretation, but life may nevertheless turn up quite the mess, and this does not mean that we have gone astray in our duty, our responsibility, to interpret the world and make it all of a piece. Chaos, the necessity of chaos, has as much worth, even when it is the height of worthlessness or of the inestimable, even when it juts out from the order of our lives, as it were, and surprises us not so much with possibility but with impossibility, the impossibility of grasping, the impossibility of moving on and giving shape, as much worth or even more than the most well-planned and well-ordered, manageable living space or system of values. Because they are both alike appearances, and only that, appearances that collide into or turn round and round about one another. Or sometimes they turn aside from one another and, as Heraclitus warned, turn each into a world of its own. But far be it from us to say that such weakness, such failure in dealing with the world, with the endless interpretations of the world and the flux of these, is strength, or is anything close to strength!
Grieving philosopher, ambiguous being! A philosopher must be wary and untrusting, must find suspect and questionable even something as basic that comes from him as his grief. Tears, those unarguable and undeniable flows and streaks from our eyes and soaking our clothes or the pages of a letter we are writing, must, even if they do not stop their streaming, be considered as just another phenomenon, and possibly just another mistake. What could be the mistake in crying, when grief sets in? What could be the mistake in grief itself? Anyone else may continue crying as long as he feels sad, and need not ask himself these or any such questions. But for the philosopher, for whom everything comes as a question, even the most unquestioned, the most brutal and obvious, the tears just might be the most effective way to ask the most far-reaching, far-digging questions, questions that get to the heart of things, if only he has heart for them. Might not the world be joyous after all, and not fit for tears and grief of any kind? Or is it that tears, grief, the height of lamentation, gnashing of teeth and cursing and those other weighty things that weigh us down and low, are somehow mixed with this joy that the philosopher finds, through his unceasing investigations, at the heart of things? Also, the philosopher needs to inquire into himself as to his place within the scheme of social encounters, ask himself whether and how he is a teacher to those around him, or what and whether he learns from them; he needs to be sure if maybe those around him are getting the wrong idea when he cries, maybe it wouldn’t be better to approach even the most calamitous and heart-wrenching, the sudden loss of a friend or a child or a relative, the actual sight of another dying or missing out on this sight and the possibility, one last time, of giving the friend his company, although he is dying in the building beside the building where he works, it is a stupid thing to shirk taking the forty steps to the deathbed, the slow or sudden death of a companion species, his dog hit by a car or drowned in the ocean, trying to swim and find his human partner on the island two miles off the shore, the insanity and as it were inhuman discouragement of things all around, the milieu and the age, the lack of discourse of the constant talking at cross-purposes, the bearing of crosses for whatever insane reason or the burning of churches, monasteries and mosques and temples through whatever mad bitterness and bias, approach whatever might move him to feel the sting in the ducts of his eyes, to cast himself down awhile, to join the lowest things and lives for a while, tossing dirt over the head, with the serenity, stillness and confidence of a Stoic, to approach it stoically, seemingly indifferently or actually so and as though from another planet, another galaxy where beings shaped much like the human being do not have human concerns or experience human travesties. Or would the stronger, better lesson be to laugh, and laugh always, in their faces, the mourners all around, and in his heart, however cold, approaching dumbness, the laughter may seem? Laugh on and on and on, even when the world itself is brought to tears and becomes itself one large, hurdling tear through space? And there’s always the question, ever on his person, he can’t let go and dispose of it, of being itself, that maximum question trying to face That there is Being or That Being gives. It is a question not about how much happiness or sadness there is in the world, how much joy and dread, how much bitterness and gratitude, but about none of these, no thing in particular but Being and to be smacked in the face, or punched in the gut or somewhere soft and vulnerable, or even in the hard head so long as it cracks a little, hit by Being or that there is anything. Sometimes, when by all accounts we should be crying–our friends look to us with the dismay of propriety, ridicule us and are in the depths frightened of us, and whatever it is we see–we are smacked in the face by the thought that there is anything, and we sit there, and we stare, we stare at you or the corpse or the sky, or into ourselves, and there is nothing to say. If we come to care again, it will necessarily be after this, not carelessness as though from stoic indifference, shock, when the mouth is closed and remains closed, or the mouth is open an inch and remains open.
On standing when the ground is slippery. Sometimes you have no choice but to pick yourself off the ground, no matter how much in tatters you happen to be and how hard it is to move a single limb; and this is no minor task. Worse yet is when you’re asked to perform this impossible feat precisely when you are least confident that it is worthwhile to stand up again; perhaps the ground, you think, plays tricks on you, and would stay stable just long enough for you to come to your feet once more, only to break the foundation and pull at its own seams as soon as your heel is firmly planted on the turf. So just when you intend to stand and to stand tall, the ground itself makes you quake with its own quaking, shake and bend over as though to take hold of a railing that is not there, and dance about like a novice dancer, whether in front of anyone else or not it makes no difference–the sole difference is that you are now dancing when you wanted most only to stand and to stand still and straight.
What else is one to do at such a time than become a jester of one’s own legs along with the earth itself, mocking at all attempts at uprightness with willing and contortionist-professional moves, bending and twisting whatever way the wind shifts, or against the wind. What else is one to do but, as soon as you take a stand again, go down, all of your failure in standing and flaying about full of laughter and the playfulness of children playing together in the park, in which it is the task of the dreamers to make it from one end to the other without so much as stepping once on the mulch? Everything is boiling hot or everything is shifting in a carnivalesque parade, so the children spend most of their time writhing in the greatest pleasure, precisely on the ground, like proud worms. You might attempt to pick up these worms of yourself, too, and use them for bait to catch a creature more stiff; but lo, these worms are slippery–good luck taking any determinate hold of them!
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 