INTERLUDE: Circling Forward

A reflection on writing, knowledge, and what it is to move through time

I have, so far, begun to put in writing the things that I know, the things that I don’t. I have tried, to the extent that it’s possible, to put the truths of my experience, my existence, on the page. I have tried to make an “I” born of words, a stagnant self by which I can stabilise my own identity (to the extent that such a thing is possible). I read back the pages. I reify my being. When I feel the threads of myself again coming loose, I return to what I’ve written. I drink the strength of the identity I have created in those words and, like the elixir of life, it leaves me renewed.

But I have arrived at an impasse. My thinking has begun, dangerously, to circle. I am wearing down roads I’ve walked before. I start down new roads only to realise that they’re same ones I’ve walked for years; I no longer know how to find terrain I haven’t covered. On these roads all ideas are mirrors. On these roads I see reality fragmented and duplicated a million times over. Everything has become what it isn’t. It’s all become the same.

Some knowledge, it occurs to me, is bigger than other knowledge, more all-encompassing. While some things are merely interesting, have only local relevance, other things, once you know them, change the way you experience the world. They filter down. They seep into other arenas. It’s the ideas of philosophy I speak of, the big metaphysical and ontological and phenomenological truths, the resolute nature of existence as we can experience it. Once you’ve discovered these ideas, once you’ve lived with and in them, much of the knowledge you learn afterward can seem obvious, predictable, uninspired—it appears subordinate to that larger, grander knowledge, only a small piece of that magnificent whole.

For instance, somewhere along the way I learnt that any concept, taken to the extreme, can stand for it’s negation. It was a mind-altering idea at the time. Order is, in fact, just like chaos. Knowledge can be the same as ignorance. Love can be hate. Presence can look like absence, and absence like presence. Being and non-being walk hand in hand. Incredible, I thought, so all knowledge is a circle. Life and death. Light and dark. Creation and destruction. Circles, everywhere—everything connected. I became obsessed with those absolute points where an idea transforms into its opposite. Absolute order, I thought, would look exactly the same as absolute chaos: flat, formless. Absolute knowledge, I figured, would feel exactly like absolute ignorance—that is, like nothing, a blank. At the moment or point of the absolute, I realised, all ideas are annihilated. Absolute absence and absolute presence are both just the absolute; they are the same. The absolute is everything and nothing. It overwhelms and consumes all else. It’s inconceivable to the human mind, which is locked in our local, limited physiology. And, I realised, I knew, I felt, that the absolute couldn’t possibly exist.

I’ve lived with these ideas for many years, have turned them about in my mind a million ways, have dug through as many of their implications as I could find. They sustained me through the first half of my twenties. But I’m beginning to tire of opposites that dissolve into each other, antonyms that become or are already synonymous. Every thought takes me here. I’m tired of the connectivity of language and ideas, the way all things show themselves to be the same. It’s frustrating.

I still remember a time when I could think without dissolving, when I could turn over an idea and find just an idea, alone and small, novel and fascinating. When did I lose that surprise? Either I know too much or I know too little. Now, when I turn over an idea, I find not itself but a different idea, a bigger one, the same one I’ve been discovering and re-discovering for years. It’s like turning over rocks and finding that each one hides a worm, the same worm, so long and tangled that it rests under everything. Existence rides on the back of this creature. Once you have seen it, you can’t see anything else.

And it’s not just the concept of the absolute—or the idea of the sameness of all ideas—that has begun to bore me. Other things, other philosophies, too. Every new thought I encounter these days is the same thought. In all topics and ideas, the same patterns emerge: incompleteness, imperfection, indivisibility. I can’t approach anything without seeing immediately the metaphysics which underpins it. I can’t read an argument about culture or politics or technology or art without feeling it to be so small, so limited, so unable to see itself in context. The things people speak of, the ideas they dissect, the points they make are often valid, but they arrive at conclusions that to me seem incomplete. There is a pattern in all of it but no one ever speaks about the pattern. There is a more primary cause but only the philosophers acknowledge it. Perhaps this is because once you see the pattern, once you know the cause, the world flattens. I want to read an idea that shakes me. I want to feel like the knowledge we’ve produced is endless. And it is. And it isn’t. I am suffering from what feels like an incurable lack of surprise.

There is more to know. This I know. I have barely scratched the surface of the totality of human knowledge. I am a child in my knowing. I am foolish to think I can see. Still, I worry that the problem isn’t my lack of knowledge but that reality itself has been mistaken for complex when it is in fact simple, that the abundance of detail and complexity we see in the world is a distraction, an illusion, a fault of our modest mental faculties. Even in learning new things, nothing feels new, and I worry this feeling will persist—that it will cloak me for the rest of my life.

I wonder, too, if the sameness I see is my own fault—if perhaps I have built up theories in my mind and let them consume my reality. I see them everywhere. Am I seeing the truth of things or is this just another illusion? Am I open to the variety of ideas the world has to offer or am I walking around blind? What books do I need to read to fix my vision? What thinkers do I need to encounter before I’m shaken awake? I don’t know. I don’t know. The patterns are thick, opaque like paint. They hide what they don’t want me to see.

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I’ve had a fear of time for as long as I can remember—a fear of ageing and all that entails, a fear of dying, but mostly a fear of death itself. In recent years that’s only gotten worse. As I neared my mid-twenties I started to sense that life was going to be much shorter than I had anticipated. Time was already speeding up and I knew it was an exponential process. I tried to situate myself in the mind of a fifty-year-old. My month, I figured, would be a week to someone in their fifties. My year would feel like a season, perhaps less. Already, my seasons had begun to feel as long as the months I experienced as a teenager. It was happening so fast. A decade for someone in their sixties, I thought, must feel like a year. Grimly, I realised that the aphorism, “Life is short,” was deadly true. Now I know that when I’m old I’ll still feel like a child.

For a while this knowledge broke me down. My death panics, as I call them, returned in force. I couldn’t go to sleep at night without thinking about the nearness of death, without spiralling down into the darkness and jolting up, terrified, in bed. During the day I would try to hold onto time, gripping the edge of the table, curling my hands into fists, closing my eyes and repeating to myself, I’m here, I’m here, I’m here. I knew it was unhealthy. I knew I was torturing myself by sustaining an awareness of what the mind was not built to handle, but it seemed to me worse to deny it, to ignore it like so many others do. I thought the pain I felt was worth the price of that knowledge. That it was better to stay awake than to live as a somnambulist. I’m still not convinced I was wrong.

In the last few weeks, however, I’ve started seeing time differently. It’s started to grow larger again. The fear is still there but it feels as though my perception has cracked open, like my sustained reckoning of time was an elastic band slowly stretching, the tension growing, the horror intensifying, until, suddenly, a breaking point: my mind snapped, the system collapsed, the elastic circle broke into a long, thin line. This enlargement has been, mostly, the product of a realisation: that I can do anything I want. It’s a simple enough thought but for the first time I truly felt it. I envisioned a life of dynamism and divergence, a life that to me seemed to be multiple lives, each cleanly divided from the other. The world can change on a whim. You make a choice. The choice is a line, or a knife, or perhaps an earthquake. Crack! goes the system. Life is split in two. You’re now on a plane of existence that wasn’t there before, moving through terrain you didn’t know existed, or could exist. You break from what was reality. You move cleanly away.

Of course, it doesn’t always work like that. We drag the past with us at all times. Phases of life blur together, hopelessly entangled. But the character of your life, I know, can be changed. A new place, a new career or hobby, a new set of friends, new routines and rituals. It would be like time reset. You could take the clock down off the wall and breathe.

I want more than anything to change. I want to exist in a continuous upheaval. I want my journey through time to be sloped and unpredictable. Revelation thrills me but I never have enough of it. I know more now than I ever have, I’m learning things every day, and yet somehow I feel like I know and am learning less. The future is a pan-flat plain. Time is a desert, or perhaps an ocean—they’re both the same. I yearn for mountains but I’m terrified by the thought that my mountain-climbing days are over, that I will wander through this desert forever. Yes, of course—it’s not time that scares me, but stagnancy. It’s not death I cower before, but eternity.

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My writing here is both record and prayer: I preserve the things I’ve been; I write myself into the future, hoping that if I write enough, think enough, read enough, I’ll stumble upon a combination of words that cracks the hard shell of existence right open. Foolish or wise? Neither—both. Only the fool is wise. The wise, of course, are fools. I need an idea that will set me down a new path. I need to cure myself of what I’ve learnt, to cut the wisdom out of my body and return to the ignorance of the child. Only in that state of absolute wonder will I be able to see clearly. Only in my unknowing will I be able to break free of the circle, to snap the band, to shoot suddenly, brightly down the line—and into a new world.