Love for Last Fruits

Some of those who think of God find Him to be an acceptable endpoint, as though the caricature of the universe somehow explained it. What drives us mad, though, is not the lack of meaning (because what the hell is that, anyway?) or the cruelty of a confusing universe. Why do we care what we name “what is,” since it changes the system at hand not at all? Why do we want to solve a problem before we have one? We cannot establish inconsistency between what we know and what we don’t know. If we’re left without a touchstone, we’ve only technically come back to where we started: the inescapable experience that leaves us with the ecstasy of response, the loneliness of biologically intrinsic isolation, and the driving need to believe in an autonomous reality that we can only ever infer. And what do we do with what we started with? We can ignore it or try to understand it or simply persist amid one great silent scream. We arrange the concepts and rearrange them. We elaborate and simplify. We decide we can use it to know more, and then we decide we can’t know more at all. We adopt new values and call new things good. Now it’s survival, now it’s peace, now it’s power, now it’s parsimony, now it’s logic, now it’s lawfulness and empiricism, and above all it is our own center. But we never contact that thing that we crave - the autonomous authority to verify the absolute verity of our very best assumptions. So we judge, we guess, we test, we believe, and above all we change. Those of us who can meet the universe and trust it to speak honestly with us must walk another new circle in the muck, with no more reason to call it better than any other road to nowhere. But we hope for somewhere; we hope beyond hope that hope is enough to keep us going and that there is a world that guides us. In essence, our lives and our strength is built on crazy hope. It’s not that we have nothing left to lose; it’s that we hope that we have it, we hope to name it and understand it, and we hope it is at all.

A true skeptic must embrace the possible, and in so doing risk the invalidation of all, while paradoxically believing that some level of understanding is possible and that some level of empirically-based selection of ideas is useful and progressive. It’s an invitation not from the vine to the branches but from the rock to the sculpture: to rest and rot on passions enflamed by impossible hope and the never-ending pursuit of an invisible lover. I like it that way.