Prose poem about narratives

I don’t know if this belongs, but I’m In a contemporary French philosophy class and some ideas about narrative were reminding me of Zen Buddhism. Sorry for the length.

If I say that I am errant, I have lost sight of my narrative. But if I say I am enjoying errantry, I have a new one to rely on. Enjoying errantry, a state of wandering, I see beliefs crumble without any accompanying anxiety. Though wandering, in this state I find my home. If it was not here, where would I find it? If it was not now, when would it make itself known? And in the hopes of living an examined life, I might think to join a monastery. In the hopes of dying free from mundane tragedies, but staying brave enough to face it honestly (and somehow still not selfish about it), I might think to separate myself and renounce the world. Where would we be if we all wished to renounce the world? Instead I might think to hope for togetherness and not aloneness, and do my best to get lost in a collective of some kind. What if we all walked toward one of the world’s great expanses, a desert or salt flat, all 7 billion and more from every nation brought in every craft to march together. When we met we built a towering monument and argued over who had the best story to tell. When I am errant, I lack a story, and I panic. The hero failing is how reality forces its contradiction, and when I am errant I am the failed hero. Turning from failure to errantry, I tell myself that searching is the finding. The existentialists told us that without a project, a person is a zombie, dead without knowing it. What if your project is on projecting? The search for the searching, examination of examining. After all, if I have gone in search of myself, what could I expect to find but myself searching? Like standing between two mirrors, I see a thousand versions of myself searching, never finding, only being found. I remember what it was like to be found the first few times, when I’d look in the mirror and jolt with recognition. I learned that I wasn’t an onlooker but a piece of the game, as slowly as we all do. Sartre compares our view of the Other to looking through a keyhole. We separate them from us, forget in our most foolish moments that they are looking at us through a keyhole as well. This realization may spark some indignation. I am so much more than my body, shouldn’t it be obvious! We want to shout back at them though their keyhole. We fall victim when we call that indignation our own, and we work on our stories to feel better. We refrain from asking who works within us, what accounts for this author? Is their voice our voice, or someone else’s? Do they hear us, or do we hear them? In our most tumultuous times, when a thousand voices surround, we don’t recall the thousand reflections of ourselves. If we did, all things would vanish in the presence of this mystery. Infinity upon infinity, glimpsed for a moment, would be enough to give us the awe that we desire; an end to all desire. But returning from the divine paradox, the dazzling darkness, we enjoy errantry once again, only now anchored to a divine ground. Directed by this freedom, I would no longer be distressed over questions of action. As I walk, I would not see a sea of people searching, but find a sea of searchers finding me.

Submitted October 22, 2019 at 02:42AM by tedlando https://ift.tt/2By1N8Q