It’s morning in July, right here. Morning in July or afternoon in July or evening in July or night in July, everywhere else. I’m coming to understand Camus’ absurdity and Zhuangzi’s flow better. One’s blade does not dull when one cuts precisely, after years of repetition. The drudgery of pushing a boulder up a hill is not misery, one must imagine it as happiness. The problems of one era are equivalent to the problems of the next, in a human life or in civilization. Different flavors of the same boulder. I’m still pushing, looking to craft a more clear definition of what this rock is, but that’s a boulder too. New definition written, it rolls back downhill and must be re-written. There’s no end to this, no final edition of the dictionary. That doesn’t make it fruitless, it just makes it infinite. The possible obsession with the final answer is unnecessary and ridiculous. The reckoning continues on to become additional reckoning, not a permanent harbor. The crows seem to understand this. They make their noise, their tools, and their groupings and then move on to the next pile of trash.
That’s the purpose of this project: to reckon and re-reckon, again and again. Finality is not achievable. Finality’s denial is rather imperative. Sure, there’s death. But a person does not live entirely within a body. One is living everywhere and with everyone, in a way, with echoes and writings and memories carrying the reality of a person across longitudes and minutes. Perhaps it requires faith in the continuity of echoes to accept certain finalities. But why do things need to go on and on? Just because things repeat, doesn’t mean they must repeat forever. The repetition is not a torture because it’s not forever. As with a word repeated out loud enough times that it loses meaning, anything repeated enough times becomes meaningless. But that’s only if one doesn’t pause between repetitions.
Roman Ryan 