Folly occurs when the intellect over-identifies with a proposition to become set against that proposition’s antagonists. Normativity is also fine. Where does this leave us? Not in the clutches of nihilism. To embrace every pattern and their obliterations aligns us with the nature of things. Antonyms should not serve to illuminate the thinking of one’s opponents, rather they show what the other side of the mountain looks like.
This argument ranges in cycles and spirals and shatterings and illuminations. When stars begin, clouds of gas collapse into each other and hydrogen fusion ignites. When life forms, chemical structures combine. Each yields a pattern, an organization. When stars and lives end, decomposition occurs, scattering the bits into unrelated freedom.
The coming and going of organization, relations, patterns, synonyms, and beings is observable and sometimes predictable. It may even be reversible, for a time. But the giant cosmic sine wave continues to meander above and below the horizontal axis. On smaller and more abstract graphs, emotions, ideas, and relationships go about their small meanderings alongside the mega-waves of the universe. Curves interweaving curves.
The ultimate finale or beginning, the where it all started, where it all ends up, these are flimsy religious notions that own and collect rent within most human minds. Sure, there was a big bang. And yes, this universe will expand as entropy releases its bonds. But the idea that all came from absolute nothing and will return to absolute nothing? Even if it’s true, it’s not very relevant to we mere creatures of millions of years.
That’s the thing about death. It’s not absolute. The creature lives on in its particles and ripples, just as its existence was prefigured by all that came before it which effected its nascent beingness. To fall in love with one stage of the pattern is to fall in love with one square millimeter of the stage. Release the obsession with life. Give up the addiction to death and after-death. Defeat the hoarder within, the gatherer of sex, of entertainment, of happiness, of sadness, of joy, of rapture, of love, of hate. Scatter the ashes of memory, of space, of time, and trust that there will be patterns again following every horizon’s dusk.
Roman Ryan 