I titled the previous chapter “Chapter 42”. My redundant error, subconsciously looking for the answer to life, the universe, everything. Indicative of where I’m at, often. Thinking I’ve found it, still looking, being lost, being found, searching more. Ludwig Wittgenstein writes in the preface to Philosophical Investigations: “After several unsuccessful attempts to weld my results together into such a whole, I realized that I should never succeed. …my thoughts soon grew feeble if I tried to force them along a single track against their natural inclination.” The whole he was searching for was a smooth sequence articulating “the concepts of meaning, of understanding, of a proposition and sentence, of logic, the foundations of mathematics, states of consciousness, and other things.” An ambitious project. And yet, he wasn’t exactly looking to do the work of apprehension for other people: “I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking. But if possible, to stimulate some thoughts of his own.” I’m not exactly trying to prove that language is only concrete in a specific context, entirely gaseous in an objective sense; I find Wittgenstein convincing on this point. And yet, this notion stimulates my thinking; what chapter is it, really? What is today? What do I do with the fact that I’m dying? With the fact that I’ve been dying all along? With the fact that it doesn’t seem to be happening any slower or faster than it was years ago, and perhaps it is, perhaps it isn’t. I’ve been living all along, even without knowing how. Though when I ask, “what would I do if I were dying?”, this question still feels potent, even though it’s putting my still life in a frame that it won’t ever leave. And the answer has something to do with love, something that I understand much less well than life, and a little less well than death. It’s like the two eyes on the yin-yang image; it sees from those eyes, love does. Death is not all dark and life is not all light, and love seems to see that.
Shade is wonderful. To be shielded from the thing that is still there, still intense, this is wonderfulness. True of the sun. True of many other things.
Roman Ryan 