Margins

It feels weird to be journalling again, and to do so publicly.

Many years ago when my mother first forced me to put into words the fleeting impressions that assuaged my senses just moments prior, all of them distal to where I was, I found myself pushing back because I simply couldn’t have known where to even begin! And starting is often the most difficult part of anything because it requires an uncanny resilience to the crushing weight of arbitrariness –

Why me? Why now? Why this? Why at all?

I wanted to start from the very beginning, from natality – but then I did not remember a single thing about my birth. And so my diary became this waddle in the temporal flow – my arms outstretched on both sides swaying in spontaneous directions causing ripples that vanish into the distance. It all felt inconsequential, unimportant – but then now and again my mom would discover a yellowed page from under a pile filled with scribbles of my younger self, and her eyes would be sparkling with a strange kind of pride – as if she is saying, “Hey look, that’s my kid right there.”

A kid that stumbled onto the secrets of immortality nestled right between the lines.

But I digress. As the impression of having finally started writing Being and Complexity began to fade, I decided to sit down, and do a quick check-in with myself.

The not-so-humble truth is, philosophising has always “come easy” for me, because it can often feel like coping with a vast, sometimes hostile, and reliably indifferent world. I do not feel the need to force any enjoyment while gnawing through desiccated parchments gestating the dry wisdoms of dusty dead men. On the contrary, it is doing so that keeps me going. There is this electrifying momentum that undergirds my jaundice in the garden of thoughts. Physically I could be sat alone in a room, speaking to an old friend, or welling up uncontrollably for no reason, but in these moments new grounds are charted, and I cannot help but feel a massive sense of accomplishment, of wonder, of disbelief – that I get to be here, to live through all this nonsense.

But Being and Complexity isn’t just a collection of shower thoughts. It is, quite frankly, the one project that I see will probably preoccupy me from now until my time is finally up. Lifelong projects are often spectated upon, and very rarely lived (with the exception of marriages but not even those these days). Going through museum exhibits of this or that invention which changed the course of human history forever in this or that way, I always got the sense that human knowledge, as something to possess, can only ever be realised collaboratively. If the goal is to contribute to an ever-expanding corpus of scientific knowledge, then like a small gear in an architectonic, one must keep on spinning. The mindlessness is not in any way a detriment but just the natural order of things. We can attribute an arbitrary device to a single person’s “life-long project,” but I suspect the truth is far simpler: One day they were here, working on things, living, loving, crying, and then one day they were gone, leaving behind only stories we get to tell to one another.

Being and Complexity feels different. It feels, embodied? Like something that grows on the side of my skull, or a constant glare in my perception that I do not quite know what to make of just yet. And morbidly knowing that it is a thread that will outlast me, it exudes a subtle warm in an otherwise scary world where I do not remember where I came from, and have not the slightest clue where I will be next.

Writing, however, comes with its unique challenges. As I began to put into words the notion of a radical phenomenological contingency, panic began to set in – Have I worded this with a sufficient degree of exactitude? Could this be used against me? Have I missed a crucial part of the puzzle? Have I stayed true to the spirit of the text? Like a newly robed monk just learning the ways of a different existence, I am beleaguered by the trappings of a “former life,” and also thrilled by the unbounded promise of a different rite. These were words that I should know, but combining them, having to make them make sense, lovingly dressing them up like a mother straightening up the suit of her little boy – it is a task that is as familiar as it is estranged, from the originary faith that it should be easy, but really isn’t.

To write is also to constantly keep at bay the unhelpful thought that before I get to say anything, I need to have everything figured out. Not only is this antithetical to the opening declaration of Being and Complexity (“This book doesn’t have to exist.”), it is also counterintuitive, and artificial. If I have all the answers now, instead of them coming to me in fragments always at least partially shrouded in confusion, then my job would be much easier as a mere scribe of some higher authority.

The moment words become enmeshed in a web of relations, as when the same term is used for a second time, what was previously “free” and “up for grabs” now suddenly demand additional justification: You have used x to refer to y earlier, what changed? And so through writing, and only in writing, there is this metamorphosis of truth through constant refinement. But also like stuffing an oversized duvet into a cover, smoothening one section merely defers unevenness to other sections. And so like a patient gardener weeding the bed of undesirable elements, I write, reread, despair, feel entrapped, until the right words come to me one day and set me free.

It is like being on an aeroplane as it shoots through a parting of the clouds, revealing the radiance that had always been in presidence.

No matter how many times I have done this, it will never cease to amaze me.