I was sitting in a barber’s chair around age five, if I recall correctly (I probably don’t). That’s when I first remember being confronted with the notion of infinity, as I looked at my image and the barber’s in two facing mirrors fractalizing our nested images down a tunnel of unending repetition.
Infinity. Once you try grasping this ungraspable, you are yourself grasped by its equally paradoxical antithesis, finity. Mix in some time, space, and matter, and you’ve got yourself a perplexity cocktail. Everything — being, if you will — looks to be both stable and unstable. There is that cloud, a moment later it’s a different cloud, every instant emerging even as it’s destroyed. I seem pretty stable to myself, but I’m finite, held within this self-destructive chain of instantiation, and in twenty years it’s very likely I’ll be dead. In thirty years — a strobe flash in time — the cessation of life is all but certain. That brilliant sunrise that seizes me for a moment as it reveals itself — that kindles the latent wonder in me with its transcendent harmony — fades back into oblivion, and I’m dragged out of this mini-Sabbath and back into the world of tensions and practicalities. Finity and infinity are both obviously and incomprehensibly interpenetrations of one another.
It’s only surprising to me that this sabbatical revelation of wonder is actually the ground of all my own desires because I’ve had it hammered into me — as an antidote to the childlike capacity I once had to understand wonder as a phenomenological ground of being — that there is nothing to wonder at; only some impervious materialist wasteland upon which I project my fears and fantasies. It’s taken work, and not a little trauma here and there, to re-realize that in these moments of revelation, of transcendence, that I (and you) have been possessed by some divine harmony, even as we can only glimpse it — obvious and incomprehensible. That I (and you) are ourselves the organs of this possession by our very nature. That this sunrise and I were — for an inbreaking instant — ourselves the harmony, one and the same, uncontained. All my subsidiary desires and intentions are listening for that cosmic harmony, an ecstatic reconciliation, a joyful rest from a broken world that falls and falls and falls again.
By nature, our nature, I mean we are not only surprised by these inbreakings of beauty — the highest form of knowledge — we are surprised that already know them. In these spiritual possessions, we are remembering the source that dwells in us, a source we’ve forgotten (or looked away from) in our strenuous captivity by the pantheon of disordered desires born of strife, pride, and power. We’ve learned that all things must be bought and thereby lost the capacity to recognize the gift — the absolute gratuity of being. We’ve forgotten what we already knew. That’s why we experience, inn addition to surprise at wondrous instants, a sense of recognition. It’s already in us.
That one you love is there in all her immediacy? Love is both obvious and incomprehensible, as obvious and incomprehensible as the one loved, whose being, whose presence, whose gratuity, is prior to any and all explanation. Beauty is the highest form of knowledge; love is the highest form of beauty; and nothing is more true than the truth of what is present. And the highest form of truth is the truth beyond words, the inbreaking sabbatical sixth sense of wonder, mystery, and awe.
You and I are not a collection of cells; we are incarnate spiritual encounters. Only our material entrapment and the entrapment and superstition of materialism — a sly spirit indeed, can conceal from us the obvious and incomprehensible truth that spirit precedes the material which it now sustains.
Finity and infinity, being and becoming, life and death, stability and instability, all confront us with the paradox of existence and non-existence. In beauty, love, and unspeakable truth (and even in their parasitic opposites, which only serve to confirm them), and in these glimpses of transcendence and perfect gratuity, there is some perfect unity, some all-encompassing source, toward which we cannot help but yearn. Only through great effort do we learn to suppress that yearning and replace it with distraction and rationalization as we worship at the altars of strife, pride, and power.
I looked at my image and the barber’s in two facing mirrors fractalizing our nested images down a tunnel of unending repetition. I’ve only had glimpses, but they were real. There is light at the end of that tunnel, and one day we’ll reach it . . . rather it will reach out for us.
I think there's a word for it: anamnesis.
Nice. Thank You. Have a good one.