Intimate Stranger

KNOWING IS ALWAYS A FUNCTION OF GRAMMAR

Mind is an insatiable gormandizer. You, as toilsome writer, will lay down a page, perceptibly mind will devour it and ask for more without giving so much as a passing thought to the time and the pain of composition. One never knows when one has had enough. To become conscious is to be alienated. Perhaps the price of survival or the penitence for alienation is to never reach satisfaction. Does one experience this feeding frenzy because Reality cannot be hunted down or recovered?

Mind slurps up the surroundings and presents as justification that the about-mind can only take on shape through the process of swallowing-and-integration. A partisan and parasite argument, if I ever heard one! This may be true if one accepts that it is impossible to know anything except through the subjective point of being. And that no other shape of knowledge can exist. For something doesn’t exist until I have taken cognition of it. (But this taking-notice-of or getting-acquainted-with may be unexpectedly sudden and brutal, as with a lamppost in the dark, or with death.)

Now this happens: the gorging and digestion of consciousness is the creation of unawareness. And also a replacement. There is neither ‘environment’ nor ‘world,’ only the waxing and chiming of consciousness. But equally true: without surroundings there can be no coming to consciousness. I cannot be without becoming, and only become in reference to that which stimulates me to understanding or reflection. Mind is but a growing awareness of the existing environment. Mind is but a tiny reflex action of an unborn and immortal and all-pervasive rhythm. Mind opens up, opens up, and doesn’t exist. The most pure being is to stop being, is nonbeing. It is also the Buddha nature. Mind is movement.

And it is in writing that we put down the dullness: both the cooled residue of pure consciousness and the seed of new awareness. Writing is the mediating line spelling out the paradox. Writing is the ongoing imagination and invention of that which has existed since all darkness and absence. It is our way of visibly trying to breathe rhythm.