DISCLAIMER: As tone is hard to decipher in writing, let me make this passage clear: I am well. I am reporting on my emotional state, but please do not be alarmed.
Have you ever felt heavy?
Emotionally speaking I mean...
There is absolutely nothing about which I can complain in my life. As I have documented in the past few months, I have been trying new things. The parts of my value system that were rigidly black, I have explored the grey to see if that was really my value(s) or if I was adhering to the principle(s) out of the fear of something new, something foreign.
I am a sojourner in the labyrinth of me, but I have come to an impasse.
I pause.
I breathe.
I sit.
I feel...
heavy,
still,
mute,
blank.
I need to be still and recalibrate.
This labyrinth has corridors, deep corridors, I never could have imagined visiting.
To you, I say:
During this impasse, I am muting the musings.
I simply have nothing to write or say right now.
I shall return with renewed vigor when I do.
Stillness, calm, and the "I do not knows" beckon me...
Until I return, much love...
Dustin Ashley Beam
1 comment:
Rock on, my friend! Stillness. Silence. So important. So lacking in this world-flurry of sight- and sound-bombardment, of muchness and manyness.
You remind me of something I read recently about Wittgenstein in N.T. Wright's Surprised By Hope. I thought it was beautiful:
"This sends us back to Ludwig Wittgenstein, whom we met earlier in the book, and to his famous saying that "it is love that believes the resurrection." Wittgenstein's most famous book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, was first published in 1921 and remains one of the most original and provocative texts of philosophy not only of the modern period but also, some would say, ever. Wittgenstein orders his remarks with a severe and logical numbering: i, LI, I.II, 1.12, 1.13, 1.2, 1.21, then 2, and so on. Actually, number i takes only half a page, whereas 2 takes five pages, 3 takes nine, and so on. There are six sections in all, ending with a subsection numbered 6.54. Then, tellingly, section 7 consists of a single sentence: "What we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence."
Wittgenstein, of course, was Jewish, and a man of amazing cultural and aesthetic awareness. He had perfect musical pitch and a perfect architect's eye. He also had a strong mystical streak. I can't claim to understand all of the first six sections of the Tractatus, but I think I know what Wittgenstein was doing at this final point. I think he was consciously modeling Genesis I: knowledge, like creation, starting small but pregnant, developing in complexity until the full height of the sixth day, the day when humans are created in God's image. Then, on the seventh day, a silence: a rest, a pregnant pause in other words, a sabbath. Some things, Wittgenstein indicates, go beyond speech and philosophy, and about them one can and must remain silent. What I want to suggest, with great temerity, is that in the resurrection one is given the beginning of a new knowing, a new epistemology, a new coming-to-speech, the Word born afresh after the death of all human knowing and speech, all human hope and love, after the silent rest of the seventh-day sabbatical in the tomb."
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