No. 10 "No matter how far a person can go, the horizon is still way beyond you." -Zora Neale Hurston I am meditating on definitions.
Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle (especially Aristotle) created their philosophies on the desire, the unrelenting inner need to define all things for all people. Universal. Descartes, Kant, and many others have carried on this legacy, this unrelenting inner need to define all things for all people. Universal in the true sense of the word. Universal meaning “applicable to all things across time and space”. Universal. I am meditating on impossible tasks. As if we could define all things for all people. As if defining “meaning” or “becoming” or “identity” is possible between even my closest friends and me. As if we could assume that all humans and their actions and thoughts can be categorized into simple definitions. As if we could assume that all beings in our unexplored galaxy would slide right into these categorizations like coins being sorted into their respective slots. As if we could define what we do not and cannot know. As if we could wrangle the unknowable into limitations and demarcations. I am meditating on the absurd. I say “we”, but all these definers were men. I am not. I am neither woman nor man. I do not see the world as something to be harnessed, as something to speak of and supersede. The world in which I live is lacking in hard lines and ego. It is liminal and grey and fluctuating. It is an exercise in futility and hubris to name it and claim it. It is a world I unflinchingly and unabashedly pursue, and it is not something to be caught and broken and tamed in the ways I think best. It is always to be pursued, never to be fully attained for then it would cease to be. I am meditating on “tame”. We have been told that the purpose of the chase is to capture and domesticate, or worse, capture and kill should the thing be unwilling or unable to be broken. But what if the chase exists to keep us moving forward, to keep us pursing, to keep us from drawing the horizon around ourselves and instead let the horizon continue to be forever just beyond the reach of our fingertips; to push the horizon further instead of reaching it and never moving further? What if its about the expansion but not the attainment? To define and draw boundaries around is to render a thing unchangeable and dead. To let something be and seek to understand it on its own terms is to live in harmony and love, is something freeing and wild. I am meditating on definitions and what purpose they serve, and I find myself in favor of queering and greying those hard dark lines.
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September 2020
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