WRITING AT THE EDGE OF NOTHING

It is not death that frightens us, that is, those of us who have not romanticized life. Of course, there is a certain agitation at departing from those we care for, of not being able to finish the vital process of thought. It's as though one were always at the edge of some great discovery, this is how it is for those who are constantly thinking. But so few know how to think.

The question that occupies us is the question of how to proceed beyond paralysis? What we refer to is far more sophisticated than mere hedonism or nihilism. These are traps for little minds. We, as serious thinkers, are concerned with grand narratives, or more importantly, grand values!

Everywhere we look we see exhaustive requirements, life is bogged down by labor in search of quality. We are not so much speaking of sorrow as we are speaking of clarity; this is, after all, the thing that leads to paralysis. What do we mean by paralysis? Everything has become complicated. We are talking about the restriction of the creator, a problem that forms inside. One has something to say, one has even solved a great deal of earthy confusion, but how to say it? How to proceed? There is paralysis. Is it fair to call this paralysis a disaster or is it caused by a disaster?

II.

The man of God loves to exploit the thinker's transparency. From it he attempts to construct an argument for the value and necessity of his delusion. Much of the world has been lost to this nonsense. So it seems a thinker can no longer think, if he does the man of God will seek to exploit the honesty and vulnerability of his thought. There is no trick, the challenge is to keep on facing the truth, to confidently report what one has discovered. However, those who are brave enough to follow this advice will be persecuted by those who fear the truth. Those who are crushed by the truth seek to crush those who speak it.

There is also the heavy burden of the truth itself. One would think it is enough of a sacrifice merely to bear its weight, but added to this is the weight of those who fear it. A thinker is pressed on all sides. 

My real duty as a thinker is to hone in on value. Notice I did not say, my real interest as a thinker? The reason is because I am aware of the difference between social-duty, which implies intellectual responsibility, objectivity, and self-interest, which implies intellectual immaturity, subjectivity. The latter is the way of inferior thinkers. So few ever make it to the point of duty, either they do not care or their ambition is toward social validation. This restricts their thought, it draws a line that their depth cannot pass.

I am concerned with concretion, most specifically, swiftness and concision. It's not good enough to wander an aesthetic labyrinth of abstraction, this amounts to mere, intellectual hedonism. An objective thinker must hunt down value. He must always ask the question of relevance. Where he fails to do this, there he is consumed by the vanity of his emotional mind. Soon he finds himself lost in an abyss where he can no longer discern up or down. When this happens he can no longer command the symbol but finds himself commanded by it. And yet the tragedy is that he is not aware of this process. It is played out in automation.

The hardest thing is to speak the truth, perhaps the second hardest thing is to write the truth. One makes too many assumptions about what they must do and what is required in order to produce value. But it is false to presume that meaning is the result of vast architectures. Intelligence tries to capture the universe in a sentence. The answer is to find a place of great vulnerability, and great honesty, tempered with great style, and from that place, proceed toward the truth. 

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