Subject: All Dichotomies are False Dichotomies
All dichotomies are false dichotomies. I/You was the first. As it were, all borders are fictions, but fictions can be just as Real as anything else. Today I walk in the hot & humid midday sun—it is not as humid as the summer afternoons of my childhood, but the air is still and thick enough to be a Presence; the streets are quiet & filled with languor. It is easy enough most days to imagine oneself discrete and apart from one’s surroundings but not so much on days like these, when the air makes clear that it has been holding you all along. Like the totally relevant band The Darkness says, it’s “touching you, touching me, touching you ‘cause you’re touching me.”
Do you remember the time before names and words? Yes I know I am one to talk, what with my fervent ardor for language, but I don’t believe you can really love something without also knowing its limitations. Of course you don’t remember, but perhaps we do, together. Neither you nor I existed then, before a person was better than a wolf was better than a tree was better than a rock. To have the right word for something is an act of creation—to find that word is to bring the thing itself into existence—but what an edge there is to wield this power. All of the feelings and experiences that are too unique or specific for a label fade fleeting to the primacy of commonality and understanding.
Perhaps love is not the deep appreciation of another, but instead the realization that the otherness never existed in the first place. I realize, that in a certain sense, this is exactly the idea put forth by the Hedwig song, “The Origin of Love,” only I do not mean it as just something just between two people, but between any number of people, animals, plants, minerals and inanimate objects. Why else, when we love something, do we want to hold it as closely as possible, to encompass and to be encompassed, to erase all the false borders?
The latest estimates show that the human body has about a 1:1 ratio of microorganisms to human cells (which is less than 1% by weight, due to their small size). Are the bacteria you, or are they other? You cannot live without them. Our language of self is not prepared to answer this question. When we kiss, we share millions of bacteria. The boundaries of self are ever permeable. Is not every touch a constant re-imagination of borders, a question: where do I end and you begin? Every taxonomy betrays a bias. In what ways am I more like you than I am a tiger, and why are those more important? You have always been more and less like me. Are you really non-hierarchical? Do you not hold genus closer than phylum? Tell me more.
In the evening, the air is cooler but still sticky, the sunset hangs between the trees. People, birds, emerge. We are all of us different (I am an island) and yet so similar as to be predictable. This is why the field of statistics is even possible. Patterns do not preclude individuality, yet we are all of us more predictable than we should like to imagine. Perhaps, perhaps, that is not an embarrassment.
I love the way my blinds fold softly over one another, overlapping by mere millimeters. I love the way cold beer splashes over my upper lip if I drink deeply enough. I love the leaves of my umbrella plant that push against the window hopefully. I love how vinegar can preserve an entire season in defiance of time. I love to feel the expansion of my ribs as air enters my body, ever and always expanding and contracting in space, somehow firm bone is pliant. I love the weather and the subtle meaning it imparts to each and every day. I love that everything I touch, touches me back (and every time we touch, I get this feeling). My table feels my warm skin as I feel its oiled surface. I love that books written decades ago fill me presently with feelings and the possibility a hundred lives I’ve never led. I love I love I love I love I love.
Hello dear reader. What do you love? Not just who. I miss the fireflies and the crickets and the crushing humidity of past summers; if I close my eyes and breath deeply enough, I can hold so much more inside me than I ever thought possible. What are you surprised to find? Not every day is better than the last, but every moment offers something new. (The present, as they say, is a present).
Tell me tell me tell me.