Points of Light
July 9th, 2009Kumiko and I felt something for each other from the beginning. It was not one of those strong, impulsive feelings that can hit two people like an electric shock when they first meet, but something quieter and gentler, like two tiny lights traveling in tandem through a vast darkness and drawing imperceptibly closer to each other as they go.
Wind-Up Bird, 223
Is it possible, finally, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another?
Wind-Up Bird, 24
Watching the dewy, unfamiliar sequined ribbon of night at Izhcayluma, I’m thinking about points of light traveling together, the slightest gravity winning over the intervening spaces an inch for an eon. Above, they dance together, are coupled or strung into a necklace of bells. But for all I know, the very ones on the cusp of embrace are in fact billions of light-years apart – a lifetime even for stars. From the right place in the universe, any two points of light seem ready to kiss.
How do you know whether you are really close, or whether the closeness is just an illusion? Whether one step in any direction might reveal a reality of utter solitude? And whether you intuit that step is right there, yet go on avoiding it despite knowing so?
Don’t stand in place. Take one step, then another. Circle around, observe the lights move in relation to each other. Whether they are close or far, know from a vast range of experience. Or perhaps not whether – but where – which axes and dimensions are closer. Whatever is real, close or far, is good.
Whether it is possible to achieve perfect understanding of another – seems an eternal question. But what if I answer quite simply? No. Because the entire phrasing of the question makes it an impossibility. As long as it is experienced as “another” – as separate, a detached entity – how can you – also separate and detached – understand it perfectly?
The existence of “context” arises from the existence of “other”. You – separate and detached – will always only be viewing from one angle. Or have the memory of a limited path of angles. In each angle, there is a pinpoint of truth. But if man is a river, then this modicum of truth is wading in, feeling the coolness and force on your ankles. At each moment in time, you experience an aspect of the flow, but it is just that – your experience of that part of it. As long as there is the “other”, it is helpful to move through the contexts – the angles, the shallows and depths, the fast and strong, the slow and gentle, the trickle and torrent. This process gives a sense, much more so than standing in place. The distance is experienced and measured. Perhaps recorded. The river illustrates constant change – yet even in that change the river has a nature, which can be felt and tasted, to a degree.
But to cover all angles, all at once, simultaneously … there can be only one way. And that is for angles themselves to disappear – and in a way that is not itself just another angle. Context itself must disappear. “Other” must disappear. “You” must disappear.
In boundless wholeness, there is no possibility of non-understanding …
