Bridges connecting

Possibilities emerge

Leading to new days

Often when reflecting on past moments of my life I am struck with an inescapable awareness––that my experience of those moments was bounded within the limitations of my spatial and temporal consciousness. I experienced those moments with limited knowledge of the future and spatial contexts beyond my own locality. I could not know with any accuracy the precise date of when I would complete graduate school; or the exact number, sex, and other circumstances related to the birth of my children. The increase in food and gasoline prices that occurred throughout the 2000s would have been as unexpected as the increasingly peculiar weather patterns of the recent past and present. In short, I was bounded within the strictures of time and space, much like any captive creature which is trapped within its vessel of containment; and if being trapped is an inappropriate metaphor for what is clearly an inevitable consequence of the current conventions of corporeality, then I am most certainly dwelling on a single square in a large and elaborately decorated quilt.

This aspect of the finitude of living clearly is a given. I acknowledge this despite my ardent hope that arduous planning and rational assessment might (if I might return to my quilt analogy) widen our domain from a single square to perhaps four. The existential nature of this boundedness is inescapable, but how it is experienced—that is perceived—is doubtlessly within the purview of worldview. I would like to revisit this idea after some reflection on classical African discourse on mortality and time.

I think that its much easier for humans to deal with their ideational constructs of people, places, and ideas rather than deal with those same things on their own terms. Our constructs invariably correspond with our own pre-existing assumptions of reality, which are inextricably linked to the social contexts that give rise to our perception.

Dealing with reality, not as we assume or wish it to be, but as it is—I maintain often requires an epistemological breakthrough. It requires one to simultaneously hold a number of potentially divergent schemata in one’s mind: one’s own construct of reality, what one imagines to be others’ constructs of reality, and a dynamic yet uncertain concept of the existential reality that exists beyond our constructs.

I think that such an approach is possible, but I think that its viability is predicated upon us reconceptualizing the mode via which we “reality check”. I think that the proclivity of testing our constructs of reality in the “echo chamber”, where everything that we say sounds exactly like what we hear and what we desire to hear, will likely deny us the capacity to experience any sort of epistemological breakthrough.

A breakthrough of this sorts—one that allows for multiple epistemologies to co-mingle, be validated, be invalidated, be constructed, reconstructed, deconstructed, or discarded altogether can only occur in dialogue across communities. This requires for us to step outside of the “echo chamber” and accept that what we say may not correspond perfectly with what we hear or what we desire to hear. This process will require for us to relinquish absolute certainty in our belief that our constructs correspond perfectly and seamlessly with reality. They may not. Instead we will have to accept that our constructs are at best tentative and often untested beliefs or assumptions about reality.

The provisional nature of our epistemologies, our constructs of reality, is not itself inexcusable. What is inexcusable is our unwillingness to acknowledge the inherent finitude of our perception, and to act augment this.

I decry it a myth, a folly, an aberration of reason

It laughs dismissively, assured of the security of it’s existence

Non-corporeal, but no less real it stretches forth its hand and ensnares legions

The world turns on its whims

The intransigent exalt it

The weak clamor to it’s stronghold

The melancholy long for it’s redemption

It is a god built of the imaginations of humanity

It is a force both irrational and irresistible

It is Hope

Kneel at its shrine, imbibe its intoxicants, and ruin shall become your lot

Hope - imperator of despair

How I loathe your inescapable dominion