Between the Ones and Zeros

From Overheard in New York:

Girl #1: Anarchists are so dumb.
Girl #2: Yeah, totally.
Girl #1: I mean, just 'cause you hate the government doesn't mean you have to dress badly.

--Williamsburg

The word for today, kids, is impermanence.

As pertains this author, its significance is not so much (at the moment) anchored to physical, material phenomena. Instead, it figures in the arising and passing of thoughts, concepts, emotions, perceptions, and desires.

The Dharma has traditionally described it in terms of the fluid coming and going of the mind; the distraction, continual return from which constitutes the art of meditation. It is the quality of phenomena for which there is no stable agent or source, and the coming and going that characterize it are inevitable whether we hasten them or not.

It's also precisely what Derrida was describing in his assertion that language is not primarily communicative, but representative; in that the majority of our application of lanugage occurs in the form of internal monologue (in thought), where we are simply representing already known information to ourselves (in perhaps new ways). Given that language is an externally crafted and imposed set of constraints with enormous productive capacity in and of itself, its potential to speak through us and surreptitiously mold representations in which we fancy ourselves the sole author is likely impossible to entirely quantify (See also Foucault's What is an Author?). That being the case, the meanings we invest in representations that may never even be uttered are by their very nature instable, fluid, and impermanent. They will arise and pass without us so much as breathing.

Which seems to leave communication rather loaded. By communication, I mean the transmission of new or novel information from one point to another (say... from one person to another). What happens when we make those passing little flashes of emotion, intuition, perception, and desire audibly manifest? Foucault had a few ideas about this, as well -- some of which seem to illustrate the ways in which that practice invests otherwise essentially impermanent and instable phenomena with an artificial stability or lasting meaning; wedding and thus investing the speaker with said meanings, instability notwithstanding... Investing the speaker with an assumed responsibility for the durability of said meanings (a daunting and futile charge, to be sure).

Impermanence, as it interests me at the moment, is the precise description of what I've always found so volatile about communication (again, I'm invoking a specific definition, here). Since my adolescence, I've been utterly terrified of assuming that aforementioned responsibility, and given the rather physical and material demonstrations of impermanence that have characterized recent years of my life, my aversion to giving audible words to what I think I know has only increased. Thus, I find myself more and more inhabiting ambiguities, honoring the instability of my own thoughts, emotions, intuitions, perceptions and desires.

Quantitatively, their specific representations will pass, and there's certainly some refuge to be found in that. Qualitatively... The jury's still out, and it's not clear they're ever going to return a verdict. The passing of something may be no more than its evolution, growth, and bloom. It need not be merely be as simple or narrow as entropy. The change, the becoming that constitutes impermanence can hold enormous promise.

So, in waiting out the swirling storm of impermanence, in waiting for the passing of (specifically) one's desires (and the perceptions that undergird them), at what point does one cease to live? By that I mean, in refusing that responsibility for the durability of my intuitions, emotions, desires; in refusing to even give them words or sound... At what point does that awareness of impermanence merely become a form of self-imposed paralysis? Exactly where does one locate the border between a measured and thoughtful practice of observation, and merely being too cowardly to roll the dice?

I'm fairly sure you're reading this, and I'm fairly sure you know who you are. Thanks for routinely making me smile, for (perhaps unwittingly) making me a bit more at ease with myself over the last few months. If I leave it at that, it's not out of fear of the impermanence of my own desires, but rather a desire to honor and respect the impermanence of yours.

At least I hope so.