Minimalism

“So you really think you can map it all out on paper?” asked Steve, with a clear sense of unease in his voice, as if Philip had just told him that those black dots on the page were some mystical indications of his inner workings.

“I wouldn't talk about mapping out anything Steve. What I've been trying to explain for the past hour is that these notes are a clear indication of something happening in me, right now, these days, these hours. They are miscalculated signs.”

Steve breathed very deep, then looked at him, while his deepest fears were coming true. Those signs on the paper were clearly doing something, they were unmistakably forcing him to see things he was afraid of.

“I’m serious man, I really wish you hadn't called me today!” harshly protested Steve “I was doing just fine this morning. For once I hadn't woken up with a migraine, for once I hadn't opened my eyes with that unbearable sense of thought-ridden yoke, for once I hadn't felt that sense of panic when looking at other people’s blank face… not understanding what the hell they think or feel!”

He was reacting, now, viscerally to what they had discussed earlier. Philip had spoken with his usual candor about the ways in which music can delicately, mindlessly though punctually, map out the feelings of a person. And Steve was unwilling to have his depths probed into by anything, or for that matter by anyone. His cat was an independent companion, who loved him though did not depend on his, gave him space but also warmth in moments of unexpected connection. His apartment was half empty, minimally decorated by Zen-like furniture – a vase here, nothing there, a Japanese futon on the floor which he would roll up in the morning, two forks in an otherwise empty drawer, his migraine pills on the shelf next to a copy of Suzuki's manual of Zen Buddhism. Steve was decompressing, his mind was expanding, his emotions were recovering, and the spark was slowly coming back in his eyes.

"Dude seriously, what ARE you talking about?" – now his voice was trembling, and his eyes were beginning to see Philip through a blurry screen of tears.

"Nothing – what I am talking about is nothing. I'd like to say that these notes are tokens of what I feel, realistic and audible manifestations of my inner self, but alas, as you know, I am trapped in a dry, Nominalist cosmos. The notes are not mapping out anything – but I am moved by them. They come out as cries, as some musical-though-sort-of-silent Munch-like scream, and all I do is write down on music paper what I hear in my ears."

Philip was uncomfortable too now – this level of awareness was unpleasant to him too. He swiftly disconnected the iPod from Steve's amplifier, and stuffed it, together with his notes, back into this old, thirty-year old leather bag. Steve, on the other side of the room, had heavily gotten back onto his feet, and now stood next to the window, his breath making a little cloud of unspoken words on the cold glass, his forehead kissing his hands which were wearily locked and trembled somewhat uncomfortably.

"I really wish one could write a grammar of the universe, a morphology of feelings, a manual for the mapping of thoughts – I really do. But I'm not that person Steve. Do you think it's that easy for me to express things? Well… How would Hamlet put it? I don’t know what seeming means – I have within me things which cannot be denoted by music, mapped out by scribbles, shaped into understandable forms. 'For they are actions that a man might play. / But I have that within which passeth show.' Talk t'ya later man."

Steve turned around and lifted up his right hand.

The room appeared to have expanded. Silence at last. He turned on the music – MaxRichter's re-composition of Vivaldi's Four Seasons was in place.

"Knowledge is power"

Thus echoed in my head my father's dictum - you study in order to know, and you want to know because knowledge is power.

Knowledge and ignorance - two contraries, not that brotherly, meeting and clashing, fighting like two opposed fetuses in one cognitive womb, for ever causing a much wanted and feared lack of balance in me.

Knowledge. I know. But what if one were to make an argument in favor of ignorance? What if Gregor Samsa were to wake up one day and, instead of a "monstrous vermin," a perfectly normal human being with the unbearable capacity to Know everything? How would that be?

Gregor would wake up and be crushed by the noise of all the voices of people, all the meanings of things said and written, he would see, with plenist discomfort, what others call the subtext and which to him would be a clearly perceivable sense of the words; he would see the intertwining narratives of truth and lies, he would read the revealed and the hidden as one, he would be overwhelmed by the visual perception of a world which is entirely One, seeing how each particle of earth is made up of generations of dead people, he would see the lives of those dead people, he would see clearly how each and every part of who we are is a result of generations of thoughts, actions, objects made and destroyed.

That Gregor would not die because of the incompatibility between humanity and vermin, but would die because, as John Donne wrote, the spectacle of a fully-meaningful reality would be of "too much weight" for him. He would die a cognitive death, or burn instantly in a moment of epiphanic tremor. Sight, hearing, all the senses would be unbearable intertwined, and the eros of our wonder-struck contemplation of the world would end in an orgasmic moment, a punctiform concentration of difference into identity, of desire into satisfaction. That Gregor, the person I'd really like to be, would disappear together with Truth, an ignored bang in the senseless concatenation of cosmic events.

Yes, knowledge is power. But I prefer to dance obliviously and playfully between worlds, between knowledge and ignorance, between freedom and possession, between myself and the Other.