(2)

It's something rather amazing, the feeling one gets on the first truly warm days of spring.  There's a sense of luxury in the gentle, wafting heat, as if the memory of some half-forgotten pleasure were hidden away there, waiting to be reawakened in the heart and in the mind.  I go about all day in my shirt-sleeves, and although the windows of my house have all been opened I stay outside, enjoying the fresh air, until evening comes.  The crocuses, I notice, have all withered – but even the murky nebulosity of encroaching night cannot quench the bright yellow of the daffodils; peering close, I can still make out the tulip buds' flush of red.  The bushes and trees are tipped with tiny furls of green, and these cast their own peculiar, sweet scent into the air.  What is it, I wonder, that I sense in the unfolding luxuriousness of spring?  What memory is it that I feel secreted there?  I pause, probing the internal realms of thought and emotion as actively as I might otherwise probe the world around me with my senses; and the answer, when it comes, comes as suddenly as the appearance of stars in the darkening sky overhead:  it's death that I am thinking of; death whose memory beckons me; death that I sense, cradled within each new bud and leaf.  Life yields ever uncomprehendingly to death – and yet it is through death, uncomprehendingly, that new life engendered.  Such is the paradoxical nature of existence.

It's because my mind is unable to grasp infinity that it formulates these ideas of paradox.  The mind can only conceive of infinity through means of the relative – that is to say, through the recognition of its own functional limitations.  Fate and free will, meaning and meaninglessness, chaos and order, objectivity and subjectivity . . .  Like the flip sides of a coin, each half of these paradoxical units may be seen as absolute; yet each half can only be understood in relation to its opposing side, or its functional capacity will be lost.  Question:  What is the relation between reality – which effects by virtue of its cyclical nature the appearance of infinity – and the truly infinite, by which I suppose I mean some elemental unity both preceding and transcending all paradox?  I do not know.  Perhaps I cannot know.  Perhaps I can only experience.

When I was a much younger man, filled with confusion over my social and sexual identities, I used to sometimes dream of moving to the city.  There, I had heard (it was given to me as a warning), one could easily become lost; but I thought there might be a blessing hidden within that particular affliction.  For I had the idea that it was in just this kind of lostness that new, more valid social and sexual personae might be discovered.  I made several visits to nearby cities, staying briefly here and there with old friends of mine who had moved away from our small town.  But I did not enjoy myself.  I was much drawn to the plethora of museums, art galleries, and theaters that I found, but the pervasive atmosphere of noise, brutality, and violence found in the streets overwhelmed me.  Survival in this environment, it seemed to me, required a protective shell of indifference, an aura of numbness, to one's fellow human beings; and I had no time to develop, during the brief tenure of my stays, that thickness of skin, that toughness of attitude, I saw so often evinced by those who called the city their home.  I remember, for instance, of one day coming upon a man lying sprawled out on the sidewalk, face down, blood trickling from a wound to his head.  Somebody nearby was yelling that he'd just been mugged; his attackers had hit him with some blunt object, they said, taken his valuables and run away.  I remember watching people step over the bloodied man gingerly, skittishly, as if they were stepping over a mud puddle; then scuttling off hurriedly down the street.  They were frightened; they were appalled; but they were not moved to help him.  I myself edged cautiously away, taking my cue from those around me and not knowing quite what else to do.  But as I did so I found myself overwhelmed by a longing for home.  I missed my own small town, where such violent acts were the exception rather than the rule.  I missed the trees there.  I missed the hills.  I missed even the weeds, with their unexpectedly lush spring and autumn blossoms, growing in tangled profusion beside the country roads.  If it is true that the choices available to those living in small towns, when compared to those possible in the city, are narrower, the range of cultural activities less broad, the allowance given with regard to personal expression more closely circumscribed, I am not certain that the underlying value system differs all that much from one place to another.  Such differences as exist seem to me more a matter of scale than content.  The one thing small towns have to offer that cities do not is a closer relationship to the land.  Even this, in the end, is only a matter of scale; but that particular difference was enough to decide me.  I came back home.  I decided I could be as lost here as anywhere else.

And yet I still have lingering doubts about the life I have chosen.  I have lingering doubts about my unwillingness – or is it my incapacity? – to join in with society, to take up the fight to change the status quo in such a way as to better allow for my inclusion in it.  I sometimes suspect that my failure to engage in that battle reveals in me some fundamental lack.  Or is it some fundamental recognition, perhaps, as to the difference in opinion I suspect to exist between myself and society concerning which of us it is that most needs changing?  I do not know.  As to sexual insecurity:  it is certainly true that love is never wrong, that our constitutionally ingrained desires cannot be fruitfully denied, and that self-acceptance is, to my mind, the primary prerequisite to enacting social good.  Still, does not the homosexual represent, in some broad yet essential sense, an extraneous element of the human race?

But I turn my mind away from such strictures as these thoughts imply.  If they yield a utopia, what an imaginatively sterile utopia it must be!  As like as not, in this world full of paradox, I could not (could I?) be anything other than who and what I am.

POST-SPRING