💾 Archived View for tilde.pink › ~imbrica › en › log › 2021-04-27-center.gmi captured on 2021-12-03 at 14:04:38. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Tue Apr 27 18:04:56 UTC 2021
Moving is a chaotic event. The chaos is actually something I can appreciate, but the containment that precedes a livable chaos — everything in boxes and bags, no possibility of fluid movement, everything changing places all the time before it settles... Not so much.
But nothing is worse than living under constant imposition and moralistic suggestion. I know it doesn't matter where I go, I will always find that. But if there are reasons for movement, one of them is to move away from spaces where the story of a single truth is told, one to which every person must bow down, and against which their words are mere fabrications — there is, in the end, only that single truth.
I can be very rigid if I'm pushed enough, but to believe my truth is the single one would be contradictory. I do not have nor do I want to have that much certainty. I feel alien wherever I go because truth is being bought and sold in big transactions, and always such a rigid truth, one that is corrosive to any other.
Skepticism, cynicism, even such irritating aspects of thinking can be of value. But fundamentalism, the kind that tries to impose a single morality and then treat what deviates with repressed disgust, I can't stay anywhere near that.
In the beginning you might even feel accepted. It's what this christian moralist calls "universal love", the kind you just give away to everyone in order to feel good about secretly hating them or needing something from them, but a kind of love that would be too transcendental to give to the sinful. A saint serves here as an excuse, but that are no saints. There never were saints. No one was ever free from what such a view calls "sin".
So as time goes by, that love reveals itself as nothing but manipulation. It says: I'm loving, so you must obey me. I give you love, so why don't you give me what I want in return?
I don't do very well trying to tolerate that. I like the concept of "center". I try to use whatever learning I do as a way to adjust this center, and then live from that center as a way to take care of my needs instead of neglecting them in name of some absolute, unknowable-but-agreeable truth.
Even chaos often forms around a center. Given the center, the chaos can be very disordered, but remains centered. It may give or lose parts, it may move or be transformed, but unless that center is lost, unless it explodes or dries up, it indifferently holds the chaos together until it's dissolved and then mixed with the expansive chaos around.