Pains of the Ineffable

I type only portions of what I think; indeed, I limit myself to writing only of those portions that can be written about. An when all of the explicable has been wrought into words, I find that so much remains yet unsaid. A Zen master once said that we cannot say truth, but can only point to it. Shakespeare’s Hamlet said that there are “More things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in our Philosophy.” I feel it’s true. After I am done expounding upon dry philosophical topics, I still havn’t even touched upon the edges of that which is beautiful.

There are so many things that I would like to write about. Not philosophical things—that which I wish to speak of is happily vague, or at least incapable of being expressed with the level of clarity that could be considered strictly philosophical. I come to the computer with a fire in my mind, a vision of glory, only to have it dissipate into dreams and shadows, like a morning mist driven away come daylight. All that remains is a faint feeling that there was once something beyond the broad daylight, something I would remember if I could.

Perhaps painful is too strong a word. The subtle ache is more akin to a sort of melancholy. And yet, even this silken nostalgia must pass. Its fabric soon becomes punctured by new thoughts that prod it with needle sharpness; doubt. It is possible that the nostalgia has no subject. Perhaps there is nothing beyond the yearning. It may be empty. As the doubts advance, I take reality as my balm. Whatever the unknowable is, it is. It is what it is. My faint attempts to grasp it are what they are as well. To me, this approach is more than a meaningless tautology—it marks acceptance of the way that the world is, whatever it is.

The world, insofar as I experience it, is a rough and rocky one. It exists with greater solidity than our idealized sterilized conceptions and pictures of it. For me, the greatest evidence that there is a reality beyond myself is the fact that events seem to depend on me so little. If there were nothing beyond myself, then how could I ever feel confused or lost? In this rockiness, I find nuance and flavor. It is a world devoid of undiluted agony or ecstasy. Everything exists in a sort of flux. My pains and pleasures are not solid, but rather tentative, as I wordlessly question their right to existence. When I am happy, I am not happy because I somehow manage to partially partake in some kind of essential or ideal happiness. I am happy in the precise way that I am happy at the moment, although I know not what that way is. And yet, I cannot even say for certain whether the world is rough, or just my part of it.