The Geometry of Joy

For Baruch Spinoza

I am the triangular ecstasy of construction and destruction, the spiraling making and unmaking, masking and unmasking of worlds within worlds within worlds. I am the masterless convergence of discordant fractions into accidental harmonies, the cosmic composition of random atoms into unaccountable flashes of consciousness. (What have mere good and evil ever made?) I am the decaying – gradual or sudden – of empires of seeing and meaning, of feeble and magnificent stories of reality taken for reality. Making and unmaking, I’m a child again, dissecting dolls, clocks, books, erecting ambitious towers out of sand, cards, words. Now and again I stop playing so I can just listen to the polyphonic hum of fuguing universes constantly forming and unforming, singing within me, without me.

For strife will never arise on account of what is not loved, nor will there be sadness if it perishes, nor envy if it is possessed by another, nor fear, nor hatred – in a word, no disturbances of the mind. Indeed, all these happen only in the love of those things that can perish . . .

I’m striving to love the permanent impermanence of things; the hardest part is letting myself go.

I’ll never understand the convoluted motions of my mind – but trying to, I’m happy.

And stones speak too of stoniness; and flowers, of flowerness (that is, of bees moths butterflies beetles wind rain earth sun and of countless other things only flowers know of – and jasmine and irises know different things). And I, what do I speak of? Emptiness.

Life is fatal – each passing moment a matter of life and death.

All the truths I try to sit on are always being pulled out from under me, and my butt comes crashing down. But my ass has wised up – now it just sits right here on the ground.

Mind spreads. Can you smell it?

To discover a few small patterns scattered in reality like twinkling islands in a dusky sea. O blazing archipelagos of time!

The commonest deathwish (because it doesn’t seem like one) is the wish for a life with no suffering.

I also have an appetite for evil.

Whenever, then, anything in nature seems to us ridiculous, absurd, or evil, it is because we have but a partial knowledge of things . . . and because we want everything to be arranged according to the dictate of our own reason.

Save me from those who know too much (especially when they have God on their side). Save me from myself when I think I know what’s what.

At the crossroads, both free man and slave agree – I don’t have a choice.

Knowing the savagery of my own passions, how can I not fear you?

The greatest labor of consciousness is to give birth to unconsciousness, to push plodding thought out of its cave so it can emerge as light-footed intuition.

In life, the reward comes first – life itself. To live up to this incalculable gift, one must be as prodigal as life itself – and as unpredictable.

The storms of the mind are also beautiful to those who dance in the rain.

I have labored carefully, not to mock, lament, or execrate, but to understand human actions; and to this end I have looked upon passions, such as love, hatred, anger, envy, ambition, pity, and the other perturbations of the mind, not in the light of vices of human nature, but as properties, just as pertinent to it, as are heat, cold, storm, thunder, and the like to the nature of the atmosphere, which phenomena, though inconvenient, are yet necessary . . . , and the mind has just as much pleasure in viewing them aright, as in knowing such things as flatter the senses.




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