day 224

Complete the sentence -

I don't think we should ever complete something. It means to die. It means we have come to an end. Hence, I would like to contemplate death, that I may affirm something that is worth our time to think more carefully and personally.

Hegel's most famous passage:

But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself.


Life, for all its procession of deaths, ceremonies of births, creations and annihilations, requires just one principle subject to be absolutely involved: Life itself, or rather the 'I' who is still living.

I am still living, though in due time I won't, and so I am still able to affirm myself as self; I still present myself as utterly myself. That is exactly the demand of living, that no matter how we add and subtract objects, people and ideas around us, the one who does the living is 'I'. No one can live for you. You do the living. And that is what 'Life' demands, it is a sentence that is not complete, it is not yet. It anticipates, but it must not coldly accept it. Life is life even if it is a second of living. It suffers death, because it once lives.

And that is why, throughout my entire life, some way of other, I am finding my life, or life finds me, demands my attention, my affirmation. I then must affirm Life simply by living, simply by putting aside the absurdity of me being alive to begin with - I live on. It is not that death is before my life, but I find death the punctuation mark at the end. Hence, the betwixt of life and death is so important to me. And that includes the breathes, the sleeps, the pauses and the simple gestures that only the living can do. I can't just 'die'. I must live first.

To put it simply, I am be-coming; the coming-to-be. It doesn't matter (it used to) who I am. Becoming, even as I am being, I am coming. I am participating in the praxis of life, being constantly present, in the passage of time and space where and when the only two constants are 'I' and the passage itself.

And that is why I cannot understand why people whine, demand to be someone or something...someone definitive, punctuate the passage of life into a destination of hell, and be so certain about something or identify as so and so. It is to complete the sentence even before the sentence is done. It is to murder.

Perhaps, 'to live' is a romantic notion. It suggests that I have all the time in the world to slowly become. Or, I think that the passage beyond life is something else, and that excites me.

No. Instead, it makes me highly conscious of the here and now; the moment. And the uncertain moment is exciting as much as it is scary. I can do no other but to face myself, find myself, challenge myself, affirm myself as much as I suffer myself, being, becoming, the finite that must meet the infinite unknown of death. In other words, I try as hard as I can to retain the brief moment to decide the possibilities of ending my life. I live, even if I must die. Hence, it is about deriving a strength, a stubborn will to live from the mere fact that I am soon to die. There is nothing else other than that - to live and die, with thinking and doing in between.

Thinking of 'Life' allows me to think fluidly. It is flux that moulds and transforms me. In order to do so, I must devastate, destroy, dismember the sum total of myself. I cannot stand still, because to define myself as so and so, I cease to live; I have nothing left to look forward to.

Towards the end of our lives, we're still learning about ourselves. To ask who we are is a complete waste of time. The question to ask then is, who are we next. We ask: Who are we passing into next, on and on. The passage of identity is what is encouraged here. And I am not suggesting that it is easy. But such a perspective allows us to be flexible and we adjust to the demands of the moment. Nothing rocks us, because we are already rocked.

As Paul puts it: Work out your salvation in fear and trembling, the case in point here is that the command is not the end product (salvation) that matters, since he has always reminded us that salvation comes from the son of God, but the emotional movement of trembling is the moment before the end that must be constantly worked out. A trembling person will never see things or behave in a flat and straight-forward manner. He or she is always moving. Stationary, perhaps, but it is not the external instability that troubles him or her much, but the inner implosion that shakes the very foundations of his or her spirit. He or she knows that death is inevitable. And the price of this knowledge is that he or she must keep moving to face salvation - the present must join up the eventual future end.

At the most basic level then, what I firmly believe is that even though man may be alone in this restless trembling, he or she is definitely not doing this in vain. At the heart of such trembling is to be in touch with a strong sense and knowledge of this world where one stands on. It cannot be any other way. As such, we live in this fine and dangerous game of life and death, careful and reckless, patient and impatient. I know no other way that could inform me of who I am or what I will be. I know and I think I know that to live means to face the core of the self and to find it trembling. This, I repeat, makes us strong and able.

And this self passes on, and on... .