There is the concatenation in every age of an utter confusion, taken to be the truth, only later discovered to be an error: the Copernican revolution upending the long-held belief in Ptolemy’s system; the entropic teleology of the universe more recently in cosmology supplanting a previous belief in an inevitable Big Crunch following a Big Bang; more intimately, in a conversation, the phenomenon of an interlocutor walking away from another with the firm belief that this is what was said and meant, while the other walks away in another direction with another understanding, both forgetting in between what you want to say, what you do say, and how you say it, and what the other person wants to hear, actually hears, and how it is heard, there are at least nine possibilities for misunderstanding. From conversations to the cosmos, both micro and macroscopically, historically and immediately, and no less with these words, confusion abounds. Striving and grasping for clarity, while not for naught, is nevertheless highly overrated. Despite our best efforts, again and again we miss the mark, and perhaps therein lies the problem, in conjuring a mark to be hit. The unaimed arrow never misses someone said, an old Hawaiian proverb perhaps, and a good one at that, as goals are often deceptive, offering the promise of purpose in life, a kind of order out of chaos, though at the cost of obscuring obscurity itself, the grand mystery of life, an undercurrent of confusion gently (and sometimes like a torrent) running through each and every one of our lives, though far from necessarily posing a problem. Confusion grounds us, in a completely uncanny way, as a tether to the truth of life’s ever present ambiguity and uncertainty, a disorienting darkness within darkness offering us rootedness to the real, an anchoring to that “something” about experience that resists scrutiny and which evades even our most clever attempts at apprehension. The world is aswirl with confusion and inside us there is chaos constellating as well. Captain Eliot of the Demeter got it right when he said the world cares little for sense. Perhaps it is not meant to be understood but rather experienced and accepted.
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