“Too many people think, I said to myself, who don’t have the right to. They have not paid for it by the kind of undertaking which makes thinking indispensible to your salvation.” A Thief’s Journal, Jean Genet
A quest for the indispensible: the folly is obvious. What can you lack without knowing it, that you cannot live without? What can you seek that, when you find it, will allow you to look for it again? Love and death, love and death. Everything I possess I may as well not, unless it is this feeling of loss, which has given me my most valuable trait: that perpetual seeking. It’s futile to be in love with what you have. I am only enamored with what I’ve lost and what I’ve yet to find: I make a light religion of it. This feeling of loss is itself elusive, it is in the end the object of every search, the prerequisite for ownership and an airtight argument against it. I have disavowed all conventional wisdom, I have fought against common sense except where it coincides with survival (because at all other times it merely undermines living), I have recoiled from every pleasure as if from pain, and leaned into every pain as if each was a coy revelation of one small scrap of the mystery of existence. I have lived a life in the negative, grown fat off starvation, principled in depravity, wise in foolhardiness, bright in darkness, alive in death. I am unpredictable to myself, I can scarcely believe myself! Each of us is a masterpiece of creation, while doomed to examine ourselves like the fly walking across Da Vinci’s “Lady With an Ermine”.
Thinking does not justify existence, it merely signifies it. Where does salvation lie? What do I do that is indispensible to my gaining it?
I have created cut-out dolls to do my thinking, and assigned each one a number. I cannot be held responsible for their two-dimensionality. And I might count on forever, might never achieve the one thought or deed worthy of the label “infinity”.
Nevertheless I begin. Let’s begin.
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