The Case For Dishonesty

1 I often ask myself, as I once did on that fall day when I was but nineteen and carrying an overstuffed duffel-bag across a desolate border-town’s square, wearing my army-best and on my way to my new unit: “What the hell am I doing here?!” It is a question that still baffles me with its need for an answer but also entertains me with its resistance to any answer at all. It is this query, with its literal and rhetorical applicability, which not only troubles me in those moments of existential angst but also vents my frustrations when I find myself in those strange environments, life sometimes leads me into, in her own mysterious way. “Life is what happens to you while you are making other plans.” John Lennon said, and I have become painfully aware of that fact. The mind, that great planner, struggles to keep up with conditions and to encapsulate them within some general tenants that will be able to predict their outcomes; a mind very much in servitude and imprisoned within a physical cell that both contains it and preserves it, enables it and constricts it, connects it and isolates it, all at the same time; a mind wanting to become master of its own destiny and ruler over its own small piece of existence. What are we, if not self-contained infinity, a conglomeration of insistence trying to attain full consciousness? An admittedly, still very primitive consciousness condemned to solitude and in search out of its isolation. A distance separates us, not only from the infinite possibility of the other, but also from the dark abyss of the self. We are just as surprised by an inner world, pulling us back into our singularity, as we are by an outer one, pushing us forth into multiplicity. Science, that tentacle of human reason, has attentively approached the outer and inner frontiers of understanding, and now resorts to poetics to fill in the gaps of its comprehension, and philosophy, wisdom’s well, struggles against rampant scepticism and nihilistic despair, where all “truth” is trapped in a web of humble perspectivism and uncertainty. In the incomplete awareness of essence we are simultaneously faced with an accompanying emptiness, a vast gradation of desolate spaces dancing with time - a priori synthesis or not - to create matter out of