I’m so used
to looking at things,
not into them
that I’m startled when I witness
the space between our molecules of Being
and come to realize:
It’s not empty,
this infinite sky,
this eternal orbiting of day
into night / into dawn /
into the glare of high noon.
I wrote this morning
in my latest revision of a fiction:
She glanced away
then out the window
at the sunrise he’d witnessed earlier;
it had morphed into the blare of morning light
the gorgeous tints of dawn burned off
by the intense rays
of a risen sun.
Will this epiphany of the dazzling light
and its glorious host of questions
well once again at at the end of day?
Can the invisible be divisible?
Is it my plight to know?
How many times can we split
the atoms of our truths
before we discover the ultimate germs of
Infinity, Eternity, Omniscience, and Spirit?
Craig Spence
Tag: Existentialism
The heart of ‘spiritual existentialism’
A recent Facebook conversation triggered by the graphic above has shed some light on why I am a spiritual existentialist, and what that means. Before the concluding reply below, I had described my daily morning mediation, which includes a vow to ‘value life’…
‘Value life’ is an interesting ethical statement, one I affirm daily, even though it inevitably and immediately leads to contradiction. To live, I must kill. How can I square that with my ideal of valuing life?
I think that’s pertinent to the original question: What are the limits of comprehension? Try as I might, I can’t round that square ethical peg. I have to decide, and reaffirm my beliefs in spite of uncertainty. That tension between believing and knowing keeps us questioning and reevaluating who, what and why we are. It’s the essence of existentialism.
My spiritual self is always looking into the world and saying there’s more to life than I’ve learned and experienced so far. There’s a love that’s larger then what I can conceive, an idea grander than anything I can imagine, a sensation more vibrant than anything I’ve felt.
Existential Philosophy, Psychology, and Literature / Oct. 17, 2021
Summing up: The heart of spiritual existentialism is the tension between belief, doubt and hope.
What Sense Reveals
I’m not a poet, but in this instance, a novelist composing a sonnet, taken from the mind of the protagonist in my current work-in-progress, The Mural Gazer. Buddy Hope has decided to take the final, life defining step of ending his life. But he’s not approaching this ‘task’ from the usual anguished trajectory. Instead, he sees it as a logical conclusion, a job that needs doing, almost as if it were a household chore.
I’ve been trying to figure out how he came to this conclusion. Many of us have contemplated the act of suicide, not as something we would actually do, but as a way of getting underneath, or behind, or into the meaning of life. That’s not where Buddy’s head is at. He’s simply tired, and doesn’t look forward to another thirty or so years dragging himself through a world that has no purpose, no sustainable joy.
To paraphrase someone very close to me, who chose Medical Assistance In Dying (MAID), Buddy isn’t living anymore, he’s just existing. He’s depressed at the prospect of carrying on, when every moment takes him farther from that time in life when he believed in his purpose as a father, a reporter, an armchair philosopher.
The question hanging in the air at this point in the novel is: Will Buddy’s recollections and contemplation heading toward his final act change his mind. He’s composed his parting letter, and left it on the dining nook table of the camper he’s been living in as his home-away-from-estranged-home. He’s saying his veiled goodbyes to family and friends, and is about to drive out of cell range to his chosen spot. Nothing he’s considered so far has dissuaded him from deploying EEK, his Emergency Exit Kit.
What Sense Reveals isn’t written to a particular person; it’s written to all the people he has known and loved.