Encounters

At the bottom of all our hopes lies a yearning for encounter. -Ivan Klima

What depressed me were certainly not doubts about the rightness of my choice, but the knowledge that I'd made a decision once and for all. I suspected that for me the most blissful prospect was not so much having the person I loved permanently by my side as a need, from time to time, to reach out to emptiness, to let longing intensify within me to the point of agony, to alternate the pain of separation with the relief of renewed coming together, the chance of escape and return, of glimpsing before me a will-o'-the-wisp, the hope that the real encounter was still awaiting me. -Ivan Klima


At the bottom of all hope--that endless circle, the one like all circles--without beginning and without end--is the desire for an encounter. It is the desire to know an-Other, and more importantly, to be known by an-Other. What is strange about this desire is its whence--its originless origin. We fight, scratch, claw, paradoxically, even to the death, to be recognized as an irreplaceable, singular one. Without one's irreplaceability, they are as good as dead--a subhuman entity incapable of true living. Without one's singluarity we are just a machine carrying out meaningless functions within a mechanical world. "NO!" Even the non-believing souls cry this--bellow it from a hidden place--"I am more."

This desire--the one for an encounter--is born out of this fierce defense of singularity and irreplaceability. It is that singular, non-replaceable infinity that longs to be found. It is like an egg waiting to be pierced by that one--one in a million--one of trillions--swimming head--to be punctured so as to give birth to life. We believe--in a place so secret not even we have access to it, from a past we were not privileged with experiencing, in a present we did not choose, in a future we will never see--that if we can have one encounter--if even one eternal moment --that life will be born; life will be experienced; we will become what we supposed to be all along.

But, what is paradoxical, excruciatingly paradoxical, about this desire--this circle--is that it is its spinning that makes life possible. If the circle doesn't spin there is no desire for encounter simply because there is no "is". If the circle stops moving the conditions for any encounter are vanquished. Yet, as long as the circle spins--as long as that desire burns within one's soul--searing scabs and scars along the outer membrane of the secret space--the place where an encounter might take place--it will long to be understood, to express, to try to explain the secret that has no words.

Escape and return. Longing and fulfillment. Yearning and rest. This is the cirlce. This is the pendulum in which desire swings.

To choose once and for all? To claim I've had an encounter? What kind of fool would I be to make such a claim?

A greater fool for never trying? A greater loss for never trying to somehow lead another down the winding, impossibly hidden, spaceless space of the infinity in which I reside?

I can't answer that. Can you?

Thus, it is no coincidence that eros and revelation are two sides of the same coin. Revelation--the Word being communicated. Eros--communicating something so secret--so precious--so vulnerably personal--without words. Both involve the uncovering of the Infinite. Both claim to lead to an encounter--to a meeting that couldn't, wouldn't otherwise be possible. Revealing the Word with special words, and revealing one's self with no words. Revealing--physically and not. All of it is in hope for an encounter. And, both spawn words--writing. Which is itself the only way to life--the immortal kind, that is.

When I can't write anymore I'll die. But I'll die loving. -Ivan Klima