On the Will to Power

I have been thinking about Nietzsche and seeds lodged under ground.

I have been thinking about the darkness of soil, how my mother’s palm would cup a rose. Pink and yellow petals drifting through the filters in my mind.

I have been thinking about the people I’ve met who told me they only needed to read one book to hate Islam, to reject Muslims, to know they didn’t want our theology in their lives.

I have been thinking about how that book wasn’t the Quran, but a single perspective of a varied whole, a whole that may in fact be at the mercy of space and time.

I have been thinking of Whitman and his multitudes, how Wilde’s in the gutter looking at the stars and I am sitting right there with him.

I was asked recently why I’m angry. I suppose that’s one word for the way I feel, but it’s somewhat limited too, isn’t it? I’ve been studying Carl Jung and Wolfgang Pauli, their work on mind and matter and synchronicity.

It’s a beautiful concept: mind and matter share an underlying reality that allows for acausal correlations. What appears to be coincidence may in fact be God shifting puzzle pieces around. I hear music when I sleep now. There was a moment, a series of moments, when I thought I knew everything I needed to know about life. I was so sure, so certain in my ignorance.

Of course I brought upon the wrath and I am grateful for my self-destruction. No matter how poetic a declaration of violence may be, it is still violence.

It has taken me a lifetime to understand that I am a lone wolf, the woman who shows up late to the party and leaves early, often without a proper goodbye. I swear she was here. She was here, wasn’t she?

We are here until we aren’t.

I have a tendency to take the long road home, that topsy-turvy see-saw way of wanting to sit on a bench near a playground and wonder why I was terrified to grip the steel pole and slide down. I suppose I did not trust either my grip or gravity. Science is a fruitful prospect full of concepts my soul is hungry to explore.

In my preliminary research about Ada Lovelace, the woman who worked with Charles Babbage on the Analytical Engine and the daughter of Lord Byron, I discovered that her mother desperately wanted to avoid Ada from being plagued by the “poetic madness” of her father.

It is humbling to realize that Ada chose to look at the world through poetical science, a combination of raw data seen through metaphors and symbols. That is partly what allowed her to envision the future of computers. She rightly predicted that they would be able to convert numbers into music, art, poetry, language.

There is a power in building proper borders. I like constitutions. I think they’re metaphysical boundaries people often encroach in the name of justice but it’s really just violence and rage wearing a tribal coat.

I have been thinking about time, how Jung and Pauli corresponded through letters. Two men’s minds meeting over ink. There is a distinctive hunger in me now for an internal grasping of human flourishing.

To break free inside the dark and stretch my palms towards the light. I look forward to the ants and bees, the spiders and butterflies, perhaps even a moth or a wasp or a child’s finger pressed against the concrete praying for nature’s trust.

Image: https://www.pexels.com/photo/abstract-illustration-of-irregular-thin-lines-19240799/