Sometimes I feel that I am in a psychic jail, paying off the debts of my life’s imperfections. I am cast upon a small rock island, a fruitless raft tossed by ocean’s waves, always pushing, always threatening to throw me onto the shore’s cliffs.
I hope for mercy and penance in return for the deep debts I seem to be in.
In debt to life, the burden of each day occasionally seems too much; I am unable to clarify, to state clearly to my self where I am, how I got here, and whom I owe.
My parents, my teachers, family, friends, colleagues, neighbors…who else?
Who else? My own imaginations of how they imagined I could be, would be, should be, sometimes at odds with how I am. How I am, in my own terms to myself? – sometimes whispering, at other times, screeching.
Do I not live a life equal to that which they hoped I could; do I not let them be the persons that they willed and will; did their own debts and pain-filled penances spill over onto me, onto my future, its hopes and would-be’s and would have been’s?
Would I know what to do, where to go, if ever I could satisfy the debts of soul and spirit and life’s accumulations?
Penance! Penance?

The institution where I work is hard to move. Having reached a size, an age, a ponderous entity-ness, it IS. It is so big that everyone talks and meets and writes summaries of discussions, but no one seems to be able to summon the energy to do anything new. Or, there is so much doing already, daily, daily, doing, doing, that any more would be too much. Perhaps, as Kierkegaard claimed (The Present Age), each official, each self, is so well-geared, so successful at doing what is done already, that there springs up great resistance to any change, to any moving which is not what I already do…and do…and do. It is as if in order to move, I, we, have to damn all our pasts which have led to this present; to disqualify ourselves from our own lives. Once we have arrived in this institution, in this present, it is as if we are outside of our own time, outside of our own lives. It is as if we are not very present, only watching. Moving only to resist movement which would affect our selves, we sit watching.

Somebody realized not too long ago that knowledge has its own marketplace. What sells, what people hear and want to hear, what is the truth, and what are the facts, have no clear tests. What constitutes truth is all mixed up with what sells, and there is no totally obvious truth. What is true, the logicians say, is what is not-false. Truth is like geometry: axiomatic, derivable, provable, applicable. Perspectives, contexts, a different set of assumptions, equally true or not, burst that bubble! What is truth, logicians come to say, is what is falsifiable. Hedging, it seemed, but noting at long last what is circular and proves nothing but what was believed already. This realization has set the stage for much wondering.

Many could not stand the tension of wondering what – anything? – is clearly true. Wanting to believe in the truth of their beliefs, they became their own earlier opponents, and declared the end of truth, the impossibility of knowledge. They (we) have become beggars, hanging about the marketplace of ideas, declaring there are none, still eager to eat the shriveled fruits and tired vegetables of yesterday. Appetites shrunken, satisfied with little, they (we) seek nothing…and find it.