I had a big migraine yesterday.

*

For each of us, in the beginning, there is chaos and the potential of articulation.

What is chaos? It is raw being, pure all-there-is, void of finitude, void of category, void of recurrence, void of quantity, void of quality — but it is not empty. It is too full. Because it lacks finitude, it is infinite. It overwhelms.

What is articulation? Literally, articulation means “to divide into a joint”. Articulation introduces entities to raw being; it puts a contrasting “something” against all-there-is everything; it defines a finite something against infinity, as an exception to all.

Articulation is recognition. The first recognition is of twice, or thrice, or myriad times. Recurrence retroactively creates the occurrence of once.

With recurrence, what comprises the recurrence also recurs: the recurrant’s essential qualities. And in the gaps, the times the entity with its constituent qualities do not recur, they are now not there, and there as a shadow of lack, as a possibility not actualized, as empty absence of the entity, a soothing zero.

But even as innumerable finite entities are articulated, the chaos is still there, and infinity is not diminished. We are surrounded on all sides, above and below, by chaos where even (and especially) zero is nonexistent. And when we look closely at what we think we have, what feels solid in our hands, we find chaos, there, too. And most of all when we approach one another, we discover chaos right before our own eyes — but not only in the other, but in the world, and in ourselves.

When we hate, it is this chaos we hate: darkless, zeroless, nothingness that surrounds and permeates our familiar cloud-world of category-things.

Chaos hides everywhere in plain sight, like blind-spots in our eyes which are not even dark, nonexistent visitors from beyond our peripheral vision.

*

Conviction displaces faith. Conviction believes in beliefs, and it calls these beliefs “faith”, for it knows no alternative. To conviction, faith is nonexistent, which means it is not even missing. Faith is filled in like a blind-spot with “faith” in beliefs.

Conviction prefers explanations to that which it explains, and it fails to question one fundamental(ist) assumption, that the explanation causes what it explains rather than describes. And conviction fears the refutation of its explanation and the dispelling of the condition it explains. The believer thinks the planks constituting his boat-bottom will vanish from beneath his feet and he will sink into chaos and drown there.

Faith plants its feet on what is. We stand here and we do not sink. We can ask why in myriad ways, and we can consider any answer, and all at once. Explanations that accurately describe what is are true as far as they succeed in describing, and describing accurately. But faith does not attribute to explanations any magical causality.

Faith is free, but conviction is enslaved to its idol, knowledge.