# 14

That meeting point ...

That meeting point, between literature and philosophy, began to occupy my every waking moment. Soon, it had arrested me entirely, and I could no longer stop myself from writing. I felt I had to write myself in to that interface, that meeting point.

There are rhythms that emerge when writing. Words, ideas, senses and emotions combine, dissolve, disperse and recombine. Meaning is transmitted in the interplay. The quest of writing is finding the words that unlock meaning. Writing is modelling and remodelling how words come together; about finding the combination that unlocks meaning, and gives expression to, or transmits sense and emotion the most aptly or accurately.

The interface is a place of discovery, a place of surprise, emergence. There is a chemistry between words and ideas that hosts the potential to yield unpredictable outcomes when philosophy meets literature. And as I wrote and rewrote with devotion, that chemistry became the sea in which life began to swim in me again.

At the interface I could dance. I could sketch and feint my way around the edges, dip into the abyss and return. The writing – or rather, the process of it – acted as a lifeline. I could plunge into the depths and be ensured of return.

I had already answered the question of what would ensue if I became lost in the deep, but I came to find it irresistible. For madness does not exist alone; it exists in combination, and the cocktail was a mix of the terrifying, the exciting, the mundane, the banal, and the enduring. To be at the edge of chaos, and to be able to pass into and out of it, made me feel powerful again.

My fears and anxieties retreated when I enacted the dance, and life flowed palpably within me during the moments of engagement. But perhaps the greatest awareness that grew within me, was the reality of infinity; that it was not just abstraction, but real, and that everything depended upon it. That without it there could be no existence; no finite, no real. These things possessed each other, and co-evolved to make things as they were. From this there was, and could be no escape.

The asymptotic was undeniably palpable. It resided in every judgement, every observation, every measurement – and yes – every emotion. Everything that we experienced was approximation. It is all we are capable of. We are always at the edges, always caught in cycles. It is in this sense that our existence embraces the infinite.

Nothing as absence – in its absolute sense – cannot exist without the infinite. They are a complex duality. There is noise in silence as much as there is silence in noise.

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