My mind has been riddle for days now
and I couldn’t even remember
which note brought this about
and what’s more
I couldn’t remember
the logic of the One either,
nor could I any more remember
how I originally knew the One,
suddenly cast and trapped
at the bottom of the cave,
trying to remember the path
towards the exit, leading out—
And I knew there to be a path,
and yet, the harder I fought
to remember the Way,
the more it seemed to escape me!
As if Edgar Poe’s Raven himself
came to perch behind my back
and began to mutter his Nevermore!
That much of my own memory
suddenly blanked and gone!
And yet I could still feel it,
in my heart, and the heart
still knows One to be True,
but no more can I tell how.
But just now—it came to me:
it was your haiku
on Hexagram 15—
but I cannot believe
your haiku poisoned me
(doesn’t poison shear us
from clarities of soul?)—
I think it was the note,
the notion of two,
inflicting on me
its own dilemma,
the great divider,
the burrowing
and caving riddle
under whose spell
helplessly I fell.
Like Nietzsche,
just like Jung.
And so my mind
was fazed and fogged
and so was my heart.
Was I drugged
or was I drunk?
And the One
shaped into Forms,
I somehow knew—
just out of reach!
But then—I did remember
what knocked me out:
in your haiku
about Hexagram 15
you called it Modesty—
you warned of the danger
of “falling for equality’s lust.”
But if so, why in Modesty?
And you say Jung was seduced
but that he inherited
even that seduction
from Nietzsche.
So I tried to read
a bit of Nietzsche,
and there something
caught my eye—
seeing his own seeing:
the world as constant flux
and no constant,
unchanging One.
So I went back—
back to the “two”
versus the One.
My mind circled and spun.
I tried to remember why and how
the way up and the way down
are one and the same
as Heraclitus said.
And going up and down
through the riddle
drove me mad—
mad by the seduction
of both Nietzsche’s
and Jung’s delusion
that both Good and evil
could (or even should?)
equally coexist—and as lust!
That’s how the poison entered me!
Did I even forget—who I was?
After several long walks in the woods,
asking the trees, the sky, the snow,
“WHY can there not be two?”
finally, I let it go
and let the question simply be.
Then, this morning, I read
Hexagram 64 and your haiku.
Right at the first reading,
that Hexagram felt
as if written for me;
Zeno’s Paradox came
flooding in—
Any distance between two things
can be constantly divided into infinity
(whether physical or otherwise),
making it impossible to cross
the distance between the two.
So if “both” truly exist,
they must in fact already be One.
Thus, any apparent differences
are nothing but illusion.
And if Good and evil both exist, equally,
and we know already that one cannot “cross”
an infinite number of halves between the two
(half-goods, half-evils) to arrive
at the other, then in Truth
only one can exist.
The other is simply perversion,
misinterpretation, ignorance of the One.
One could certainly choose
(through illusion) to believe
that the only “one” is the evil,
unconscious, perhaps even insane,
but then this robotically thrusts
one into a downward spiral
of dark nothingness.
How could darkness
be the source of light,
love and joy and soul?
Why do answers
(and questions) come
at kairos time—
in their own and right time
as opposed to chronos (or Cronos’) time?
Still I don’t know how it was
that I forgot my way—
or was getting lost necessary
to bring me back to where I left off
so that I may continue to go
where I ought to be?
Thus I’m finding these days
slow and steady wins the race...
