Saturday, November 16, 2002

I’ve heard it said that

I’ve heard it said that life is like a circle, a wheel, a ring in which the end is the beginning and the cycle rotates through the same worn path, age without end.  At one time this idea infuriated me.  The thought that my rigorous rectitude would lead me only to my playpen, crib, the womb made my exertions seem superfluous.  Why should I endure the aggravation of existence if all I could anticipate was to endure it all again?  I wanted life to be a highway, broad and straight and true, or at the very least a line, extending outward from my birth until I’m blown out into inky vastness, never to repeate a step.

But I eventually sort of reconciled to the notion that the line I wished to walk was actually part of some great cycle I was not adept enough to recognize, a cosmic ebb and flow ceaselessly washing the same sandy shore, reordering the pebbles and eddies without altering the essence of the landscape, every permutation but a reoccurrance of some prior state that only the enlightened can recall or divine.

But still this theory troubled me.  I sought a sense of purpose, of the value of accumulated action, a justification to believe some sort of progress had been made even as the same old wave curled up to strike the same old beach.  I needed a model to reflect both cyclical and linear action, repeated verities mapped against a past behind me and a future yet to come. 

It was DNA that gave me my solution, DNA and Archimedes.  I have chosen the spiral helix as my philosophical geometry.  It circles, yes, returning ever to a spot it previously occupied - but moving inevitably outward, the old places constantly transformed by virtue of new distance, experience, perspective, the ring a twisting pointer and the path returning ever home, a home evolving but inherently unchanged, a pointer reaching out I know not where with reinforced regularities. 

Now that I’ve chosen my geometry I don’t expect my life to change, but I indulge the hope that my appreciation of it will, and that the things I start to recognize, repeated from a prior epoch, will guide me to an understanding more evolved and elementary than a two-dimensional model could ever inspire.