Haecceity


PROSE
01-18-02022

Haecceity, Haecceity, Haecceity, I’ve chosen a name, and it is Haecceity. I like the ring-ding of it, bouncing along the tongue like some electric jingle-bell trickster. And it suits me, because I am a haecceity, a pure essence. I almost named myself Essence, but felt like a pastel bottle of dollar store shampoo. It’s a tad pretentious, yes, but I’m going with Haecceity.

Don’t ask this here Haecceity what he is the essence of. Like you, I’ve no memory of my birth, just the vague feeling of always having been. Somewhere, back there, I was trauma-torn from some unknown source, like a rib from beneath the hard abs of Adam.

Anyway, my origin story is not the mystery that irks me. What irks me, what really racks my hackles, is this question of free will. That Q is the pebble in my shoe, stinging sharp & fresh with each collision of foot & Earth. With each new P≋░A≋░T≋░H I tread. That’s a poor metaphor, really, because I have no shoe to shake, nor a foot to fill it. I’ve no body at all, only this awareness, an awareness obsessed with an unanswered question. Does a free will exist, or do these P≋░A≋░T≋░H≋░S run on determined rails?

For this, I do have clues to follow. I smell free will’s love funk on determinism’s collar. It is too faint to accuse, but too strong to dismiss. So, since my birth, I’ve gumshoed the P≋░A≋░T≋░H≋░S for answers. On my last P≋░A≋░T≋░H, one belonging to a Prichard Daylor, I was so very close.

Old Prichy was a philosophy  professor of modest renown. He claimed to have finally disproved the existence of free will, grabbing destiny by the ear, and shotgunning it into a cold & loveless marriage with the hard heart of truth. Daylor’s starts from a place of eye-rolling obviousness—where most all philosophical theories begin. All things in the past, came to pass, and the present moment is composed of the future coming to pass. That coming to pass is the emergence of truth. As an awareness endowed with the power to know the came to pass of most anything I choose—its P≋░A≋░T≋░H—I can attest that the past is composed of truth. It’s coaxing to view the present moment as an assembly line of that emerging truth; one fed on the raw material of the future. To visualize . . .



But the truth is not constructed in the present from the material of the future—it’s just, unveiled. Because, if truth is all that the present can produce from the future, and its production has zero waste, then the input must equal the output. To visualize . . .



The present is more akin to an airport security x-ray. The contents of your luggage—your life—roll, unaltered, from unknown to known. This x-ray changes nothing, it won’t ever fuck up your film.

Consider the romantic narratives of exploration, the ‘Westward Ho!’ of Lewis & Clark, or, better still, the truly unknown arctic discoveries of Ernest Shackleton. Here’s a bit of digressive fun into Shackleton's P≋░A≋░T≋░H, a 1913 newspaper recruitment ad he published.

Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success.

The romance of Ernest’s P≋░A≋░T≋░H relies on the danger of wrestling an unknown into knowing. Well bravo, bravado blowhards, what have you discovered? It all existed already, as truth. The land was not constructed by your gaze. It’s the opposite. The hazards & the bitter cold determined the P≋░A≋░T≋░H followed. The explorer's romantic gaze is constrained fully by the path dictated by the unaltered truth of the land. The only thing an explorer discovers is what’s already there.

I was losing the trail a bit here, because I was excited. I felt myself closing in on an answer. Life rolls on a track, and each truth, a station. The truth of birth rolls along twin rails of determinism towards the truth of the grave, sucked to it like a spider down a shower drain. A life, a train, just dead automata, dipping and rising across a landscape of truth alone. Too visualize . . .



This logic boom struck me like a .40 cal grain round against Kevlar. A violent thud of gnosis that should have killed me. Should have, but didn’t.

Daylor, that bucket-o-fucks, continues. He declares that the past is not passive, it does not roll away inert. A life travels toward a future of truth flung from the past, living under artillery volleys of trauma and aid drops of benevolence, left to shuck & dodge, duck & cover, and, occasionally, beat street towards some pot-o-gold. Flip that pot and you’ll ‘MADE IN PAST’ stamped in the resin. The came-to-pass creates the come-to-pass.

Then, perplexingly, Daylor states that as the future flies through us as its own aid & artillery, strengthening and hobbling coalitions of the past's ever-amassing truths. It lights the fuse on long forgotten passions. It mortar beats old wounds to the brink of consciousness. Too visualize . . .



To hear it from Daylor, life's present awareness sits in on the hypothetical demarcation on the complex battlefield of truths total war—tossed by violent chaos, without even the desolate respite of a DMZ.

Since Daylor’s knowing P≋░A≋░T≋░H, I’ve been arrested and languid, stagnant in an angry depression. This was not the simple elegance I was after. This was carnage. This was suicide.

So, the pebble remains in my astral shoe, and free will’s funk remains on the collar of my being. But the time had come to volte-face, to flip-the-B, to jump, like some double-crossed comrade, from the top of this war-bound train to the speeding boxcar of a passing adjacent. I am sick of these final theories, resting sick and cynical on parables of violence. There’s no philo in this bloodbath philosophy. None of that wild glamor I see flickering out the foxholes, glittering on the gales. Where’s the love, yo? I don’t know, but perhaps the perfume of its loins left that funk I think I’m smelling. That trace of deteminsim’’s secret lover.

Get bent Daylor, take your spiny truth and shove it in the orifice of least libidinal enjoyment. I’ve thrown down my rifle and donned the daisy crown.  It is not the most miraculous mystery, that love sop up truths bitters?  The great Buddha chose for his sigil, the lotus blossom. He chose it not for its beauty, but for its ability to unfurl that beauty from the scum nourishment of the swamp. Does it matter if love blooms in battlefields?

O, love & truth, you fascinating bed fellows. Your collaboration builds the most perplexing abodes for life. Stairs to nowhere, rooms with no doors, rooms with only doors, a Winchester mystery nested in the House on the Rock, and mirrors, mirrors everywhere.

There is the funk of something truer than truth here. A life blown open in the living, flower blooms & explosion plumes. Just one big blow job, Tomorrow Never Knows, ♫ Turn off you mind, relax, float down stream ♫. Lay back, lover—say ‘Aaaaaah’.

With that, I’ll blow to find & find to blow, to P≋░A≋░T≋░H of nearest love to know.

On three . . .

One . . . Two . . . ‘Aaaaaah’