2001-08-20 - 3:43 p.m.

I write to you and am at odds with myself. Would your first impulse be to stop and to dissect such a sentence? I speak and I toss at you this double image -- cloaked in duplicity? Two angels, wrestling for supremacy? If only. I would be closer to a truth if I admitted that when I can see my conflicting thoughts they only ever amount to the work of my hands. Yes, yes; I'm ambidexterous, you see. I write in different directions. I'm stretched.

And so my conflict becomes eminently resolvable.

Would you try to write with one hand if you knew that writing with both was merely the prelude to a lifetime of inquiry? Given the choice, would you choose to question? If to question is merely a pursuit, and if I acknowledge that this particular diversion is not likely to yield a tangible increase over the strata it would seek to overleap - tell me, do I then begin to indulge myself?

Let me regress for a moment. Sweet respite. Let me tell you - I do wish for things to be complicated. I want life to be beyond human comprehension. I want numbers to be gargantuan and inestimable. I do not want a forseeable future. I want to be 'savant.'...I want to be knowing, but the cup of my knowledge must only ever be three-quarters full. You mention in passing that I do not, after all, have much of the masochist in me. I do not disagree.

Why must contentment and knowledge be personal contingencies? I seek a path. So long as it is not my own. I turn away from 'congenital' and 'innate'. Let me lie. Away somewhere with that which may only be acquired and derived. In a dream, I seek to divine.

I ask myself: Must we always be conditional beings? The refrain is "We may be happy." Must it be so?

I am not by nature violent or imperative but to only hear, once, "We must be happy" or "We must be brave"...

"Must" does not even begin to approach the forse that I wish to harness. I cannot help but feel that we are whatever we are upon a whim. There is no reason why you are where you are and I am in Malta other than the fact that I was born into one set of circumstances and you into another.

I see myself as a tragic figure. Reality and nature are not comely. I turn away from prying eyes because such is the stuff of farce.

Even now I must fight with myself. I must search for a pattern or a ghost in this machine of ours. Why? Why? We are born and we begin to unravel and we have choices. But I cannot bear the weight. I can only repeat that we are chosen, in a sense, through heredity. We are born and we begin to choose. But why was it so in the first place? Who was it aeons ago that proclaimed it so? Perhaps a Zeus somewhere etched the design of our lives upon tablets.

We are here. You and I are living proof of the consequences of ineffable power. Inevitable mechanics. I don't know how I will ever be able to reconcile the idea of a personal happiness with these facts - that nothing I was born with was truly mine; that my path in life will be determined by talents that I had no need to reach for and a spontaneity that is even more distant.

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