2:0 - the world of 2 (1)

We conceptualize the world through opposites or dualities.  Our senses detect differences and we starkly name them.  We say male and female, night and day.  We crave hot and cold.  We hear hate and love, taste and smell bitter, sweet.

Our minds seek meaning in our movement in the world.  We say, “This is good, that is bad; this is true, that is false.”  We are forever categorizing and analyzing—endlessly dividing things in two.  To live is to separate and to join.

We experience and name degrees between the vague and stern extremes.  There is dusk, a partial eclipse, a crescent moon.  We have a lukewarm bath, walk out into a temperate spring day, place a bittersweet morsel on our tongues.  Some blur gender distinctions through dress and biology.  Something is a half-lie, a dubious action, imperfectly good.

But it is the dualities, not the grey, which we use to circumnavigate our limits, as a primal and impossible comparison for the murkiness we live within.  The dualities are a foundation of language and the portal to the world of 2.  We are able to say grey because we have perceived black and white.  We sense the ambiguity of truth because we concoct notions of good and evil, even after we have said we have moved beyond them.  We feel contradictory and confused because we have known, even if but somewhere within our souls (and does not this place of knowing seem so real to some of us that other places sometimes fade?), the extremes of passion.  While our lives are lived in the muddled indefinability of everyday existence, it is the dualities themselves that wrap the foil of dream around us and stab our empty centers.

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Over the past few centuries, with increasing vigor and clarity, the reality of the dualities has been questioned.  What is male?  What is female?  What is good?  What is evil?  What is truth?  What is falsehood?  Everything essential and objective has been made value-laden and subjective.  Many are lost without the appearance of such firmness.  Traditionalists grasp at the familiar patterns from the past.  Materialists and hedonists ignore the question through possessions and pleasure.  The avant-garde in philosophy, art and education say such questions are no longer relevant—we now know that definitions are a matter of utility; they serve the interests of a given age and are the collective creations of that society and the internal struggle of its members.

But the familiar has been fading and those who choose past patterns live in dangerous cloisters.  The quest for possessions and pleasure knows no limits and, without limits, we endanger the earth and ourselves.  A radical focus on the social and political context of values is a pendulum swing away from the past radical focus on an objective, God-given creation.  Such pendulum swings are normal historical correctives, but should not be taken as normative themselves.

The world may not have been as objective as the past perceived it.  But it also may not be as subjective as the present perceives it.  The dualities are needed, not because they have a solidity which provides us with an unalterable security, but because we cannot live life without reference to them, even if such reference can be cloaked in caprice.  The dualities lurk in the wispy circumferences of our dialogue.  Life’s meaning—we use the term, knowing how it, like all terms and things, plays in shadow and rain—stretches to 2 and, in the stretching we feel the risk of snapping.  Do we stretch to feel the risk?