Equivocality

I managed to surf today, actually made it up on the board for the first time. Rinsing the salt from my hair afterwards, watching the water break into rainbows, I thought: this seems like a hell of a lot more fun than war, disease, poverty, or global warming.

It’s my hope that both hate and greed are ultimately petty. But it’s not logic or fact that dissolves prejudice and ignorance. The more I learn about psychology and sociology, the more obvious this becomes.

Grudgingly, this intellectual has learned that knowledge is foolish quest. While science is able to pin down certain facts, many other kinds of truth depend on who you ask. And anyway, the world is too big and too complex for one person to know. And interlinked. You can look at some one part of it in great detail, but everything outside the frame eventually breaks down the door and messes up what you thought you knew. The “frame” could be anything. A nation you live in. A language you speak. Your religion. The subjects you study or the people you know. Whatever your context is, it’s too small.

The only thing left is perspective, and I think it’s perspective that changes people; and something else. I don’t know what to call this other thing, but it definitely tingles. It has many names: inspiration, joy, hope, beauty, fullness, emptiness. The unbearable lightness of being alive. Equally, the unbearable darkness of certain times and places. There are certain things that are not poetic; there is concrete, cordite, dried blood and old meanness, but they still need poems for us to comprehend them.

Light and dark – I want to see both in my travels. I want to see it all. I want to try to find stories that say something to the people who could not see firsthand. And these stories need to be both beautiful and true. This is where art meets science for me.

Jonathan Stray
Hikkaduwa, Sri Lanka, February 2008