Reflection 126

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Mystery

I end downwards, at the bottom of the scene, in a Blank that’s unoccupied and imageless and unimaginable, in absolutely nothing whatever. Here, completing my submission to the evidence, I come to the most overlooked and underrated spot in the world, the place that’s replaced with No-place, the Terminus of termini, unique, baffling, the Mystery that’s more than worthy of my humblest obeisance. All other places and objects I come across are set on all sides against a background. Somewhere or other they stop and something else begins: however big, they are encompassed within a perimeter – sharp or blurred – where they end and their environment begins. All except this magic shirt I’m wearing. It’s as if some transcendental moth had been at it all along the neckline. Indeed this is the gnawing of no creature but the gnawing mystery of creation itself, of WHERE caught redhanded popping up out of NO-WHERE, of WHAT popping up – a divine Jack-in-the-box – out of NO-WHAT. All things above this Ultimate Bottom Line – those toy shoes up there, those truncated trunks, that pelmet-shirt itself on three of its four sides – all are normal inasmuch as they rest on something. Those are things that I can handle, that I have taped, that lie well within my capacity. But This defeats me. Here I’ve come to something that rests on no support, on a gap. Now this is irregular, abnormal, absurd – terms altogether too weak to do justice to such an Oddity. Here is the Line which underwrites and underscores all things, and is itself underwritten and underscored by a total White-out, by What’s conspicuous by its absence. Above it, the world; below it not so much as a dust-grain – nor (and this is the point here) room for one. (Douglas Harding. Head Off Stress.)

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