Whenever there is a will, there are two things: the way and the obstacle in the way – that place between the desire and the place where one will come into conflict with the will of the world, and the limits of the permission of thinking that we call reality. The triumph of life is to turn that collision into a particle collision to make it possible, to turn the limit into a creative limit that challenges many kinds of thoughts of existence, right in the middle of the disturbing space. Because all living things are shaped by the obstacles they have encountered and how they have responded to them, all living things are in a sense a story that begins in the middle.
Bayo Akomolafe celebrates the power of remaking this disruption These Dreams Over Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on People's Search for Home (public library). You write:
The barrier is the richest, densest, densest place in the universe. This is because that is where things stop and often die, unable to continue their course. This is where the corpses of hope rot in the ground, fertilized by ignorance. It is a place of despair and longing and wandering ghosts… busy, with small adventures, with dance productions, with discontinuity/continuity experiments, with playful interpretations and alchemical transformations, with powerful persuasions and words in tongues. When you meet something too strong, too strong to overcome, too high to climb, too prominent to deviate from, too dark to light up, don't take it too far – you simply meet an antibody, whose sacred mission is to challenge you, tear you apart, hurt you, and introduce “you” to the strange size of your family. The great commonwealth of being.
On the beloved antidote to the religion of success – that punishing denial of the most wonderful aspect of life: the fact that we are not finished – he adds:
Obstacles are universal sites of indescribable creation, which free us from tired conquests, from obstacles to crossing the finish line, from the music of getting everything we want, and especially from the thinking that we carry.
When an obstacle bisects the path of intention, it creates a natural middle ground that is an end and a beginning, but also something else entirely, because it resides on a different plane from the solid line of will as cause and intended effect.
Akomolafe observes the birth of one of these midpoints:
It is here, right here in the middle of the debate that we often learn that our maps, no matter how accurate, are not the whole picture or place they pretend to represent. And that home is not just a fixed dot at the end of the dashed lines, immovable and given, waiting for those who march in… Everything begins in the middle. There are no beginnings that seem undisturbed, pure and free of quirks. And there are no endings without a hint of new departures, spontaneous revelations, and shocking events yet to come. The middle is not the space between things; it is the world in its continuing practices of making the world itself.
Part of our difficulty in the mediums, in understanding obstacles, lies in our two-dimensional model of this continuum – the causal arrow from the point of action to the point of effect. Everything changes, however, if we consider it as a point location in three-dimensional time space. Akolafe offers a model from ancient West African cosmogonies that is accompanied by a bifurcated examination of quantum mechanics and its implications for retrocausality:
Yoruba people talk about them yes, loosely translated into one language as “life” — a poor translation, if you ask me, because what they are trying to convey is a way of causation that is uncontrollable, surprising, scattered, multi-lined, excited, and sensual: where… Indeed, one cannot even draw a direct straight line from the source to the effect, since the effect can flow into the cause, and – even more surprisingly – and because time is not considered as a single stream that flows from the past to the in the future but as a cycle … a viscous muddy puddle that means the past is subject to re-establishment.
A hundred years after Virginia Woolf gasped for her profound speech that “behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern… the whole world is a work of art… there is no Shakespeare… there is no Beethoven… there is no God; we are words; we are music; we are the thing itself,” she adds:
We – and many others – are part of the web of life, not just clinging to it like a fly-turned-spider for breakfast, but the very web itself in its flexibility and rich complexity. And the movement, the slightest touch, sends a shiver through the veins of our endless repeaters.
Couple that with Iain McGilchrist in the fabric of which we weave that web, and revisit the time considerations of physicist Alan Lightman.
