A Human Strategy, Matt Berry aphorism 100
100
Searching for a Black Tack on a Black Wall: A human is a creature who makes things disappear through repeated contact. After living on a ship for a month, the sailor has accustomed himself to the waves of the sea. Within his sensory world, it is as if the rolling and pitching have ceased. Then this creature goes ashore and nearly falls down because it is the land that now pitches and moves: it is a movement that now exists as an absence of movement ... and only as such can it be “sensed.”
A question: how can I see forces which affect me without the cessation of these forces? ... or create an environment where I am at least thrown out of synchronization with these forces? Perhaps even now there is a key force, a stimulus, a recurring event, with which I am, through ceaseless contact, unable to “perceive” and therefore unable to put to my advantage or remove as an obstacle. If so, there seems to be no end to the forces I take for granted ... nor an end to my ingratitude ... just as there seems to be no end to the seduction of these “invisible” forces: I want them to serve as the basis for a “world beyond” ... as a means of escape.
Or, am I already at the end? Nothing is hidden after all. This is just my first encounter with a “corner” of the knowable universe, and I am too stubborn and disappointed to turn away.