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Whenever there is a will, there are two things: a way and an obstacle in the way — that place midway between desire and destination where one’s will collides with the will of the world, with the parameters of permission for imagination we call reality. The triumph of life is turning that collision into a particle collider for possibility, turning the limitation into a creative constraint that challenges more imaginative forms of being into existence, right there in the interruptive middle. Because every life is shaped by the obstacles it has encountered and how it has responded to them, every life is in a sense a story that begins in the middle.
Bayo Akomolafe celebrates the rewilding power of these interruptions in These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home (public library). He writes:
An obstacle is the richest, thickest, densest place in the universe. This is so because it is where things stop and often die, failing to continue on their way. It is where carcasses of hope rot into the ground, inadvertently fertilizing it. It is a place of desperation and longing and roaming ghosts… bursting with activity, with microbial adventures, with dancing generativity, with experiments into dis/continuity, with playful meanings and alchemical shifts, with eloquent invocations and stuttered words. When you meet something fierce, too strong to overcome, too high to climb, too eminent to sidestep, too dark to enlighten, don’t take it too personally — you have merely met an antibody, whose sacred task is to challenge you, discombobulate you, disfigure you, and introduce “you” to the strange vastness of your family. A larger commonwealth of becoming.
In a lovely antidote to the cult of achievement — that punitive denial of the most wondrous aspect of being alive: the fact that we are unfinished — he adds:
Obstacles are the universe’s hubs of unspeakable creativity, redeeming us from tired victories, from the banality of crossing the finish line, from the soundtrack of getting everything we want, and especially from the hubris of thinking we are in control.
Supplementary art based on An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, available as a print and more.The moment an obstacle bisects the trajectory of intent, it creates a natural midpoint that is both an end and a beginning, but also something else entirely, for it lives on a different plane from the strict linearity of the will as cause and its intended effect.
Akomolafe considers the singular fertility of these midpoints:
It is here, right here in the contested middle that we often learn that our maps, however elaborate, are not the whole picture or the terrain they pretend to represent. And that home is not simply the fixed dot at the end of dashed lines, motionless and given, awaiting the ones who come marching in… Everything begins in the middle. There are no beginnings that appear unperturbed, pristine and without hauntings. And there are no endings that are devoid of traces of the new, spontaneous departures from disclosure, and simmering events that are yet to happen. The middle isn’t the space between things; it is the world in its ongoing practices of worlding itself.
Part of our difficulty in inhabiting middles, in orienting to obstacles, lies in our two-dimensional model of this ongoingness — causality as an arrow from the point of action to the point of consequence. Everything changes, however, if we conceive of it as a locus of points on a three-dimensional sphere of time. Akolafe offers a model from West Africa’s ancient cosmogonies consonant with the double-slit experiments of quantum mechanics and their implications of retrocausality:
The Yoruba people speak of ayé, loosely translated into the one-tongue as “life” — a poor translation, if you ask me, for what they try to articulate is a mode of causation that is unwieldy, surprising, diffracted, multilinear, ecstatic, and sensuous: where… one cannot draw too straight a line from cause to effect. Indeed, one cannot even draw a sure unidirectional line from cause to effect, since effect can flow into cause, and — even more startlingly — also because time is not conceived as a single stream flowing from past to future but as a cycle… a muddy viscous puddle that means the past is amenable to reconfiguration.
Discus chronologicus — a German depiction of time from the early 1720s. (Available as a print and as a wall clock.)A century after Virginia Woolf gasped in her profoundest epiphany that “behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern… the whole world is a work of art… there is no Shakespeare… no Beethoven… no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself,” he adds:
We — together with multiple others — are part of a web of life, not just stuck on it like a hapless fly-turned-spider-breakfast, but the very web itself in its fluctuations and rich complexity. And movement, the slightest gesture, sends tremors through the veins of our never-ending reiterative becomings.
Couple with Iain McGilchrist on the loom on which we weave that web, then revisit physicist Alan Lightman’s poetic reimagining of time.
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