... the irregularity of the heart ...

ON MODERN STOICISM

The Irregularity of the Heart

I think I first realized the lie in my early 30s. Not while poring over the meditations of Marcus Aurelius in a bookstore, feeling the weight of a 1,800 year old mind who is now so in fashion. Not while breathing in the flowers and essential oils in a studio, surrounded by 30 identical bodies in some pilates or yoga pose. It was after a really "good session" at the gym. As I stepped into the shower, feeling the sweat, I felt totally empty, or maybe "unfulfilled" is a better word. That I’d actually achieved anything by conquering my own supposed, so-called personal best, that my body had actually done what I was asking it to do in the period I’d set aside for this task, and that my will had carried me through the undoubtedly tiring task of forcing my body into the demanded positions in order to lift the required amounts of resistance weight. When the full weight of the absurdity of it all finally dawned on me, that is, that all my efforts had been directed solely towards the creation of a physical barrier that had no impact on the external world that exists beyond the boundaries of my own little fortification, the warm water of the shower started to feel colder, and I was standing there in the harsh glare of the cold light provided by the cheap strip lighting above the shower cubicle, feeling cold and shaken to my core.

It’s an unspoken promise we all agree to. The spiritual commitment that tells us we’re supposed to wake up at 4 a.m. to run on the treadmill, meditate for thirty minutes on the cushion, and become better versions of ourselves. We’ve reduced the self to a business that must constantly be improved, our bodies to machines that need parts replaced, and our souls to code that must be debugged. So our modern Stoic hero rises at 5 a.m. to write in his journal about all the things he’s grateful for and then lifts 200 pounds to transform himself into some kind of flying vehicle. He monitors his heart rate variability to ensure his spirits remain properly subdued. The Chief Executive Officer of his own human existence. He uses the same tools to regulate his emotions as he would his investment portfolio. He schedules his happiness around his work schedule, turns every encounter into a zero sum game, and manages his self so effectively he becomes a walking monument to himself, a parody of invincibility and strength, the embodiment of modernity and of an invincibility. We treat the self as a business, and turn the practice of virtue into a successful management strategy for self preservation, and in that, the self is no longer virtuous, but instead reduced to a perfectly secular form of cowardice, carried out with dignity, as one would honour an ancestor.

He seems to be the comfort of every age, this Stoic hero. A tranquilising balm to soothe the mind and banish its troubles in an era of unrest; through reason and resignation and a kind of “moral geometry,” he seems to promise us freedom; we shall be free if we are in harmony with the Logos, if we can bring our thoughts within the order of things; if we can regard our passions as invasions to be repelled; our bodily needs as unimportant, mere distractions from the main business of living; if we can create that abstract and abstracting personality of the “free mind” the “soul” that has observed humanity and the movement of the world and come to realize that it is a small part of the circumference. This is the Stoic creed, wise in itself, wisely worded and wisely written. There is even a Stoic smell, a musty smell of old leather, the smell of old bookbindings, the smell of virtue and of age. There is even a Stoic feeling, the feel of the temple steps beneath bent knees, the feel of the world’s heavy weight lifted from the shoulders as one bows one’s head in humility. But all this cannot be given to one who is prone to surrender. One has to bring oneself to it; one has to rise to it after a fall into the abyss of surrender. There are resistances to be overcome before the mind can be brought into that calm tranquillity which is the centre of Stoic thought. These resistances are two: emotional and intellectual. The emotional resistance is by far the strongest of the two. The Stoic must shut his eyes to the ugly in the world and its beauty, to humanity’s baseness and the loftiness of nature. He is not allowed to look, to weep, to be awestruck, to pray to whatever gods there be, nor to fall in love. All these things lead away from the centre of the mind and take one out of the calm region of reason. The citadel of the mind must be fortified and guarded, the gates locked and patrolled by the sentry of reason who casts no shadow on the darkness outside, and who is conscious of nothing but the strict measure of his own marching. When he has reached this calmness he may be at peace, but his peace is not the peace of the world. It is not the unity of all things in themselves; it is not the harmony of the whole with itself. It is not the rhythm of the totality of existence, but the solitary rhythm of the part that has withdrawn from the world and is concerned only with itself.

Things the Emperor cannot acknowledge, things the yoga instructor of flexibility cannot say, things the CrossFit coach who evangelizes the joys of “functional fitness” cannot realize: Humans are open. We are not batteries charged with virtue. We are not a savings account at a divine bank that earns interest. We are open wounds through which the world bursts in and transforms us. We are permeable membranes that change the world outside into our insides and ourselves into otherness. The passion we have for our lives is what makes us vulnerable to danger to our overall well-being. We can practice detachment of our passions in order to protect ourselves and refrain from being “swallowed up.” But in doing so we are not freed. We are rather neutralized. We are anaesthetized with a spiritual epidural so that we can “waite” our turn to give birth and thus avoid going through the labor of birth. The Stoic is not free. He or she is merely listless. The advanced yogi is not flexible: she is stiff and remains unbreakable because she is rigid and unyielding. The CrossFit “athlete” has a body that is capable of doing anything and everything except for one thing: what it means to surrender to the fact that it is not capable of meeting the size, weight, height and beauty expectations that we demand of it.

But oh to be swept away. That is what haunts me. Marcus Aurelius warned us against the peril of shipwreck, as if it were not inevitable. As if the sea were not a power that threatens to overwhelm us at any moment, not so much as a threat, but as a cold and sober fact of life. The current of existence has not stopped flowing, and we have simply decided to think that we are not moving because we are in a state of torpor. When the world rushes over us and we are overwhelmed by music until we weep at some old melody that brings us back to our ancestral home and reduces us to speechlessness before its power. When we see a face in a crowd as we see a miracle, a sudden upheaval of our geography so that we turn down one street instead of another and end up lost in unknown neighborhoods. When our grief opens us wide like a seed pod and we sprout in unexpected ways, in unforeseen directions, towards lights that we have never seen before, in unfamiliar soil, without being able to choose it, without being able to prevent it. These are not moments of morality, but of a kind of poetic, tragic revelation. The tragic and the beautiful are not moral terms. They are modes of access to the world, reminders that the world is always more vast than our little moral landscape. Reminders that there is a whole field of sound that has nothing to do with the dry cadence of morality. Reminders that there are notes that resonate only if our instrument is broken.

The modern gym is the Stoa rediscovered in the form of aerobics rooms equipped with shiny aerobic machines and floors of neon-colored vinyl or rubber. In these precincts, individuals engage in a regimen of bodily discipline in order to be in a position to lead normal lives, thereby purporting to prepare themselves for the uncertainties of an unusual or even an average day by stripping it of its surprises, and by increasing their capacity for life through the elimination of those same sources of difficulty or of tension that could also be useful for living, a process in which the numerous burpees carried out on the treadmill are seen as a form of genuflection before the altar of functional fitness and each perfectly executed sun salutation as a moment of disciplinary asceticism in which one reaffirms the absolute nature of one’s dedication to the practice of gymnastics and one’s ability to achieve through the gymnastics exercise an absolute discipline of the body. Thus individuals seek endorphins the same way as in Augustine they sought chastity, and without noticing as little as Augustine noticed the effort required to strive toward chastity in order to obtain the chastity for which they are striving. It is no longer life that they seek to live in their bodies, but an “insurance policy” with the label “wellness,” which they try to fashion into a “bulwark” capable of defending them from “misfortune.” Instead of a means of protecting themselves, they accumulate “ammunition” so that they will be ready in case of war, an image that is no longer fitting in the form of bodily fitness and its exercise because fate does not assail individuals in the form of attacks against a fortification, but rather in the form of invasion, mingling, and transformation of those same individuals in whose bodies they took up residence, and therefore the human body can no longer be the site for resonating and hearing the sounds that make us live. That is to say, the body can no longer be anything more than an apparatus that needs to be adapted to maximum efficiency and performance for an average everyday existence. Instead, it should be a resonant sound-wave chamber in which life resonates in sounds, allowing itself to be sounded out in the space of existence.

Today, in our physical bodies we are the managers, the human resources directors of our passions, the quality control specialists of our grief, our joy and our emptiness. We carry out evaluation interviews, write performance reports and try to determine our level of self-realization and our areas for improvement through the practice of meditation every day. According to the Taoists, the authentic practitioner "flows", in other words achieves a perfect balance between his body and mind and so, for us, this notion of flowing has also become a practice to which we can add a succession of postures and breathing techniques that lead to what are called meditations of the attention and various visualizations to monitor and regulate the variations of our bodily state or our level of spiritual development. The Zen practitioner must learn to empty the mind. Our life experience then becomes a competitive match: who is able to remain the most empty, with a minimum amount of investment and attachment. We also use acceptance for the same purpose as the Stoics, to allow us to maintain a certain level of internal stability on a daily basis. Thus, it works in the same way as a thermostat that maintains the room at a temperature between 20° and 21°. So as not to let our spirit overstep these limits, nor sink beneath them. Fear rules our wish to be in control of everything which exceeds our limits of reason and humanity and that we do not master or understand, such as for example grace that is not deserved, an unparalleled beauty which seems to function only for itself, or love which exceeds our comprehension and seems to neutralize our faculties as if we had been struck down by a stronger power. We then seek a transcendency that is on the one hand immanent to our daily lives, and on the other hand the simplest way of acquiring a minimum of mystery that does not perturb our balance, that we can rule as we wish in accordance with the laws that we have chosen to organize it, or which enables us to have a full emotional life while controlling the excesses of passion through the proportions, the timing and the rationality of the emotions it inspires in us and which grants us the responses we seek as promptly as possible to the prayers that we address to it.

However, I soon realized. Precision is not meaning. And I have known that for a long time. I have sat at the piano feeling that my fingers had moved across the keys with a certain level of so-called "precision". But it was a corpse of a piece of music, formaldehyde- preserved in a proper tempo, with a lifeless skeleton of rhythm and a melodic theme that hollowly rattled through my head without ever stirring my soul. And the same thing holds true for our bodies. We can look perfectly proper in the mirror of the asanas. They are the perfect body position as illustrated in all the magazines. And yet, because the person standing in the asana can no longer be seen we are only left with the stiffness of the pose caused by the rigid control needed to make the body go into the exact position required for a proper asana. And, in so many of us, a proper diet of precisely measured portions of protein, fats, and carbs has enabled us to build the powerful muscles needed to lift our many heavy weights of work. But the very effectiveness of our diet has killed our imagination and drained the magic out of our lives and turned our biceps into atrophied and unresponsive muscles. And so too, our perfect, or as near perfect as we can make them, morning routines that give us a perfectly productive day also rid us of freedom and unstructured time that allows us to meander through the day and stumble upon those events, happenings, and feelings that bring us joy and maybe even the occasional spark of creativity. We have become so muddled in what is important and what is not that we have lost the distinction between precision and meaning. We have replaced life itself with a map and a GPS and we still have yet to come to the realization that tracking our calories burned out does not give us nourishment; and tracking our heart rate data does not bring us to life.

Too tragic, they tell me. Am I? Yes. I believe in a sort of tragic humanism, hope without optimism. Why am I tragic? I am tragic because I am human. And I am human because though I suffer I have open to me the whole of the human condition. Open to me the possibility that my suffering and all the rest of my human existence may not be without meaning. And so I suffer my humanity: the fate that I am limited and finite; the fate that though I am capable of joy I also know loss and so I weep at my own finitude. I weep because I know I shall weep and that I shall lose those things I love most dearly. I weep because the essence of my relationship with others is not intellectual but rather an intimacy that is necessarily a bloody business; that it is necessarily a business of suffering and sorrow. That my relationship with others is not always an equitable one and that there is no way to make it so. That there is no way that we can make our relationships a fair market of give and take where each person receives in proportion to what they give. No, my relationships are a scandal of the particular. They are personal and they demand more than I can give. They demand more than we can give. They demand the very thing we seek to withhold in order to maintain some semblance of balance in our lives. The Stoic argues for balance and seeks to transcend the suffering of the particular by sublimating it to the level of the universal. The Stoic abstracts away from the particularities of human existence in order to relate in a more abstract and thus more manageable way to the universe as a whole. So the Stoic who claims to love humanity can give no more than a charitable check to the particular individual who stands before him asking for aid. He can give no more than that because he cannot afford the cost of compassion that includes himself as an object of that compassion. He cannot afford to weep and to know his own vulnerability. He cannot afford to love in a way that exceeds the limits of the rational and is rather more akin to being hit with a ton of bricks. I want to weep. I want to love in excess of all rational bounds. I want to love in a way that is not interested (merchant) in any sense of the word. I want to love in a way that is not mediated economically at all. I want to be able to be merciful without any expectation of reciprocity or without any hope of reward or compensation. I want to be able to be vulnerable in the simplest sense of the word without fear of consequence. I want to be able to be open to others in a way that makes me utterly and completely vulnerable to them. I want the world to wound me. I want the world to wound me so that I can see it for what it is: an infinite and economically unsustainable generosity that leaves me with nothing but my self when it is done.

The body remembers what the mind wants to forget. Our bones remember, our blood remembers and our nerves remember the sparks that fly between them before we are in any way cognizant of what is unfolding. We remember that true courage is not about the structure of our bodies, but rather an alchemy that transforms us from the moment we choose to give in to our deepest desires. We remember that there is no way to live fully and remain unscathed. We remember that the choice that lies between slavery and freedom is not freedom at all, but rather surrender to the unknown. If we listen to the music of the body with the skin on our torso instead of our ears, we remember. The beat of a bass line shakes our rib cage and transforms our heartbeat. We remember that music is not something that can be written down in a score, that it is not something we can totally comprehend and control. We remember that a melody is an event between us and the music that exists between the notes of the melody and between the notes and the spaces between the notes and the music. The music exists between the notes and in the silence after the music has ended. If we listen with open hearts and minds we remember that to possess is to surrender to that which is greater than ourselves. Rather than fighting this fact, we can learn to see it clearly as the Stoic sees the harmonies of the music as nothing more than a reflection of the principles of composition. He notes the scientific forces of fire as it devours all in its path. The yogi forgets himself in his attempts to breathe more efficiently and to note the exact amount of oxygen that he is taking in and expelling. He forgets that there is anything unusual in the fact that he is breathing at all. That the air he breathes is also breathing him. The dancer falls. The singer loses her voice because she has not protected herself against the full force of her own emotional expression. The lover is rebuffed and the carefully constructed walls of his ego come tumbling down. The risk is what makes it all beautiful. The risk is what makes life itself worth living. Rather than living scrupulously sanitized, sterile lives, free from risk and from disease, we choose to live.

Marcus Aurelius talks about what he calls the “uniqueness of your goodness”. It’s in principle a great description but to me it sounds more like the description of a prison from which no one can visit you, a place of solitary confinement, embellished with an overture of moral dignity. The autonomous self has within it a latent tendency toward solipsism that often reveals itself as a moral virtue through the lens of a self-sufficient good that does not need the “other”. It’s a good that has no price because it asks no risk and has no impact on one’s integrity because one’s integrity is also invulnerable. Because one’s integrity has not had to contend with the uncertainty of human exchange, with the shock of being chosen as a friend because the other chose us rather than chose to relate to someone else. And, because the obligation to belong, the unwanted summons to a community, often deters the unique quality of our goodness from becoming an overflowing and abundant good in the lives of others through the open channels of genuine communication and communion. The unique quality of the good that we have or that we call good is an expansive quality, expansive till we are physically weaker but also, at the same time, stronger because our self-containing, separative walls have been breached to allow the poetry and tragedy of life to spread and work its miracle of healing and liberation as it draws us to itself and lifts us up even as it brings us down. You can’t will love, nor is there any effectiveness in trying to choose the way you want to feel. Life falls, as it were, beyond our control, falling indiscriminately on the just and the unjust alike.

To me, thus, what the world needs is not unreason, but a more complete reason. Not elimination of constraint, but new constraints that can achieve goals that reason cannot attain on its own. More rationality but also openness, discipline but also receptivity, order but also ecstasy, structure but also grace. More soul, the citadel of reason but also the threshold at which strangers are received. More sentries but also more guests laying down their arms. More law but also more music violating that law and creating a new law in violation of the old. And above all a new way of looking at the world, not to the idea of creation as a rationally necessary and unchangeable world, nor to the Logos reduced to the laws of reason. But to the mere fact that the world might speak to us. To the fact that the universe may not be just a mere machine, but rather something that exists and is present to us, in whose silence there may be an attentive ear. To tremble at the mystery, to have desires for the impossible, to hope for the unattainable, to will the unachievable, to need the unattainable.

I’ve been listening to beats on my silly keyboard drum machine over the past week, suddenly finding myself comparing the cadence of a drum machine to my own heartbeat. The machine always delivers a beat to measure and never fails to keep rhythm. The accuracy of this electronic device is almost more than human. Our hearts, which regulate our vital rhythms can drive up into huge numbers when we receive some surprise, such as the 3 a.m. phone call, or take leaps and bounds skyward when the full moon is upon us, and dive precipitously down, too, when say the loved one walks into the room, missing a beat along the way as if unable to keep time, irregular, as-unsyncopated-as-possible. Drum machines epitomize Stoicism as well as the philosophy of self-improvement, they promote a meditation that can be likened to a plumb line yoga pose, holding the stretch of being present, steady, unyielding like a marathon runner hurtling along with an un-fragmented mind, completely immersed and absorbed within every rep or second. These machines act as a paradigm of business, untainted by disturbance or outside occurrences. While our hearts, and thus our humanity are imperfect; the core we all reside within is difficult to come to terms with when seeking to live this high ideal of the human being as a manageable object, where self-improvement as the highest moral and desirable achievement trumps everything else. Temples of self-improvement with rituals and practices filling the places of poetry make the optimum self their common goal, while our “hearts”, organs we really can’t make work in harmony with all the programs we put them through to reach this target of our “higher self”, are supposedly just mere relics of an archaic, emotional, pre-rational, pre-scientific era, and more suitable to be put in the garbage heap of antiquity rather than given the value we have for human and evolutionary life, banished to the domain of health and wellness and even to what is called spirit, these things all represent ways of silencing or numbing the heart so we might attain our quest for mastery over the bodies that carry us around like vessels carrying passengers to the next terminus. As we labor under our search for the perfect form through self-help, the plans, routines, diets that are constantly touted for advancement in the never ending campaign to get us better and thus lift us up, the stillness they strive for leads to apathy and thus to sleep, our primordial hearts stir, unquiet, taking a beat that isn’t aligned to the strict timbre that the self-help or body management purist commands, but resonating to an entirely different cadence one that is farther away from our modern conceptions of what an ideal and a perfected human being is thought to be and further along the scale towards an essentiality far beyond our civilized grasp.

If the gym is a cathedral of control and the Stoic meditation a fortress of the self, then what stands against them is not another technique but a different quality of attention (yes, I love Simone Weil), a willingness to be undone. In some moments, I can see this, like a brief flare in the darkness that shows me exactly what it is that I strive to lose myself in the dull repetition of practice for, the ease and serenity of the old man swimming in the public pool because he doesn’t want to swim fast or well, or even at all; the carelessness of the child playing on the structures of the playground, not because he wants to ascend to the summit or feel powerful upon the throne but simply because the apparatus of the structure is there, the trough in the surface of the rusty bar against which he can nestle his hand, the ladder rungs, thin and narrow and perfectly suited for his fingers and toes and so easy to hoist himself up using only his arms, his legs bent at an awkward angle behind him like a diver ready to take the plunge and then hang, motionless, for as long as possible, the body already beginning to bruise and swell with the influx of blood from the sinus caverns, the air thickening in the head like overproof bubble gum taffy as the whole world is turned upside down and everything becomes strange and otherworldly. Or the dancer lost in the thumping beat and glow of the dance club at four in the morning. Her eyes closed, not in contemplation but in surrender, they are completely open, drinking in all of the coloured light-filled air, the stench of bodies swaying against each other, the temperature of the thick smoky air heavy with scent and heat of dancing bodies; the beats of the thumping bass dropping all the way down into her spine and the neck and vertebral discs, arranging and ordering them to perform the only motion possible under these conditions, that of complete surrender, rather than exertion or attention or discipline. Exposures rather than exercises.

Then there is flânerie, that is, to walk without destination A city of movement and yet an absolute absence of destination. Walking along a path because the foot finds more comfort walking along the line of a crack in the pavement than because the path leads to somewhere. Always on the treadmill, projecting ourselves towards a goal, towards a horizon that recedes before us. Without destination we become witnesses. Eating as reception rather than as consumption. Receiving food from others, in a state of humility and gratitude before even assessing the product, weighing up the calories. When we eat we do not really consume something exterior to ourselves. We are invaded by the world at its most intimate level: we ingest the gift of others and we become what we eat. The macro counter and food scale sit proudly on the kitchen counter. The hungry soul simply receives and becomes.

Music is a more exact example of all this. Not all that can be dysfunctional about the music world (conservatories, the strain to perform flawlessly), but rather, to participate in music, to sing in a community choir where the voice breaks and the breaking is validated as evidence of the human voice, to drum in a circle where there is no pulse to keep and one discovers instead a shared, fleeting, and inherently ephemeral rhythm, to improvise in a context where the note that doesn’t belong opens the way to a new key because one is attending rather than executing. The metronome and the censor/judge are dispensed with. What remains is listening, the quality of being open to the flow of interactions and willing to surrender to the forces of change set in motion by the others.

Also then, what constitutes friendship as a practice, as opposed to a utility? Is it the friend that calls at the wrong moment to pester you with the same problem you solved just last month? And is it the friend who really doesn't need a solution, but rather your actual presence? And for whom you can remain silent? This isn't networking, which is the practice of treating your contacts and acquaintances as mere functional resources for further advancement in your career. It is instead the friend who makes demands that can't be scheduled or plotted on some productivity calendar. They are a disruption of your efforts to organize your own time in order to become the s0-called most efficient version of yourself. They amount to a beautiful conspiracy against the managerial self.

Even grief, when properly attended, becomes an alternative too all this. Not the grief that one can get credit for because it has been worked through and properly grieved over in five stages (an ubiquitous trope of today), but rather the grief that, uninvited, shows up at the anniversary of someone’s death and suddenly lingers for months rearranging the furniture of the mind, making it hard to want to do anything about anything. This grief recognizes that the self is not a closed system, that our house can be haunted, and that we are still inhabited by the dead long after they are gone. Memory is not a file we can access or not access at will. It is a presence into which we can be invaded, and from which we cannot escape. The Stoic would like us to be able to close some doors to life in order to preserve our balance and our ability to function with integrity. The haunted self must leave some doors ajar to allow for the cold air of absence that wafts in when loved ones are gone.

There is a kind of work too that looks like play, the work of the woodworker who must sand a board of wood until it speaks, until the woodworker can hear the wood's texture of resistance and surrender, until the wood's resistance reveals the very form that the wood wished to be. This is not the work of the efficiency expert who asks us to work in focused bursts of 4 hours free from distraction. Rather, this work is deep because it is available to interruption, open to the kinds of mistakes that reveal our ignorance of the material, that reveal the material's secrets when we least expect them. The work of the carpenter who can't help but look down at the sawdust falling from the table and lose himself in the constantly shifting patterns of light and shadow. The work of the cook who tastes the food not to confirm that everything is correct but in order to be surprised by it.

We think of alternatives as if they had something in common. We try to program them, to put them in a computer and work out their optimal performance. We try to optimize them, assuming they are a matter of means and ends, projects to be finished. But the alternatives we are facing are not for finished projects but for mysteries we are to live. They call for a kenosis beyond our power of thought to conceive, an emptying of self not as a discipline but as a fact. We must vacate the premises of management in order to take up residence in the poverty of poetry, the helplessness of those who receive what they do not give and viceversa, the powerlessness of those who are sustained by gifts from beyond their own power to sustain themselves.

The body remembers when we order it to forget. When we cease to command it, the body recalls its independence. Sleep, sex, sneezes, and unsuppressed tears all remind us of our helplessness in a greater world. By embracing these moments, we surrender to our bodies and enter into a partnership in which the body instructs the soul (yes, I said soul). When we are no longer controlling our pace, the runner sees only the light of autumn passing through the barren limbs of trees, his breathing becomes ragged not from the force of his stride but from the weight of light that has struck him in the pit of the stomach. When the lover loses interest in the techniques of seduction, he is overcome by the aroma of the beloved, the feel of the temperature of her skin, and the topography of her scars mapping routes that do not exist on any human map.

These are not solutions because they do not solve the paradox of life that inevitably finds itself balanced between order and chaos, discipline and freedom, the citadel and the threshold. They inhabit the dialectic of these opposing concepts, while simultaneously keeping them distinct and preserving the integrity of the space between, rather than trying to reunify them through a process of synthesis. They represent a way of life that cannot be formalized in a consistent doctrine and which can only be experienced in the tragic joy of enduring the costs and pain involved in giving oneself up to it. Unconditional love is such a cost and it is so powerful and so frightening that it has to accept the terms imposed by death. They embody the pulse that resists being replaced by the metronomic cadence of a machine, not in a revolutionary way but only insofar as it continues to resist in the simple act of its difference, its difference from the automatic and monotonous because it is not programmed to respond to the same sequences of events, but is rather given over to the intractable and unforeseeable nature of a reality that resists comprehension and therefore can only be approached, lived, and loved in its strangeness...