Concordia Discors

Ahren Lehnert
Sep 9, 2018 · 4 min read

“Above everything, to the man of today life seems to have no meaning. It is often said that the prime phenomenon, or state of mind, is that of wonder. This too he has obviously lost. We try to explain the universe in terms of scientific theories, but we are unable to explain even the simplest phenomena. We overlook the fact that meaning comes only when we discover the purposelessness of creation. We mistake order and classification for explanation. We cannot abide the notion of disorder or chaos, yet the need for such an admission is essential. Likewise the need for utter nonsense. Only the genius seems to understand and appreciate the joy of sheer nonsense. Nonsense is the antidote to the monotony and emptiness created by our continual striving for order, our order, the antidote to our compulsive efforts to find meaning and purpose where there is none.” — Henry Miller, “Reflections on the Death of Mishima”, Sextet

Oakland, California — If you wonder what we have lost, it is wonder itself: the self-assured confidence to allow oneself to be in awe of the sublime, the overwhelming, the vast, the expansive, the illusive, the mind-bending. The zeitgeist of today is to remain calm, ordered, in control, smug, unconcerned…a postmodern leveling of the grand and the inconsequential snapped in selfies. No longer do we allow ourselves to be mystified by the thunder of a million wildebeest hooves any more than we wonder at the shaking of minor temblor. We are cool, image-ready, magazine-cover minded, confident in the order of the universe and our mastery of it.

Concordia discors, order erupting from chaos, where the fire meets the sea in steaming plumes of sizzling molten rock creating land from nothing. Where the wind meets the land, lashing palms into arcs and inundating the streets with water and crocodiles and flotsam and jetsam and the bodies of the eager waiting for landfall and then washing the land clean and the rubbish out to sea. Where the fire meets the wind, tornado conflagrations ripping across the land, ashing trees and grass and houses and parked vehicles, animals fleeing before the flames, creating room for vibrant growth from the charred remains.

Climbing Mumbles Hill…murmur mumble mumble murmur…in The Mumbles, Wales, shrouded in morning fog, shapes both living and still rising from the mist — stones jetting from the earth softly nestled between the dewey wool of sheep. The mist blowing in from the sea drew a line down the climbing body, the left half soaking wet and the right half dry, eyes focused on the path only visible a few feet ahead winding between rocks and grass and sheep, climbing higher into the cloud. Then, with an audible rush of wind, the mist was gone and the sea shown brilliantly, glistening with a thousand points of light and the sun blinding on the blue of the sea and sky and the verdant green of the hill, above the boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away. In the chaos of the wind and the mist and the rocks and the sheep, the order of the sublime, awesome and overwhelming. Witness to the act of creation and destruction where the land meets the sea, and the sea meets the sky, and the sky meets the wind, and the wind meets the body.

And we are never at peace, waging wars over imaginary lines drawn to overlay order on the landscape, neatly placing people and things into groups to better understand where they fit, and as important, where they don’t. How can we really like octoroons and Pluto and lands which changed hands over millennia and protista when we can’t easily classify them? They are not to be trusted if they cannot be ordered. We resist chaos even as we relish watching as spectacle. At heart, we are disaster tourists, even as we cling to the ordering principles which shape our own lives and make them livable.

And we order the order erupting from chaos, labeling each into pre-configured categories aligning to current thinking. Everything in its right place. The more we order, the more we understand; the more we understand, the more we lay waste to wonder. Can one bound this chaos? Can one order this disorder? Can we understand and still remain in awe and wonder? Classified and organized and categorized, even the deified reified and taken without question, without the true rush of grandeur and turned into a set of daily living doctrines, no matter the inherent chaos, absurdity, and contradictions.

We pivot on the balance of order and chaos, precariously grasping onto the dividing lines between the light of being and the darkness of the unknown, climbing out of the cave of darkness but still amused by the firelight shadows flickering on the stone walls.


Originally published at theairconditionednightmaretoday.wordpress.com on September 9, 2018.

Ahren Lehnert

Ahren E. Lehnert is a native of Michigan and now lives in Oakland, California. He likes traveling, photography, and swimming.

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