Red

What is red?

You might as well ask: what is pain?Everything is red.

Point to it, if you can't name it. Are you a monist, then?

And you wonder to yourself if philosophy will get you there. Everything is infused by that light, sinks into it, is understood in relation to it-insofar as it can be understood. There, you might ask: what is inner, what is outer?There, time is obliterated. You fell into my arms and time stood still. But one also falls out of love. And when the moment has passed, time stands still again.

Attentiveness: the more you look, the more you see what is missing...who is missing.

This, the world, full of cluttered images, that makes sense against the background work. The world is not just the world of fact but one of objects of love and life is not just a re-arranging of the objects but the desire and the ability, the human ability, the quintessential human capacity, to take a step out of the room and look at it from another angle, to see something in the spaces between the ordinary. Orientation is everything. It colours our perceptions. Here, there is no looking 'objectively' but a looking with justice and a loving glance.

And here we can be mistaken..deception and illusion is always with us; this is a task, not an accomplished or achieved state of being. Neither thought nor deed, but instead an infinite goal..necessary fallibility, the fragility of goodness, a responsible freedom. Bewildered by a dazzling soul, we wonder if this is the first moment or the last, whether I am in you , or you in me, whether it is day or night.

We see things in a new light, there's a change of key, the voice becomes gentler, some clothes start to fit.

What is red?

Have you forgotten? Why not consider red as an ideal end-point, as a concept infinitely to be learned, as an individual object of love.


Shortly after meeting Hannah Arendt, Heidegger wrote: "The demonic has struck me. Nothing like this has ever happened to me. In the rainstorm on the way home, you were even more beautiful and impressive. I should have liked to wander with you for nights on end".
--Courtesy of Roxana