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So for those who are mad "why" is really a tragic word -- a soft articulation of the tragic -- it has a tragic sound. Not because events don't have a meaning (I believe they always and everywhere offer up meaning for whoever seeks it) but because the meaning so often can't be used. It seems to point outward to the transcendent place that is outside even "outside" or that extends beyond "extension" itself. Take something like the death of an innocent person, say that young woman in Iran, whose death a cellphone recorded.
The sane shake their heads and move on. But the mad brood over it.
They can't shake it. The event is like a string tied to something we are aware of but can't see. The string leads out of history to another dark and intuited place. A "place" with no place in the world.
"She is in heaven." What is heaven? Is heaven just the lumber room where everything is stored that doesn't fit elsewhere? No. It has an order of its own. How do we know that? How do we infer its having an order? We know this because "order" itself is one of those things that is always being killed in history. It is killed yet it survives and so must have a "place" to survive. So the transcendent itself must be ordered and orderly.
And the tragic part of this is that all the wonderful things that are killed and yet survive cannot survive here. We are here and everything we love is elsewhere. We can't let them go and move on because there is no place we would want to move that doesn't contain them. They pull us out of the world. They seem to make life impossible.
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Now you ask the mad to get over this vast melancholy and move on. But they say no. They seem to insist on staying where they are.
What is the "why" of this?
Surely the best reason is the most obvious -- the melancholy contains a deep joy that no one who feels it can relinquish. It is like a little lane through the broken glass into the things that most matter. The core of the "why". The sustained land of what is intrinsic and beautiful and completely useless.
"Reason not the need".
But the sane rub their hands and worry, saying: you must go on. You must live. You must move forward.
And the mad are forced to see the logic of this. It seems that reality doesn't stop. It too is transcendent. There is something transcendent about history itself, always picking itself up and moving on past disaster.
Itself full of tragic gestures.
So we pick ourselves up too. We move on. We move on a little bit but never completely.
If we should break a little bit while we are moving then the poor people who love us will need to follow that breakage to its "place". The place where the breakage is stored.
Always asking this question: where is why?
I sometimes feel that in some way this place is impossible to describe to those who don't believe in God. They can continue not to believe but then can never understand this place. This storage and what it stores.
They will call it absurd and thus substitute a word for an understanding.
It exists or it doesn't.
But if it exists then humans can run away. But it never runs away.
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