The Lunar Eclipse

Continuing our exploration into inquiry and existence, from coitus to conflict.

Under the blood-red moon, we are sanguine. But it will offer only a few moments of insight. We have been shown the way of sublation. We cannot go back to seeing only painted moonlight.

There is the moonlight, which we once thought tugged the tides. There is the umbra, which challenges the moonlight in conflict. And there is the penumbra, in which something novel is revealed, offering an omen for our becoming. But we would never have gained the gift of insight if the shadow had not challenged the light and spilled penumbral blood.

This is conflictual inquiry, which differs from coital inquiry.

With coital inquiry, questions and answers beget questions and answers. With conflictual inquiry, a proposition and its negation are at war, but the war’s resolution reveals a greater unity.

An answer awaits in superposition.

This process, too, is open-ended, unfolding within The Fractal of Unanswerable Questions.

One day, the Empiricist and the Rationalist found each other at the Inn, drunk and belligerent. The Empiricist cried: “There is only that which we observe, and we are locked within our observations.” The Rationalist cried: “Reason is the architecture of abstraction, and we are free to reveal the world’s design.” They met with their pistols on the dueling field and took ten steps before turning to fire.

Each one’s bullet struck the other, and both were dead.