Second Lesson: Sacred Definition

Sacred Definition- marking the edges

Where you end is my beginning. Discovering our edges, locating the thresholds of our extent in the world is a task which will preoccupy our entire lives. It is the beginning of inhabiting our Eden. It is a task which has not recently begun. Years back, you lay in your cot; your eyes played over the blurred images of shapes and forms around you. Six week old lenses were not yet able to crystallise and resolve the edges of the world around. They roam. They catch the dissolving form of your hand, waving in front of your face and the colourful splash of the cot mobile swinging above your head, placed tenderly by your parents. Your mind does not distinguish between the two. The cot mobile is not perceived ‘other’; you do not for another month perceive it as distinct from you. You are coterminous with the world- you extend, limitlessly, without boundary into space. There is no end to you; there is no you. Experience is simply a rushing stream of sensation, disconnected colour, noise, texture, pain, fear, safety. You fall, free fall, into time, plunging headlong through the deluge of unconnected unmediated, unrecognised experience. You are raw, piecemeal, atomised; you are becoming, you are joining yourself up, knitting the flow of experiences together into some primitive, crude thread. It breaks continually; the links are gone, the world dissolves once more into mere sea.

Slowly, over time, you learn to crystallise perception; your neural pathways recognise something familiar, already experienced. You hold it, relate to it, cling to it. Your world begins to solidify, take form. Slowly, its shape arrives upon you. Yet, you yourself are only arriving; slowly, solidifying, distinguishing, as a primitive narrative emerges from the blur. What difference is there between the blurred hand and the blurred coloured shape swirling in front of you? Only later do you understand one is of you and one is not. Only later, slowly, do you begin to apprehend a limit to that which you come to recognise as self. Only later do You come to mean. You are becoming.

Your end is my beginning. I must discover that I am not infinite. That I have boundaries, limits. Most crimes in the world originate from a failure to live within right limits. The theft of ideas, property or intimacy is a trespass beyond borders. Abuse is the brutal boot trampling down fragile, private buds; rape the coarse unbidden grasping of intimate fruit. Such trespass is not reserved to crude brutality. Casual indifference, careless feet walking over tentative plans or germinating ideas- the everyday acts of rushed people unaware or thoughtless to the foot prints they leave over the landscape.

‘Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those that trespass against us.’

I must learn to limit myself. The world is not mine to take or intrude on. The media must submit themselves to the limits of public space once again. The Facebook generation must be educated as to what they have lost within a decade: the history-long distinction between public and private space. What loss! I must learn what is sacred, what is profound, what is not to be given away.

Becoming undefended can only begin to occur once one becomes rightly defended.



(c) Simon P Walker 2011