You only need two points for a line, you only need a line for two horizons. It does not take much to draw an image of ‘all there is’. And yet, while all that matters plays out somewhere between the primordial soup and heat death, there is more to the art of choosing the points of the beginning and of the end in order to give a robust impression of completeness, the satisfaction of grasping a totality, of sliding smoothly from A to B, from edge to edge, and back again. The ease of this moving-between would need for one of these well-chosen points to be a point of attraction, while the other one, like the sun, of propulsion, expansion. They wouldn’t be symmetrical. Beginnings and endings are very different things. The satisfaction would then be something like letting yourself float in a river, being pulled by its stream: an image of ‘nonsubstantial’ thought, all clarity and distinction.
But then again, between two points there is always an interval. We’re unable to leap from A to B, and instead must always ‘pass between’. This necessity of the interval, the transit, seems to be ‘substance’, the stuffness, which slows down the movement, introducing a certain viscosity. We can’t just jump from A to B, because then B just would be A, and neither would we have moved, but neither would we have had any reason to. But we only move from A to B if A propels us to B, and B attracts us from A. The transit, then, is not anything. Yet, insofar as it unfolds qualitative distinctions that allow there to be a multitude of terms to move between, it is absolutely necessary. This textured interval can’t even be thought of as the matter of thought, insofar as the matter would be the A and the B. But, owing to its establishment of gravity wells and velocities and directions, can’t be a mere context or passive medium either.
It would seem, then, that even though thought is free to make and unmake distinctions at will, carve regions and encapsulate totalities, even ‘everything that is’, these regions and totalities must negotiate their expanses with some dark and ineffable liquid that not only organizes the direction, but also introduces an ever-multiplying micro-history based on the traversal of these boundaries and borders that thought itself establishes with its endless play. Thought always borrows from this texture but can’t repay this debt, as it doesn’t preserve the coinage once the transport has been accomplished. This itself suggests a direction, one in which time may be increasingly running out – but for whom? Would it be just, then, to say that we are all destined to float towards a singular point of attraction – our own death – which engulfs not only our life but also our thought. Or are we ourselves capable of cutting our own deals with the dark liquid, or at least producing our own turbulence, while we perform our transports, in order to slingshot ourselves beyond the gravity of our destinations, and chart new courses? In any case, if such acts of freedom and novelty are possible, they are not made possible by thought’s demarcation of regions, its dotting of points and tracing of lines. They would instead be made possible by that which makes thought wait, that which says that for any two points, no matter how proximal, no matter how short the line, no matter how inevitably and fatefully one follows the other, in order that they be two points at all, one must undergo a commute.