Ashes

It is hard for me to know what moves around me in any other way than what I have been taught. Description clouds the opposite horizon, which is always the identical horizon, nothing other than itself recognizing us in consciousness. But we are pulled apart in determining our own differences. Words and bodies are the real retardation, facing both inward and outward like Janus clumsily trying to maintain a fragile balance; self-regulation, not mimicry or blind trial and error, but awareness of our own turning and reflections. We don’t have any direction at all except what is our own, though we may not recognize it, and the world has borne us as fruit, and the knowledge it holds, so we carry mirrors in our souls wherever we walk. How can we say one is blessed, another cursed? The differentiation is momentary, cosmic only in its hilarity. Stars are bursting and collapsing as I write. Perhaps if we were to retreat to a place without any light at all, we might defy a contradiction, take the next dusty step.
‘The new facts made imperative a new examination of all past history. Then it was seen that all past history was the history of class struggles; that these warring classes of society are always the products of the modes of production and of exchange — in a word, of the economic conditions of their time; that the economic structure of society always furnishes the real basis, starting from which we can alone work out the ultimate explanation of the whole superstructure of juridical and political institutions as well as of the religious, philosophical, and other ideas of a given historical period. But now idealism was driven from its last refuge, the philosophy of history; now a materialistic treatment of history was propounded, and a method found of explaining man’s “knowing” by his “being”, instead of, as heretofore, his “being” by his “knowing”.’ Engels, Letters