Thoughts

Vast Contradictions, Dec. 2011

What contradictions there are in the world.

Someone I care about very much is in a place that has been characterized by poverty, malnourishment, armed conflict, systematic rape, and years upon years of exploitation and oppression primarily by outsiders. And then there is this—the search for worlds and ideas far beyond ourselves.

This slideshow, combined with things I’ve been writing and thinking about lately, reinforced like nothing else for me that life is vast, beautiful, terrifying, confounding, and utterly incoherent.

Photo: Michael Benson/NASA/European Space Agency - Pictured: Jupter's Moon Europa floating in front of Jupiter's massive "Great Red Spot" storm system

“I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction.”
—Georges Bataille

“That the sun will not rise tomorrow is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no more contradiction, than the affirmation, that it will rise.”
—David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

“Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.”
—Gilbert K. Chesterton

By Alexis

Alexis Clements is a writer and filmmaker based in Brooklyn, NY. Her creative work has been published, produced, and screened in venues across the US, Europe, and South America. Her feature-length documentary film, All We’ve Got, premiered in the fall of 2019 in New York City and has since screened around the US and internationally. Her play Unknown also premiered in October 2019 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Other plays of hers have been produced, published, and anthologized across the US and the UK over the past two decades. Her prose writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Guardian, Bitch Magazine, American Theatre, The Brooklyn Rail, and Nature, among others, and she is a regular contributor to Hyperallergic. In addition to her writing and filmmaking, she is currently serving on the Executive Board of CLAGS, the Center for LGBTQ Studies at the City University of New York (CUNY), as a Coordinator at the Lesbian Herstory Archives, and a co-founder of Little Rainbows, a queer story time for children and their caretakers.

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