Antifragile

"There is only one evil: disunity." - Pierre Tielhard de Chardin 

In Gaiman's Endless, there was once a nightmare that escaped in Dream's absence that wreaked havoc in the dream world. It is one form of metaphysical monism that assimilated everything organic unto itself, and Cain had let it out into the kingdom. The story revolves around how Dream, having just gotten back from being wrongfully summoned, controlled it again, not without considerable damage to everything he has.

I have no object permance or ontological security, up until now. I didn't get to develop it when I was supposed to, and it resolved into separation anxiety when I was older. I remember I would cry my 2nd-grader eyes out when my mother would leave me in school for the day. This persisted until 4th grade. That is why when I read that Gaiman story, it spoke volumes to me - dare I say it - in feeling, in primordial fear, and not in words. "This is what God must feel like," I remember thinking. "This is why Hegel's God exists. It cannot be alone unto itself, and therefore had to splinter his conciousness into human form so as to return to itself, having thus known that it is not alone."

The engine that drives having no ontological security is this fear of being alone, of being rejected, of being left behind where one always already is. It is a crack that turned into an abyss when you weren't looking, for it yawned bigger as you grew up. And since every fear harbors a desire, the concommitant want is not only to be with, but be - to not be alone, to not be oneself, to eradicate all traces of absence and master it the way a lover masters seduction. The way out of this abyss, furthermore, is one of the truly impossible things in the world - it requires a bridge to be built by the very feet crossing it at that exact moment.

At that exact moment: this is, after all, a problem of persistence of identity in time. That is why some people resist change, for it requires little deaths, and that which persists over these deaths is the very thing questionable. "We are still here," Morpheus in The Matrix have shouted, but Locke would ask: "As what?"

This is precisely why the concept of that which is antifragile exists, as a polar opposite to the ontologically insecure. It is to exist as something stronger because of that which stresses it, not only surviving, but becoming. That is why antifragile things speak to the soul: for they, if we were to believe Plato, are the things closest to the perfection of the ideal soul, nearly changeless, or in this case, having been broken, is now henceforth indestructible.


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