apodictic

The ground on which my words were founded foundered. The descriptions and depictions had become unpredictable; I panicked; I portended aporia and predicted apocalypse: I espoused a doubt leading only to the conclusion that is the end, and by no means could I reach it.

One word of truth, firm, not relative! Or even an apophthegm, a didactic maxim. Can no one show me the way? Quick, apodeixis: an absolute proof. Where may I find it? Not in Metaxa or 80-proof Absolut. And not, for goodness’ sake, in apocope. No, say, in what disrobing room of the mind, what apodyterium of the brain’s bath-house, may what had been rooted and descending as a p turn and, abruptly apogeotropic, ascend as a d so that we may say “I see, I see”?

Do I decrypt the apocrypha, or pick up a dictionary? How is it that I may expect direction? I look away and find “away”, Greek apo, but it is already getting away from me: this “way” may mean “very”. Show me the way, then? It is the “way showing”: apodicticus, ἀποδεικτικός, established in incontrovertible evidence and thus truth of an adamantine nature: apodictic.

Yes, bedrock, a certainty particularly applicable to the purest of mathematics. Nothing moves, nothing is relative. But in bits linguistic, this is an impudent trick, a dupe; I appeal to apodioxis, the rejection of assertions as absurd. Language is polymorphous perverse, a social creation, and communication is a particular copulation of solipsistic consciousnesses. The frames of reference are never identical, the perspectives and experiences incommensurate. It is between these irreconcilables that the contact occurs, requiring respect and cooperation, at least enough to accept the phones or pixels as indexes of schemata and deixes to extending intentions. The apodictic must perforce by apomictic: an asexual reproduction, which is to say, a single source undilute, a parthenogenesis. In place of agape, apogamy. Incontrovertible because untouchable.

Purity is not the way of the word. One cannot create without loss and cross-contamination. In the tears excited by every apodacrytic exists a successful succubus. When you seek the way, you see not one, not strait, nor straight, but two roads, diverging because converging (diachronic misdirection?). And can you have genesis without disingenuousness? I will not speak here of apophasis.

As the smoke cleared and I caught a glimpse of my psychopomp, I knew that my search was not over but away. In language we stand not on rock; we are all pulling up each other’s bootstraps, and who knows where in time and space is the basis. So preempt the apodictic, and at its temple pronounce your apopemptic: a hymn of farewell, not to what never was but to the hope you kept. One is too lonely a number in any case.

I dropped the rock I had picked up; my doppelganger pocketed it. And that was where we stood. Our ground was what we held in common, or one after the other. I knew that he knew that I knew that he knew that I knew that the matter of facts was hypotactic, embedded, subordinate, turtles all the way down. In the beginning was the word, but you cannot find the beginning of words. We made our exit into the dappled crepuscule: it was evening out.