Deeply Borgesian
"Yet say ye, Why? doth not the son bear the iniquity of the father? When the son hath done that which is lawful and right, and hath kept all my statutes, and hath done them, he shall surely live." Ezekiel 18:19
Was it in some liminal twilight that our forebears tweeted that same perennial argument in which we now find ourselves embroiled, doomed to repeat the same talking points, rehearsing arguments which others have also rehearsed on facebook, somethingawful, livejournal, AIM, usenet
There are exactly two kinds of people in the world, those who take my position in this fight, and those who take yours, and at times it seems that the specifics of the disagreement are less important than the fact that you speak, and I oppose you. A good war can hallow any cause
But as I furiously googled for essays and academic papers to bolster my increasingly tenuous claims, building my castle of logic and evidence, I chanced upon an archive of a tweet that your grandfather had made, in which he had taken the same stance where I found myself now
It was a curious twist of fate that neither you nor he had chosen anonymity on a platform that allows it, and I was at first struck that you shared a family name, and upon further searching I realized also that he had argued against my grandfather, whose alias was known to me
Abdul Qadir Gilani, in his Book of the Secret of Secrets and the Manifestation of Light, wrote his famous maxim that every tweet is a dagger. After so many bitter ripostes and emotional language, could I trust you enough to share this unexpected connection?
I found that I had forgotten entirely the materials of our dispute, after seeing myself reflected in you, in a past version of you, and likewise your own past reflected in me.
As I read through those internet archives from decades ago, I realized that in a past generation, we were mutuals, maybe even friends, and I recognized that our argument should end the same way that theirs had, with a promise of a future one.
What can we make of men who conduct the same argument with each other, over and over, but that they enjoy each other's company after all? Is eternal recurrence is a relation between a man and his fate? Or is it a tendency shared between father and son?
