Hamartia is a lack. A negation. An absence. It is not a sin. It is the absence of landing in the right place, evading ones spot, presuming the spot, or target, was important enough to be hit originally.
The New Testament writers are correct: it is a wide landing, a missing of the proverbial bull’s-eye but the landing in itself implies a landing still.
But what if a ricochet occurs, and not only is the mark missed wide, but what if the “it” never lands? What if “it” transgresses infinity?
What if the hamartia never finds a home. What if what one was doing finds oneself in the place of undoing and the undoing just “is” because the hamartia remains in orbit…encircling everything but never finding anything?
One can peer into the abyssopelagic contours that contain the constant ringing of the hamartia that eternally misses. One can stare into the obsidian destitution that contains a plethora of cascading lights.
But the lights never shine on anything. They only illumine themselves. They are nothing but silent noise. Sparkles of madness.
The hamartia just rings through the halls of infinity.
Hamartia, typically translated “sin” doesn’t have to mean its translation. It can just mean landing elsewhere, even if elsewhere is nowhere. Its precise determination as a resting place that alluded its object.
The object is empty.
But suppose this is not the result of the carrier of hamartia. Suppose it’s a mark missed even when it was attempted to be hit with precision, care and a dream that burned hot until it incinerated its own content; content that turned into Thomistc straw.
Suppose hamartia is the most intended unintentional thing that has ever happened. Suppose volition meets boundlessness and the boundaries become forever blurred. Suppose this happens and it takes itself nowhere even as it misses the place that used to be somewhere.
Hamartia, viewed in this realm, is not the transgression of an originary command or the lack of following the rules of Paul’s Christ. It is, rather, the eternal recurrence of unintended return that starts but has no end. Its end and its beginning is its own endlessness.
There is nothing that can be done about; it just Is. This is the sin that cannot be forgiven because forgiveness is a someplace that cannot hold the no-place. The mark is missed; Pandora refuses her box.
There is nothing more hamartirian than missing wide, landing nowhere and exceeding the balm of forgiveness that disguises no place as placed.
It is the deepest agony. The most profound sense of purposelessness. The ambiguity of ontological ambiguousness.
It is the burning of a thousand hells within, around and enveloping this hamartia because even hell spits it back out when it tries to land. This hamartia finds noplace, not even in the place where God is absent.
The Dark night of the soul is what they call it. The shade of St. John of the Cross patiently offering his silhouette. It is the night that outshines the sun.
Hamartia: the paralysis of going nowhere but having to be somewhere or the somewhere that is the nowhere. The mark that is missed because it can never be hit.
The disenchantment of totem objects decorating the sacred halls that no longer contain the element of the taboo…and lacking this…so too do they now lack our concern, let alone a concern that is ultimate.
The Nakedness of God revealed in the insulation that can no longer warm the heavens.
But all of this could be avoided if the hamartia had never occurred at the originary moment of its release. If the bow of Heracles had never been pulled back and caught in the cross hairs of the Christ.
What if the allure, the whispering from out of the closet, had…
rather than wandering on this Yellow Brick Road?
Ah…the hamartia, the beguiling moment that is never found because it never could be on this journey…the ricochet that never rests. The existent non-existent allurement of the thing that presses itself into creation without having any weight.
Hamartia being lost in a sea of woods, drowning in the idea that will never be thought, on the trip that leads to no place, captured in the words that do not matter and laughing at us from out of the darkness in which no one resides…
At the dream that should have never been dreamt.
This is the REAL Fault in our Stars.
