“My sources link the ultimate goal’s path to reason. He only realizes when logic & empathy are his only credible angle of nuance; the leader’s first discretion is the gravity of the better part of his valor and the next is a step-sequence in which he keeps a wavelength of himself, keeping the pretense of civility, as he had now kept it all for keeps.” I know him as my grandfather James Modest, a good but repetitive judge, who used to know the scientific method – once again saves humanities faith in human nature; an epoch of better legislation cascades forward, a brave new beginning to a new era emerges, and its all due his last ruling as a retiring Justice.

I was 18 years of age and despite how I trusted my gut, I held on to a pit in my belly, seeing it for the first time: a sculptured-bust of my grandfather’s candid grin made in 1981 with “heritage festivals” sculpted on both of the ends in honor of Modest. The moment framed the long-form picture of my baccalaureates program of study with no hard-and-fast rules. In an age when it remains the “status quo” to sell the information that our elders and betters “sold to someone else” and that much should’ve “taught us by now,” I remind myself of this day, fondly & forever, as it remains as the harmony made for the aim of “chasing, achieving, and displaying my ideal”. My consistent motive is to search for answers without realization-failures for making my first and only philosophy to be founded on the Higher, “capital T” Truth as it now remains my only (remaining) option.

Modest passionately defends the school’s cognitive beginnings, but more importantly all we can see is more downstream changes, falling as they domino off of one another, putting more dualities to rest by interpretation from his Abstract-eon Bridge, quintessentially by way of his clever reinterpretation of the Min/Max Theorem, discovered long before he was even born. But here we remain phase-locked to, in fact, believe more frequencies remain unknown to our conditions of prophecy – to which we owe the 21st century its freedom, only of a chosen generation that was destined to decide before and against the odds if and how to continue the great fight to secure either our truth or our survival. The truth is, we are mortals alive to live life for forever in a world of Either/ORs.

“When changed, nothing can change the truth back to where it began,” were her first words to me in class on that first day; yet, it reminded me of the rebel in my bones meeting me half way – how I imagined the idea of Love leaving claw-marks on me for the first time, was now no longer just a fear, it even showed its teeth.

By Jasmin Ivankovic