Serving Kant

On a priori truth and looking at the moon. 

By Duda Kovarsky Rotta

Illustration by Justin Chen

Read while listening to Billie Holiday's I’ll Be Seeing You. 

Ever since I spent a semester reading Kant's Critique of Pure Reason for class, that Prussian virgin's words have loitered in my mind. The thick Critique weighed heavy on my bag from class to class, and on my peregrinations to see the woman I love. 

Over the course of our medium-distance New York-Boston relationship, we took turns purchasing countless $15 bus tickets to spend weekends together. I befriended the bus driver, a middle-aged Asian man with a mohawk who manages to eat chips, scroll on his phone, while still driving the decrepit bus. Mohawk Man was the charioteer who took me there and brought her here. One time, I waited with flowers at the usual stop and when he opened the door he grinned, “For me?” 

Sitting on her bed, she'd fall asleep on my shoulder as I battled with Immanuel over his tepidly unintelligible prose—she'd chime in with the charming Cunt/Kant pun throughout the semester. Every once in a while, she'd ask me what a chapter was about, and I'd adopt a monotone reading of the seemingly unrelated string of words Kant proliferated: the transcendental idealism, the empirical realism, and the things-in-themselves that are not appearances in space and time, of which are not objective, but instead, a priori forms of intuition. She would gently interrupt me, “Okay,” and go back to quietly playing the guitar as my background music. 

Kant finished this brick of a book at 57 years old, and I wondered often why he even started writing it. Was it the seduction of being brilliant? Had he no whimsy or hobbies? Did his alleged celibacy give him too much time? Then, flipping aimlessly through his infinite categorizations, it dawned on me: This book is about a lonely man being haunted by reason, and is anxiously systemizing everything he knows in order to find something truthful, somewhere. I took every opportunity I had to complain about Kant, and yet, I discovered we were afflicted by the same demise: how far can reason go? 

The woman I love lives far away and will move farther. Soon, Reason might abandon us: I will not be able to impulsively get on a bus and see her five hours later. I will have to get a bus to the airport, get a ticket, and fly across the country. Among palm trees and blue skies and hard work, she’ll be watched over by the three Californian Joans—Mitchell, Didion, Baez. I can see her there, moved by the heat of the noon sun and the interminable fire she has within her. She's chasing her childhood dream of being a rockstar—how could she not do it? 

But for now, we are both still on this coast. I had been reading Kant when we had the inevitable, dreaded conversation fueled by the question: What will we do? Will we adapt to this new, longer distance? 

I wondered if Kant would tell me this question could be answered by Reason. In the anguish of imagining a future without her, I needed a fix of something beyond the empirical; to vulgarize Kant's terms, an a priori truth. I needed something unattached to experience, unchangeable and independent. A promise that everything would remain, and that there would be no distance too wide, no time too long. 

I resented Kant for arriving at an answer that took me much longer: that there are places where reason cannot go. That there are situations—like a long distance becoming longer—that are completely a posteriori. Experience must barge over us and run its course, proving everything we thought we knew to be entirely something else. 

I don't know where the answers will come from. It might be from Kant, buried alone in the cold Kronisburg. It might come from Mohawk Man, and his chariot. It might come from my father, a devout believer that all things must pass, or from her mother, who saved her own life and meditates everyday, picturing herself as she wants to be. It might come from the daily bread of saying te amo, it might come from buying endless stamps for postcards, or the grand moments of celebration. It might come from the Philosophy of History, or the next song she writes. It might come from the mere image of us driving down the coast, with Morrison's drunk voice singing to us about the city of night and fire and the women of Los Angeles. It might come from letting time pass. It might be a mystery, it might be an ecstasy, it is certainly a rarity. 

I hope you’ll forgive me if I desert you, dear reader, and address her. 

Meu bem, there are places where reason cannot go, and yet, look at the gentle and generous history we have created alongside each other. I just want you to lead me in my graceless dancing, and hear Lady Day ringing true: I’ll be looking at the moon, but I’ll be seeing you.