The Splendor Of Interrelation

What do you with a book that wants to be a world? How does one even begin to write such a book? It would be a book of infinite details, fragments, miniatures, dark circles, crazy oblongs, sad ruminant cows in Chilean rain, creaking floorboards, busy carpets, old sagging couches, abandoned Colorado silver mines, a surface of brilliant particulars. Shoreless undercurrents and tropical interiors. The invisible and interior sphere of consciousness in which everything has a ghostly conviction. Whoever, in this context, senses our destiny crumbling, will yearn for a sky of shimmering air in which to write themselves into being. Something, you don’t know what, is creeping toward the window in total silence. A formless presence craving texture and meaning. Wires and shapes. Fulfillment and blood.  Typhoons and arks. A book. Unfettered and curious and busy with life and death.

I saw the smallest insect I have ever seen walking in circles on my Patient's Guide: Preparing for Your Eye Surgery. It would be so easy to crush it with my index finger. But there was no reason to do so, and I have an aversion to killing things, particularly when the situation doesn't merit execution. It disappeared quite fast, and might’ve been an aphid, or a booklouse, which are found around old books, and are pale, prefer high humidity, and feed on microscopic mold, necromantic writing, and extravagant theories concerning the underworld. What if, I imagined, I did kill it, and what if the equilibrium of the universe teetered on this tiny little being? Size isn’t always proportionate to importance. A tiny aphid contains roughly 10 quintillion atoms. That’s a universe. Or at least a galaxy. Someone acutely perceptive might – as William Blake put it – “see a world in a grain of sand / And a heaven in a wild flower, / Hold infinity in the palm of your hand. / And eternity in an hour.” Science and poetry promote epistemes contrary to one another, but when their observations converge, the result can be startling.

The day my father told me that there is more empty space in a lead ingot than actual lead, it changed my perception of the universe forever. On an atomic scale, an ingot of lead is almost entirely empty space. And somewhere Kerouac writes that it is simply incredible that he does not fall through the ground on which he walks, so insubstantial is everything. Material is largely immaterial. The manifestation of the universe, of microbes and bathrobes and earlobes and jittery arachnophobes, of lobsters and crabs and oysters and unassuming coelacanths, of stars and planets and asteroids and nebulae and black holes and gas pumps and hydraulic lifts in greasy garages, gravitational waves and cracked mirrors in Siberian rest rooms, forests and castles and roulette wheels in Monaco, nations and dalmatians and squishy slugs and mushrooms, faucets and facets and the glitter of diamonds in a jewelry store display case, are all illusory. Reality is elsewhere.

Which is what words are: ingots of air. Concepts costumed in phonemes. The unreality of words is right at the surface. Words are inherently hallucinatory. “Sound exists only when it is going out of existence,” said Walter Ong. “It is not perishable but essentially evanescent, and it is sensed as evanescent.”

What are the implications of this? Implications are folds and it’s by unfolding them that their content overflows, and spirals into an unfettered plurality, which is where we find the splendor of interrelation.