A Great Converging

So yeah, I guess I would say that the major discovery of the week has been my sheer indolence. I mean, I used to be way more critical of people who spent all their time loafing around, but I'm not much better.

And I would say that you're to blame, and you know what you are and what you do and why we have to speak on terms like this. But I'm not angry, because it is a mutual sort of thing, and it's natural that two separate, discrete forces in the universe must lend just as much as it borrows. Then what is the nature of this relationship? Why do I eat fire and why does it eat me and why are neither of us particularly concerned with the inherent danger of such an arrangement?

But the problem is that it wasn't very much arranged. To say that I arranged these circumstances—put my bed here, put my chair there, read this book then, drank this soda yesterday—would be correct. But to say that the everyday flow of fate is predetermined by my very actions, that, indeed, the next steps I take are connected to the last ones I took seems to be simplistic point of view. It's much more accurate to say that the natural happenings of life arrange themselves. Take the sand in an hourglass. As they fall, they don't say, "There. I shall occupy that place and name it and take it and make it mine forever." Instead, they close their eyes (or would close them, had they any) and fall. The fall itself is the blessed thing, the natural warping of a soul's fatespun thread as it is woven through time. Felix culpa! Beautifully, the grains fall one after another, arranging themselves not through some patterned, rigid order from above, but by the natural, simplicity of falling.

To intellectualize it further does nothing to enhance our appreciate of the fall. As writers, we cannot be satisfied with how sharply we have honed our mind's knife. We must reassemble that which we have so precisely taken apart, transforming it, transmuting it from what it was into what it could be. Possibility, the imaginative faculty of which we alone bear witness, must be our creed. Once we embrace this realization, the future becomes a hazed cloud of odds, a crapshoot of whether or not to be. But this, too, is beautiful. Jeder Engel ist schrecklich.

Soon we will see the infinite expansion of the canvas, the never-ending poem, the song written for sixty horns, the meandering of the stroke upon the subject. And I look forward to this, because this is how I feel more comfortable embracing the world. Before, they called it detail, called it division. But this division is inflation, is duplication of the very natural and extrapolating the "perhaps" to its further limit. I don't think there is a nobler pursuit for the artist than this.

I feel this way because of the world around me. It, too, has not decided upon its own path. It has merely tumbled through countless possibilities to arrive exactly where it is.

And I don't want to link this to the now, because as far as I'm concerned, this should have always been the goal; it just hasn't become explicitly possible until now. So I think I'm going to seize this chance and hope that I make it out alive.

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