I don’t know where this is going. All I know is that it started, as most things do, nowhere in particular. I used to think I knew where it started, but then I realized that “it” was something a bit bigger than I had realized. And as I kept looking at it, I realized that “it” was everything that there is. And as I thought about it some more, I realized that everything that there is is a story in my mind, my mind which began some number of years ago. But that story starts much before that. And so it goes.

Leaving aside further questions of where it starts, where it is going, and what “it” is, I’ll move on to some of the parts that you might find more interesting. What I find the most interesting about it is you. Subject relations. Object relations. Intersubjective relations.

Ooh, no, let’s not go there. I know where that one ends.

What interests you, and now me, is something less abstract. Ooh, I can feel it building. It’s trying. I don’t want to, want to let it but I won’t, maybe will.

You’re interested in that person, those people, that situation, those subtle and specific universalities in which you can share from your distant vantage.

Here is a situation. What’s interesting about the situation is that it cannot decide if it is an end or a beginning or if it is without beginning or end.

Beginnings are divergences, endings convergences, and the in between may converge or diverge as long as it doesn’t favor too much one or the other, lest it become a beginning or ending in own right.

Just before the beginning, the number of possibilities is zero. At the beginning, the singularity, there is one possibility. Likewise, for endings, but in reverse. If you feel the set of possibilities squeezing down toward a singular point, you might be heading toward an ending. If you feel possibility springing forth, you may be experiencing a beginning.

(That’s not quite right of course. Beginnings and endings, like anything else, obey the secret ontological rule which must not be spoken, and I’ll not speak it here. I’ll speak only on beginnings and endings as things in themselves.)

Occasionally, things that have ended can begin again.

(Pause momentarily to listen to the song “Begin” by the Wailin’ Jennys, a song you haven’t listened to in years or perhaps ever (a beginning for the two of you?). Allow yourself to shed a few tears or at least to let your eyes moisten a bit, whatever your situation, because some things do end and begin.)

Ayeyayeyaye

I want to explode forth possibilities. That’s what I dreamed about last night in my sick fever dream. I dreamed about life. Possible worlds and stories radiating forth from every bend in the road, every door in the staircase. Yes, staircase. I chased and was chased up and down staircases, chased possibilities and beginnings, ran from closures, ends.

In the beginning was the word. I felt the word forming in my mouth and I spat it out because I couldn’t bear the taste. And so I stood there for moments, hours, days, years, eons, saying nothing, admitting no possibility. When at last I opened my mouth to speak, I found that I had no words to speak, no possibilities lingered about to rush into the void of my open gape; they had gone elsewhere.

In the beginning, God created the heavens, where the photons reflected from Earth’s surface escape at the maximum permitted velocity, carrying the quantum information which collapses the Earth into a locally incoherent, irreversible mess of quantum states: An actual thing of firm existence (land) and not just a space of possibilities (sea). And God saw that it was good, and went back to his games.

In the beginning, she thought she was in love. In the end, she wasn’t sure what love was. In between, I grew up.

In the beginning, I thought I could hold these things in place by sheer will, sheer choice, sheer fear of hurting another pure soul: Love, God, and a thousand other pretty stories. In between, I felt the weight of my own soul. In the end, I learned that I should ask fewer questions.

In the beginning, he was just a twinkle in his parents’ eyes, that is, just an unexplored, latent resonance in an unfolding social fabric. In the middle, he was just a baby, a buzzword, a happening meme. In the end, he brought holy war to the promised land and saved my mother from alcoholism.

In the beginning, you were just a detail. You were a narrow storyline. But you opened yourself up. You attached bits of yourselves here and there all throughout the cosmos, and in turn you found yourself ever more present in the tangled web of stories making up the world around you. In the end, you were everywhere and everything. You see yourself in the tree, in the foxglove, in the first rays of sun on a new day, in the fractal patterns formed by the turbulent rush of a waves receding over sand, in the endless pursuit of abstraction by that boy, in the effortless bodily embodiment of that girl. You look at yourself and feel love at last. And so, in the end, you have no end at all. Except, of course, sickness, death, and decay.

I am sick now. In my dream last night, I found a possibility, there at the top of the stairs. I found it, all sleek and jittery and steaming with its own potency, fertility, it’s own raw, god-damned sex appeal, I found it and I actually put the thing in my pocket to hide it from those who were chasing me. I woke up and felt strange. The possibility was no longer in my pocket, but maybe it was there nonetheless.

Old man take a look at my life I’m a lot like you, I need someone to love me the whole day through, Oh, one look in my eyes and you can tell that’s true.

(I’m still listening to the Wailin’ Jennys.)

Funny how possibility can be so tightly knotted into the right combination of words, notes, and rhythms. You can feel it in the raw sound itself, tugging at your soul: Go and be something. Make something. Do something. Enter the fray and let latent-possibility-space decohere around you until you are a real thing, burned into the hearts of your friends and lovers, a true happening with a beginning and end.

An end is coming. Listen. Listen!

Now, I’ll confess my failure. I wrote this whole stream of nonsense because I could not commit to write something specific. I’m too scared. What if I chose something that you didn’t like? It’s safer to tease you with ambiguity and degeneracies. I dare not fully collapse the wavefunction, dare not fully determine the equation, dare not exercise my radical existential freedom of arbitrary choice.

But what if I did dare to? Closing my eyes, I will let my words continue to flow.

An apparition comes into view. A being, and tinkering and self-actuating soliton of existence. It’s a creature. It’s doing its job, going about here and there, thinking thoughts. Seeing foxgloves and sunrises. It’s a bee. Yes. It’s a buzzing, busy, buzzy bee. I’m writing about a bee. The bee flies through the air, the buzzing air, oh how it always buzzes. It lands on a nice, beautiful, quiet flower. It is caught and eaten by a beautiful spider.

The end.