Infinity

                                                                                                      Infinity made imaginable.
                               
                                                                                                                COLERIDGE						

                                                             I







You can begin with the usual suspects,
a series of ones and zeroes, by imaging these things
either infinitely close or infinitely far away—
I mean even dead space has its moments.
Just as we live for the most part a little closer to home
amid all these vestigial thumbs, and electrical impulses...
According to Steven Johnson, in Interface Culture, "It would see the world
the way a poet does: a world teeming with associations, minglings, continuities."
Yes and no. From our perspective this is neither here nor there but rather a far more
commodious and uncertain blend of the two, a pretty iffy proposition at best. I am
nothing if not electrical, too, waxing both positive and negative at the same time, often in
the most inappropriate moments, yet somehow still managing to stay afloat in all of this:
A whirling half-wit wedded to a more or less commnon afterthought.
I need to keep moving and I must have more space. So, please forgive my intrusion.
I mean nothing by it. Or next to nothing. Let's just see, here, where the mud
starts to stick. "Shaftoe walks towards snow and trees" (Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon).
							
							
Should we be pursuing, then, something that is building in complexity
or simplicity, or is this the wrong way of looking at most things? 
I think I am beginning to harbor a few doubts. I want to take 
these hours and minutes and seconds and parse them out 
as cleanly as possible 
and string them into smaller
and smaller units then larger, and so on,
until finally I've begun to make many of their distinctions my own.
							
							
In fact, upon arriving almost anywhere, we speak most often emphatically
about being bone dry, or else compounded, not by anything the least bit
relativistic, but knotted nonetheless. And not about to be appeased in any way.
And so it was, somewhat splintered by its own appearance, and looking
for a safe place, though all the while never completely domesticated
but never truncated either, we could never really read anything
by or from this. It was too much like a dream, although some
were still moving sideways, and some up and down.
And so forth.
But there was never any doubt as to the outcome.
You could set it under any cloud, or edge.
We were all more or less present in abundance.
And nothing anyone could say about it 
or do about it
was ever going to matter
ever again. No matter how good or bad an idea this was.
That wasn't going to have any effect on any of this.
At times all of this seemed mostly like quicksilver,
or bells–
a somnambulistic quilting
or some stiffening of fact in defiance,
of something all that much more gracious, yet unyielding, but meant for us.
Although it was never meant to snow, here, in the first place.
							
							
Just as there was never going to be another soundbyte
like this one anywhere else. In Feed, Keith Gessen writes that
"selling out" has never been so sexy: "Gone are the gray spiritual
scars, one almost thinks that these are simply poets..." Yet not simply
enough to warrent our being here finally. What matters, incontrovertibly,
can more or less zip up one cheek and down the other, like a quantum series, or tree,
or the shadow of a tree, each perhaps bending over this page, or another just like it like a
thin cloud, all set at once to either parse or unsettle, to sing or to unsing our praises–
so just what do we mean by infinity after all? Some semi-pristine advent of first particles, maybe,
instead of admitting we had little idea at all about what infinity might actually really mean,
except for the places where the tape was completely missing, where you could still see the torn
spot where the tape itself had tried to remain stationary, but to no real purpose, except for
the plain and simple fact of simply clinging, and who cannot fully respect this? It is a condition
of the future that we cannot ever completely knuckle under any of this to begin with having
always so much more to do, with ourselves and each other, and every thing else. And yet
the moment itself always seems a little flushed, and uncertain, but eager as always
to move on, to the next fulsome horizon, if only to complain that it had absolutely no business
trying to circumnavigate so many pretty shaky and inquisitive stars in the first place.
In fact, I'm all for letting them be. But I'm still taking dead aim. I'm trying to make of their borders
the same dissolution the sea tries to make of the air, the same rents, and half passages, and the
seemingly dynamic interplay of light on light, dark on dark, and so on.

							

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