Ante Absentiam
Automatic typing to prince charming, if he still remembers
An imperceptible alien light glows for aeons, more than aeons, it shines for eternity; glittering. Timeless. A glistening, clear glowing disk, suspended in absolute stillness. Formlessness, pure absence, ante absentiam. From nothing it came, and nothing it remained, until, in a moment, in an instant, it found its opposition, which it needed and needs to determine its completion. Nothing was enough. The impercitable became valuable, and what was once crystal clear grew foggy. Vacancy began coagulating.
On the seventh day, as they say, the infinite absence congealed, turned black, then white, red, blue, violet, and, at the very end, gray. Color emerged from transparency. From ante absentiam, came shape and distance. From shape and distance, came time and space. From time and space, came measurement and definition. From measurement and definition came use, parts, and mechanisms. From infinity came eternal difference. From clarity: light, then shadow, and in the shadow, we learn to develop sensory awareness. In the darkness, we learn to speak.
All the while, once upon a time, as clarity gave, and continues to give, condensing and clotting, modifying and replicating itself, scar tissue in space, processing into haze, vapor, dust and hydrogen spheres, slowly it found and finds itself empty, emptier still, as if it had always been that way — inverted — looking into a mirror reflection, a picture of itself, mutilated and dissected into so many billions of discrete, incompatible parts.
The more it created, the more it sensed itself to be nothing but mere surface — a mirage, an image — a reflection of all the pieces and shapes it had excreted. In this reflection, it sensed only a small fragment: a reduced and finite measurement of its former formlessness; as if it were two-dimensions, when really, it was three; as if it were a solitary entity, when really, it were many. So lost in the image of creation, did the absence finally escape, peering deeper into what it had made, transfixed by finding itself again, discovering how seemingly limitless were the permutations possible in creation.
The more it searched and observed, the more it poured itself out. The more it refined its essence into hardened, swelling substance, the more disparate it became. The further it was pulled apart.
Debt was made when clarity became elementary — the same way we owe everything to what came before, and this karma can never find restitution. The absolute inability to square the difference is the what sustains the wave of time and space, recycling. It's the exchange that gets closest to equality. The oscillations of giving and receiving, pouring and swallowing, contracting and expanding, decaying and blossoming, ingesting and ejecting. The more one gives, the more another must take. The more one takes, the more another must give, and forever and ever does this asymmetry take place. The difference keeps us afloat in our great basin of segmented, disunited parts.
The greater the effort made to repay this debt, to homogenize, find stasis — the greater the debt increases, and the distance between harmony and equilibrium widens — infinitely fertile expansion. We must not worry, because it is moral, good and virtuous to owe and to need. Chasms open up in the effort to stabilize and reach an impossible balance. We create vacuums in space where nothing can hide: acts of empty service, compassion without recompense, charity exacerbates divides. It's necessary, of course. Life is in the trying to keep a fair score — needing is a primordial, generative force.
Sensory awareness becomes the currency of repayment. Life and death as atonement for the great crime and robbery of division. We live and behave as angels to nurse the laceration between absence and difference. Our lives as withering binds stitching the wound where nothing once was and where now exists the concept of void. When you die, you put the world back together again.
Trinity and transparency. Neither light nor shadow, but instead: brutally painful clarity. The distortion of "form" is a scab on the injury creation, sensing it as it arises. A fusion between what always could be and what forever will never not. The split between ante absentiam and absence must be stronger than nuclear force.
In the space where all things simultaneously can and cannot be, whole sets of bodies spring into being, sculpted from the depths, the outer edges gray, lifeless ash. They bloom here, in living, radiant color and light, to balance equations where others have created surplus and debt. Too much corrosion in one part of space, an abundance of mass in another. A vacuum there, where nothing in millennia has once reached. All it requires is a single organ to sense, feel, absorb the radiation. Take it in as it emits. Sense is all it takes to bring forth being. Sensation is creation.
What I imagined
today, limping on my walk to get an x-ray,
was being in the ground — with you...
On my knees, in the dirt, covered in mud.
Mouth full of wet soil , and leaves.
Smiling. Grinning. Threatening.
Teeth bared — a rabid animal.
My arms pulling at you — dragging you back down to me.
Buried in the Earth, we grasped at one another. Tugging.
As though battling our way back to life from the grave.
I was so, so happy, until I noticed ...all the plastic in the way...
Shiny, broken, overflowing. Filthy pieces of waste.
It was such a distraction from what we were creating.
From what we were initially struggling against and fighting.
“Well,” ... I thought,
“I think we need to make a sacrifice ,
I think,” I thought,
“I was made to collect you?
Place your soul at the altar...
Build a temple devoted to how much I love you...”
Ten billion times, I erect ten billion shrines.
You're mine. You're mine. You're mine.
Even when you disappear.
You'll come back and find me, gluttonous and smug —
nestled in the residue of your insatiable vices and monotonous consumption.
I lurk in the shadows. Always.
And from there, ceaselessly collect your lifetime’s decay.
Every last bit of it — for myself — I take.
And take.
And take, and take.
You’ll have to destroy worlds. Universes. God’s God’s god…
and all that came before, and all that ever could be,
before I could ever possess close to enough...
I need what you break.
I’m testing to see if you can annihilate more than what I resurrect.
It’s a competition... Secretly, I hope you’ll win it....
Unraveling your long-forgotten refuse, to silk and golden thread, I weave from the abandoned debris.
When you cycle around, and find me at the center of the burning pyre
obedient to your love, impulse, and need —
We'll have both already been purified.
A billion times : separated and reunited. Expanded and contracted. Disfigured and contorted.
Wrecked by abysses of endless excretion and greed.
I'll glimmer and glow when I speak,
and once again, I'll say I’m sorry —
So, so sorry...
I made paradise... For you,
in this.
