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"The Center Cannot Hold"
It's amazing how words hold so much power. So much ... expression. Well, it is what they're for, I know, but still. Amazing. Like everything else. Like absolutely everything else. Have you ever seen it? Heard it? Felt it?
How can I describe it. When you hear a line of a poem, or a play, or a quote from a movie ... how those words encapsulate an idea, an image, a totality beyond what they should be able to hold. "Brute beauty and valour and act." "The center cannot hold." "Ask not for whom the bell tolls." They become symbols, those words. Talismans. They can be held up, small and light and readily maneuverable, and still carry all the weight of the knowledge behind them, the idea, the image.
Words are the perfect example, simply because they can be held up so readily, but they are far from alone. So far from it. Everything that ever existed has that depth, that capacity. Have you ever looked at something, a human hand, a falling leaf, a rock. Have you ever looked at them, and felt your mind unmoor a little, drift over to them and through them? See the cat's cradle of forces that shape the fall of that leaf, the intricacies of muscle and bone and sinew in that hand, the quiver of atoms in that rock that belies its solidity, its stillness? Have you ever sat at the center of the world and watched it move? Have you ever just sat and grabbed the edges of the world, the way it fits and flows and swoops together, the way it moves, vibrates, trembles with latent energy, the way the threads cross and cross and flow and dive, and sing together, touching each other, touching everything?
Pick up something. Anything. Look at it. Feel it. Drift inside it, and feel how it quivers, how it sings. Learn it, understand it, and then ... reach through it. Follow the threads of force that touch it, the weight of it, the electricity in its heart, the air that moves over it, the chemicals that sizzle inside it. Pick up a pebble. A leaf. A feather. Touch it, then touch the world it touches. It's beautiful, you know. That world. This world. All worlds. For sheer majesty, for sheer potential, for sheer, unutterable beauty.
We used to get a theater company coming round to our school, raising awareness for student problems like drugs through drama. They were good. One year, it was drugs, and it was a true story, I think. A girl describing a trip where she spent the entire time staring at the wonder of her right hand, lost in the complexity of it. I never understood, really, why people used drugs, if that was all you got from it. My mind does that anyway. I spend half my life sitting at the center of the world, just seeing, caught up in the ... in the vastness of it. I mean ... don't you? Doesn't everyone? I mean, look at it all! How can you just ... not see it?
Except I can understand, sometimes, why you wouldn't want to. It makes it ... difficult ... to do anything else. Every time I look at something, it's ... there's so much there, so much lying underneath, and I can feel it quivering, feel it waiting ... The whole world like that. And if you follow it out, follow the threads, go through and out ... so much. There's so much. And you can feel it. You can feel the ... it moves. It flows, and swings, and these vast rivers pour into each other, and sing threads around themselves, and planets move and atoms dance, and leaves fall, and, and, and ...
It's big. It's so big. So huge. It's so big, and it's like being blind and reaching out, touching the underside of some vast skeleton, grabbing onto its edges, feeling the curve of it, just enough to understand how vast it is, how huge and monstrous and beautiful and complicated this thing is that you can't see, only touch, only trace the bare edges of.
Icarus, looking at the sun.
It's Icarus. The fear inside my heart, the power and pain. That sounds corny. I don't care. It's Icarus, if Icarus had known before he flew what it would cost him. I want. I want so hard. To fall through the stone into the great rivers. To fly into the sun. If I do ... if I do. I know what happens. Everyone knows what happens. The knowing is the chain, and the chain keeps you safe. Madness is a step away, and madness kills you. But. But.
It really is so very beautiful ...
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