69. Inside This Emptiness Is Without

Fig. 4: The Poets Await the Revolt of the Titans

How far can explanation go? About as far as we can see with into this box – look! it’s a blank space – but – look, how strange, yet how common – it’s full up of a complicated transience. No wonder we’re glum: all those peptides under the heavy compression of continually emergent events. The city that this place represents is buoyant, but not really in a good state, like a bear at the peak of its bounce wondering whether it will fall heavily into those hydraulic engines, or stay up for ever[1] in an anomalous plateau of metastability, on top of which it will though slowly fade. Purely endogenous factors, of course. The third possibility is to go on a long voyage; but we’re all on that already? I hear. This landscape with all its cultural geology will shift, suddenly, catastrophically. Look carefully at the yellow bits, and the pink bits. There will be both the slow falling asleep mentioned above, & in particular the certain risk of sudden, invasive cancer. That balance of genetic markers matched to previous ecosystems & continual environmental & dietetic degradation will catch us all up. Yes, we can heroically graph the structures of what lies within, map the glossoclines (as they were), even just make up stories of happier things, which could have existed & ought. At night I dream of the Revolt of Titans. I’ll open my eyes.

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[1] for “ever” read “never”