Illusions

Posted on May 1, 2003 in Book of Days Myths & Mysticism Thinking

Note: This is sixteenth in a series based on exercises from A Writer’s Book of Days. It’s something of a rebellion against the Friday Five and similar tupperware content memes.

Today’s topic: Write about circling the edge.

Circling edges? It doesn’t make sense to me at all. In my most arrogant moments, I’m the space of body fat and bone that defines things. I cannot be circled because I encompass. A little ingested humility puts me in my place, in the universe that surrounds everything and is in everything. When you blow things out to the furthest ends of your mind, you hit only the edge of what is you. You don’t circle: you bounce back in the shock of knowing that things keep going on. For every surrounding, there’s another surrounding. Edges evaporate in the watched pot of the realization that the universe is infinite and you can’t ever know how big that really is.

It’s more than a kitchen table, off which you can roll an egg. The egg falls and smashes on the floor, but it never stops being in the universe. You can’t push it out of the universe no matter what you do. The remnants may stay there for a long time; bits of the shell might attract shoes or naked feet that carry them elsewhere; a conscientious gardener might sweep up the shells and grind them up for a rose garden; the cat may lick up the gooey parts; bacteria may rot the rest; and a sponge might carry off the last slime traces for dissolution in the local water table. But all that was the egg continues to be an is. It stays on the table that isn’t a table. It may never be an egg ever again, but the shards, slime solution, molecules, atoms, quarks and less are still here.

The Buddha called permanence, substance, the illusion. I suspect that it is equally true that annihilation, nothingness, is also an illusion.

Suppose the idea of an anti-universe is nothing but that — an idea — a relic of the limitations of our minds that prevents us from seeing the egg as it is? Or isn’t there an egg?

These things only confuse me if I think about them. So I don’t. Not often.

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Tomorrow’ topic/prompt: Write about falling.