Murmur

Time is the plane that reveals this interlocking, though time is not discrete. You cannot pin it down. Very often you cannot see the point at which things start to come together, the point at which cause generates effect, and this is a variant of the measurement problem.

If the tessellation of forms is perfect, do they divide? Or are they one?

Luckily for us, however, the statistical system of the universe has about it a marvellous impurity, which is that it functions also as a dynamical system or mechanism for the maintenance and reproduction of order over long stretches of time. Or, to be disappointingly precise, the prolonged illusion of order, because the statistics of thermal disorder are all still there in the background and, like suspicious tax officers, they will get to us in the end. The art of living then, on this view, is simply that of defying them for as long as possible, until equilibrium, which isn’t as nice as it sounds, is restored.

One day, and with the creepy precision of retrospect, it will seem logical.

The veil of night draws back. The sun comes close, colossal in the sky. A pale hand hangs me on a wall that rises from the desert’s fiery sands.

However much the world ages, deformed by war and entropy, the parquet and the chevrons on my socks point the same way.

I’m like a crow. I see time as a ritual.