Working Excerpts from Of Evernost
No Prime Mover
So far, there is always incomparably more, even though a whole, a vanishing point, a circling, an inevitable recursion, a God is persistently rumored. It is a great horror of this existence (The greatest? Or should that name fall to the great contingent horrors, to horror itself, the sum of horrors, that dark thread in the tapestry?). No dying. No resting. There are plateaus of rest, of course, facets of fullness, and on top of that spaces even of dwindling, falling, loss—but not one of these things that is not included in some upward movement, by paradox at the least. There is always further up and further in* (and out and around and through). To enter Evernost from the Kingdom is to enter your own ineffaceability, to make good on the is behind every has been or will be (not that it does not also offer and perhaps even compel deeper immortalities as well).
Filaments
There is, perhaps, a structure of—beneath, but also within, branching, not in a simple uniformity of macrocosm and microcosm but, usually, with a new complexity at every height or angle—what is. Picture, let’s say, filaments of light. It is an arbitrary image. Even the best mind at the height of its powers perceives only a perspective here, a schematic there.
Let some network of strands come to the front, others fade back. You can make almost any shape you choose. Possibly the best image you can have, though, the one that includes the most and misleads the least, is the one you are living in, to which these words are making a small addition. (A snapshot of what you experience at each of the infinite number of instants can be traced in the filaments, as can every partial totality into which they may integrate, and any patterns that govern or characterize their evolution.)
The images you create, though, are not just incomplete and ordered uniquely according to your perspective. They are untrue to what they do capture. Usually they are untrue by error, taking one pattern for another, bending lines, disregarding the order in which they are layered. There is, more rarely, untruth that is new creation. Of course the rules and means of all untruths are outlined in the light themselves, but if the gap that permits you to see at all is a miracle, the power that allows you to see untruly and to create is a second miracle. Some call these, together or separately, the greatest miracle.
There are other sorts of minds, whose miraculous gaps are differently constituted, and of course we will not understand them or easily believe in their possibility, and perhaps we never can grasp them entirely. Some of these minds may be said to see incompletely but not untruly. Their multiplicity as a result is a smaller infinity, and one that multiplies and strengthens what is , excepting them, without perverting it. The more you think about this, the more impossible it will seem. A vision is untrue simply in that it is not its object. A vision cannot help but create at least the rules by which it abstracts or the rules by which it finds the rules. Perhaps these problems are a misunderstanding, or perhaps the truth and untruth is only a matter of degree.
*an homage to the heaven in C.S. Lewis’s The Last Battle
Of Elsewhere 