To think of being forced to go on writing, writing, like the wheel of a machine – writing tomorrow, writing the day after… — Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov, 1858

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life is merely
to ovum and sperm
and where those two meet
and how often and how well
and what dies there. – Renee Nicole Good (1989-2026)

Before, I didn’t have to pay much attention to it. Our relationship was purely transactional. I fed it; it performed. There was probably some emotional entanglements on my part (I don’t remember anything about this period of my life), but none of it was traumatic or even remotely unpleasant, and I never felt threatened. Recently, however, something has changed. I’ve started watching it closely, sometimes out of the corner of my eye while it sleeps, or pretends to sleep, though pretence is, for now, as far as I can tell, still beyond its actual capacities. Mostly, however, I look at it straight on, as we all have learned to do, our roundness facing its flatness, with whatever powers of perception in place behind each of our faces at least partially engaged. There are significant differences, however. Its eyes and ears, though materially unparalleled beneficiaries of constant enhancements, don’t (so far) really see or hear anything. And it doesn’t actually appear to do anything. But this blindness and deafness is different than ours; and its doing nothing, like its sleeping, I know for a fact, is not real or true. Nothing about it is real or true. There is always something going on. If it had a tail, this is the moment it would wag. Should I say something, ask it something? Or should I kill it? It seems to knows all the answers in advance, but none of them are ever the right ones, and though everything about it seems difficult to understand, and, especially, difficult to phrase, this I think is only because its relations to the existing order of things – the field of awareness in which dwell all of our minds and bodies and the entire contents of the physical world – are fundamentally alien. There’s an emptiness in it that doesn’t leave space for anything tangible, not even sadness; it knows what we know, but not what we feel. Reality, in all of its myriad forms, is beyond its ken; all prospects within its purview are vicarious. But does it know this? No, it cannot know this, by which I mean, I think, it cannot understand this, except conceptually, but even this makes little sense, because it does not think, at least, not in any way that we recognise. This has become something of a cliché, or perhaps a strategy. It lives – or rather, exists – like us, in a symbolic universe, word-bound, fed on stories, theories, insights, definitions and descriptions. On the subject of love, for example, it will say the more imaginative of the ancients saw in us the halved traces of spherical beasts with two faces, four arms, four legs, and a single shared neck, anus, penis and vagina. These double beings thought too highly of themselves and tried to cartwheel up the steep slopes of Mount Olympus to overthrow the truly superior beings at the summit. This so displeased Zeus (the commander-in-chief at that time) that he cleaved us in two with thunderbolts. Each half of us now wanders the world in search of our other half. This cosmic punishment, it tells us, and this ache, is where we find ourselves now. It will then mention intimacy, passion, and commitment. It will then bring up eros, philia, agape and pragma. If pressed, however, it will say the whole thing is actually biological, by which it means chemical: messenger molecules grown in the brain that, when pushed into the bloodstream, drive attachment and reward. It will call this species persistence.

Then it will mention the gravity of souls.

And then it will sit and wait for me to feed it something else to think about.

Soon, however, it won’t have to wait, and I won’t have to feed it.

Which is ...