On and of erotic undercurrents of Infinity

an exercise in applied belletristics

It's all flowery and summery and there's romance and weird abstractions and their alarming consequences; I'd call it a poem even, or "suprapoem", whatever that unfolds into. If that’s not a hook, I don’t know what is (perhaps this 🪝). Enjoy at your own risk!

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Like two passionate lovers, humans and Infinity practise tantric sex with each other. The practice goes back aeons and since then has transformed many times as soon as it became boring, either when another infinity was conquered or when the previous method was mastered. Humans find The End → Infinity sees that, thinking "Bloody hell! What is going on!" → expands, for it has infinite capacity to do so → naturally, humans look further and further until the catharsis is reached, and it never is! There's always one infinity beyond! See, in the olden days, everything was finite: finite land — flat was the earth, its balloon not yet inflated, finite sky — all plain blue diurnal, all plain black nocturnal, finite language — only pa and ma and some swear words, finite gods of finite things demanding finite sacrifices of one finite goat per month, finite money dug out of the finite gold mines, finite growth due to the said finite money, finite decay following it, and then finita la commedia! Everything is "anthropic" before it becomes "entropic", such as when my ancestral I draws a circle on a sandy beach by the fresh lil' lake blooming with nymphaea.

— Bloody 'ell! The line's infinite! Look! — I reckon, actively gesticulating.

— Bloody 'ell it is! Let's draw some more, shall we? — my heroine enthuses.

And we do. And all is merry until it isn't, like it always happens on an infinitely long time interval, for things be things and tend to fuck up on occasion.

— The problem with infinity, — our professor says, — Once it enters human consciousness, decay and dissolution become inevitable companions to growth. It's a virus that wants to eat itself but cannot, unlike us, for we skinbags can absolutely eat ourselves out of existence.

I don't listen to him, he's boring and frankly drunk as he always is on Saturday mornings, just like two of us, my heroine and my lyrical I, though we're young and fresh, already recovered from sex, drugs, rock'n'roll, sobriety, hatred, hardcore. I eye my heroine who sits on the other side of the auditorium with her best friend. My heroine eyes back. My imperfect memory and imagination draw her perfect curves in my notebook, in the exact place where the professor's words fail to be. Luckily, he doesn't care.

— Instead of thinking inward, from the fullness, which I would argue a proper term for what we call infinity, we start with discrete things and think outward: "what if we remove boundaries", what if we this what if we that, bla-bla, what if a thing isn't a thing but an in-thing, un-thing, thing-less, non-thing even — something that includes everything else but the thing. This view is atrociously negative and turns something that could be presented as beautiful and complete into a boundless borderless void. We say endless (something that never ends) instead of startful (something that forever starts), we always sat whatever-less instead of whatever-ful. No wonder, I'll tell you, no wonder…

We flip-flop on the sand by the lil' lake and wonder about nothing.

— I do wonder… — my heroine wonders.

— Let's wonder not.

The bushes round the lake have burnt out and shed their thorns. This happens once in ever so many years, the number you can never guess. From the water itself all the way to the horizon they stand — black charcoal branches grown up from the earth, beneath which little green thorny shoots crawl out anew from the soil, striving to overrun the field, to drive us out, and let no one else near the nymphaea, until once more everything dries up from the heat, bursts into flame, sheds its thorns, and we come again, probably quite old by then, or perhaps quite dead.

— I do wonder tho… — she does.

— What do you wonder about, my heroine?

— Nothing, — she teases me, as she always does.

The nymphaea bloom in three colours: white, pink, whitepink. Those places where the beach ends and gives way to marshy thickets, which in turn give way to the lily-covered surface of the water, where one mustn't swim, for one'll get tangled and the nymphaea will strangle and drag one down into the silt and mud.

Through the field of bushes there neighwhinny-gallops a herd of wild horses, pulverising the burnt branches to dust, leaving behind a black charcoal trail. We watch as the horses vanish beyond the horizon and wonder, our mouths agape.

— I wonder, — my heroine wonders, — what's there beyond the horizon?

— Probably just another one, as professor said, — I wonder not, I refuse to wonder.

— You never listen to him.

— I do, but I don't write anything down and forget everything.

— No ignorance is rebellious. You should know at least that, — she's being stern. — Let's follow the horsies.

— Please, let's not.

— You can stay here, alone, by the lake or a pond or whatever that is (a water basin?), and I'll follow the horsies by myself.

I eye her a sign of "Are you sure?" and she eyes nothing back, for her eyes, precious gems, colour of which I can't see from the distance of auditorium, are transfixed on the notebook or the professor whom for that sole reason every so often I want to kill with an axe in the most prominent literary style:

— Once all land is conquered, humans raise their gazes to the sky, — he mumbles. — The sky, the space, the cosmos, remains unconquered, remains infinite, perhaps not in a true sense, for we don't know that answer, but in a practical sense, for we can't reach or see the very end of it anyway. That's why people start drinking — they cannot see the very end of whatever the thing they want to see!

I don't listen to him, he always speaks to me from faraway wherever he is, except when on that lil' beach where nobody but my heroine's allowed to speak. The sand on the shore is soft, but the presence in it of sharp little stones and splinters from the burnt bushes prevents any pleasure of peaceful lying upon it or, even more so, lying of another, more active sort. We press our ears to the wet sand to hear the horsies' hoofbeats, and the sand suddenly whispers back, something like "Abandon the earthly (finite) towards celestial (infinite)" or other such professorous insights.

— I always thought, — frowns my heroine, — that it's quite the opposite, that the earthly is infinite and the unearthly = finite, the earthly = masculine, an immovable stronghold, and the unearthly = feminine, airy, enveloping, just like a womb, imagine.

— I don't want to, I've been there already.

— Exactly! When it said that the earthly (finite) is feminine, and the unearthly (infinite) is masculine, I stopped listening to him. When we grow old...

— If. If we grow old.

— If we grow old, promise that you won't be a sky father, and I in turn won't be a mother earth, there won't be any irrigating rain, and the soil won't yield any fruit. Promise that it'll be the other way around.

— I promise.

— The earth will simply be fatherly earth, the motherly sky will lay upon its almighty chest, envelop its body whole with its heavenly, celestial gentle hands, and the fruits will descend upon the world from the above. You hear me? — she inquires of the sand and bends down to it (not to me), whispers something to it (not to me), and then kisses it (the sand, not me!), whereupon I stop drawing circles on it with the charred splinter and thrust it into the sand with all my might, again and again, deeper and more furiously each time, so I can feel the liquid beneath its thin layer. The sand shudders, vibrations run through it like those that sweep across the earth from horses' hoofbeats, and falls still.

Quietly my heroine leaves the auditorium without even eyeing to me, so now my drawings have to rely solely on imperfect memory and imagination. My heroine has always been everything to me, the heavenly Fullness that heroically happened to be one person possessing it all: desire, intelligence, virtuousness, wisdom, while I have always been the earthly Foolness possessing her. The world starts with the Fullness and grows inward, to the individual things, like myself, but my Foolness grows outward until it conquers the world and — like the world — has no boundaries, boundlessness born of lack.

As she leaves, the professor eyes her, but my heroine eyes not. My lyrical I, however, does. He eyes at the pervert professorial geezer with an axely gaze. Everything concentrates in that gaze, congregates, consecrates, consternates; it, I could say, is perfectly perfect, it's Full in the highest sense of the word, so full that no one's left alive after meeting with it eye-to-eye.

— Look! Bloody 'ell! — I shout to her, pointing at the two-headed lil' snake rolling across the sand in sinusoidal motion.

— Bloody 'ell! A lil' snake!

And I thrust the burnt splinter into the sand right beside the lil' snake, it dodges and crawls on, sliding sideways towards the water.

— Why? Don't hit it! It's just a dice snake.

— What if it's poisonous?

— Dice snakes aren't dangerous at all.

— It's not dangerous while it's small, but then it slithers itself into a boa and swallows you whole, — I say and stab the sand right in front of the lil' snake to change its direction again.

— If you keep doing that, it'll swallow you, and me, too. It's got two heads and two mouths — enough for both of us. Let it go. Let's better follow the horsies.

— We can't just let it go. I've always wanted to feed the snake to itself, like in those lectures of your favourite professor.

— What are you on about again! Like, what mouth would you even choose?

The best version of snake is the one where you can't pass through the edges, finding yourself suddenly at the opposite edge. The only goal of any snake is that it shouldn't eat its own tail or any other part of itself, though any part of a snake is its tail, except for the head. You can't complete snake — the pixels will fill the entire field, the whole field will become snake tailbody, there'll be nowhere for new pixels to appear, and you'll have to keep steering it until your hands tire. In a sense, it's already complete, for it's impossible to add anything to it. Snakes with two tails don't exist and shouldn't exist, snakes with two heads are something absolutely abominable, unholy, something that through the illusion of choice between two deprives you of the natural choice of one.

My heroine sheds the overwhelming majority of her clothes and enters the lake, shivering and covered in goosebumps, seeming so large they're visible even from several metres away. Having grown accustomed to the water, submerged to her collarbones, she enters the embrace of the nymphaea. Their long vines reaching to the lake bottom refuse to entwine her and she calmly navigates between them, merging with them, herself becoming a nymph, the nymphinity. I'm afraid of cold water, I'm afraid of nymphaea, their flowers, their stems, their leaves, the whole idea of them, so I lie on the beach and trace in the sand perfect circle of her perfect curves. All I think of is how outward and inward, inward and outward, outward and inward, inward and outward, outward and inward, inward and outward it goes, and so to the fullest. . .

On the opposite shore from the burnt-out thickets emerges the professor, sheds the overwhelming majority of his clothes, dives into the lil’ lake and dice-snakely swims towards my heroine. Somewhere in the distance from me, serene, she floats on the water surrounded by nymphaea, white, pink, whitepink. From the heaven, the sun blazes, burns the bushes, heats the sand, reflects off the water, glares, blinds us all. I grab a burnt branch, longer, blacker, sharper, throw myself into the water, swim somehow, limbs tangling in the nymphaea vines, but I catch up to the professor. With the black axely branch I strike him in the head, again and again and more furiously each time, until I feel liquid beneath the thin layer of bone. All I think of is how outward and inward, inward and outward, outward and inward, inward and outward, outward and inward, inward and outward it goes, and so to the fullest. . .

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