Space. Extension. The increasingly nonlocal.
Not distance. Distance is merely hypothetical travel time—the time it takes to get from here to there. I’m talking about beyond-ness, the compelling delusion of out-there-ness that has an even more compelling delusion of me at its center.
“It is all in your head,” she said. “The world that stretches infinitely in all directions is something happening inside your skull.”
And the me at its center is no less confined in the same bony chamber.
And the bony chamber itself—or everything I might be able to think about it even down to the thought that it is its own something else among all of the other something elses and possible something elses and impossible something elses and something elses that are only probable and something elses that never happened but only because it took too much time to get there.
A compelling delusion.
More than mere delusion, more than mere false belief, more than false because there is nothing true with which it might be contrasted and you can’t know a thing unless you can know what it isn’t because there is no figure without the ground.
So, I sit here, groundless, and watch the dog patrol the back fence from her vantage point next to the deck like an old newsreel. Her eyes are spotlights above a WWII prison camp. Her head sweeping in radar-dish arcs. Her ears are a periscope on a Japanese submarine and her muscles have just been armed with squirrel-seeking torpedoes.
I listen to her Morse code breath and I wonder how it can all fit inside.
