. . .

I had no idea what a djinn out of the bottle I had just called forth.

No more were those words off my tongue than Lah! Two dots!

Odd, for hitherto there had been no hint the dot had delusions of duo. Perhaps the dot had somehow managed to conceal a second self inside its first self, but how can a thing of one dimension have more than one self? In no time at all the dot became two the two made of themselves four the four made eight — Oh how like bright children the way they learned — eight made sixteen sixteen became thirty-two and . . . well, you get the idea.

How did they learn to multiply before I taught them how to add?

Soon I had a veritable dotidemic on my hands entire volumes of dots dots, dots, more dots, others beyond these and beyond those too, fission, fusion, frisson, fruition teeming beadotitudes of sacradotige as I watched in amazement how dotilific they became.

But then a problem arose: all this jiggling dotulace was constrained within an infinidotmal point. They yearned and squirmed for dimension!

I never dreamed a dot could behave like this, yet felt it rather cruel of me to subject them to all this compression for the lack of a dimension.

So I gave them — surely you’ve guessed — all the growing room they could desire on either side of where they were, to wit: a line.

Oh dear … if ever there was a self-defeating invention, that was it.

All of a sudden and for no discernible reason two of the dots discovered that they could by uniting then separating again emerge as a thread bridging the two. And thus they made their own line.

Which it dawned on me as I watched, was their first self-ruling axiom: U as I, viewing them from my mountaintop remote, discerned the back door their axiom had left open:

Division Inverts Multiplicity

AS MULTIPLICITY INVERTS DIVISION, BOTH OF WHICH ARE THUS MIRRORS OF SYMBIODOTIC REALITY.

The rascals! Already they were inventing a First Principle to justify themselves, and — why, those impertinent little … — in so doing ignored the First Principle bequeathed by ME! Who was in charge here, anyway, or … at least supposed to be?

Meanwhile, other dots saw also and also soon united till a vast dotulation of teeming harmony had grown — lines upon lines and more upon those the more the dots the more the lines and O! what play they made! Dot-dot-line, line-dot-line, line-line-dot-dot, line-line-line-dot-line . . . they had invented their very own binaridottery!

I began to worry I may have dwelled too long upon my Empyrean heights paying too little heed to what the younger set was doing. The line I created to contain them all only inspired them to be even less contained.

I imagined their traffic jams because the lines had so little room to race except atop each other, or ahead, or behind, another line.

So — surely you saw this coming — I extended their lines in all directions till Lo! they had an planar playing field with no goal posts or boundary marks, and no rule books or coaches, either.

Which invited the Law of Unintended Consequences, to which even we gods must obey. They thought up angles, they devised crosses, they invented starbursts, they became radii.

But then four of them dreamed up the hachure # whereupon all clamored to spend hours playing noughts and crosses.

I never dreamed they would learn how to calculate odds!

Out of this bursting profusion of what a dot with a mind of its own might do they at once diverged and coalesced until entire dotiverses they made, all stealing ideas from each other. Had they all somehow acquired MAs from a coding school I had not invented? Even so I had to concede admiration for them: out of so little they had invented so much with their marvelous talents of memorizing and agglomeration. But then they once more astonished me with yet another marvel. There seemed a wisdom emerging from them: they discovered closed shapes — rectangles, rhomboids, trapezoids, triangles — were made of primary elements, sections, secants, axials, tangents, all of them incomplete in themselves but necessary if one is to make something complete. Aha!

They had devised their First Law of Thermodotnamics:

THE TRUTH OF KNOWLEDGE IS PROVED

BY THE KNOWLEDGE THERE EXISTS NO TRUTH.

It was their first self-formed axiom out of their formless origins, and they discovered it themselves. You can imagine my pride! Yet alas for me, I felt myself sidelined to my distance-hued aerie, banished there by their self-absorptions. As indeed I was, for while a creator can elevate to no godhood does that elevate in return. Reason can be controlled, but not so emergence, because reason has no respect for anything, not even its consequences. Their inventive frenzy could not go on without more room to grow, so I upended the plane in all directions till at last they had volume, and what’s more, an infinitude of it. Lah! They soon busied themselves, immediately inventing colors. Colors!!? I blinked my eyes in amazement, I expected volume to inspire them to curve, but not that their first curve was neither a messy meander or slinky slither but a proper and tidy wave — or to be more exact, a wavelength.

Oh my, where was all this going?

First came circles, ellipses soon followed, forms inverted forms, those became decoration, then, inevitably, overdecoration, till whole schools evolved— decoradotism mannerdotism minidotism maxidotism dadadotism

(kitsch already?

Without even a pause at Dotaroque to say nothing of Dotcoco?).

But they soon discovered mere surface-embroidering to be inelegant fluff. decor must be structured with consequence, and that (thankfully) was the end of kitsch.

I sighed a mix of relief and joy for they were on their way to meaning, and once there the disciplines of craft. Perhaps that would inspire them to self-contain!

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Their aptitude for craft progressed quickly, first an then an

(they never quite managed to square the circle so gave it up to tame instead the wrangle of the w).

Then, inevitably, **sigh** …

How a Dot Ended the World

merging locutions into languages memes, phonemes, morphemes, supremes, dotulucent gossamers like unto which cobwebs glisten with morning dew, gutturals and glottals, plosives and grammar, balletrysts (and in public! Oh mercy me!) until by degrees they made their own theanthropos, a dotulace having the properties of both creator and created. Did they not realize theirs was but a pool with the same face looking back?

I could only sigh uneasily from up there on my dot-creating cloud as their one-dot one-law dotynamics invented and then reinvented itself. They discovered assembly, invented locutions (as if they needed any), turned calligraphies into libraries. Without voice they spoke without eyes they saw without ears they made music, so many tonalities and percussions, it more resembled detonation than direction, yet with a tonal afterglow of lyrical unity, it gave rise to every music they could make with their binary orchestras of the plausible impossible.

I listened as vast assemblies of sound evolved, glottals, gutturals, sibilances, siffles, surging toward a babel that, had they but a single voice with which to express all this, made of each and every one of each other all singing in unison could only be sung bravo dotissimo.

Then I watched as a trio of lines made an

A which they turned into a fly with its wings folded back

B a butterfly concealed upon a lobate leaf

C the moon waxing

D

Upanishad in Asian Pale the moon gibbous

O the moon entire E cactus spines at the beginning of bloom

G a teen-aged C slouching in a chair

H a (short) ladder leaning against a (short) tree I a bouffant wig atop a slinky-gowned gommeuse (cabarets they had invented!? With stages and lights and too-loud music? I shuddered to think of the goings-on in the back rooms!). L a gardener snoozing against a tree M pinnate mountain ridges in ascending peaks of gleam

Q a full moon wagging its tail

(they were on their way to whimsy, O mercy me!)

How a Dot Ended the World

R a portly politician in a Nation-Day parade

S a slithery serpentine sithering a sibilance

U a vase awaiting its flowers

V a flight of birds

W the wings of a diving gull

X the carrefour crossroads we fear to approach but then fear to leave Y a lotto winner waving arms in the air a lightning bolt from cloud to earth (and how, may I ask, did dots make clouds, since I hadn’t yet invented water?)

The possibilities were endless and so their imaginations. Sand and pebbles became scales of a serpent, stars became gems circling the dome of the sky, from which they drew messages of scorpion lion brothers bull ram cup

Betelgeuse The Red One

Arcturus the Yellow

Antares the Incarnadine

Vega the Sapphire

Merope the Veiled as wish-touched as the tensor in which time without space is the only real motion. Neither intellect nor emotion nor morality nor aesthetic did they deign to embrace, but only the pure joy of inventing this thing, that thing, anything, everything and then moving on.

Alive, alive, alive!

They were creating their own sense of place, from mountain-crest necklaces to sunset tiaras of tint. Admittedly, they were a bit weak on fruited plains but absolutely top-rate when it came to mountain majesties. Shapes fused into colors the way dusk fuses earth and sky, till here, there, everywhere, tint to hue upon surface in a frame, all the feelings of art and beauty became dots like themselves each construed of all the others, a massed chorus of dots voicing a great and majestic thrum that had learned every possibility language could imagine, and turned it into a significance in which they alone could now live in.

So I gave them the only dimension they yet lacked: future, and watched their birds murmur into a cloud.

The last I saw, they were inventing their dwelling place under a breathtaking sky, heaping up mesas, upending crinkly mountains, grooving great rivers, filling chasms with sand, creating trickles and springs, whispering skies of such glory it was difficult to imagine they had never been here before. Hmmm, but now that I think about it of course they hadn’t been here before! They had devised their own universe in which they saw no need of mine Thus I left them, departed their self-made world twirling a leaf between my fingers, said to them — the first time they had heard my voice — “You are what you say you are, for all who may come to heed that your imaginings became more powerful than my rules.”

“We have made this realm and call it our own,’ they shouted as one.

“Whomever you may be, Oh Great One, we thank you for having brought us to be. But now please leave our land, we need you no more.”

Shi Yen I

Leaves fall plangent roars amid my footsteps faint along the wilderness path. In those dry and curling remains of fallen ideas, do I see beauty veiled in the mist or is the veil a disguise? Do the rising wolves of the pathwayed world live the illusions I embrace because I have none of my own? Or am I really, unknown even to my mirror, makyo, the delusions that give rise to illusions, that each by each we one day see behind the energy diameters of all our confusions, hallucinogens of Self that O! would that we might become wise by knowing the link of the two. And, too, accept the verso side in me, who pulls the puppet threads of I the fool, the shallow vanity of my bourgeois blaggarderie the pathetic triteness of the art on my walls all for lacking the temerity to ask someone who knows more than I.

Why, when I cry, does the water in my eyes cleanse neither sky nor soul?

Am I Sungchil from Haein-sa?

Sungchil who was famed for his daily practice of 3,000 prostrations which required seven hours and to those many who came to him for counsel he said he would receive them only when they had done 3,000 prostrations for each of the 108 beads of Afflicted States. Many were angry and set off to find an easier savior but those who did the 3,000 prostrations for each of the 108 beads found they no longer needed him. These told others and soon the entirety of Haein-sa commenced to live the Metta Sutta. He lived to ninety-six and when he died the perfections of his province died with him.

Am I the tall slender woman in the corner café, so thin she seems but a wift of sticks moving to the gusts of will, wearing a red-and-white tiny-patterned hound’s tooth shirt with the tail hanging out from the waist of her jeans, hair a ragmop of once-blond looks, face as plaited as the love knot of the Scots, eyes of near-majestic nonengagement, body shape now lost into the bones of her life’s grand succession from needle to needle and spoon to spoon and yet a shape that upon closer look ascends and descends her Sisyphean day like a great and stately staircased building reaching the top only to descend reaching the bottom only to ascend perceptible only by her ghostly progress of shadows, up and down and up and down, whose physicality has long been lost into the great wandering search for salvation yearning out of her eyes.

Hasn’t it been enough to filter sand through the decisions of your fingers as through an hourglass and watch it turn to rain to feathers to leaves to diamonds to faces out of the past to a woman haloed with fishes which upon closer look are in fact doves to tales told by children in the ascendancy of the schoolyard to the chatterbox expulsiveness of a man who has no idea how full of himself he is Oxbridge Ph.D. and all to the dunes of nudes in auto sculpture glimpsed in a too-bright sun while the roadsides of yellow-bright rose bushes wither fume by fume into a lacework forest dark at dawn on a moist spring morning to the history stamens of kabuki hiding in Elizabethan slashed sleeves, all of these all of these revealing the silk within all beings which by glimpses and only by glimpses is more enduring and empowering than by whole cloth just as is the woman who boudoirs herself perfectly reveals more by what is not seen than by what is, to the ever-presence of time flying, to your meanders through old family photo albums discovering of a sudden every origin of what you once were and you are horrified by what lay in the background of those images that at the time you never noticed was far more interesting than you, to the bound goat in the cave behind which the cookfires begin and in your goat mind you wonder why aren’t they afraid of that flicker? It’s hot. exeunt Exeunt via the timelines of your Gordian knot your loop of folds and entwinings and colors more than rainbows turning ever more majestic as you fathom the mysteries of linkage between all this and all as yet undreamed till in a searing instant you are severed by a sword and your mind of visions falls away to the earth on which your sand of wonder once flowed and you gaze up in a single last glimpse at the man in metal armor turning to the next just like you and you say why did you cut me? exeunt

I was only the beauties to be found in a grain of sand with a mind of its own.

Or am I Navagunavala the nine sublimities of the Tathagata the thus-come-thus-gone ephemera of life which is self but not-self to the finely crocheted cotton monkeyfists of the Burmese which are then varnished till they become beads on the mani of Asia’s rosaries.

Of what use is ephemera unless it ignites phorescence?

Am I the width of the moon multiplied by its distance or the distance to the sun divided by the sun’s width?

Both are 108.

Does that revelation come from phorescence, too?

Exeunt

Or

am I the clothes

the accent and the miserable cassette tapes offered by a retired civil servant who is trying to sell his three scratched dirty obviously unplayable collections of Parsi folk songs now locked into immobility by their days in a Mumbai street gutter spotted by the desperate eye of a man whose fixed pension is slowly becoming worthless as inflation and all else rises so he sells anything he can get his hands on for the price of a meal? Would you treat him to a few hours of respite by way of a shawmala vendor in a streetcorner hawker stall, a shawmala pita cone filled with slices of broiled chicken fried potatoes minced cabbage pickled beet mayonnaise, all rolled carefully to be eaten like an ice-cream cornet? Or am I the you in your you who would buy him that shawmala if only you could be there at the right place and right time?

Am I the urchin beggars fake and real, the flute seller who doesn’t sing much better than his flutes a cigarette hawker voicing an emphesymic bzzzlaaghhh the untouchable dalits manifesting out of nothing from after midnight till before dawn scavenging into the filthy jute bags slung over their shoulders every potentially vendable scrap and remnant of civilization’s detritus left after the close of the day? exeunt Or am I as you contemplate your own world’s cruel mix of the ghastly and the noble a shoemender whose entire premises is his lap and a box at each knee who serves a steady stream of those with soles in need of cementing or laces that require replacing and who has condensed his entire income stream into one tube of glue and fifty or so shoelaces from the girlishly colorful to the businessy mundane all of which are properly knotted around a slim stub of wood so you see right there exactly what you’re going to wear, and who from this establishment-in-a-lap, has put his four children through the best schools his caste allows children who when their maturity matches his dotage will support him through his accelerating debilities? exeunt As Master Kung put it, “Writing, shi cannot fully express the meaning of speech, yen; speech cannot express the full meaning of ideas, i.” And when a student asked if anyone could understand the sages, Master Kung replied, “The sages established the images, hsiang to express the meaning of their ideas; they devised the diagrams, kua to express the distinction between true and false; and they attached judgments, tz’u in order to fully express their speech.”

Utter them as one: “shi yen i hsiang kua tz’u” how lyric sound the syllables that bind us ever to approximation.

Think of the confusions of our temporary existences the dilemmas of which way to turn on the pathway’s necklace of uncountable pearls, fusillading as we do from the bang of our beginning simply to ask, “From what does our universe derive?

A self knowing itself?

Lightning bolt from the gods?

Touch of a finger from father to son painted into permanence above the stinging eyes of a man cursed to his labors?

From trimonotintinnabulation the sound of a single bell rung thrice that begins zazen?

From Descartes’ dadodecadodefibrillihedron the geometric figure that merges shape with law and of these makes meaning?”

Or am I in the hope you always have had but do not admit you?