I have nothing to say, and I am saying it. That is poetry. – 13 Words, John Cage

Where does it begin? What is “it”? What is a “beginning”? If you’re going to plumb the depths of the universe and try to come up with a way to explain each and every thing from sea to shining sea, you really have start with a definition of terms. Right?

If you subscribe to the idea of cause and effect, every cause is an effect, and every effect is a cause. Like the old mythological riddle goes, “it’s turtles, all the way down.” There is no beginning and no end – just an endless collection of here and now’s that meet as two ends of a myriad of sticks. And you can’t pick up one end of a stick without also picking up the other end. Every birth has bury it in.

So if you’re going to write something like an autobiography, where does it actually start? With your conception or your live birth? Or does it start with the energy that fuels you, that fueled your parents and their parents, that is simply passed on from generation to generation in one form or another without pause or ceasing? How could you become what you became at birth without whatever your parents were at that time or any previous time in their existence? They didn’t get to where you became a thing just by flipping on a switch, any more than you got to be 50 or 60 years old by blinking your eyes at age 5 and wishing you were a grown-up.

Can you explain the fact that you’re not the same person you were in elementary school using some exact science, or is there invariably (and perhaps unfortunately) no small degree of magic involved? How much mumbo-jumbo is actually required to explain the universe, after all – and doesn’t that inclusion automatically defeat the purpose of rational explanation?

31 MAR 2025