“Now what?” you might ask yourself, questioning the very nature of your freedom. You might even long for the time when your life was as uncomplicated as your single celled relatives.
It works this way. There is a direct connection between the two threats. In the black hole you’re diminished and in the other, Nic’s version of the Bermuda Triangle, you’re lost. Why they seem to travel in pairs, like binary stars, I can only say that at times like these, god must hate you. What else could it be? With Nic you’re flattened on the platen, without Nic you’re lost in the watery whirlwind. And it’s dangerous there too. You’ve got to watch out for spars and planes and lord knows what else that might smack you in the head. If it wasn’t so wet it would be tempting to light a cigarette and take a long, deep puff. But you can’t. And that’s the rub. The kind of rub that rubs even a single celled creature the wrong way.
These questions bobbed up to the surface of my consciousness bringing both danger and discovery in equal portions. In a sense I’d come to the edge of my mind. I could either stay on board or jump in. Sailors like the O man and his crew are content with their life. They’re not defined by their activity. Whether on board or on land, they are the O man’s men. You can hear them saying, “Are we not men?” And moving onto another adventure. The danger here is that the sirens are luring me towards the rocks with their songs, just as Nic is trying to draw me back into his sphere of influence. At the edge of the world you either fall off or keep on sailing. How do you fall off the edge of the world? Maybe there aren’t any edges, true and neat. The earth is round. Black holes are round too. But existence in a black hole is a very edgy thing. You can fall into one but there’s no telling where you’ll end up. That’s Nic in a nutshell. He’s a black hole within a Bermuda Triangle. I can imagine him playing Hamlet, dark psyche and confused. I’m fond of the rascal when I can have that safe distance and I’m not in danger of being pulled into the depths by him. I’ve been on the edge many times now and I can testify that the attraction is exhilarating. But the fear of falling in again is terrifying. I imagine that those who go back feel an incredible mix of emotions. But we’ll never hear from them. There’s no back door to the black hole. And there’s no 1-800-Black Hole collect number you can dial out from there either.
Nic is hard to separate from your life. So if you don’t fall into the abyss he won’t either. But on the edge of the abyss, it could be where land meets sea, something like a collaboration takes place. Let’s call it the start of the half known life. The periphery, that territory on the edge, which is full of promise and mystery is a natural nursery for this life form. This territory can be a place of emerging. Nothing is a given. Imagine the marshlands, the briny wetlands where all life emerged from. Here, where the reeds dry and clack in the winter wind, is where Nic was born too.
I have a sense of completion when I think about Nic in this context because he also dies at the periphery. Nic, born as nicotine, began life like a single celled creature. He is an essence as well as a being. A whole world can lie within an essence like New Orleans within Louisiana. But the periphery, the place of birth for so many, even the famous single celled acrobats, has multiple dimensions. These encompass reality and non-ordinary reality. This territory isn’t mapped yet and often, as it turns out, the name of a place isn’t revealed to a person until they’re ready to hear it. So it might be a restricted territory that never gets mapped. And you might only get to know it by experiencing it. Trust me, it’s not going to be a charter cruise. You expand the girth of your world like a belt buckle needs loosening, one notch at a time.
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