1988

A single link, a child's familiar game, but I have never learned to separate each bar with its twisted shuffling loop from the other. The deep suction of the world that releases the spirit with a pop into the mathematical giddiness of chaos {3. [Math] Stochastic behaviour in a deterministic system} and I the reluctant bride longing to gobble in my body the great wetness of God.

How many degrees of freedom does this simple puzzle have? how many apparent constraints? The slender bars are as heedless and unyielding as the strict logic of a well-trained theorem. My mind is soft and fecund with the possibilities, a womb, or like the worm-rich loam of the rotting forest floor.

As I walked, I began to feel the warmth of the struggling eight AM sun, this time without my father, this time in silence. The moist crumbs of soil rimmed white with chill November slipped and crushed. Brown leaves slithered live against my soles to slide me under. The path was liquefying slowly to a mud that sucked my boots and patiently followed my rhythm in its own slick and slop.

The puzzle stayed cool metal between my cooling thumbs and fingers. I palmed the pieces, breathed the air still stiff with frost and let my mind float in the icy middle sky. I ceased to see and felt only the movement as I walked, only sound, the random chittering of birds and rodents, the soggy split of twigs lost in the humus, until I found a rock to sit on, granite with hard scabs of lichen, roundly irregular, like a diseased head.

I sat and, being still, felt again the insistent poke of the toy nuzzling in my hand. Once more I turned it, twisted and teased it again and again. How many degrees of freedom did I test until I found the right one? My hands slipped free, as though a soul had sighed. Quickly I linked them again, practicing to reach simplicity, practicing until my wrists and eyes knew what will always befuddle my divided brain, passing like a rich man through a narrow space to unlink and link again.