While I was in Santa Fe a couple weeks ago I re-read Annie Dillard's, Holy the Firm. She got her title from the name of a substance ("Holy the Firm") that is deep deep down in the "waxy deepness of planets" that some claim is "in contact with the Absolute, at base." Reading that, I couldn't quite get my brain around what such a substance would be, and where, and how it had been either imagined or ascertained in the first place. While reading, however, I was sitting on a balcony within sight of the Sangre de Christo mountains, and glancing from page to blood-red rock I had no trouble at all comprehending what I could easily label Holy the Firm.
Dillard wrote the book based on the happenings of three consecutive days, with each of the three chapters representing a day. I think I read somewhere that she made a deal with herself to write about whatever happens in the next three days, but I may be remembering wrong. It seems more likely that a certain three days passed, and those days had alerted her in such a way that she knew she would write about them. I say that because at least one extraordinary thing happened in those three days around which a substantial work could grow. I say that because her three-day set was vastly more evocative than my average three-day set.
Nevertheless, I want to cheer for the first scenario: that she rolled the dice of days and these were the three that went face up. I want to believe--and do believe--that with wide enough eyes and an imagination to match you could take any moment or set of moments and link it forward in time or back, or hook what fills that moment, whether living or inanimate, with anything else past or present, with nearly infinite possibilities. I've been trying to think of a way to describe the potential for infinite linking possibility in geometric terms, but the same brain that is having trouble grasping that deep waxy planetary substance is also having trouble remembering the ninth-grade geometry Mrs. Runkle taught me. Therefore, I'll dispense with the X, Y, and rotating Z-axis I've been mentally playing around with and limit myself to a simple sphere, with any particular moment or set of moments as a seed at its core. The sphere is Everything and any plane that cuts through its diameter, by definition, cuts through its core. Voila! An inelegant proof that any finite Something can be extrapolated and linked to the point of nearly endless possibility on the page. Might it even connect with the Absolute?