is it you

There is no such thing as a whole not made up of smaller parts.

Ever.

Ever.

Let me try to explain it with a field. The field I'm looking at is one of grass like as you'd find every day in Southern Ontario. Grass is my favourite analogy because because it's really the same everywhere.

If we move in, the field is not a field at all. It's a huge shape formed by variations on how the little lines of grass are placed. Given a big big number of blades of grass, you can make any shape.


Of course it doesn't stop. Molecules, atoms, particles, energy, in unmeasurable units. Which are contributed to by the acting of energy on them. We weren't meant to see parts, but wholes. Our eyes are made to look at mountains, stars, trees.


Which are part of ranges, skies, forests.


You're going to come to the question: what turns parts into a whole? Is it the parts themselves? Is it the whole before it even exists?


Is it a third party observer and changer?


Ask yourself: is it me?


It's everything. All at once. You do it and it's done to you. The real truth of the world is that it's a constant arranging of wholes and parts. Arranging messily, beautifully, uglily -- the whole turbulent democracy.


I am a whole, and I am also a part.


I am Rachel of the Fields.

writing a short story

announcing it because I haven't written prose in forever
it is called
"The Man Who Turned Out to Know Absolutely Everything"

and it begins,

There was, I recall, a man who knew absolutely everything. He had almost nothing to say about it, and had never really held down a job. He and his wife had long ago split up; he had gotten used to living with only one of his children; he visited Chinatown and bought and ate fried Ramen with chives for lunch every other day except Sunday. He often purchased this same brand of Ramen for the neighbours who could stand him, and convinced them, and himself, that he had been so lucky as to find the one really great brand of Ramen for such a price, and that he was doing them a marvellous favour. He used to buy thirty or sixty at a time. When he visited, they ate it together, and sipped discount chai tea afterward. It was very poor Ramen. All the same, this man knew absolutely everything.