Either you build on what you already have or you start something new, something fresh (building on what you already have), I thought to myself as it was raining that day, that wonderful unimaginable and rainy wet first virile fertile day of Spring of that year, that crazy, tremendous ice block glacier of a year full of so many things I couldn’t keep up with, so many changes happening like quicksand, or coming upon the Great North, vast tracts of undiscovered frontier, snowy land, gargantuan and open, that year, that future, the future of the end of the world.

I was, you see, attempting to make my way there – to find my way, feeling about like a blind man frightened in the dark (why should that matter? I thought, why should it matter to the blind if it were dark?  Still, things are more ominous in the night, more unknown, seeing or not, more uncertain, more uncertain indeed, I thought).

And perhaps that’s it.  Perhaps that’s the whole story right there, a little library card-sized description, my now, that now-past experience dragging on as a present unopened, some blinding night setting at what seemed a foreboding and wide-open end of the world?

Let’s revisit where we’re at here, it will help me get my bearings, help me decide how to proceed – do I build, do I set out?  In one case I work with what’s already there (here) all my work and toil and worry, all my whereabouts and wherewithal; on the other I construct, invent, create, here in my whereabouts and utilizing my wherewithal, I craft something not already here around and within me, make something occur, I act or continue, by acting continuing, in what direction, that is the question, how here now, this interminable present situation I am coming to find myself in, how shall I go on, proceed, in what manner?

Where am I, for starters, and am I alone?  I find myself wanting, quite naturally, spontaneously even, it seems, to be inclusive here, to desire (apparently) inclusion, to say “let’s” and “where are we” to establish a location, a whereabouts, a “situation,” as if the feeling of lostness of untrammeled terrain will forever be my sitz em leben as long as left to myself alone, as long as I can espy no reference points, no company, no where-with-al to my whereabouts.

Where were we, then, I’ll assume we’re together, that there are many of us in similar straits, coterminous, co-traveling, travailing, up into up against up toward this vast unknown expanse, this blankness, empty landscape thick as ice and night, as blindness.  We should reach out our hands perhaps.  Extend our arms, get a feel for things, touch what might be there in this dark, or rather this milky grey of blindness, this lack of distinction of specificity of landmarks, with no map, nothing we could read, could decipher or chart.  I grope.

First day of Spring, did I say?  Is that a location though?  A place?  A place in time perhaps, discoverable square on a grid, a 21^st, an equinox in things, in elements cycling and shifting about one another, out into the galaxy, some enormous imaginative gyre, it is raining, blind or not, on this first day of Spring of this particular year, haunted and mystical year, it is raining – we can hear it, can feel it on our skin, we are wet.  I am wet.

Determing then, our whereabouts: it is wet, it is Spring, let me describe it for you this thick endless open night of a year –

It is blinding – a glaring brightness that equals blackest night – one imagines it with the help of images – photos and films of discoveries of the glinting scintillant wastelands of the Poles…a disorienting everywhere one must forge ahead through, one needs ropes and flagpoles, say Everest in storm, say outer space, say vertiginous void, perhaps one’s own mind in nightmare, or depression, shock, grief.

This is where we are, some of us, in a saturating rain at the edge of a great blank expanse, blinding in its sheer whiteness, its big empty, darkening the brain, cancelling out the signposts, fogging the familiars, there is rain there is blindness and void.

I love the rain.

Maybe we love the vast expanse – the future – the unknown?  Perhaps we feel ourselves at the edge of tremendous, breathtaking, thrill-seeking adventure?  Perhaps it calls for a hurtling, what do they call this?  A point of no return, of lift-off, all systems go?

Either I build on what I already have or I start something new, something fresh (building with what I already have), I think to myself in this rain on this day, this wonderful unimaginable and rainy wet first virile and fertile day of Spring this year, this crazy and breathtaking, frightening ominous glacier of a year full of so many changes and detours, jagged peaks and harrowing cliffs, quicksand and mountain range and all at once undiscovered future frontier, scintillant, open, glaring and flood-drenched and dark, my blindness, my groping here at the edge of the future of the end of the world

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