How Google Saved A Girl From Melting Away

A cloud in the wind, at the corner of the world.
---Tu Fu.

Less than a day in paradise
and a thousand years have passed among men.
While the pieces are still being laid on the board
All things have changed to emptiness.
Nothing is what it was but the stone bridge.

---Li Po

From Cassiel's notebook.

In a strange village called Karachi (sorry, astarte, couldn't resist!) a man climbs a pole, vowing to never come down. At last, he thinks to himself, like a Baron in the Trees, I can breathe. Fed up with the world, he will never look another human being in the eye again. He clings onto that pole for all his life, but one day he will let go and fly from here into the wild blue yonder, like a bird that melts into the clouds.

In a remote corner of the universe a girl types something into google and is assured that she hasn't floated away. A thousand flowers still blaze away, like a fire searching out a form, or a sun that burns with an untold brilliance: I want to live, I want to die. Meanwhile, the blue mourns the loss of the Red.

Memory is neither a melting away nor a crystalization; neither Spring nor Autumn, neither what we know nor what we will know; it is but a trace of what we once knew. The rose, like the ripples of light on a stream, gathers itself in to from an image, and then disappears. And who is to say whether this image is fading away or soaring? You do exist, you do not exist: the image is not nothing, precisely, but neither is it the Real.

Khayyam, this Red you see before you, is it not the same as that of the blush of the girl's face you once knew, or the lips longing for wine's deep mysteries?

Only the philosopher asks, dumbfoundedly: what is red?

You do not know me.

No, I do.

You will never know me.

I will.

You have never known me.

There you are wrong.

All is fleeting, all is vanishing. Why do we cling on, then, so tightly? What else can we do?

Useless to call this spiralling wisp of life one strand in the the web that heaven and earth weave.--Li Po

In the immediate present there is no perfection, no consummation, nothing finished. The strands are all flying, quivering, intermingling into the web, the waters are shaking the moon. There is no round, consummate moon on the face of running water, nor on the face of the unfinished tide. There are no gems of the living plasm. The living plasm vibrates unspeakably, it inhales the future, it exhales the past, it is the quick of both, and yet it is neither. There is no plasmic finality, nothing crystal, permanent. ..Life, the ever-present, knows no finality, no finished crystalisation.

The perfect rose is only a running flame, emerging and flowing off, and never in any sense at rest, static, finished. Herein lies its transcendent loveliness. The whole tide of all life and all time suddenly heaves , and appears before us as an apparition, a revelation. A water-lily heaves herself from the flood and looks around, gleams, and is gone. We have seen the incarnation, the quick of the ever-swirling flood. We have seen the invisible. We have seen, we have touched, we have partaken of the very substance of creative change, creative mutation. ...tell me nothing of the changeless and the eternal. Tell me of the mystery of the inexhaustible, forever-unfolding creative spark. Tell me of the incarnate disclosure of the flux, mutation in blossom, laughter and decay perfectly open in their transit, nude in their movement before us.

---D.H. Lawrence