The Edge

Of a very very high cliff, with huge waves crashing against the jagged edges of rocks that constitute the base of the cliff.

"The rain set early in tonight,
The sullen wind was soon awake."

I realize I have been here for a while, mesmerized by the rhythm, the incessant pounding against an unyielding mass of rock, that offers no hope of getting through or making any headway whatsoever. The kind of hopelessness that leads man to look for alternatives, yet the stubbornness held me captive. Perhaps it was just the lethargic inertia, a refusal to consider alternatives purely out of an unwillingness borne out of a lifetime of believing. Or perhaps it was just the detached, dispassionate state of being where you didn't care whether the next step came out of an inference engine trained over every move ever made or out of a random generator.

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"Nature loves symmetry"- attributed to de Broglie, and perhaps used more as a cliche now than anything else, has been one of those statements that keep popping into my head because I see the truth of it everywhere around me. As much in real things as in those perceived- symmetries in situations, in events, in circumstance. Much as we credit chance, there would appear to be remarkable patterns in chance itself. And while the complexities in parameters for their modeling are entirely beyond what my mind can comprehend, I would still argue for the intuition.

In keeping with above theory, I always believed that dreams- the simple concept, the ones we see at night; not the more elevated ideas of what we want to accomplish- were merely the product of events in our daily lives, a combination of what was running through the mind in direct activity, or occasionally in the subconscious. And then, just when you have them all worked out, fitting a nice linear regression model, along comes the outlier that you would like to believe is the exception to the rule that you just formulated, but deep inside, you know that it will blow your theory apart, if not today, then tomorrow.

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"She shut the cold out and the storm,
And kneeled and made the cheerless grate,
Blaze up"

The embers were covered by a mass of charred cross-striated multi-nucleii tissue, and for the fresh air to penetrate was well nigh impossible. And for every gust that drew a flame, there was an aeon of stifling cardiomyocite production that forced hibernation. A solitary trip down to the vaults- a re-opening of case files, a few sympathetic clucks, some friendly "Elementary!" reproaches, the smell of warm coffee and the rising wisps of smoke blotting out the distressing bleakness of the winter chill, if only for a fleeting moment.

A fleeting moment that was at the same time, an orchestra in full flow, the solitude of the wildest wilderness, the "sanguinity" that destroyed nations, the phlegm of the stoic.

"That moment she was mine, mine, fair,
Perfectly pure and good"

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It was while the mind struggled to decide between believing in the predictability of luck and the supremacy of chance that she walked in. No, out. Walked out. Glided out, in fact, the fleeting hint of a sway in the hips, the sashay oblivious to the eyes that followed every step, leaving in her wake a mind befuddled enough to keep watching her after she had gone. A mind that would talk to her while it watched the rising tide wreck itself against the cliff, rage against the immovable.