The hardest thing is getting started and why is that exactly?
Imagine God a few moments before the Big Bang, mincing
around behind the stage in a petticoat with wine-tipped cigar -
the anxiety! Have we rehearsed well enough? Are the atoms
all in their correct costumes? Is there enough gas in the tank?
Enough light in the urn? God prancing with a Martini, upending
his gums with a toothpick. Of course God knows that should it
all go wrong, there will be another chance to put it right again. So why the anxiety? God pretends that he cares more than he does.
And isn’t that all of us? Our survival projects. Our artistic escapades.
The ridiculous conversation we have which leads nowhere, and yet is so worth having. The pets we keep! The bushes we hide behind. The valleys we scale and the clouds we climb. Anxiety is, as we know, the supreme aphrodisiac, better than chocolate, better than power. We are turned on by what could go wrong because we may discover something in the process. We are like children doing what we can before the parental storm returns home after performing its duty. And God is like all of us in that way; curiously precocious, reckless and daring. He said “Let there be magic!” and suddenly, from the darkroom of creation we had the Photograph. With the photograph came the negative.
With magic came boredom, with living came the necessity to think about what we might be doing if not doing this – someone translated it into what is called “death”. Of course death was never necessary, except as a preservation of magic. There is magic in the beginnings of things. There is a sparkle on the lips of dawn, a carriage of treats departing the platform of each moment. Have we come together to create magic or death? Is there something holier than a ghost that enters each sacred discourse? The bird spinning itself into a flock of leaves? The old man’s walking cane knocking on the paved belly of a city? The assassination of neurons in the rampage of love? You see, we all decay into the inevitability of magic.
