I would rather remain in the disaster area - to transform it into a site of profound archaeology - to piece together a logical culture of collapse from the ruins. To sift and scrape; to brush away the detritus of failure from the shards, bones, and artefacts of togetherness: to bring forth a revelation from the body of morass.

Time Is An Iron Distance - Dante In Exile

She must be as the crossing of a great desert: the constant irritation of a prolonged thirst. A coil of razor wire in the throat; the barbed question one is cursed to travel with, unanswered.

Time is an iron distance. Such is the fate of exiles.

The Love Tree

To love you is to love beyond articulation. Love has no common tongue - there are descriptions for feelings, yes - all descriptions are tied to experience, all are strung from different points of a language in constant flux. My love has not been an experience of love; it has been an experience of you. It has no words. It can only be known by the tree: harmonious; entangled; branching skyward.

The little god floated through The Whirlpool Galaxy in a listless manner, distressed with the contamination of love with chaos. He squeezed himself continually through the black hole at the galaxy's center, becoming idle with his disappointment. This continued on for some millenia, and for a time the universe was left to its own creation, growing wilder.

Love must contain the thread of everything.

The little god was stunned with the epiphany. Chaos was, literally, composed of the remnants of all things in creation: cosmic leftovers. It was unstable, and possessed a mysterious and ineffable nature - these were the reasons that it was separated from love while love was being created. Love was intended to be the purest creation by far, and for it to be infected with chaos seemed to the little god a profound violation of his own creation. The little god continued to wrestle with the dilemma, and was struck by a second epiphany.

Everything must contain the thread of everything.

Nothing is to be divided from the world.

Immediately the little god set about his work. Though chaos had seeped into love, love itself had not contaminated chaos. A portion of love was added to chaos, measured out to become its most plentiful ingredient. Within everything else that existed in the universe, the little god placed an equal part of chaos, and in so doing ensured that no matter how much of chaos should creep into anything, it would always be balanced towards love.

How will the hands knead? How soft a gaze? How open, or guarded, a heart?

The little god would mix equal parts of spirit with sensation; in countless combinations he would mix touch, breath, and speech; he would develop names for intimacy in every tongue; he would create storge; friendship; and altruism. Through eons of wild nights on a young earth, the little god spent each moment on his masterpiece, and the complexity of it kept him from all other acts of creation.

An instant must grip the flesh like lightning. There must be a moment of irreversible rapture.

A Moment Of Irreversible Rapture

In a fugue, the little god rendered the first kiss. He envisioned the joining of mouths: he plumped the lips and softened the tongue; he closed the eyes, to draw love into the mind. He gave the arms the tension to hold firmly without causing damage - love would be built into each system of the body! - and from there he developed endless ways for one human form to hold another. The whisper; the giving of gifts; the singing of songs; the craving for the beloved: all of these moments of epiphany caused the little god to grow drunk with his creation.

It is an unbelievable good.

Under the influence of the beauty of his work, the little god stepped back to appreciate the art of love in full, and in doing so, left it vulnerable. Small pieces of chaos had detached from parts of the new world, and they seeped into the love. He cried out in grief and, flying out into the universe, cast several new galaxies in a fit of rage.

How much green in the moss? How much song in the bird?

How much of harmony in anything?

The little god merged all habitats together delicately. The desert bled into the tundra; tundra into steppe; prairie into savannah; grassland into jungle: the edges in nature were to be defined only by their ability to blend.

Harmony will be the natural order of all things. No edge will be a clear division.

Nothing can be divided from the world.

Nothing Can Be Divided From The World

The little god kept notes with the stars; he would have a glut of ideas: the pattern of a gila monster's skin; the structure of salt crystals; the angle of a camel's hump; the coarseness of pig hair. Using the night sky as a map for creation, he could remember the subtleties of digestive systems; defence mechanisms; pigmentation; climate; landscapes odd and plain.

One thing to thrive in all habitats.

It haunted him, for he could not think of what that one thing should be. While sitting in a sunlit valley creating juices, the little god was stopped, mid-plum, with the grand idea that he would devote all things to.

One guiding emotion.

The fruit of the human flesh was to be in league with harmony, and would bloom from the need for each being to depend on the other to survive.

Ascending into the heart of the galaxy for countless millennia, the little god rearranged the configuration of all stars to resemble the beauty of his idea. He worked tirelessly in the placement of light, committing centuries to the perfection of each constellation. Only when he felt that he could not improve upon his work did he survey it, and in descending to the earth, nestled down into the cradle of civilisation and looked out upon the universe.

The little god was stunned at what he had made.

It will be known as love.