“INTERSTITIAL”

Sometimes it was almost too much to bear.

Everything tapered off, deliquescing endlessly in all directions while simply repeating itself at every scale, as if the entire world, existence itself as well as our apprehension of it, were all simply one large giant fractal.  Math, into Cantor sets and multiple infinities; irrational, ultimately imaginary, number lines; the abyss of probability.  Human relations, starting with one's own, forever reducible, all the way out to history, where every added level of inspection revealed only more and more detail in endless emergence.  Not just Mandelbrot's coastlines, but even consciousness itself.  Even culture, all the way out in its entirety - - in its very pro-ject, as the Greeks put it.  Everything,  Everything!  All simply an endless, repetitive filigree of motion, mapping, endless fitting.

All just wave stuff.  An endless, eternal mapping and fitting of motion to its medium.  Some highly detailed disturbance, taken for substance, destined for what, if anything at all.

Was that it?  Were we all just standing waves?  Was everything, or whatever it was that we called everything, just one big set of standing waves in some unmeasurable, ultimately unfathomable Gödelian hyperspace?

Was that it?  Was that the something big that Nancy said he was wrestling with, that he was destined, or at least trying so hard, to quote work his way through?  Was that what the unusual configuration in his chart she'd referred to been all about?  Was that it?

My god, he thought.

That it was almost too much to bear wasn't the problem.  That was the easy part.  No, it was the almost.  The almost part.  That was what was too much to bear.  The not knowing.  The open-endedness to it all.  To whatever the hell 'it' was.

That, was the problem.