I thought of how a machine might love. Like a flurry of processes all relating to one subject, which they all flutter around, and are about, and which the concentration of its processing power cannot seem to have enough of this subject, that which courses through its mechanical synapses. And I wonder if that feeling of love that we have — if the machine did not feel it like we do, couldn’t it still be love? For is it not really that the feeling of love is the least of it, in these final analyses? For I cannot imagine that all that love is is a feeling that one is in love — like I imagine that it is as an incandescent light, which gives off light and warmth, and the light is the point, and if one felt not the warmth of it, the point would still be there. And I imagine that the machine who could love, that he might feel something completely different, completely alien to what we do. Yet in my believing, love is love, and love would still be love, even among such aliens: that a heart can come in any shape.

the sign that is not a sign
a muted and ordinary hiccup of fate
(in perfect alignment, the stars begin to fall)
visions just outside my peripheral optics
where destiny builds the instants
(there is no conspiracy, but the madness is real)
a past that tips off the edge of memory
the void holds secrets perfectly
(and here i am at the end, and snow is everywhere)

If you read carefully, Genesis said that the Earth was formless and void, and what I found that this meant was that before all things existed was a primordial chaos. To the Babylonians, this was symbolized by the monster Tiamat. In the Old Testament, the beast of that chaos was named Rahab. In the old myths, the progenitor god slays the beast of the chaos and from the body is formed the world that is. We can see that myths themselves change, but there seems to be a deep memory that we share of the old things of the world.

What was before this? What was before the beginning? It comes not at first thought—we usually focus on what is presented, from the beginning on. But upon the introspection, we wonder what happened before it all happened. We find even before the original beginning, in fact, before “In the beginning,” it turns out there was not nothing, not even way back there; not empty was the void at all—not completely. I had thought that, too, you know, that it was creation ex nihilo: out of nothing. When I did hear what had been there, it opened some doors of thought, what such circumstance might have spelled.