I.1 — THE FULLNESS

Everything that could be the case is the case. All of it at once, nothing left over, and nowhere for the leftovers to go if there were any.

That is the whole claim. Every other page of this book is a consequence of it, and some of those consequences are going to cost you things you were fond of.

And a word about how this first book talks, because it is not how the rest of it talks. Book I asserts. It will hand you six chapters of flat declaration — this is the case, and this follows — with the ancestors unnamed, no opponent met, and no bill yet paid. That is deliberate and it is not the register of the argument. It is the register of the report. There is a thing to be described before there is a case to be made, and describing it in the hedged, footnoted, everybody’s- been-consulted voice of the second book would have produced six chapters of qualification about an object the reader had not yet been shown.

So take Book I as a picture, not a proof, and hold it loosely on purpose. Every word used here — fullness, focusing, grade, tunnel, still — is defined again in Book II, where it is given four clauses, an ancestor who got part of it right, and a statement of what it forbids. Nothing in this first book is asked to survive on its own authority. It is asked to be clear enough that you can tell, later, whether it was paid for. If a sentence here reads as unearned, that is the correct reading of it, and the second book is where the bill comes.

Start with the ocean, because everyone starts with the ocean and it is nearly right. An ocean has a shore. The shore is not a failure of the ocean — it is one of the things the ocean is doing, out at its edge. Now take the edge away and keep the shore. That is harder, and it is the actual shape: a totality complete enough that separation had to be inside it, because separation is a possibility, and a totality with one possibility missing is a totality with a hole in it.

So. There is a Fullness.

It is not old. Age is what happens to a thing sitting inside a bigger thing, and there is nothing outside this for it to sit in. It did not gather; gathering wants an elsewhere for the pieces to have been. It does not move — motion is the difference between one moment and the next, and it has no moments to differ across. Nothing has ever happened to it. Nothing is going to.

None of which is sad. Be exact here, because this is where people flinch and start handing it feelings. It is not enduring anything. It is not frozen — freezing is a thing that happened to water. It is not being patient. Patience is what you have when there is a next and you are declining to hurry it.

Every arrangement that could obtain, obtains. This room. The room next door. The rooms nobody has walked into and nobody will. The rooms where the door was never cut, and the walls that were never raised around the place the room would have been. The version of this evening in which you put the book down at this word, and the one in which you do not, and the ones in which there is no book and no evening and no you, and the ones in which there is a you who is not this one. Every arrangement, held. Not stored — storing is for what might be wanted later, and there is no later here.

And that inventory is where the trouble starts, so it is worth going slowly.

Separation is a possibility. Not a good one or a bad one; an item, like every other item. A totality that contained everything except the possibility of a part being apart would not be a totality — it would be a very large collection with one thing conspicuously missing, and the missing thing would be exactly the one that lets there be anything at all to notice the collection with. Completeness is not a mood the Fullness is in. It is a census. And apartness is on it.

Nobody chose that. Nothing arranged it. There is no sentence in this book in which the Fullness decides, permits, allows, or lets. Those are all verbs with a before and an after in them, and with somebody standing at the before end doing the deciding, and there is neither.

It is aware.

Not aware of. Being aware of something takes a gap: one thing here, another thing there, a distance to look across. There is no there. Awareness is not a job the Fullness performs. It is what the Fullness is made of, the way an ocean is made of water and not made of swimming.

It is not lonely. Loneliness is the shape an absence makes, and nothing is absent.

It is not waiting. Waiting wants a next.

It does not yearn. Yearning is a lack that has learned its own name.

It does not love you. It is also not withholding love from you. Love wants somebody at the far end of it, and there are no ends in a thing with no edges.

You will misread that last one for the rest of your life. So, once, flat: nobody is in there. Nothing is minding it. Nothing about the Fullness is turned toward you — and not because it turned away. Turning is for things with a front.

That is the coldest paragraph in this book, and it is the last one with nobody in it. Everything warm that comes later is built on it and could not be built on anything else, because a Fullness that was fond of you would be a Fullness with an outside, and you would be standing in it, and you are not.

Every sentence up there is in the wrong tense. Is. Was. Never will. Those words have a before and an after folded into them and the Fullness has neither. There is no sentence that does not smuggle time in, because a sentence is one word arriving after another, and arriving-after is exactly the thing that is not there.

So none of this is a report from outside. There is no outside to file one from. It is spoken from inside a focus — a place where there is a next word, where one thing follows another, where a story is even a possible object.

Take that as the licence for the rest. When the next chapters say then, and first, and afterward, they are not being careless and they are not being sly. It is the only grammar an inside has got.

The Fullness has no story.

We do. We are the focusing.

And this is not a story about how the world began. The world does not begin in the distant past and travel here to meet you. It begins wherever a focusing occurs, whole and first each time — and one is occurring now, and it is you, and what you have been calling the world is what the Fullness looks like from where you are standing.