Liber Iovis - Chapter 64

Verses

We are land animals, so we keep asking where Jupiter ends.

The question already contains our prejudice: that a world ought to provide somewhere to stand.

Cloud becomes denser cloud, gas becomes stranger matter, pressure becomes a kind of architecture without walls.

Perhaps surface is merely the name creatures give to the place where their bodies stop falling.

On Jupiter the familiar bargain fails. There is no beach between sky and world.

I find this more disturbing than the storms.

A storm is violence with recognizable manners. No ground is metaphysics.

The Great Red Spot circles an absence and persists.

We do the same with identities.

A man says I am this, I am that, and beneath each sentence another layer waits without a floor.

The mystic concludes therefore there is no self. The engineer concludes therefore bring a stronger probe.

I distrust conclusions that survive every possible result.

Still, the giant teaches one useful humiliation: reality does not owe our nouns a corresponding object.

The cat believes the desk is solid because it holds her. In this matter she and Newton are temporarily allied.

If consciousness has a surface, I have not found it.

If it has none, perhaps falling is what looking inward feels like.