Would Haydn have started?

Big things start small.

I had to piss on the way home from Toronto last night. It's not usual for me to stop on the side of the road. Must have been all that coffee with schillerium. I pulled over to the shoulder and got out of the car. Along Sideroad 20 the countryside was dark.

It was an eerie night: a loud chorus of insects whirring in the wet woods, like a fleet of spaceships landing, screeching in some inexpressible language. What were they? Didn't sound like crickets. The primordial bacchanal has begun, a vast feast and swagger of life burning itself lustily toward the crash of frost.

A hunchback moon lurked behind shapeless clouds, a diaspora of pale gloom seeping across the heavens.

Astronomers are studying two clusters of galaxies colliding not far away in the grand scheme of things: only 800 million light years. One contains 1,000 galaxies, the other 300. If they were brighter they would be big enough to see. They fill a patch of sky half the size of the moon. In our own celestial neighbourhood, a cataclysm vaster than anything in the universe is taking place. It will last billions of years. It's spewing x-rays all over the sky, and we can't even feel the ground shaking.

I stood on the shoulder, pissing into cattails, caffeine smell rising with marsh grasses and gases. It just kept coming, my productive bladder carrying on and on.

Finally I finished and turned to face the car. Under deafening insect whine, the running Sunfire sighed, emitting the muffled bluster of Haydn's Symphony Number One, the opening allegro. I paused a moment hearing two orchestras merge like galaxies in darkness.

If Haydn had only known, the radio announcer said. Do you suppose he had any idea, when he wrote Number One, that he would write 103? He might have shut the book right then and there, never published, never started. We never know when we begin a thing, where it will carry us.

Dinocephalosaurus would only appear to fish as a small head in the murky waters. Its neck was more than twice as long as its body: 25 vertebrae. Just for comparison, all mammals have only seven neck bones, even giraffes. This ancient marine lizard could open its mouth and draw in water, the cervical ribs gave it this ability, to suck in its prey before they realized what was hiding there in the depths.

Who is waiting for me? Or what? I step forward onto a nameless coast. I make choices. I have these things before me: training, apprenticeship. Or I could simply cast away all care, plunge into this ocean of words and let my writing consume me. I could run away to the pine barrens, live in a shack and let endless Arctic winter cover me. I could retire now to Lake Fletcher, watch the moon rise over eastern reaches, paving the water silver, let it spill galaxies into my eyes, endlessly birthing stars.

Maybe I should go implant some ovarian tissue into my notebook and see what's born. But that's what this process is all about, my pen on the pages, my fingers clattering on the keyboard, swimming relentlessly forward, an ancient monster emerging. We can only guess what it will look like.

Until now scientists only had skulls of this creature, didn't have a clue about the long neck. It came out of nowhere, a rock.