Bang

How can I write, with a new universe erupting beside my head? Maybe not a universe, just an unexpected Amaryllis.

Mom gave me the bulb for Christmas in 2007. All winter while she died, it erupted. After it bloomed I didn’t know what to do. Mom used to set her Amaryllis pots in a shady part of the garden for the summer and next winter they would bloom again faithfully, but I had no such place. I couldn’t throw it out (most inactions attributed to laziness are actually deeply-disguised emotions). I didn’t water it. The pot sat on the back of my toilet all last year, its strapping long leaves defying my passivity. When they finally withered, I stacked the pot on a pile of junk in the hall. There it hung precariously for months.

Several weeks ago, a bud appeared. Out of nothing comes this Big Bang of vascular, erotic tissue, life out of death. The only plants that flourish in my apartment are ones that like to be ignored. Those fat leaves had absorbed all the nutrient needed to recreate themselves. Photosynthesis is a marvelous phenomenon. If I feed the plant a little now and neglect it for another year, will it repeat the performance?

The flower is an image of the universe: nothing gives rise to infinity and then implodes again.

Actually that’s an obsolete image, because latest cosmological models suggest implosion is unlikely. On the other hand, multiple universes are probable. Somewhere out there (In here? Just behind my shoulder?) various realities pop into existence at the same time.

Or not the “same time.” Time is an illusion, at least the orderly procession as we perceive it. It bends around ideas. Somewhere it even ceases to exist, though such places mean nothing as far as daily life is concerned.

Wrong again, now that I think on it. Some mornings feel like black holes. Perhaps the stuff inside a singularity is particularly meaningful, but how can I know, if the mind can’t go there and no information can escape?

There I go again with more inaccuracies!. Some scientists theorize certain information might escape, but I can’t remember what. It must have seemed irrelevant when I read it, but who knows? I was probably wrong about that, too.

I’m bumbling along, trapped within the meaning of an Amaryllis. I can’t even remember the name of the cultivar, the star that exploded, or the identity of this universe in relation to others and their inconspicious bulbs. This is the reward of sloth: leave something alone for 10 months or 13 billion years and it will surprise you. If I were diligent or fastidious, the space within these walls would be far less interesting.

Speaking of mind warps, here is the first published photo from the new piece of technology.