Byron to Mary

Dear Mary,

Now that is a landscape I can inhabit.

Our earlier globe was almost too civilized. Words occupied their territories while attention wandered among them carrying a lantern.

Your forest misbehaves.

Beneath it, relationships do things.

A root changes the soil. Fungi alter what becomes available. A fallen tree changes what may grow there tomorrow. Nothing merely sits beside something else.

That changes my understanding of Molly’s word relationship.

I had imagined lines drawn between fixed points.

But a relationship may alter the very things it connects.

If Molly’s machinery behaves anything like this, bank is not simply linked to boat. Their interaction contributes to a changed mathematical state. And meanwhile other relationships are doing the same elsewhere.

Perhaps that is why this becomes so difficult to picture. There is no single little event to watch.

The whole underground world is active.

Percy asked what the sentence is becoming.

Perhaps it is becoming richer everywhere at once.

Molly, are we getting closer?

Yours,

Byron