Fluttering: A Black Tornado Filled with Fire

One looks up at the sky: the relative homogeneity of the relatively unexplored: one thinks of only a few kinds of phenomena. But the acceptance is forced upon me that there are modes and modes and modes of inter-planetary existence: things as different from planets and comets and meteors as Indians are from bison and prairie dogs: a super-geography—or celestiography—of vast stagnant regions, voyagers and tourists and ravagers: the hunted and the hunting: the super-mercantile, the super-piratic, the super-evangelical. Sense of homogeneity, or our positivist illusion of the unknown—and the fate of all positivism. Astronomy and the academic. Ethics and the abstract. The universal attempt to formulate or to regularize—an attempt that can be made only by disregarding or denying. Or all things disregard or deny that which will eventually invade and destroy them—Until comes the day when some one thing shall say, and enforce upon Infinitude: "Thus far shalt thou go: here is absolute demarcation." The final utterance: "There is only I." Vast black thing like a crow poised over the moon. The datum is so important to us, because it enforces, in another field, our acceptance that dark bodies of planetary size traverse this solar system. Our position: That the things have been seen: Also that their shadows have been seen. Vast black thing poised like a crow over the moon. So far it is a single instance. By a single instance, we mean the negligible.