The Age of the Possible - Orion Magazine

There, at the bottom of being, where the water that makes aaaa this planet a world aaaaaa is the color of spacetime the octopus— with her body-shaped mind and her eight-arm embrace aaa of alien realities, with her colorblind vision aaa sightful of polarized light and her perpetually awestruck aaa lidless eye— aaaaaa can see shades of blue we cannot conceive. Call it god aaa if you must lean on the homely to fathom the holiness aaaof the fathomless whole. aaa And meanwhile, up here, aaa we swim amid particles we cannot perceive aaa folded into dimensions we cannot imagine to tell stories about aaa what is real and what is possible, and what it means to be. A blink of time ago we thought the octopus impossible, we thought this blue world lifeless aaa below three hundred fathoms until in 1893— aaa an epoch after Bach aaa scribbled in the margin aaaaaa of a composition aaaaaaaaa “Everything that is possible is real”— we plunged our prosthetic eye aaa deep into the blue and found a universe

saved by

• Fang Ting