Forever in the Finite
From The Hellbound Heart, by Clive Barker:
But there was worse. The eyes! Oh god in heaven, he had never guessed that they could be be such torment; he, who’d thought there was nothing on earth left to startle him. Now he reeled! Everywhere, sight!
The plain plaster of the ceiling was an awesome geography of brush strokes. The weave of his plain shirt an unbearable elaboration of threads. In the corner he saw a mite move on a dead dove’s head, and wink its eyes at him, seeing that he saw. Too much! Too much!
Appalled, he shut his eyes. But there was more inside than out; memories whose violence shook him to the verge of senselessness. He sucked his mother’s milk, and choked, felt his sibling’s arms around him (a fight, was it, or a brotherly embrace? Either way, it suffocated). And more; so much more. A short lifetime of sensations, all writ in a perfect hand upon his cortex, and breaking him with their insistence that they be remembered.
In a finite space, how do you write about the endless?
The passage above from Clive Barker’s The Hellbound Heart grasps the experience of the unending (or expected unending, as from the character’s immediate perspective) through a progression of ever-amplified thoughts and feelings and narrative descriptions of those human abilities.
Barker’s text begins and finishes, to be sure, but there are spaces when even reading it feels like forever. The text that precedes what you see above concerns smell and then the man’s attempted management of smell. Then touch. Then taste. Then hearing. On all fronts: Futile efforts to suppress.
When you reach sight! there’s maybe a letting go of the foreverness because there are only so many senses. Right?
In reading, I forgot about proprioception, which is here found in the man’s position in the room.
I hadn’t considered equilibrioception in the man’s physical resistance to memory and present.
There’s nociception too in the pain of the seen, heard, touched, and in “more; so much more” unexplained in the text but understood in the moment.
If we’re being particular — why not? — each feeling can rely on the others, so we could continue into millennia with an infinite combination of everything before us and whatever else we hadn’t yet thought was possible with regard to human sensation.
Barker even breaks outward to the “plain plaster of the ceiling” and the “weave of his plain shirt” as allowances to rip through the bonds of normal time into a bottomless felt expanse.
He contains this, so impressive to me, into phrases I’ve become attached to within this passage and the rest of the opening — this is the opening of the story — of Hellbound.
Awesome geography of brush strokes.
Unbearable elaboration of threads.
Specific but allowing me to ponder them for as long as I choose or am compelled. I might never forget them. Buried somewhere in the depths of my own cortex.
You might write about the endless by allowing for more, so many more avenues for inquisition into the matter. Presenting as many options as possible, and in realizing you are limited by the spacing of printed ink on paper, forcing ideas that could be considered “boundless” in their scope. Starting readers in the physical; shifting them to the metaphysical; showing options and avenues with the hope they will attach themselves and never release or be allowed to release.