43:1

There are mirrors in this song, so turning the start of it backwards feels like an internally constant recursion, the first lines fed into the algorithm that some of the later lines describe, (which were of course triggered by the first lines in a kind of lyrical butterfly effect). But these lines didn't yet know about the mirroring to come when they were set down and photographed, when it was a blank page following a little idea (that making a thing is a valorized symptom of an illness and that the making creates a debt that one eventually needs to pay; then you write the song, the debts pile up, you hope to finish before the remittance stage). The future of the idea comes back to the spark and recasts it, in light of what it now knows. Time travel, made possible by taking a picture of something unprepared, in a conventional sense, to be photographed.

I think about documenting What Is Happening Now, for future filtering through the perspectives of Where It Will Lead. Omit the transitions, the intermediate stages; blank like rest of the page, white space after the initiating lines, the seed seen from the top of what eventually grew from it. The idea is that we can look way down to a germinating moment from a treetop with the tree somehow erased. And not fall. So if it's true that you spend 43 days down for every one day you spend up, timing is everything. What was I doing on October 18? (I counted calendar days from this photograph.) Eating all of the enchiladas in Albuquerque. How did this song look on that day? Like the first line turned backwards. Sickness masks things making. Making is the natural state.