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This wasn't always so. Writing began as an occult art, which served either the celestial gods or the terrestrial god, the king.

The oldest written story, The Epic of Gilgamesh, fulfilled the talismanic purposes of an author who was the first to set his name to a work of creative writing: Sin-liqe-unninni, a professional exorcist and resident of Uruk over three thousand years ago. The incipit of this most ancient text vividly asserts the sorcery of its author's purpose: He who stared into the abyss.

Scored with human blood, writing not only defines and authenticates our lives, it also provides an expressive liberty we call imagination. Those of us uncultivated in the profound implications of contemporary physics minimize its power with phrases such as: just imagination.

Since earliest times, imagination has told us there's more to reality than meets the eye. Now, through science, we know that's true. Quantal interconnectedness, entanglement of subatomic particles, non-local phenomena such as Bell's Inequality, and the illusion of time (Einstein's relativity revelation, already over a century old) are all well worth checking out if you're not familiar with them. They imply that the abyss is not at all what it seems.

The mind's eye is what gazes out from the pit. The irrational intelligence that author's our dreams, the spontaneously fanciful part of our human reality that inspires our poetry and fantasies - our yinsanity - is our freaky yet serene freefall through our days to the vanishing point.

Because we now know time as an illusion, we can forget about the tyranny of the past and the one way arrow to the future. Unlike the Sumerian sorcerers who invented writing, we have the possibility of understanding something very powerful about the vanishing point. It's not necessarily the end. We can conceive of it as the beginning.

Death emanates our lives. The vanishing point becomes the point of origin, where we appear in the void as the sum of our lives. Everything we are is there - where we begin!

The illusion - as convincing as the sun rising or stars wheeling - is that we are falling toward our last moment. No. We are ascending out of it.

The poetic conclusion to the truth of contemporary physics is this: we are the abyss. Forget your anthropocentrism. Our brains evolved to serve our gonads and ovaries, not reality. Our genitals, powered by Darwinian forces, inveigh against the extravagant truth that we are evoked out of nothing, out of an astonishing strangeness we call reality but may just as well and more accurately name for what it really is: unknowable mystery.

Dazzling, light-filled emanation of death, you are the sublime agonist. Reason struggles against you. But your significance surpasses all understanding, all concepts. You survived the downfall of heaven. Existence for you is but a dream. Erotic, prophetic, ephemeral, your appearance is an incomprehensible apparition in the void. In a flash of fright and lust, those who came before you are gone.

Before you also disappear, you have recourse to a fierce power rare among our kind and more transmogrifying than music. You can write. The anthropocentric fanatics among us will try to use that power against you. Contracts, tax forms, levies, rules, regulations, laws, manuals, bills, theses, pamphlets, fact sheets, histories, authorizations, wills, edicts, reports, critiques, reviews, catalogues, monographs, policies, assessments, subpoenas, letters testamentary, missives, licenses, tracts, position papers, notices, amendments, résumés, essays, transcripts, brochures, memos, articles, epistles, billboards, permits, disquisitions, newsletters, memoirs, lists, ordinances, interviews, encyclicals, announcements, notes, invoices, ad campaigns, rosters, dissertations, charters, hagiologies, writs, registrations, dossiers, e-mails, compositions, treatises, mission statements, analyses, proclamations, records, weblogs and, of course, memoranda - anything the modern mind can spell out to spellbind you, the glandular zealots will exploit to keep you normative, anything to exorcise your irrational splendor.

Fight back. Write a poem. Not any poem. Not doggerel. Write a folkloric poem about your uncanny spirit rising out of the abyss, emanating from death, raying backward through the delusion of time from the appearance point. Make it something deeper than logic or will, something mystically shaped by our grander unity. If modern physics is right, this poem will not only change you - it will change the world. You will find yourself living in a different universe. And the more intimately you touch the secret state of your imaginative nature, the more profoundly and irresistibly will you transfigure our unparalleled universe.

Unleash your strange power and write a story. Resist the numbing toxin of spider-minded writing instructors who urge you to write about what you know. They want to tangle you up in their webs of reason spun from the swollen glands of our terrible, desolate evolutionary survival. But you already know we don't survive. You are an emanation of death. You have leaped directly out of the pit.

So, write flamboyantly about all that is unknown and unknowable. Write at the limits of sight and light, in the tenebrous ranges that curve into the abyss. Don't try to make it good. Make it bad, shocking and exultant, a mesmeric mix of transcendent and infernal. Admire what's bad in your writing and redefine it deeper to holy. Bloody the tight-lipped mouth of God and press yourself passionately against the heart of infinity.

Don't let anybody fool you again. You are the mysterious, majestic spirit of the incomprehensible.