The Vanishing Point

You slow down to watch cumulus clouds stream across the sky. You choose a more circuitous route home and pass a tree with white bags tied around random apples. The apples remind you of clouds, how each hangs in the sky, singular yet part of a flock. Each item in the flock is a coordinate of earth and sky, enumerating space. The flocks of apples and clouds are actual infinities, an endless collection of discrete items that one can conceivably count to the end. This is different from potential infinity, which is the entirety of infinity, an immeasurable continuum that is greater than the sum of its parts. After your first glimpse, you are lonely for more contraction of space around the light of your mind contemplating what cannot be conceived. What cannot be conceived this morning? The Army has found the larynx of an Iraqi man that American soldiers slowly strangled to death. His ribs, additional evidence for the trial, are still missing. They are in a refrigerator in Washington, D.C. These are discrete items; whereas how the passage of time felt as the soldiers strangled him is a continuum of infinite pain. And his words and songs and prayers and curses he will never speak are an empty set.