I took the stars from my eyes, and then I made a map
And knew that somehow I could find my way back
Then I heard your heart beating, you were in the darkness too
So I stayed in the darkness with you

- Florence Welch

Sometimes storytellers and scholars thereof reference an "inner echo." The term is associated with the oral tradition, and because it is often wielded by humanities-aligned writers, it is often coded as non-technical.

However, reason and rationality have an inner echo, too. It might even be older than its more popular cousin. The first myths, let us not forget, were in essence early science: posed explanations for phenomena beyond the outskirts of mortal understanding. And just like our present-day age of empirical dogma, those who drove forward the corpus of knowledge, adding new overtones to this primordial inner echo, were those who could see beyond whatever consensus the majority agreed upon. Penrose's twistors augment the relativity of Einstein, who amended Newton by discarding the prior of absolute space, who himself stood atop Descartes with his contribution of coordinate-based thinking.

In "De Primis Paucis," I wrote about the absolute and void, the latter as observer or reference frame, boundary as the cut between the two generating the myriad things. Let's make that more concrete.

The oldest creation myth we have access to at present, older than the Book of Genesis, is the Enuma Elish. It tells the story of Tiamat and Apsu, saltwater and freshwater. One represented the chaos surrounding all constructions of order, the other the essential ingredient needed to bear order. The story frames diffusion between saltwater and freshwater as the first union, out of which everything else follows.

The Enuma Elish comes from the Mesopotamian canon. The other oldest set of ideas we have access to come from Ancient Egypt (and later, what the Ancient Greeks built atop the Egyptian mythology). This Egypt was ideologically centered around the sun; the Greeks later conceived of the human heart as a flame within.

I guess what I want to point out is, these mythologies are somewhat isomorphic. The sun is itself an essential ingredient to most life as we know it, akin to Apsu. It is a resource the human body takes in and utilizes, and it is separated by coporeal boundary from the inner fire, the generative chaos we all carry. Diffusion here mirrors observation, as we who gaze upon the deep let in just enough light and universal solvent to see deeper and live longer, but not so much that it starts doing damage to the orchestra of cells that comprise us.

Haruki Murakami has this great passage, I forget where, in which he points out that before electricity, there was little to distinguish the darkness without from the darkness within. But taking the complement of this observation, we notice that the two initial plasmas meet only through the ocular instruments we use to record empirical observations of light: by day, the sun; by night, the heart.

So the rational inner echo, which feeds itself through the drawing of distinction and boundary, resonates from a separation of flames that without which, the human condition cannot exist. While one flame is passed from one generation of observers to the next, burning bright in those who illuminate what for others is indistinguishable from further darkness, the other flame burns with nuclear near-perpetuity on a timescale that may well outlast all humanity.

The saltwater is still saltwater post-diffusion, just of a different ionic concentration. And so the waves of the echo persist, independent of observer, absolute.