The Mythos of Possibility: 6 Fracture, Play, and the Return of the Possible

If Post 5 described the sedimentation of cuts and the forgetting of possibility, this post examines how that forgetting can be unsettled. It is a story not of restoration to an original state, but of resurgent openness within worlds already habituated.

Fracture as Revelation

Fracture is the partial, imperfect disruption of habitual pattern. It is not total collapse, nor is it annihilation. Rather, it is a moment when repetitions fail to produce expected outcomes, when phenomena appear at the margins of stability, when habitual construals encounter something that cannot be accommodated.

Fracture makes visible what had been forgotten: the provisionality of cuts, the contingency of patterns, the openness that persists beneath sedimented regularities. In fracture, possibility asserts itself not as a return to some pre-world, but as the acknowledgment that worlds are never fully fixed.

Play as Reorientation

Closely allied with fracture is play. Play is not frivolity. It is the deliberate or spontaneous holding of phenomena in ways that diverge from habitual patterns. Play tests, stretches, and recombines cuts, exploring orientations that are adjacent to, yet distinct from, what is stabilised.

Through play, the rigid distinction between necessary and contingent, expected and anomalous, is temporarily suspended. Possibility is made vivid once more, not as a theoretical abstraction, but as experienced potentiality.

Play is a mechanism for reopening the field of what can appear, for making available phenomena that had receded, and for reminding participants that the holding of possibility is always ongoing.

Creativity Without Guarantee

The return of possibility is not guaranteed. Fracture and play do not automatically produce new worlds or novel phenomena. They only reorient attention to what was always possible but overlooked or suppressed.

New cuts may be taken, old cuts may be modified, perspectives may shift—but none of this is certain. This uncertainty is essential: the resurgence of possibility is fragile, provisional, and relational. It is inseparable from the contingencies and constraints of the worlds in which it occurs.

Habit Revisited

Worlds are stabilised through repetition, but repetitions can be flexible. Recognising habitual cuts as provisional allows the emergence of adaptive or creative habits. Fracture and play do not destroy structure; they enable it to be responsive and open. Habit can be held lightly, rather than blindly, making coordination possible without enforcing closure.

The Edge of Possibility

Fracture, play, and the creative return of possibility are practices of attention and holding. They require recognition that every world is a construction, that every phenomenon depends on a perspectival cut, and that nothing in the habitual landscape is inevitable.

At the edge of possibility, one inhabits worlds with awareness of their contingency. One perceives regularities without mistaking them for necessity. One engages with phenomena without imposing closure prematurely.

The final post will examine how to live and act at this edge—not as a retreat into abstraction, but as a sustained stance in which openness and stability coexist, and in which possibility continues to be held without being forgotten.