Alien Welcoming Station

YOU TOO CAN BE US :

A Tourist Guide for Visiting Aliens

by


Donald Brackett





“Circumstances are difficult only for those who draw back from the tomb.”


Justine, Virtue Reclaimed






As usual, the ignoble Marquis was quite correct. A eulogy for ourselves then....or at least a eulogy for our history of ourselves. What a charming idea. And why not, since much of our time is up, like entropy in a suitcase, and yet we persist in tensely, and so intensely, lingering hereabouts, fragments of intergalactic unconscious energy unable to suitably retire from the fray, lingering on as if, or if only, to tell our story. Or perhaps to resurrect whatever is going to be left of the shattered story of the past twenty centuries. Yet often, rumination causes in us a humorous sadness. Musing on works after the physical, the metaphysical, induces an amusing melancholy. The meta-world just past the edge of the physical, about which much can be surmised but little can be confirmed, while being excessively tantalizing but unyielding in its stubborn silence, remains a mere emblem of the enigma. There are of course, many emblems of the enigma but only one enigma. Thus, the confusion hereabouts. The trick is in developing access, through some recalcitrant cellar door in your head perhaps, to the fourth dimension: an awareness of the mind underneath “your” mind, an awareness of, and travel into, the interior world. Between atoms, between brains: a users manual for the fourth dimension then, a space which cannot be measured, but without which the “outside world” means nothing. Welcome to the intermediate zone. Some people call it the “dreamtime”, some people call it the “bardo”, either way it is the in-between place: a three dimensional alien welcoming station designed to orient you to your quite understandably puzzling surroundings, and your soon to be even newer surroundings. Soon you will imagine that you are a native here, when actually yours is only a transitional visit, but one where the customs become unduly confining and tend to camouflage the actuality of what is happening, or at least the meaning and consequences of what is happening. But the in-between does not suddenly begin after this life ends, the intermediate zone exists as an ever-present element in all of existence: in other words the place one encounters upon death is of course already here during life, on the periphery, not only out of the corner of the eye but out of the corner of the mind. Let’s face it, basically, you’re surrounded. During your stay here you will be issued a body but have no choice in the matter of its appearance or function, and regardless of the model it will last only as long as its design permits. The skin will be your only certainty. Everything else will be mere speculation, enjoyable or otherwise perhaps, but generally unverified and certainly not worth dispute or debate. Still the froth exults. If that is, you can find stillness inside it all. If you’re lucky, you’ll be born cute, clever, sexy, attractive and witty. And if not, well, then woe betide you. Sometimes, you just have to try and become something or someone else, to embrace an unknown part of yourself which feels like otherness at first and is possibly materialized, like ectoplasm perhaps, out of whatever hubris (some call it karma) you ended up with, if taken to its logical or natural conclusion.

On the other hand, afflictions can often be transformed into blessings, particularly if they consist of certain cognitive anomalies which disrupt the customary circuitry of the brain. Often you become the exact opposite of what you started out being, unless destiny lurks dumbly in our very cells and nerves. Let us hope not. In which case, three cheers for entropy after all. And the energy which melts away (watch it as it evaporates) some call it “kundalini”, some call it “chi”, some call it “Jack Benny reruns on a Sunday morning”, whatever it is it is the fuel that propels the transformations into which you are thrown by virtue of your temporary presence here. So it seems that, philosophically, nothing but the self exists, or can be proven to exist. Yet oddly enough, contrary to expectations, Stirner’s structure does not reign here...rather it is possible to conduct oneself according to slightly tarnished but nonetheless sturdy golden rules if, and only if, each self permits multiple realities to exist without in the least being threatened by them, since nothing but the self exists, or can be proven to exist. And then, even that can be proven not to. So that we may remain perfectly clear at the very outset, it should be emphasized that in the thoughts that follow, the fourth dimension is conceived of and presented largely as an “attitude” (or perhaps an altitude), an awareness of things as they are, though it could just as easily be described in a neurological context, including these many intriguing cognitive anomalies, and amounting to little more than successfully improvised behaviour. But what else is advancing forward through a panorama of evolutionary entertainment if not a well managed program of compensation strategies, including procedures for a well-timed ending? This attitude, or angle of perception and conception, is a simple, natural epiphenomenon of living in a world such as ours, and one that arises spontaneously, in a sense, but only once it has become necessary for it to do so. But more of that later, for now it is enough to stipulate that if the “real” is merely a component of the possible , then the possible is the real pushed to its logical, or natural, conclusion. And dear reader, if concerned with matters metaphysical, you must also approach the fray as if you were the king of a nation with only one inhabitant. Oddly enough, through this ironic and shared egoism, each lives according to their own inclination with a surprising tolerance...since no one is overly concerned with the operations of anything in particular but the personal musings and reveries which float through the inside of their own head, including the apparition of all the other apparent heads floating past in a steady parade, through the outside-head. Hardly concerned with any shared reveries such as those suggested by the externalized phantoms of other solely inhabited countries, worlds and galaxies, you will rather find yourself preoccupied only by that which preoccupies you, and let others be led onward by the specific compulsions which in turn grip them by the throat of their own psyche. Perhaps then, the fourth dimension is to the other three what the sixth sense, if one indeed exists, is to the other five, or what a fine, ethereal and molecular mist is to the brute force of the solemn procession of solid, liquid and gas. Perhaps we should think then of the exercises required to make manifest, or at least noticeable, this spacious realm in our midst, and think of them as a series of neurobic exercises.

Precisely as the aerobic effort aims at increasing active control of air and breath through movement, so too are neurobic activities primarily concerned with increasing the range, speed and depth of the nervous system in general and the use of the electro-magnetic labours involved in what we call cerebral incidents, otherwise known as thinking, in particular. So... thinking, and its afflictions, let us closely examine what these are or might be, so that they, like the rest of the transcript, can be found embedded in a crevice somewhere in the fourth dimension, for which this self-help book is a users manual, at some point in the near or distant future. In other words, in case of future, break glass. So as well as there being that dusty little recalcitrant cellar door somewhere inside your head, the one leading to the fourth dimension, within that cellar there appears to be the little trapeze upon which our imagination does its acrobatic manuveres Metaphysical mnemonics, in a manner of speaking, or in a manner of thinking. And one of the first things you’ll notice about this intermediate zone in particular, and about the third dimension in general, is that suffering of various sorts seems to abound here, its almost a specialty or international sport. But what to do about the suffering? The west seems to fetishize it, the east to transcend it: for when you first accept suffering and then begin to celebrate it (by perpetuating it) you objectify, and thus fetishize, not the body but the potential experiences of the body. While when you eliminate the sources of suffering (such as falsely perceiving reality) you address things at a much more basic, and certainly more amusing level. Totally unpremeditated conduct and consciousness appears to be on the menu. But so many other items are provided almost intravenously, somewhat force fed directly to the psyche, that such a dish remains rarely tasted. Even though it is indeed one of the subtle specialties of the kitchen. So, in the former, the focus is on that which pertains to the uses or requirements of oxygen in a system or follows the principles of aerobics; and in the latter, that which pertains to the uses or requirements of thought, philosophy or metaphysics, though art or poetry will do in a pinch, and which follows the principles of neurobics, which are briefly outlined below. Since life has existed on earth for millennia, there have probably been reasons for the development of your skin and its container in the present form it takes, however, as with everything else in the intermediate zone, we won’t know what those reasons might be. Being temporarily trapped in the third dimension is all you can securely count on for certain, which is why alien welcoming stations are so crucial to your initial well-being here. Your house of skin can be a luxurious and calm place or it can be a tormented nightmare, depending on what appears to be pure chance and circumstance, so there is little you can do about the model you were issued or the encounters it has in this place. Where literally everything is rhetorical but we don’t quite realize it. But are we really temporarily trapped by the limits we live within? Or trapped at all? The lesson is a simple one, not necessarily easy but very simple: the objective is to decrease the amount of “you” in the world, until there is none left at all.

The more you, the more suffering, the less you, the less suffering. Some things are just so simple they are truly horrifying. History is a mask. It is worn by things which are gone, by the living which has been lived. Sometimes something can be so unique that it barely appears even to be unusual, so rare is its occurrence that its presence amongst the ordinary barely elicits so much as a raised eyebrow. So it is with the presence of the fourth dimension here amongst us, hidden in absolutely everything which has been jammed into these three physical zones, these forests: it is the gap, the space, the crack, the interval, the emptiness, the void. The fourth dimension is the very glue itself which makes the other three possible, it is the place which is left over after the three dimensional world vanishes, which is to say that we who animate things with our perception and participation are the ones who vanish, our time being up. The place we were always occupying however, was, is, and remains to be, the fourth dimension of metaphysical “things”: thoughts about afterward, musings after the physical. Which is to say the study of death, or perhaps it is more like oblivion, during and not after the fact. For the strange symmetry and synergy between life and death is the result of the glue of realizing...to know time. To know time. And though it was the charming and exhausting Baudrillard who has recently taken up the theme of the end of history, and its sudden reversal in a flow of time running backwards, it was Elias Canetti who first postulated that indeed at a certain point we might be tormented by the thought that history was no longer real , that without noticing it all of humanity had left reality and that everything which has happened since that point was supposedly not true. And the task, as it appears clear from studying the consequences of such a situation, is to determine just when that point was. True, a system of pataphysics, the science of imaginary solutions, would come in quite handy right about now: since if there is no problem to solve, then all its solutions would also have to be imaginary as well, wouldn’t they? Apparently we all originated in the ocean, where due to the conditions of a curious evolution a protective layer of skin was less necessary and only the slightest thin wall of cellular film was enough to separate what was living from what surrounded the living. For millions of years this was a perfectly suitable arrangement, and even though we have arrived at this current design and seem to be somewhat in control of the situation, though only barely, there are still countless life forms surrounding us which haven’t changed at all and probably never will. When we all lived in the water in the earliest version of ourselves, tiny mircoscopic organisms, we had very little definition for the interior and exterior worlds. Once we began to pass through the incredible processes of evolution over mindless generations and millennia we started to develop the need for a skin. Environmental conditions changed, evaporation created an uninviting oceanic home, the air beckoned to us and we responded by creating the skin-house and climbing up out of the soup we had lived in since the beginning. There is much to be said of the foam which history leaves in its wake, after it emerges from the accidental collisions of air and water.

When pleasure is an analogue, an extraordinary lucidity prevails. That which we refuse, we assign to the realm of the “unconscious”, never really imagining just what the term might mean. Yet it is the larger of the two venues available to us here in the intermediate zone, that of the unconscious void, the fourth dimension, to which we will return. After having emerged from the very same locale upon birth so too, ironically, do we return to it after death; and even more ironic, we dwell right smack in the middle of it all our livelong days, without ever stopping to glance at the obvious evidence right in front of our stupified eyes. Actualizing the marvelous always produces a kind of personal heaven, which can also be reached by any number of connected but different routes, all of which also actualize the frightening fact that perhaps we are supposed to pass through this realm, but not necessarily to dwell here forever. And perhaps the troubles hereabouts are actually caused by the reluctance of the inhabitants here to move on, that is, the melancholy mortality of each individual is somehow magnifed and even institutionalized, as the society, culture, and civilization in which the inhabitant lives, where an astonishing spectrum of distractions is provided to prevent people from quickly figuring out the obvious and thus altering the arrangement of things, and the foundational supports necessary to prop up the appetite. But first, yes, chance must be permitted to operate according to its own noble and methodical techniques, and we shall permit each other to follow each his own voice of the blood. Survival in a world of otherness finds a curious ally in a solipsistic view: the limits of my experience are not the limits of your experience, and the limits of your experience are not the limits of my experience. The voice of the blood speaks to each in their own dialect, thus existence apparently expands to accept the multiple realities necessary to make it possible, then real, then possible again. Once in the open air and exposed to every imaginable and unimaginable peril, we quickly began to develop a variety of defenses to protect our fragile selves. At first, our ancestors were barely able to create a barrier against the suddenly huge “outside” world, some still preferred the dark waters and lived partly there and partly in the air. Some still do. Some relatives had skin so thin they could almost breathe right through it, others made up a skin so tough that even the elements and enemies could not endanger them. Slowly, amphibians developed toward reptiles, reptiles toward birds, birds toward us, and the animal skin that we so treasure about ourselves started to be born. Things that have fallen from the sky to this earth.
What’s worse, contrary to popular opinion, we do not arrive here equipped with a “soul” or “consciousness” of the sort necessary to survive the eventual move from your current to your new surroundings. In fact, we actually appear to have come here in order to construct, fabricate, or otherwise attain the required form of awareness or attitude to remain focused when all begins to melt away. To weather the transition between the five senses and a collective sixth, from the solid to the ethereal, from life to death and back again, and again. Unless....as you appear to be experiencing the melting away, which will feel like a colossal collision of many dreams at once, unless you remain calmly fixed on the background of your existence, the underneath portion which you have always occupied but seldom noticed.

Because of course, since it is not there, since there is no there there, there is or was nothing to notice: we can only notice this peculiar fact here. Here in front of us, the void is hidden in plain sight. Which means again, that we must become peripheral visionaries in order to touch it, must practice paying attention to the way our daily dreams, both asleep and awake, play out against the backdrop, screen, curtain, or stage of the interior world, in order to fully grasp the dire consequences, not of our being here so much as the difficulties presented by attempts to leave after our tasks have been completed. The fetish of the absolute forever distracts us from the fact that we already possess what we are feverishly searching for. So what is required is a technique for both soliciting and eliciting a steady stream of revelations, often disguised as everyday occurrences which go unnoticed by an otherwise engaged species such as ours. Unconscious objectivity was waiting all along to be used by everyone, yet it was only accessible to those who, either voluntarily or against their will, were precariously perceptive enough to surrender to it. For it does seem to demand a certain suspension of the customary faculties with which the business of the world is conducted. Thus it ushers us to a different seat in the theatre: one stripped of all extraneous acoutrements, peeled of distracting appetites or superstitious senses, from which the view, though suddenly scary beyond belief (precisely because it is beyond belief) is also truly splendid in the spectacle of its sudden clarity and distance.
Eventually the more or less present form of human body and skin took shape, after many experiments to find the best and most suitable design. Not all such stones simply allow themselves to be picked up, some resist the grasping hand, as if to protect the barking noises frequently found beneath stones in general, and such stones in particular. Of course, this process may still be going on, and after as long a period of time in the future has passed as has already been endured up until now, our bodies may actually turn into something as unrecognizable to us now as we may have been to the ocean dwelling cells who became us. For there is an ocean inside each of us that only few hapless vacationers ever discover. Where the sun’s breadth is that of a human foot. That’s why the man with the funny glasses says its so high you can’t get over it and its so low you can’t get under it. The objectification of chance. The unconscious origin of all love, passion, poetry, mythology, religion, philosophy and politics: all the sicknesses and all the cures. Such a surreal morality tale. What is required, always something, before a next to last plunge into such a marvelous maelstrom, away from ennui one supposes, into the arms of everything which awaits us in between. Granted, a baroque exhaustion of sorts emerges, expands, engulphs, and evolves across the face of all and everything, but is that not a small price to pay for access to an ineffable state? Is there even a shared destiny between the interior and exterior worlds? How could there be, when 95% of the interior world is unknown to the outer dwellers, who have, as we have observed, developed a daunting efficiency for suffering and lunacy, not to mention a dark attachment to things as they are. Imagine play as an art-form and you will be close to the region of requited love.

The democracy of death, the ultimate place where all are equal and love is all that might remain of a life well-lived, is not that all have souls and therefore might succeed the interval, but that all can have souls, if they took the time to build one out of the mind they were given, which in turn, as mind, was built out of the body which precedes it. So this mythical democracy which you must feel so reassured by is not to be found after life, when after all it is too late, but during life, where it comes in very handy indeed. The making of a soul, of an actual rather than an inherited self, also involves considerable surrender. Since the interior world only commences its objective operation in everyday life once the inherited conscious, the memory and its fetish, the conscious identity, has been supplanted by the fast appetite for the large-houred dream. Because when you are dreaming, your mind, though not at peace with itself, or with you, is in fact at peace with its environment. Suddenly its environment becomes you, or rather your body, rather than you imagining that you, or rather your body, occupy the environment of the outside world. To your mind, a dream is the outside world, while your body is dragged along like a puppet, anxiously awaiting the time when it might awake, take control, project itself outside and vanish into the collective. Try to imagine therefore, operating while awake as if you were just as intimately tied to the unconscious as you are after surrendering to its tidal wave during slumber, and you will have a pretty complete picture of things. This outside world we now inhabit, a six thousand two hundred million cubit foot mass of earth which zooms through space at sixty five thousand miles per hour, will just have to do until the next place comes along. The next place? Somewhere wedged between the third and fourth dimensions, a place where thoughts are as real as objects, where thoughts are objects. Where you fail to be aware of what you do after you wake up just as you forget what you do while asleep, and ironically enough, melt back into the swirling waters of the dry interior. Imagine that, after all the work of struggling to emerge from one damp universe and survive, we ultimately end up, if properly permitted, resolutely returning to the fourth dimension seeking peace and quiet after all the boisterous hubbub of evolving. But first all dreamers must awake from their dreams. A forest of fearful dreams must be cut down, not down to size but cut down. The glass forest of the mind, the mobile forest of the body, the flesh forest of forgetfulness. You can hear the music of the axes starting to swing in these three apparent forests, and once awake....it is difficult to dream again. As if by accident, we are all by nature solipsists, labouring beneath the weight of the myth of otherness, cursed yet blessed by otherness. Its merely a matter of finding an appropriate operating method, a strategy for surviving in a world of limitless multiplicity and extreme transience. A state of mind reflected in the surface of a body. Yes, it is one thing to acknowledge the ruins of a civilization, and quite another to allow one’s gaze to roam freely across the wasted expanse. And still quite another to gleefully relate the observations to the current inhabitants, such musings provoking more consternation than anything else in the encounter with interlocutors at the edge of the abyss.

History now running backwards? Yes, surely one can feel it in the very fibre of our being, since we are but clocks to register the procession of possession in minute detail, forgetting everything we remembered, until the clock runs out. And then, remembering at the last moment that the meaning of existence is that it is meaningful but unknowable. During the last ten minutes of one’s life this last notion becomes particularly touching. Preparing for that last ten minutes properly is what this manual is actually all about. That...... and the first ten minutes suddenly stranded in the fourth dimension. That’s always a bit of a surprise. But so is the slow and deliberate leaking away of meaning, a soul drain, out of every intersection point between space and time, every being that is, until in its entirety the reflective and intentional world vanishes into the space underneath the game board. There’s the rub: imagine a board designed for the oriental game called “Go”, the one that uses black and white stones to carve out opposing territories based on these intersection points. No imagine all the interior spaces in between the points. That is the space and time of the fourth dimension. But the dissolution of meaning is far from being the same thing as liberation. In the first forest lives the yogi of the mind, the intellect’s appetite for order; in the second forest lives the monk of emotion, the doctor of feelings; in the third forest lives the fakir of the body, the scientist of soul. An inaccessible fortress. Survival, but not of the fittest but rather of the must abundantly absent animal. Where whatever opposes unites, and death is whatever we see when awake, while sleep is those things we see when asleep. Nothing in nature is comparable to this melting. The hand is a claw which has forgotten itself, the song of the hand is the glove, just as the mind fits the brain like a theatre set fits its play, and the audience approaches to cut down the forest emerging from the playwright’s dreaming eyes. The results of any philosophy however, especially one as charming as solipsism, are the study of bumps which the intellect has gotten by repeatedly running its head up against the limits of language, and living within those limits, as Ludwig attempted. But the dissolving must be done in a dignified, and if possible, elegant manner. The fact that there are so many plausible hypotheses which it is possible, or only permissible, to propose, only underscores the fleeting fact that it is not necessary to fully explain or justify this strange vanishing, this compulsion with endings, this evaporation of history, any more than it is necessary to justify the weather. This is, or was, after all, our psychic weather, we produced the storms which have ravaged the last twenty centuries. I say we, dear reader, when obviously I actually only mean you. History is also perhaps best comprehended, though not explained of course, as a crystallization of events, and in Baudrillard’s most telling and revealing image, an “unfolding of causes and effects we call reality”. To look closely, far too closely for comfort, at these causes and effects, is to come face to face with the fourth dimension.

And perhaps things have not really speeded up as much as people have told us, but rather have slowed down to the point where each instant is immediately spread like butter across the globe of informational bread. Simulation has indeed replaced the original object of living, but then again, what if there never actually was an original? What if any projection of our consciousness out into the world is already a simulation, and therefore it follows naturally that everything is equally false, in the sense of the absence of a true model, a design, a blueprint, a diagram, a manual? With such a guidebook clutched firmly in sweating hands, it just might be possible to navigate one’s way through the glue-like void holding together all events, just as sinew holds together bones and temporarily fills the spatial gap between things with a little vacation called life. At a certain point, surely the amnesia is over. The signals suddenly start to come in loud and clear. But running the signals to ground presents no unusual difficulties, none which cannot be overcome by the easy gait of the chasing animal. The signals scurry in their natural nervous manner, from place to place, as we presume they search frantically for a small hole in the ground or air in which to curl up and quickly transmit their message. This is their message: maps of a territory make it easier to get lost, they litter the shadows of those who use them and special service stations issue them, perhaps according to the colour of your eyes, or perhaps the colour of your dreams. Thus the unilateral pawing we get at the hands of the undifferentiated dream, the one without borderlines, the one without a compass. The one where the sleeper awakes. For a person in the night lights a small lamp for himself, since his usual vision has been extinguished, and while awake he touches that which is dead and when asleep touches that which sleeps. This place, this intermediate zone: where the interstitial gap between bone and muscle, between each heartbeat, between each breath, between each thought, proves to be much bigger than originally imagined. It is vast in fact, since it encompasses, and even surrounds the whole existence of each of the three forests in which we dwell day by day: heartbeat, breath, thought...heartbeat, breath, thought. Our eyes are two windows into or out of which the visitors look. At the deliberate catastrophe of the waters within. Yet we are armed with the invisible weapons our imaginations bestow: rebellion only poses more questions, while embracing the solipsistic laws which govern us, now that creates the appearance of answers. Surprisingly, everyone is born a solipsist and must, it appears, moves slowly away from that perspective as one ages, if indeed one ages at all. But it is not a “philosophy”, it is something that the bones tell the mind. Any child knows that. So, some never move away from it at all, since it is as impossible to evade as it is to refute. Because it offers for the selfless a fresh menu of character options, ones designed to be more effective than any they could hope to manufacture on their own, the solipsist’s bible also offers an additional charm, since its main content is also that ever popular item, the prayer mat of flesh. Lessons in motion, and in stillness. Intellectual hygiene.

Imagine that. It is also, by extension, a practical tool for fixing nonexistent machines perhaps, or pataphysical machines, for measuring metaphysical broadloom: a users manual for the fourth dimension, the place hidden inside all these “things” we are all surrounded by. All our suitcases are filled only with silence after all. And we drag them all the way with us on our slow and sometimes sad transport toward the fourth dimension. The “twain”? Forget it. The mind continues onward, where the body cannot follow. The next place? First a brief history of the goings-on in this vicinity, so that at least I can be said to have completed my mission, done the research, watched it happen, and filed my report, all according to our mutual agreement. Giving up command expands us immeasurably. Since in death there await things which people not only never expected but could never even imagine. The roar of the interior ocean is not all that different from the roar of the actual, physical, wet and dark ocean....except of course that it is solely located inside your own head. Yet is it not equally wet and dark, and hear the sound of it, the restrained howl of colliding layers of consciousness and perhaps even of different times, spaces and dimensions. Somewhere a clock is calmly muttering to itself beneath is breath. In the realm of the primordial, names are sacrificed to something burning inside the nameless. Swimmers gone haywire, each of us with his own little sea saturating the space around our heads, floating inside of mobile bodies, not bodies of water however, but of thoughts, ideas, feelings, and fears. Yet nevertheless, these oceans can also be in one of several dimensions and states: frozen, liquid or gas, one, two, or three dimensions. Just like before: its starts with heartbeat, breath, thought...then it progresses to a more strenuous combination, that of thinking, talking and writing, all of which are as alike as water is to ice and ice is to clouds. In the face of a tiny trembling, temptation never stands in the way. So many questions to remain unanswered. Just as an amputated limb leaves behind a phantom image in the brain that causes the victim to imagine the limb’s presence, so too our fragile and vague acquaintance with the fourth dimension causes an upsurge of feelings which accidentally and disastrously become translated into the obscure formations of everything from art and philosophy to religion and fashion. Just as the brain uses its network of connections to translate messages from our nervous skin-house into representations of our experiences, so too do the natural experiences of
the fourth dimension become morbidly translated into the darker examples of child-like human superstitions and fears of all sorts. All because human existence passes by so quickly that its multiple voices can barely be heard, let alone heard clearly. Bone-chilling brevity, every moment surmounted by the next to last. Wide-eyed interlocutors with only ourselves, we persist in reaching out for things which exist beyond our sense-impressions, using these “phantom limbs” from a less material world perhaps, and thus insulting the ineffable with our very presence in the scheme of things.

One can barely avoid seeing this elemental entertainment as a pilgrim’s progress of some kind, where after walking through the wilderness of this world hounded by invisible and largely nonexistent adversaries, we light upon a certain place and we lay down in that certain place to sleep, and as we sleep we dream our dreams, and as we awake, we continue our solid dreams, unaware of where we have been, where we are going, or what to do about either. Creating a body of knowledge based on nothing but one’s own experience and so-called reason: the unintentional triumph of solipsism...almost an abstract individualism, where one can only hope to understand anything at all from within that anything at all. Perhaps this is the stage-set for a new style or method of cognition, extinguishing all obstacles. Or perhaps just the latest in a variety of stages to human history: the emergence of a hominoid line of apes with our brains; the discovery of agriculture and the formation of the first cities; the surprising rise of supposedly universal and monotheistic religions and moral codes; the concept of a world civilization; the emergence of gray shades of rationalism and science; the encounter between the invading Europeans and their innocent prey around the world; the industrialization commencing in the nineteenth century.......and the rest is what’s left of the debris of all that history, plus of course, the discovery of the fourth dimension. Latent purified mass cleansed of wasteful elements quickening without revealing the thick clouds of sanctuary. History is, after all, only a story we tell ourselves, either to keep us awake or to put us to sleep. Take your pick. But when did spiritual machines, machines to live in, begin to encroach upon our interior spaces? About the same time life itself turned into a B-movie presumably, carefully scripted by the Inquisition, and other questionable cocktail parties in hell. Alas, for the last hundred years we have been living in the next ten minutes. Where night beats itself into submission, ascending night, impenetrable night, nourishing night waits for permission to do nothing in particular. All of which requires us to become acclimatized to the words in between things in rather a rush, though the chosen actuality is only a blink on the carnal calendar as time continues its inexorable march into the endless future. Time is the fourth dimension, therefore we are the fourth dimension itself, we.....who are the breath of clocks. A passive power allows the apparent. Some famous french comedian of the void once said that history is the lie that historians all agree upon. Seemingly, in order to understand our origins and beginnings, the best place to start is in our endings, our well-timed endings, since the outcomes are all embedded there. The geography of the physical world is distinct and diverse, different continents and oceans appear drastically in competition, while the geography of the imagination (the interior ocean of the fourth dimension) is shared and held in common, not that anyone realizes this odd fact in daily practice. Since art, poetry, philosophy, and perhaps even the psychic cancers known as religions, are manufactured dreams designed to keep us awake under the onslaught of the perpetual and permanent slumber of the stars. Until the plan comes tumbling down from the sky like a thoughtful rock. Astonishing fate, a sinking contest where the last head held above the soup below is declared the winner. The process of improvement. Answers to unasked questions.

Immigrants from the imagination, also known as the fourth dimension, descending by the boatload with their false passports and hopeful faces. Into cities built inside the hourglass figure of perpetual appetite: each dimension hungering for the next and adding itself to the menu of reciprocal maintenance. Figures of one dimension: lines. Figures of two dimensions: planes. Figures of three dimensions: solids. Figures of four dimensions: something like the multi-faceted and layered world before it becomes unraveled. The flat beings know nothing of our existence, while we know nothing of those whose homes are within the domain of the fourth “place”. This is partly because we ourselves are the inhabitants of the fourth dimension but we cannot see the extensions which occur there, and also that it is the greater part of ourselves that dwells there but of which we are unconscious, and therefore which we attribute to all manner of magical influences. While in actuality they are no more magical than rain. But let us not make random conjectures about such important matters. For we are separated from that with which we are most continuously in contact : the void. The gap in between all the things which distract us, and from which we can never escape, since it is with us before our arrival, in the beginning, during our stay here, and after our departure. Those that are asleep are the labourers, and the co-producers of all that happens here, there, and everywhere. While changing, we rest, and neither indicate clearly, nor conceal, but only transmit the signals and scrape out the signs. It was called the experimental method: to construct an account using only the science of memory. To understand the happenings of the past in order to comprehend the analogous and inevitable happenings which the future will “cause”, it is recommended that all activity be ceased at once. Inventory is being calculated daily, so long live the inhabitants of empty rooms. The miniature walls, extended into forever in the shivering fourth dimension, are no longer hemmed in by the voices. Can representatives of extinct kingdoms and defunct languages really hope to convince our cartographers, a conservative bunch at best, that drastic changes are necessary in their maps of the territory? The unexpected happens only to the unprepared, for as Alyn remarked, we carry very little, knowing that even this meagre baggage will soon be taken from us. The fulfillment of the task. Carefully study the men without qualities in order to isolate and describe a perfect occupant archetype: the man of action who does nothing, spending his life like the spare change it might actually be. The diary of a victim of circumstances: infinity begins at the edge of the fingertips. The intervention of the allies. Dreams conceal the dangerous drugs of consciousness: the elimination of the opponent. The earth itself, also known as “the intermediate zone”, occasionally cooperates by revealing obscure parts of its own history to those are are capable of engaging in the negotiation. It conceals itself from those who are cautious or afraid of the attack. While the news of the world wakes itself up with its noise, it still puts us all to sleep with its purring, waiting as we are for the always anticipated satisfaction. Listen to the action as it occurs. Observe the narrative as it evaporates before your eyes.

Consider all the factors affecting the action, and finally, consider the identity of actors involved and the precise nature of their confrontation as all events occur in time as it elapses. Remember whatever it is you were supposed to remember. Can I go now? Oh yes, I almost forgot...the goings on in this vicinity. Alright then, get out your anti-melancholy bandages and plaster the room. The whole story takes only about eight thousand years, more or less, from beginning to end, and is therefore fairly easy to recount, since it is largely a series of variations on only a few principal themes. Firstly, the original difference of opinion between neighbours, some fifty thousand years ago, a minor skirmish between the last of the Neanderthals (them) and the first of the emerging Cro-Magnons (us). Here was a classic case of different races within the same species mistakenly thinking that each group represented a totally different species, rather than merely a branch of their own, not unlike today’s story, in which diverse races are still unable to notice the obvious species similarities they share and instead butcher each other over surface ethnic fears about substantial otherness. Since then its just been one thing after another, without much significant change, apart from the astonishment of technology of course, which still remains in the hands of confused primates, after all. Fast forward slightly, since it was relatively quiet except for the internal changes of psyche and teeth, up to the point when the West started selling tickets to its doomed roller coaster ride, at which point things start to pick up somewhat in the area of evolutionary entertainment. For instance: the end of the Paleolithic era some seven thousand years ago and the settlements of the Sumerians, first to stand still and write it down; the Egyptian calendar meanwhile emerges, regulated by the sun and moon; earliest known cities and numerals; Gilgamesh was up and walking about this time; as were the builders of the Cheops Pyramid, dragging their bizarre burden through the deserts; four thousand years ago Stonehenge was assembled in England, as were the other dolmen sties throughout Europe, followed quickly by Moses and his grandiose insurance policies. While a mere three thousand years ago, the classic age of paganism flowered in Greece, and only 500 years before the big birthday party started, in Confucius, Buddha, Zoroaster, Lao-Tzu, the Jewish prophets, Greek poets, artists, scientists and philosophers, a zenith of human wisdom and achivement is arrived at. All of which would also shift, if not evaporate entirely, after the birthday played havoc with not only time past and present, but forever wounded the future itself. This is the location where we recently found ourselves, staring at the wounded clock of the cosmos, some even trying perhaps to rewind its bleeding springs. Troubles wrapped in dreams. So the trick would therefore be to find a way to first contact and then represent the fourth dimension, via some “perspective”, through or by the third dimension, since the three dimensional world is largely a two dimensional “drawing” of the fourth dimension.

And just as the invention of perspective permitted the three dimensional world to be rendered accurately in two dimensions, such as drawing and painting, so too a certain “perspective” allows us to experience the fourth dimension, which is after all hidden or embedded in between all the other three, or at least in the gaps and spaces between all the things in all three. Or perhaps this would only indicate to us a suitable manner in which our own so-called existence itself could be multi-dimensional. Either way, the three dimensional world, our world, is a picture of the fourth dimension on two planes, and just as a two dimensional picture captures our world, our world is the captor of another, far more interesting place. And as the lights begin to dim and the arena grows dark, as the roller coaster keeps going by its own momentum and hurtles yet faster through the dusk air, as the fair grounds begin to congest and accumulate the blowing debris associated with development, we hear the sounds of the electric sparks from the wheels striking the track and they are almost soothing, almost tranquilizing. But no one appears to notice that their life here is really about duration only.
Entranced as they are with the roller coaster ride, with its careening carriages and twisting tracks, and mistakenly thinking that their existence is comprised of the train rather than the time it takes to cover the distance, they lose sight of the astonishing collision between space and time represented by our being here in the intermediate zone. We live far more in time than we do in space, since space is only a convenience for the containment of time, and for the slow leaking evaporation of time as it passes through the third dimension, via our minds, via our Mind.. Space and time seem to be fused, and were shown by one of our greatest comedians of the void to be fused, in a four dimensional picture of the universe. That much we might now appear to be ready to conceive of and possibly to perceive. Added to length, width, height, the fourth dimension of time actually saturates all and everything, making of the whole ride a drastic exposure to the occasional pressure of consciously apprehending something which is otherwise totally unconscious, and which is otherwise too large a mind to be experienced at all. Our experience of existence, being time-based, produces our multitude of cultures, which exist in the fourth dimension, the one superimposed over the one we occupy. We occupy the three dimensional world of matter, the world of nature, out of which our minds and mind create the cultures which reflect, or refract the fact that we were here. Time is the temporal expression of matter passing through our mind’s perception of that matter. Our mind is the fourth dimension. Or more accurately our mind is the clock of the fourth dimension, by which our existence is both measured and erased simultaneously.

A thought experiment. It is also not what it appears to be. Since the fused muscle that pulsates at the juncture of space and its fuel, time, is also curved in a charming manner, apparent flux will always enter into a picture which formerly we though solely occupied by the kingdom of entropy. And therefore the meaning of life is that it ends. What a pleasant surprise...And after the downfall? Not in the sense of something as
catastrophic as a shipwreck...more like a protracted process of decline, decay music in other words, the epitome of entropy, like a sunset in the head, for which some sort of universal symbolism would be useful. Unfortunately however, the symbols are all embedded in the things themselves, stuck there in a manner similar to our own. For this exercise, only a careful morphology would assist us. The proponents of which dwell in a magical world of mysterious presences: a vaulted cavern we all call home, within which a theatrical spectacle unfolds before our stunned eyes: politics as a facade for the power of money, money as a symbol of energy, energy as a symbol for itself. All cultures eventually become fossils of themselves sooner or later, since the ultimate verities of both existence itself, and the performance it inspires, history, are both sunken deep in a realm far beyond reconstruction. Phenomena limited in time and space. The logic of space is one thing...the logic of time is quite another, an organic necessity perhaps, since chance is the fool’s name for fate or destiny. Apparently the hidden soul which lurks in the shadows of the fourth dimension is historical in texture. Such is the dilemma of what could be called “borderline experiences”: the tangible feeling that you are pushing yourself past the border of what was impossible for some earlier edition of yourself. Living with limits means living in limits, where the sense of a limit is identical to our sense of an inner form, a form flowing in the interior space we created for ourselves once we climbed up out of the actual wet ocean and started to make a metaphysical, dry version of the waters within. Unsought impressions of definite meaning. Humanity as the only animal which is aware of its eventual demise, with all the obvious ramifications. Time which has become rigid suddenly reveals itself as space. To appropriate alien means without yielding to them. For instance: the meek will indeed inherit the earth...but not its mineral rights. And so, just as circumstances are difficult only for those who draw back from the tomb, there is also an easy method for doing all the “things” it seems necessary to do during your brief stay in this dimension, and ironically enough it could be called the “easy method”. Doing everything in the easiest and fastest way possible at any given time, a discipline which eventually evolves toward accomplishing that most difficult but most important of tasks, doing nothing. Which only arises after long practice of thinking about doing everything easily, at which point the adept will no longer be “thinking” in the traditional sense of the word, since thinking is strictly reactive in nature and therefore could not possibly approach the state of transcendent ease associated with the method.

The main stumbling block? Belief in the existence of “hidden knowledge”, as ever, a superstition which prevents us from absorbing the actual knowledge that literally collides with us every day, since we do not “have” special information, we “are” the information. The belief in and search for this advertized hidden knowledge is clearly founded in the insolubility of many of the questions and puzzles which confront us. Of course it is possible to deceive ourselves into believing that we understand something, anything, but at bottom and upon reflection, only a fool would fail to admit that we are as helpless in the face of an unexplained existence as a savage, an animal or a little child. Which of course accounts for the popularity of superstitions such as religion in the first place. However, once we understand the nature of insolubility, we have already understood everything essential we will ever need to pass through this place.
Our clever machines and instruments will not help us once we admit that we have barely budged from the middle ages, let alone commenced a grand futurist adventure. So, let’s agree with many, many comedians of the void that there are basically two insoluble problems facing us. But let’s not call them problems, since that suggests a solution where there just isn’t any; instead let’s refer to them as what they actually are, dilemmas or puzzles: the dilemma of death and the dilemma of the invisible world beyond the skin. In all sincerity, we might recognize that all our scientific and philosophical systems are precisely the same as the instruments and machines inspired by them, namely only further complications added to the dilemmas without either explaining or solving anything at all. Perhaps the foremost obstacle is in the very fact that we tend to divide the world into the visible and invisible powers that inform or conform our lives. This arbitrary division, mostly imposed by the community armour surrounding us like a psychic fence for protection, is the very element which prevents us from ever gaining access to the invisible realm, since we insist on its being weird and mysterious instead of what it really is: the transparent meat of all our hopes and fears Therefore what we can study clearly in the actual physical world is apparently incredibly small, possibly even imaginary, when compared with what we have greater difficulty studying, those works after the physical: the huge interior ocean that fills every tiny crevice and crack between the things surrounding us, and the Time, the duration of our stay by which the interior world is measured, and by which the exterior world is withered. Escape from this arbitrary division of the world into both the visible and invisible is the essential ingredient in learning how to operate successfully, not to mention easily, in the fourth dimension. Even if we only manage the prospect of escaping in slow motion. Escape of any kind however, fast or slow, will never be found in the three systems upon which our roller coaster ride is founded, the religious, philosophical or scientific, simply because escape entails getting off the tracks, not merely speeding up the ride.

So the invisible world may be imaginary only in this very real sense: if we have produced some mistaken or illusory notions about the world we both inhabit and project, which by this time is probably beyond dispute, then what we have actually managed to accomplish, quite by accident, is to create a drastically mistaken conception of the so-called invisible world. Suppose the invisible world so sought after by religions, philosophies and sciences is so difficult to access not because it requires special or unique knowledge to do so, but rather because there is no invisible world, only a visible world which we persist in misunderstanding. Microscopes do indeed expand the limits of our vision toward the infinitely small scale worlds, and telescopes do expand our vision of the infinitely large scale worlds, but neither is of any value when considering the question facing us in the short time remaining. The invisible world therefore, of works after the physical, does contain two basic traits: first, that it is incomprehensible to us, unless of course it isn’t there, and second, that embedded in its very invisibility are the causes and phenomena of the visible world. But then of course, the same two traits can be applied to the visible world itself, and therefore more attention should be paid to the subtle cracks in the real, rather than a frenzied search for the surreal or magical. In these cracks, crevices, and gaps dangling before your eyes are the very essences and explanations which you search for everywhere else, which is rather a troublesome waste of time, since there is no “else”, much as we would like there to be one. And even more distressing could be the fact that we ourselves might already be this infamous else. There are no invisible forces...only forces we have trouble seeing. And since it is even more difficult for people to believe in or accept death, they have become obsessed with explaining the existence of something after death, quite oblivious to the fact that they have utterly overlooked the possibility of believing in and accepting life and death simultaneously, let alone the possibility that its mysteries can be explained without being eliminated. But most importantly for us, the way to escape from the division of the world into the visible and invisible, and to step off the roller coaster ride, is found in the elimination of the concepts of reward or punishment from any conception of a future existence. Only then does it become even remotely interesting for existence to continue on in some fashion forever.

Again, just as a three dimensional object casts a two dimensional shadow, does the fourth dimension cast shadows which we mistake for our own world and its objects, for ourselves? Or is the fourth realm simply the total quota of time soaking through all and everything else...in other words...we creatures with our sudden interior lives, so separated from our animal cousins who still toil with sensations alone in the absence of reflection, are we the means to an end, if not an end in itself? Are we the confused clocks by which the physical world is measured and experienced? And after? Or is the fourth dimension synonymous with the “Interior World”, towards which all animals ambulate, in which we currently find ourselves, and after which we emerge as significantly different creatures, as different from ourselves as we are from our animal relatives? Or, even more disturbing perhaps, are we already as different from ourselves as we imagine others to be, suggesting that we already inhabit all the possible places we could ever imagine occupying, whether we know of them or not? The outcry of silences. Our equipment is registering but also transmuting. The signals are becoming stretched further apart. No possibility of imagining a solid world anymore. There never was one anyway. In dreams, where there are no measurements or limits, no east or west, we may in fact experience the world in a multi-dimensional manner excluded from the waking mind, which might in fact be the mind of a four-dimensional being, but one which is turned toward the third dimension with only one of our sides, with only a small part of our larger being. Thus dreams may not necessarily be what they first appeared to be, mere psychic debris, since we are in fact sleeping right now, while imagining ourselves to be “creating” that debris. A single instance is a powerful thing. A most extraordinary and singular phenomenon. Bodies in the Earth’s atmosphere for instance...not far up there, just about six feet let’s say. As opposed to either below the surface of the ground, where most things live, or deep inside the interior mental ocean, which is of course even more obscure and unknown. And history, that overlooked collection of inevitable, screaming analogies which reveals the future embedded in the past, as sure as sugar, or soap. Soap is the ultimate analogy, and as Ponge has pointed out, in a manner of speaking, the ultimate metaphor for the seepage that occurs between dimensions. Between the in-between. History has much to say to those who listen. And after history has had its say, it no longer exists. History can be cleaned by the aforementioned soap, before both it and the soap disappear together, forever, until the next time. Turning rumination into reverie, now there’s the tricky part. Weather patterns for the interior environment : we like if possible to think of ourselves as being part of the forces controlling the train of events. Sweet enchanting dream. Sweet dream without design or direction. The arrival of the occupant-archetype: the man without qualities. In confined spaces and amidst outlandish limits the thing to do is to suddenly strive with a passionate zeal. Thus we begin our entrance to the large hours of life.

It is one of those fine examples of the subordination of all energy, time and space (let’s also call space “material advantage”, as Musil did) to one single act of the will. Our inward details are only developed through our outward expression of them. The body inside the clothes wears the clothing of the mind. This is what Stendhal called the interior doctrine which must never be communicated. The interior doctrine which can never be communicated. Let’s suddenly advocate the solipsism hidden between the lines of all and everything, let’s call it a dialectical process by which you too can be me, let’s celebrate the intense polarity between self and other and its conditional nature as a personal history, not failing to pause to enjoy the aesthetic created as a by-product of this rarefied demeanour. Nor the elegant balance of twin poles which at first appear to be positive and negative, thesis and antithesis, but which later reveal themselves to be mere stages in the process of transcendence. Dare we call synthesis transcendent? At any rate, this final stage is somewhat “transformative” in nature, representing perhaps both fulfillment and annihilation. The material of the mind suddenly becomes manifest, its manufacturing schedule crystal clear, suddenly the speaker can be the spoken. Every instance of an image, whether literal or visual, is connotative in general, and in particular to the individual, for whom it is either implicit or explicit. Since there are areas of knowledge which can never be quite quantified, either entirely or even partially, every explanation of something is equally a hypothesis for something else: its own alternative (as in any anthropology in general and the Golden Bough in particular). Everything is contingent upon context and upon one’s conception of the idea or “image” of the situation. Something which is not static cannot be considered a situation. Praxis cannot be conceptualized because only “situations” are open to conceptual work, while a situation, if it ceases to be static in that very specific sense, equally suddenly becomes open to conceptual work. With customary clarity, Wallace Stevens speaks on this account, saying that any feeling which is subject to discussion has a value which is debatable. But does this mean that ”value” is subject to discussion? The poetic element, the poetic environment, is one of the areas of knowledge which cannot be quantified, in which the unique alone has actual value. A poetic situation is never open to discussion really, since the value of the unique is reduced drastically until it is transformed into its dialectical opposite. Whereas the value remains constant in the actuality of the unique, only the unique is diminished in the actuality of value. Is there some unknown result from the constant, internal and perpetual pressure between the actual and the aesthetic? No aesthetic analysis can be applied to the actual, whereas only that which is actualized can be analyzed according to any system of aesthetics, unless of course aesthetics analyzes its favourite subject, itself, after all anyway.

Similar to discussing the comparative heights of wind (what we lack in length we more than make up for in height?) which gain access to a door held open to the days and years, the large hours, and here there occurs the intersection of passengers. To cross the expanse of what the mouth once knew is to restrain the pillow, where the skull itself is only a symbol for the duration of night. The order of opponents leaves no time for talk of time, where the years run backwards in order to arrive (the order of opponents) while dusting off danger. The original agreement? Standing quietly in the corners of a storm. Quite an enclosure to have entered, by accident a design divined, as the figures forming in this density are coupled with columns and calmly discuss the waves. To move the silent shadow, attention wanders across blurred maps when you’re carrying a suitcase filled with stone memories, or memories of stone. The eyes that seem to see other eyes staring in the dark, where slowly the shadows are emerging and no tell tell traces remain of a period prior to arrival. Here is the misfortune of mirrors: in the three initital attacks into an atmosphere at once alert and not, no vehicles travel to or intentionally halt at this edge, where the eyes have forgotten what the mouth once knew, and all that is left is a certain.....ringing. No illustrations possible for negative dialectics, impossible to show how the sickness dialectically is at the same time the cure, how the intellect is a scar on the body of society. Necessary sickness, unnecessary cure. Can a question still be a proposition? Is abstraction really the seal of mythical thinking, or is all thinking mythical thinking? But the given object is not especially a fetish for thought. Reference is not to how meaning is to be organized but how organization can be meaningful. Ideas are dependent on criteria of limits and independent of the positive desire to gain entry to the “world of things”. The admonition to “above all, be silent” does not refer to a warning to stop talking but rather to stop participating in speculative arguments which cannot be stated, represented, or verified. It is by no means certain that one can start out with an error and convert it to the truth. An entire mythology is indeed stored within our language, but can this situation ever be given an adequate name? To give the mythology a name is to select from the mythology’s own warehouse of words. Since, what the solipsist means is true but it cannot be said so much as make itself manifest, the background to a way of acting, where one would need a way of thinking a way of talking. The idea of the world as a limited whole is an unlimited idea: perfectly summarized by the delightful fact that we cannot think what cannot be thought, and therefore naturally cannot say it either. To avoid technique or move beyond it would entail what comedians refers to as the ethics of the unspeakable. Not the suggestion of a private language so much as a private meaning to a common language: where the self shrinks to a point without extension. Why even bother building a target that you will eventually only knock down, if you are lucky.

This puts into action an idea only implied through aspects of an exotic sensibility: clarifying is as close as we can ever hope to come to verifying. Things can be clear, if not of necessity, proven: thus the tension between topological spaces of public and private, between concrete time and its fluid duration creates or allows to come into being, a permanent shift. The purpose of which is perhaps to investigate the limits of the possible. Emotional static obscures the nature of occupancy in its obvious sense, by whatever means possible, whatever means are at hand, in order to distract the occupants from catching a brief glimpse of the void. All contradictions are parallel and hence intersect at the limits of the possible. That is true which can no longer undergo either reduction or extension, other than through the emergence of its opposite, its antithesis, its negation, its otherness. So the inauguration of a syntax: a language which only serves to transform experience, never to translate or to explain it. Every assertion does not so much contain as conceal an assumption. A symbol that does not stand for anything other than itself, a symbol for otherness in itself, a metaphysics, as in the original, “after the physical”, a demolition of existential habits without however replacing them with other habits. The unique yawns at its own termination. The only real problem associated with the operation of the absurd: the questionable unity of mind and world. Life without theory implies living in the absence of mental rehearsal for physical acts, nothing more or less than this, or even mental rehearsal for other mental acts. Are these anything other than “peculiar notions in the head?” In exactly the same way that fiction in a narrative occupies the mind of the reader, as a lover of literature, it is reality that occupies the mind of the solipsist, as another, more obscure kind of lover. But reality is still only a theory which has yet to be verified, after all. The mind ocean of the fourth dimension has no metaphor, it already is a metaphor: the mind burdening the naked idea with heavy clothing, while the idea is already clothed in its own costume, the erotic attire of nothingness. Infinity begins at the fingertips. Existence is neither otherwise nor elsewhere: the moral credo of a tentative movement beyond technique. Where knowledge based on experience has value, since transcending something certainly helps you to understand it. Structural, perceptual, conceptual: three faces of the unreasonable animal, a body extended in superior space, the spatial range occupied by the animal, and thus the universe is all of that which is the exception to oneself. Every artwork a symbolic assassination of reality? There are those who could be said to suffer from criminal sanity. It is the end of conception that regulates and inaugurates death, not the end of perception. The outside of thought: the meaning of the myth of otherness. That almost everything can be foreseen perhaps, except for the feelings that surface in us through what we foresee. Let’s call it sublimation. The culture of others is, for the man without qualities, a “collective representation”, a system oif signs to which he does not possess the code or key. The falsely obvious, the arrogance of normalcy: here is the origin of all myth.

What Hegel called the “unhappy consciousness”. A kind of posthumous life, where we suffer from the pathology of the present moment. To study the works after the physical is therefore to study one particular extremity of limitation, perhaps the quintessential limit: eternity begins at the edge of the skin, and its horizon it blurred by thought. The imagery of morbid movement through the world, where travel manifests the most exquisite immobility. One persistent theme of this activity is that the work and efforts of prophets become obsolete when the real world surpasses even their own guarded severity. Knowledge becomes erotic when it calms the fragile mind. Forcing the object of attention to reflect your presence. So, running the “blank” to ground presented the usual difficulties for the chasing “blank”. Since maps of a territory make it easier to get lost, and the eye is seeing but it says so silently. In fact hanging over the entrance to this peculiar nightclub we all inhabit is the sign which anxious visitors always manage to miss, since they are facing greedily forward...”welcome to the kingdom of silence”....the sign says. And like the mountaineer who does not, or cannot cease moving, we are faced with only one choice after reaching the top......to go back down. Customers who purchase silence by the pound require maps of a territory where the only tourists are salesmen carrying suitcases filled with silence. Duration is suddenly aligned in the most curious manner. Small monuments to short breath make it easier to tell the time. Dimming the lights will clarify the incidents of travel with which the visitor, and the manual user, will be fascinated. Fascination forms itself out of that peculiar clay which never quite hardens. A simultaneous action or activity which we accepted as part of the revolving door of our visit here, where we live on an escalator and tap our feet. Since breathing itself is a full time job, though speech is a cautious kind of overtime. Common courtesy prevents us from warning all new arrivals about what they have to face if they stay in this place. A strange site for a vacation, the holiday of being human. Completeness was not a goal but only a means to an end, like tying your shoelaces, since we are the only animals on earth that announce still-life after life. Once still-life before life arrives, the distance traveled is determined by duration, and the breathing of blind-folded children who speak a language of dust and light. The surface of things is none of these things, gloves grasping nothing, but rather a facousing of the lens which allows the occupant (the observer) to clearly apprehend the obvious. The image in the frame is the last thing you would expect to see and probably is the last thing you do see. Your own reflection gleams from the stomach of the machine, you are able to absorb analysis like a sponge, not luxurious but clean. At such moments as these, when you are free of the animal logic, and you can see clearly what living might be both within and without the dark vigour, you can pause and reflect, for in actual fact you are resting right now, worthlessly preoccupied with one single, senseless thing. But such a beautiful and charming thing.

The environment is covered with an almost invisible wallpaper which is quite nearly opaque and taut, as tight as the skin of a drum. The body itself is a landscape where the voice of wind colonizes the air. The body is a memory of the environment, various sites having been carefully selected and casually revealing the subtle hostage situation where names are the ransom for objects. What can be said will be sufficient. Gestures in the dark will have to made in the meantime, shaping in the air a map of the world painted in tea and covered in dust. The least sought after but most valuable substance on earth. The only evidence of our trajectory here in the intermediate zone. The substance which flakes off the unique and conceals the very presence of the fourth dimension here amongst us. Hidden, but here. A story in several parts which could conceivably be told in a series of different but related voices. The end result may briefly be summarized, barely more than a sequence of open ended interrogatives really. A brief introduction is more than ample, then listeners will help to expand the conclusion. Several narratives give a proper direction and perspective to subsequent enquiries. So after all, the kingdom of silence was not at all what it was advertized to be. In particular, most of the maps have a small yet rather significant printing error: in an access of feeling, the crowd gathers around the nearest incident. Perhaps then there are four forests. Four forests. About time we discussed the physical mind and the mental body: the aesthetics of life and death. The apparently accidental tension between both self and other, and even more entertaining, the discovery that the self is already the other. All studies are directed at those outside the dwelling being studied. There’s the rub. Even if this fortress is totally inaccessible, it, like all fortresses, still has an architecture and therefore can still be described and understood by those outside its walls. Surely some phenomena are exceedingly difficult to formulate with any finality, occuring as they do in an environment devoid of formulae. We require a concrete survey of the intangible. Many blueprints have been produced by the designers of this cottage for solipsists. It is a conscious little building capable of motion, superimposed as it is over the highly specialized vision of its occupant. A brick which feels itself to be the whole building, a leaf which knows it is a whole tree, a tree which imagines that it is an entire forest, and so on. But even before approaching the fortress, one must contend with the mischevious forests erected around it. Some attitudes are conceptually hard to swallow: no knowledge outside of the self and its apparatus, that admits only the self as known or knowable, not to mention nameable?

Breathing is sometimes difficult but at least calm and mechanical. The information, once transmitted, can rarely be repeated. The signals were slowing down slightly. The colour will leave your face slowly. A four-alarm fire. There is a new kind of perceptual machinery involved, since steam escapes easily from the prisons we built for water. Its face bears the curious expression of those recently released from a bondage they never knew existed. So it is with our own transformation into the steam of ourselves in the fourth dimension, whether before or after the physical. But steam can no longer speak in its own voice and is forced to experience a warped ventriloquism in its calm discussion of colonial affairs, as it talks its way across this dark room and right over the balcony of the future. Where we compared you with other strangers who had visited us, and so led ourselves to a general discussion and comparison of our many guests. An accurate determination of the elements must be established, a tour through this ancient but somewhat futuristic fortress, embarked upon in order to most fully study the biology of its shadows. The shadow cast by some, the man without qualities for instance, is a mirrored surface with dust collecting on it, a tabula rasa newsreel that unwinds until the screen is once more just an empty white rectangle. No new continents, only new maps for the old ones in the geography of the mind, and without any guides save for those who have already abandoned all compasses. Alarm clocks with the faces of men sit quietly ticking. A dream of the country you are presently visiting (why wait until later?): the edge and its echo is a bank for the money of moments. Clients are advised never to swallow their own names, don’t try this at home. The curtain is dropped down, sooner or later, over the mouth of your memory. Each psychic gardener dreams a forest where he dwells. Anonymous narrative, dreamed in black and white but with a technicolour analysis. Each of them dwells in a domain. The last sound you’ll hear just before either waking up or falling asleep is the sound of the lumberjacks, the music of their axes. Upon waking the interview commences immediately. Reporters from unknown locations asking the questions. The dreaming person awakes. The solipsist never really goes to sleep. Encourage a manufactured dream to help us keep awake in the aesthetics of the flesh forest. A constant progression from the first to the last breath. A studio with a global stage: the union of absence. Pure chance allows the raw material for reflecting upon our condition. Comprehension and confusion are equal enemies. Everything outside is theatre, this was the one unassailable law. The politics of solitutde serve as the crux for the condition. Not seeking some vague state of objective reason, not interested in either pure or practical reason either. Here is an art without an audience, detached from meaning apart from a posture in space. A complete text of soil or soul is unlikely, though we need and ceaselessly search for a kind of immaculate perception. Imagining a point at which opposites cease to be contradictions (when dealing with a profound truth, its opposite is also profoundly true). Since so few of us can stomach the idea of a hereafter without our participation, there won’t be one. Only in life as lived is safety so very dangerous.

To go to the extreme limit of self-consciousness might be to generate or perpetuate an incredible tension between the mental body and the physical mind, seeking solace in the middle zone, the intermediate zone, this place before us. A condition perhaps so integrated, or so fragmented, that it seldom admits to any knowledge beyond that of the individual self, without realizing it as such of course. One must solve a puzzle by allowing a mystery to continue and even to thrive, in its special form of life in the mind, that mind which paradoxically has developed all its special faculties in a definitive war against mystery. Mystery as an animal of which we are the parents (in the entry to an alien contrary). If our rough and hastily sketched maps are to be of benefit as a guide through a thousand foreign lands. But the solitary as opposed to the species creature.
And when each dreamer awakes from each dream, they leave behind an indication of how they achieved that end. In the glass forest, the imagination hurts as a result of its continual bumping into the limits of language, the results of which are an uncovering of bumps. These “bumps” are whatever debris manages to be considered a special insight, a discovery, a law, a way, a practice, a system, a philosophy, or even, in its most degraded and disabled form, a religion. Stating the case, even if only a fragment of the truth, or perhaps even if one knows the case to be the opposite of truth, because (as Musil has also astutely demonstrated) certain errors are stations on the road to truth. And one does “all that is possible on a definite job at hand”. Next. In the mirror of a shadowy medium. An expression on the face of mild mockery and mellow astonishment. Directions will take you precisely where you want to go, making departure easier but arrival impossible. The story begins with a mistake and an accident, and accident becomes the sole authority of the story. Our knowledge about ourselves, if any, of the world we live in, and the impact of one upon the other. What the story that makes up the narrative amounts to is that the story which was supposed to be told was never told. Arguments are dramatized, views become persuasions, presentation is all the more true for not pretending to be true. A prodigious geiger-counter. A disembodied voice sheltering its experiment. Dry forecaster. Character-capacity: amiable psychopath, an aesthetic-ascetic, a rebel who remains, to find all sorts of valuable and futile things to do, capitalizing on a poetry of turbulence. If you can think in a new way, you can live in a new way: emotional economy. A collateral campaign: combating a mysterious disease of the times, millennial criminals. Stepping-stone jubilee: practicalities aside, overcoming the other world by rigorously examining all that is in this one, by identifying phenomena with perception. If humanity could dream collectively, who or what would it dream? And can’t it? And can’t we see what our collective dream produces? The like of it now happens.

Hunger is a basement where all the files are stored. A library of ice in temporary buildings. Cities for sleeping in. An additional forest was erected to the memory of music. Will the three dreamers awake from three dreams or the same one? The clue to understanding is that you can give an explanation of something before you know whether or not a proposition is true or false. When you smile, do not wince. That is the whole of the teaching, and if you find an excuse or reason for carrying on, then consider yourself fortunate, and do so. You don’t need a veritable folk-dance of explanations once the obvious is true. We are getting into a dark region. A form of propaganda for the body, an ad hoc history which alarmed us all. Conclusive evidence to the contrary. One supposes that the job was to investigate and understand the tensions between intellect and feeling, the polarity between theory and action, the difference between characteristics and qualities. The largest part of our expressive natures, ambitious sunglasses which have been issued for those who refuse to see the obvious, are attached by thin chains to handcuffs worn on the wrist in the most elegant and ornamental fashion, like forgetful jewelry. Is it more than average motivation one needs to seek? The static issuing from our eyes is almost unbearable to the environment. The shapes we tend to see vary with the weather. For instance, if you have ever tried licking the palm of your hand, you will surely agree that sooner or later (particularly if you close your eyes) it feels like you are licking a closed window at night. By any other name, the sense of a well-timed ending remains primary in our plans, and the procedures for a well-timed ending have never before been so suitably disposed. When you open your eyes again, you will see the room as it really is, in the cold light of an indoor dawn, and no matter how many times you blink, the taste of dark windows will not go away. Something almost approximating silence. Some call it thinking, and touch air, while others call it thought, and touch water. Some call it living and touch fire, while others call it dying, and touch earth. A strange frustration is sustained throughout an epic scale. The beauty of the like of it is that “it” actually never really happens. This is something surprisingly real. For us, civilization simply means everything our minds can cope with, until we nervously become aware of the absence of a soul, at which point it becomes necessary to frantically build one out of nothing, for that is where they come from. Surrounded by pure personality, aspects of the world take shape in the head and are mistaken for accurate pictures of that world. The existence of “certain people” begins to be perceived as a problem with which society must contend, but how, and who are they after all? Comprehending all things as a magnificent gesture, as a collection of details which may or may not add up to an entire picture. But even one who manages the objectivity required to recognize our condition, is still a victim of the circumstances which made them recognize it, and it is always during “the recognitions” that one is unexpectedly interrupted by the reality of what one thinks one recognizes.

Practicing something through the strenuous denial of such a practice. Awaiting the blank which blankets our blankness. A differential calculus of behaviour: personality as a kind of private property, thus what of spiritual socialism? Nothing. Just the poetry of turbulence: the theory that a thing or an event can have a tangible existence long before anyone knows of it, or even what it is, such as the end of the world in slow motion, for instance. In investigating a formula, one would do well to always remember its foundation and basic principles: from the Latin then, solus (alone) and ipse (self), hence the sensibility that everything other than oneself is a state of oneself, hence the myth of otherness. To interpret the persona that sets off the alarm clock which examines the waking state: distortions of the perceiving consciousness. Our awe is reserved for an awkward silence that surrounds a certain noun, when the spirit stands alone inside, a naked noun. True, certain murderers are musical: precision of living and control of circumstances, aligned perfectly with their polarities, of confusion and coincidence. But a subterranean weakness in the system supports and confirms a tragic view of the human condition, where control is exerted from below and information from above. Witness the behaviour of the man without qualities, who does not behave at all. Our own effort allows no exit from the labyrinth we created: a head without a world. Life transformed by language into a singular task. A long and dazzling stroll through the mind. There are always people standing in the half-light of this world...and behind their backs, a great and impenetrable darkness begins to spread, and only a short distance further on, it becomes all but engulfing. Utopia is after all, not a goal, but merely a direction. Things just happen, that is the sum total of all wisdom. Empiricism is after all a game, in which the cardinal rule is not knowing what we are actually saying about what we are experiencing. Knowledge is the bizarre capitalism of the inner life. And if the world is only a figure of speech, an analogy, an image, a sum total which must be calculated? A favourite assessment of the man without qualities: our history, when observed very closely, resembles a half-solidified swamp. The exploits of culture, the poultry-farms known as philosophy, religion or literature, trap doors through which we plunge toward a borderline experience. “Hell is not interesting, it is merely terrible”: since good and evil no longer exist but have been replaced by faith and doubt, and in some strange way we do devalue things as soon as we give utterance to them. The headless world. The romance of the inevitable. The shattering thought of crowds and power: there may be nothing to know and our error comes only because we try to know it. Thinkers are those who occupy the butcher shop of the mind, they are not dismayed by the meat of thoughts, hanging from those velvet hooks. Oh to live in a world where we did not have to exist. We are predators of grief, where words have a conscience. What Canetti called a grave realization: that the beyond is within us, but it is trapped within us. A great and insoluble fissure he called it, for within us we also have “the mass grave of creatures”. For that is also where we keep our money, in our hearts, where the beats count it for us.

Time. Some sentences release their poison only after years. Give it all away and it all comes back. The more you give away, the more comes back. Its all a matter of sending yourself, or perhaps just major portions of oneself, into the future, into the spirit world, into the fourth dimension, before you arrive there. Arriving in advance indeed. And constructing some sort of a .....self....or call it a soul if it makes you feel better, which will ostensibly survive the “interval”. Surprise! You don’t have a soul...you have to build one yourself, one piece at a time. So things will be familiar...except that there will be no “things”. The second to last part: one can lament, one can become better. The burglar left behind a handwritten note, but apparently it was illegible. Guidebooks, Melville grumbled, are the least reliable in all literature, and all literature, in one sense, is made up of guidebooks. So true Sir, and how ever moreso when speaking of the fourth dimension, within which it is yet possible to take a sentimental journey. The existence of the world, after all, and even its odd anomalies, cannot be skirted as an issue. Existence does precede essence after all. Ahhh, that goofy sacrament of the twentieth century...doubt. Perhaps the aim of the experiment is to see if sorrow has a super-saturation point. Don’t ask me, I’m just another tourist passing through hell, just like you...its just that I’m a tourist from further away, that’s all. A veritable da Vinci of attempts at optimistic occupancy. We who witness the case as presented before its court of inquisition, can certainly hold certain truths to be revealed by this triumph of “collective” solipsism to be self-evident. As is the apparent fact that surrealism is about to be reborn...but not as an avant-garde art movement, no, something far more dangerous and disturbing is about to happen: surrealism is about to be reborn in the streets of actual, everyday life. One shudders to consider the possibilities. Unlike literature, for instance, or in painting, no matter what shape the object took, real life surrealism results in actual, rather than aesthetic or moral, vertiginous freedom to absorb the unconscious into everyday life. Once it is everyday life, acting out collective impulses which convulse thousands of unknowing individuals, well, now that is quite another matter, isn’t it Monsieur Breton? The essence of the journey can only begin to be grasped when it begins to end, where the destination was concealed in the departure, all present and accounted for captain. If there is paradox in the concept of a shared solitude, how much moreso in the notion of a shared soliloquy. So, not necessarily denying the existence of an outside world, so much as severely doubting it as source of value to oneself. The quest is simple, not easy but simple: the search for the dissolution of the puzzle of division, of otherness, and most especially, of the urge to assimilate all around us, to absorb everyone and everything around us in a celebration of safety and sameness. This would however, be an error of the most morbid sort, it would be a profound negation of difference. And difference is what makes a difference, in the long and boring scheme of things known as evolution and enlightenment.

Who is this “other” that one can catch a glimpse of out of the corner of the solipsistic eye? The other is a crowd symbol, pure and....well, not simple, pure and naive. And although many have felt honor-bound to attempt to defeat solipsism as a system, many also admit that they are unable to do so, even if they use the marvelous weapons of their rationalism, so too even less so when actual surrealism erupts in the streets of everyday life. When there is no position which is not “pure metaphysical hypothesis”, musings after the physical, which are guaranteed to doom you to despair, plunging you ever further into a perfect surrealist world: utterly unjustified and purely gratuitous, wherein it is impossible to ever ascertain the deepest inclination of our being. Borrowed being. A region where ethics are impossible but values are everywhere. There is no “as if”. Existence is not elsewhere, it is here, it is the other which is permanently in search of elsewhere. We meanwhile, we are permanently trapped in the present moment. A moment which never ends. Symbols of nothing, or symbols of symbols of something. Yes, staining the silence is unfortunately necessary and essential to survival here, if only briefly. The reduction of doubt is symbolized by the abolition of art. But psychological aesthetics or philosophical aesthetics? Everything is what it is and not another thing. Just as Uncle Wallace pointed out by remarking on a “metaphysical street in the physical town.” The music of the axes in the flesh forest. Since nothing we say about the Void actually can tell us anything about it, some solutions are just as puzzling as the original problem they appeared to solve. Like birds of prayer, we sit waiting on branches for calamity to fall from the sky and sure enough, fall it does, in great gooey blobs of epiphenomenal and lamentable expedients. No, we do not write for love of humanity, but from the perverse urge to procure for our thoughts a separate and tangible existence in the world. At such a point, opposites cease to be contradictions. We have been manufactured by fiction to serve reality. A realm of silence, gesture and immobility. One is forced to keep perfectly still out of the quite logical compulsion to witness the slow erosion of the dream. The dream decays before our dreaming eyes. Alarming holes appear on the other side of being if it is observed too clearly. Still one stares, even as the central hole begins to expand from within each of us and eventually reaches outward to encompass everything. Eventually, the prosthetics are all abandoned, the vast artificially shared spine evaporates, and suddenly there comes an end to all surmise. Who in such a situation would want to hazard conjectures about the future?