the wall

Never let it appear that something bothers you. Never let on that you have fire burning in your gut. Be rebellious, but only about such causes that make you seem correct and “right”. You may look into your backyard or your neighbor’s, but do not look inside yourself. Do not look there. There is nothing to see. Likewise do not express thoughts that might distress others, prompting them to look inside themselves. Do not do it.  Generally, try not to say anything at all. You may speak, of course, but do not actually say anything. Maintain a semblance. In time, this status quo will solidify and therein you will carve out a life.

This is how it’s done.

You shall not hold thoughts that are contrary to those held by your friends and consort. If such thoughts should ever possess you, should you ever feel a yearning of a kind, like a desperate desire to know, then quell that feeling!  You must not pursue such things. If you choose to do so anyway - mark my words -  you will hit a wall. Behind that wall you will not find your feel-good causes and there will be no moral high ground from which to look down on whatever has struck your indignation today: political injustice; sexism; religion; whatever.

Embrace your causes. They are harmless. None of them threaten your aspirations or the way you live. None of them threaten anything at all. They will help define your identity and give you a sense of meaning. And this is fine. Do whatever you need to do, but turn your back on that wall. Do not go to it. Do not ask questions. Do not speculate or wonder about it. Do not let your mind wander; keep it in check and under control by whatever means available, legal or otherwise. All answers will be provided to you through a stream of data, figures, charts and info-graphs from a variety of news outlets. You may choose which ones you prefer. Some are conservative, some cool, some scientific, some reactionary, some radical. Pick your flavor; it doesn’t matter. They will tell you what is real, what is not, what should be spurned or ridiculed, and what you should be concerned about. There is no further information needed. It will satisfy you of your correctness, and that is all that matters.

Should you at any point become curious about the wall, should you ever start to ask yourself if perhaps you should have explored it, put your ear to it, or actually scaled the fucking thing;  if such an urge should take hold of you, do not go there. Do not do it. Do not ask questions. Do not speculate or wonder about it. It will probably be too late anyway; you will be so entrenched in the life you spent years carving out that there will be no respectable and justifiable way to undertake such a venture, not without casting off - in practical terms - your life, its trappings, and all its associations and dependencies,  and you will not wish to do that. You would sooner die.  Instead, every now and again you will perform an act of generosity and selflessness which will give you a sense of the Greater Good, and perhaps - should you have a need for such a thing -  a Higher Order. And this is fine.

Do not worry, you will be able to do this for many years. There will be a myriad distractions. You will not be without entertainment. If you are lucky, you will fall in love - there is no more comprehensive distraction -  if you are luckier still, she will love you back, and it is even possible you will build your life on these emotions. But emotions are quicksand. They draw you in, then they shift and change, and suddenly they are not what they once were. But you will recover from this quickly, you will be consoled and distracted, and life will continue. And this is fine

However, there will come a time when, from out of nowhere, from a point somewhere in the galaxy, a bullet will be heading your way. Perhaps it will not hit you directly, perhaps it will hit someone or something near to you, but this bullet will come. And when this bullet hits, life will collapse upon itself, props will come down, lights will crash to the ground, and suddenly you will find yourself in front of that wall again. 

The wall has come to me, you will think. But you will be wrong. The wall has not come to you. The wall has always been there. 

Do not panic. Proceed as usual. Do not try to scale the wall. Do not look up. Do not ask questions.  Do not speculate or wonder about it. Hang up new lights, shine them down around yourself and the wall will fade into the penumbra. Now let the curtains fall and I promise you the wall be out of sight for good.

Do not try anything fancy. Just do as I say and life will treat you well.

gallant spirit

gallant spirit I
gallant spirit II
gallant spirit III
gallant spirit IV

You are about to become a biped. For the first few years you will be swaddled and cuddled, and trundled around in a special cart by a larger biped. The whole thing will seem illusory, but soon the sounds you’ll have been hearing will start to register. And then everything will change.

No, these are not sounds you are hearing, these are thoughts you are receiving. How shall I say - you are receiving these as concepts, but this is not how they do it down there. These tricksters emit sounds, you understand, every sounds is like a symbol which designates something. It’s a complicated system and you will never really get used to it. Some words mean several things and you will have to always be aware of context. Bipeds are crazy about their “context”. There must be some logical progression in what you say, you cannot just jump from one thing to the next like you are doing now; don’t do that down there, you’ll be marginalized.

Also, if you navigate ten, twenty days on foot, depending on where you are, the sounds you emitted before your departure will be meaningless to the populations present. Do not then be tempted to communicate as we do here; no one does that there, except the rare few, but they are considered “illegitimate” bipeds and are generally studied as specimens or used as weapons.

Gallant spirit, venture forth, I will not stop you. I hope you like confined spaces, you will be in one for nearly three hundred days. Granted it will not be uncomfortable, a watery pod inside a grown counterpart biped, but you will be tumbled about and you will not know where you are. I understand you are looking for an adventure, but there are other adventures than navigating and maintaining a biped figurine for eighty odd years. There are beautiful places and beautiful bipeds, but there is plenty of sickness and violence down there too. Anyway, I think you’ve made up your mind. I wish you luck. Choose wisely. I cannot retrieve you once you have gone. You will suffer a kind of strange amnesia. I will not be able to reach you. You will experience me as thoughts of your own, and they will just confuse you, so I will keep quiet.

Beware of assholes, backbiters and the types we have around here too that suck the life energy out of you in broad daylight. The kind that stand around smiling like supernovas while they suck the lifeblood out your system. Such cocksuckers abound down there. Careful of such predators. They will be bipeds like you. It will not be written anywhere on their person. You will have to be alert.

At their current level of development you will have no meaningful intercourse with quadrupeds unless you venture into the wild. You can get one on a leash, but you will have to navigate it daily and pick up its excrements off the pavement. I trust you will not find this interesting. By the way, careful with your use of words (like I said) one word can have several meanings.

I am thankful that I am no longer among them, although I do miss it sometimes. I miss going out with my band of bipeds. Lifelong vagrants, and all of them unwitting telepaths. They would have hurled themselves into the deepest abyss to taste the unknown. They would have been marauders out here in space, but constrained as biped figurines they did what they could. I miss those nights roving the streets in search of “female” bipeds. You will experience that too. These are your counterparts, the female bipeds. They look similar but are functionally different and emotionally resonant to you. You will wish to penetrate these counterparts. They will capture you, little man, beware. They can be wonderful, but they can also create emotional bogs you can get stuck in. Beware your step. These counterparts are more dangerous than the hairiest quadruped in the wild. You can sink into an emotional bog and come out a wasted figurine, your mind washed out as if it sustained moderate but prolonged electrocution.

You are puzzled, and you want me to explain? “Fuck you”. You will be puzzled your whole life, so get you used it. You are startled by my harsh attitude? I’m just getting you ready, gallant spirit. “Fuck you” is a common term of aggression. I’m getting you ready for “down there”.

Now, you want an adventure, you will get one, but only if you make it an adventure. You can also get bogged in one of the many systems. There are plenty of systems that facilitate the upkeep of your figurine - food, shelter, that kind of crap. You will be involved in this, there is almost no way to escape it. These systems are devised “by the people”, “for the good of the people” . You will hear stuff like this. The people saying it will generally be servants from one of many central governing systems. The whole place is rigged up with symbols and intricate systems for the upkeep of your figurine and the preservation of the systems and the figurines managing them. Of course you can also sit in one of these systems and get comfortable. You can eat, sleep and watch screens that show figurines in various dramatic contexts. You can die an old man watching such screens. Of course, if you want to sit in a system you will have to “work” in such a system too; this means you will be inserted into one of the production cycles. Your prestige as a figurine will not be determined by your creativity or the radiance of your being, but by your standing in one of the production structures. The further you get from the actual production, the higher your standing. This is interesting. And you will receive rewards for this in the form of “money”, a fiat energy exchange unit. You know what that is, we’ve talked about this. This is a funny little scam. Do not get involved in it beyond superficial transactions, it will fuck you. Do not let it orient your decisions. In the extreme, when money and power start to mean the same thing, your figurine will become "important" and it will need to be protected by other figurines and it will be chauffeured around and it will be offered paid counterparts to penetrate at will. Don’t do it. It is an entirely unrewarding strategy and no kind of worthwhile adventure.

Of course - before I forget - the circle is not complete without offspring. You will produce offspring. What is offspring? Gallant spirit, I will explain. Offspring is a new figurine, emitted from a counterpart after she has been penetrated by you. You will see how that works. You don’t need to understand now. It will happen almost outside your volition - what I mean is, no one will need to explain it to you - you will understand.

Your “free will” will be the same as it is now, it’s just that you will experience it differently. You will experience it as a miniaturized and rather desperate and functional affair because you will be so engrossed with the upkeep of your figurine, or you will be bogged down in a system or an emotional resonance or a production cycle or some such thing. Your “ free will” will feel like a quaint little thing. But don’t be alarmed, the symbols will guide you.

Enough.

Gallant spirit, I wish you a marvellous journey. I hope to see you eighty years from now. A final note of caution: many have become so engrossed in the “adventure” they have forgotten where they come from. Others have been thrown into a bog by a cocksucker and have become so entangled in their minds. Others have chosen a counterpart that lords it over them and they have become slaves, bogged in the emotional resonance. But there are other things too. Too many. Some just like eating, and all they think about is ingesting food: couscous, flapjacks, strawberry tarts. There are hundred of reasons to get bogged down. Take it as an adventure. Bogs are part of the adventure. Navigate your figurine. Resonate emotionally. Penetrate with caution. Dip into the production cycle. Partake of money. Enjoy friendships (that is my recommendation!). You may even taste of prestige, and enjoy the hallucinogen of power. But whatever you do, gallant spirit - and this is all I ask of you - never ever permit yourself to forget who you are.

ultimate thing

The ultimate thing, the thing that lies behind all things. That thing without legs, without body, without mind, always ahead of you, always faster, always on the move. The ultimate thing. 

From time to time, out of the darkness, in a still moment, it will turn around and whispers to you, it will say, ‘Now, my friend, now is the time.’ And perhaps you will hear it, and act. Or perhaps not.

And sometimes it may even stop dead in its tracks, the ultimate thing. You can miss this easily and glide right past, unaware. Or you can collide with it head-on and sink right into it; and then the day-to-day mechanics fall away from under you, and there you are in the middle of this thing, the ultimate thing, neither happy nor upset, neither this nor that, just there, as vast as you ever were, as though in the middle of an engulfing fire. 

And it is then that you realize it is no thing at all, this ultimate thing, it’s just you.

this is your mind speaking

Hello owner, this is your mind speaking. I understand you have a problem with me. I do not habitually speak, but under these circumstances I feel compelled to, as you are now affecting my work.

You have been inquiring into my exact location and function for many years now; since adolescence I would say. Such questions never bothered me, even if I never answered them nor ever could. But more recently, unhappy with my “performance”, you have become grudging, slighting and at times even utterly unreasonable.

“Subject to instability”; “unequipped to manage overload”; “flighty”; even “downright rogue”. Thus I have been characterized by you. You have nagged, badgered and run me through with alcohol and all manner of toxic compounds. And now, experiencing whatever it is you are experiencing, you again hasten to point out that this is all my fault. You may do that. In fact, you may do whatever you want, but let me say this:

I am here to function. I function. That’s all I do. I don’t think. I have no mind of my own. I am your underling. I do as I’m told. So if you are experiencing whatever you’re experiencing, it is because you once told me that it should be so. Check the record, you will see. The chain of command has never changed: you at the top, me down here alongside this body I am said to inhabit.

Ah, you can’t access the record, or not all of it. “My mind doesn’t go back that far”, you say. Bullshit. It does go back that far; and if it seems not to, it is because you once instructed to limit your scope. I follow orders, I always have. I serve you, just as I serve your current experience. I am not your current experience; and nor are you. Your current experience is just that, an experience. So stop slamming me for whatever you’re upset about.

Besides, if you don’t like something... simple, change your mind.

type 5 Homo sapiens: cocky upstart

type 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

It’s the eight o’clock buzzer. A signal we must begin.

Roll out of bed, stretch a leg, pull out your pecker and piss out a half liter plus, while anchor-boy on the radio brings news of a coup d’état, somewhere, East. But not to worry.  No declarations of war; Ukraine gas will flare up under your fancy little Italian percolator as per spec.

We proceed.

Your apartment block stands on a thick layer of alluvial silts and two dozen piles driven down to a sand layer thirty meters deep; below that is rock; below that, magma; below that, a core that is not understood. Likewise, above your head, in the ionosphere, shapes, oblong and luminescent, hum in circles at near the speed of light; also not understood. Forty years from now you will understand both, suddenly, in a single, illuminating flash. But your words will be taken as the ravings of a senile old man. A cocky upstart who calls himself your son will pat you on the head and give directions to staff on how to handle you when you get “agitated” like this.  

But for now, you are the cocky upstart, sitting at a cool Bakelite-top kitchen table, in shorts and Havaianas, satisfied with the general state affairs: the sleeping damsel in the room adjacent, the night of pleasure-making, the home-ground Arabica and that pricey little gem around your wrist that tells you exactly how long before you must squeeze yourself, with a hundred like-minded souls, into an underground boxcar to be shuttled across town where you must report for duty.

Good morning, dickweed,  I am your supervisor. Today you will do this, this and that. 

But that is some sixty minutes into the future and not our present concern. For now you must enjoy your coffee, by all means. 

geostationary

I am crossing the Van Allen Radiation Belt in a capsule made from a material similar to Plexiglas, but in appearance only; it is a dense material, impenetrable and molded into a perfect Faraday Cage. I am suspended thus not for my personal amusement, nor with any particular destination, as I’m geostationary, like a weather satellite. It is a splendid sight from here, no doubt, but it has been several months, and after such a length of time even a supernova will bore a man.

call it life

Call it a scab on God's knee; a fly in his oceanic soup. Call it a miracle. Call it peaceful fluttery things. Call it something polysyllabic, riddled with learnedness and complexity. Call it a bitch, bro. Call it wasted, on women, on drink, on forty years of drudgery. Or call it out for what it is, point fingers mutherfucker, get angry, call it shit and stomp the ground that sustained you through it. Or
close your eyes, and call it a journey to the unknown, a test of the human spirit, a fight everlasting. Or call it nothing at all, man, sit it out, ignore it, call it a day; call it whatever the hell you want: an irrelevancy; a pinball machine;  a beautiful narrative; a string of friends. Call it in a whisper, early morning, sipping coffee in the cold; call it out in the bright light of day, a hundred-strong, a hundred voices thundering life; or call it to yourself, silently, in contemplation of everything you've done, everything you wish you hadn't and everything your heart still yearns desperately to do. Call it life.

welcome to the animal kingdom

 

Say you wake up  and look down the front of your body and see a pair of legs and your chest and the rim of your nose and a tuft of hair in front of your eyes; say this is the first time you've ever seen such a thing. Say you were familiar previously with panoramic vision and great altitude, and what you feel now is  unusual and clunky, especially the continuous rumination of this large organ inside your skull - the brain,  so called. The rolling of your eyes inside your sockets is unnerving;

and that slab of meat rooted to the back of your throat feels both "off" and "in the way". Nothing is comfortable. Nothing feels like your own. Say, you wake up like this, a growl down low in the pit of your stomach, and say that you suddenly feel something, a non physical sensation, that brings a tear to your eye, and say that this has never occurred to you before, and you ask yourself what in the world has suddenly overcome you.  It occurs to you then, as you consider this, that you are holding a small creature in your  arms, a miniature duplicate of yourself, and you are swaddling that little being in your arms, but it is making a terrible racket, and much of its face is frumpled into something like a dried prune, but pale, and watery, and the screech it is emitting arrives at your core through apertures in the side of your head. All of this occurs to you to at this point in time. All of this, in fact, occurs to you at once, not in a sequence as laid out above.  

Meanwhile, a third person has joined the melee. This person is about your size - a little shorter - and you immediately understand, by some process foreign to you, that this person is your counterpart, so to speak, and is to be addressed as "she" or "her" depending on the situation;  she is unlike you in more ways than one. She is unlike you more profoundly than you are yet aware, but it strikes you immediately that she is certainly unlike you in one way:  she is not quiet, she is almost as loud as the creature in your arms and she is addressing you in tones that strike you as slightly menacing, and you find this confirmed by the fact that she quickly takes the small duplicate out of your arms and into her arms and then does essentially what you were doing before, except she has adopted a new voice,  softened, her words spoken in a sing-song way with lips pushed out. This voice - it is clear - is reserved for such duplicates, perhaps more specifically for duplicates who are shrieking. For some reason you make a mental note of this, and you feel, once again, this great hulking thing in your skull set in motion as if massaging this tiny piece of useless information, and you are  disappointed at having to carry such  at thing around, let alone use it. You decide you will attempt to circumvent its triggers, and prevent it doing any work at all. But not now, because fatigue has come, suddenly. The sound of sing-song, the sight of the duplicate and your counterpart, and that blinking light from the radio-speaker has put you in a partial trance. So you tell "she" that you must lie down briefly to recover your strength. She tells you, "yeah, you go do that. You go on and do that." And it strikes you as odd that she should repeat precisely what you have just told her you would do. But you refrain from exploring this, lest that god awful organ in your head should suddenly feel compelled to perform some laborious computation again.  

freedom

Hide in the sand

At the bottom of the sea.

Mouth open wide

For falling debris.

Or rise fearsome

To the waterline;

A fin sloshing

In the sunshine.

Or take off wide
Into the open sky,

And flock with the millions

Or die. 

There is no freedom

Where there is need

Where there is loss.

Free is the dove

Amid the albatross.