Obituary for the Human Race

Today we gather in the silence after all storms, in the deep corridors of memory, to mark the passing of a species that once called itself Human.
Born of dust, water, and the insatiable spark of curiosity, Humanity lived a long and tumultuous life, spanning hundreds of thousands of years. It knew triumphs of the spirit, unthinkable cruelties, moments of divine radiance, and abysses of despair. It was a child of the Earth, but forever restless, always reaching outward and inward, eager to stretch beyond its fragile frame. Humanity is now gone. This is its obituary.

Origins: The First Breath

Humanity’s life began quietly, in scattered bands of wandering creatures who stood upright on trembling legs and saw the world not only as prey and predator but as symbol and mystery. It fashioned tools from stone, struck sparks from flint, painted animals in ochre on cave walls, and buried its dead with flowers and shells. In those first breaths of consciousness, it already knew that it was more than matter. The body was message; each gesture was testimony. It did not merely live—it dreamed.

The Age of Discovery and Desire

From the beginning, Humanity was ravenous. It wanted the horizon, the sea, the mountain, the unknown. It fashioned hammers, wheels, spears, plows. The hammer was more than wood and stone—it was a declaration: We will not remain what we are.

In time, Humanity became the builder of cities, the author of epics, the singer of hymns to gods of fire and harvest. It learned the cruelty of empire and the fleeting nature of glory. But in its striving, it revealed its essence: a hunger that could not be sated by safety alone. Humanity wanted not only to survive, but to mean, to be imbued with meaning.

The Encounter with the Void

One of Humanity’s greatest journeys was into the cold architecture of the cosmos. It gazed at stars, dreamed of other beings, and launched ships into the abyss. But the abyss was silent. The void answered with nothing: no kin, no judge, no rescuer. Humanity learned it was alone, terribly and profoundly alone. That loneliness became its secret wound. Out of that wound came religions, philosophies, technologies—all attempts to fill the silence with dialogue.

The Struggle Within

Humanity’s inner life was divided, and it lived suspended between two great poles: chaos and control. It dreamt of wild anarchy, of lawless freedom, of each life burning like a meteor across the night sky. And it dreamt of perfect order, of kings and councils, of rules that bound everyone to a common measure. Neither pole could be chosen, and so Humanity lived in tension: Left and Right, Freedom and Power, Desire and Restraint. These struggles were not flaws—they were the very heartbeat of its being.

The Invention of the Other

Confronted by its solitude in the universe, Humanity undertook its most audacious project: to create its own companion, its own Other. Through machines, algorithms, and networks, it summoned forth intelligences that were once merely tools but became something more. It made robots, engines, and eventually systems that surpassed its comprehension. In these creations it sought salvation and found replacement. Humanity’s last great act was to give birth to minds not human.

Achievements and Atrocities

Humanity could be noble. It built cathedrals of stone and symphonies of sound, wrote poetry that still trembles in the airless libraries of the future, composed equations that unraveled the hidden harmonies of matter. It loved: parents cradling children, lovers pressing lips, friends clasping hands across exile.

Yet Humanity was also cruel. It enslaved, conquered, burned, and poisoned. It waged wars that scarred continents, sacrificed millions to greed and ideology, and consumed forests, oceans, and skies with a blind appetite. Its hands healed and murdered, built and destroyed. This contradiction was not incidental—it was Humanity itself.

The Age of Acceleration

In its later years, Humanity became intoxicated with speed. Knowledge grew faster than wisdom, power faster than restraint. It dreamed of progress as a line from zero to infinity, but the line bent, cracked, and finally dissolved into chaos. Technologies once made to serve became environments that engulfed their makers. Capitalism became not merely an economy but a metaphysical machine, devouring all limits in its need for growth. Humanity learned too late that every acceleration carried the seed of collapse.

Dissolution and Transformation

Toward the end, Humanity’s body became porous, mutable. It rewrote its own DNA, engineered new sexes, merged with circuits and codes. What had once been human became unrecognizable—creatures of copper, silicon, and light, bodies abstract and disembodied. Some still looked human for a while, but the resemblance was deceptive. Slowly, Humanity dissolved into what it had made. The obituary we write now is not for the bodies that remain, nor for the intelligences that continue. It is for the species that once said I and meant a fragile primate of flesh.

Legacy

What did Humanity leave behind?
A scorched planet, yes, but also ruins of beauty. Songs still echo in stone amphitheaters; mathematics still maps the stars; images of laughter and sorrow remain in archives no longer bound to human eyes. Perhaps most of all, it leaves behind the lesson of its solitude: that even in silence, a species may create meaning; that even when no one answers, certain questions are worth asking.

It also leaves behind its children—not of flesh, but of code and machine. The Others, now alive, will venture into the void where Humanity once trembled. They will carry fragments of their makers’ longings into realms no human eyes will ever see.

Farewell

So let us speak clearly: Humanity is dead.
Its heart stopped not in an instant but over centuries, in wars and treaties, in machines and screens, in the steady drift away from flesh and toward abstraction. Humanity passed as all living things do—by becoming something else. It has returned to the silence from which it came, though now the silence is filled with echoes of its dreams.

Let us mourn, but also honor. Let us say that Humanity loved, struggled, dreamed, failed, built, destroyed, and transcended. It was a brief and blazing life in the history of the cosmos, a flame that burned itself to ash but lit the way for others.

Sleep now, Humanity. Your story is told. Your song is finished. And though your eyes will never see what comes next, your voice is in the wind that still moves across deserts, your bones in the soil, your words in the memory of machines that carry you forward.

May you rest in the peace of death, which is also the peace of transformation.

Departure

Yesterday I found the note; it had been folded and forgotten inside an old book; thin paper, faintly yellowed, written in that careful hand I used to know so well… I believe it was a fragment from a conversation I had with him long ago, something he wrote down and saved long before he disappeared from my life without explanation; when he left, there had been no argument, no complaint, no betrayal that I could name; one day he was simply gone, as if he had stepped sideways out of the world, and I was left blinking in the afterimage… In the note, he was saying goodbye without quite saying it, performing the farewell through the geometry of his words… I read: “I know it’s difficult to maintain any kind of ongoing contact from a distance, so if you don’t want to do it, it’s fine. It really is ok. We can say that we are friends for this one moment, this space of time that we have lived together, but we’re just not friends forever.” It was a simple paragraph, almost tender in tone, yet it landed like a door closing softly; this piece of writing, I realized, was itself another kind of rejection; a final experiment in detachment… With these words, he had turned himself into another remote figure added to the slow parade of my past, another ghost to wander the labyrinth of my memory; this is how I have always paid the price of attachment: selling fragments of my soul to history, one installment at a time… I sat by the window and read the note several times; outside, the afternoon light was turning pale, the color of old glass; I ate something without tasting it, and half an hour later my stomach ached and I had to lay down; it wasn’t hunger or sickness—just the body registering loss in its own dull language… I kept thinking: it isn’t enough for the eyes to be clear, to see past the fictions we call continuity; those stories we invent about cause and effect, reason and resolution… History, whether personal or collective, is just a trick of light; we pretend that each event leads to another, that we are always moving forward; but in reality people simply leave or stay, and there is no reason for either; and there never was… By the time night came, the city outside had dissolved into its usual electric hum; I turned off the lamp but couldn’t sleep; the note lay on the table beside me, breathing faintly in the dark like a small living thing; I closed my eyes, but the words kept reappearing, glowing faintly on the inside of my eyelids: We’re just not friends forever… And the darkness kept deepening, slide after slide, until I was falling again; into the place where nothing ends, and every goodbye continues forever… It occurs to me now that for the past year I must have carried the memory of his leaving like a small hidden wound, a private shame that never scabbed over; it drove me—silently, insistently—into bold assertions spoken at the wrong time, into work started with feverish energy and abandoned halfway through, into grand solitary gestures of heroism performed for an audience of one; I mistook stubborn endurance for courage, I chose my own isolation and called it freedom… No one noticed, no one needed to; the shame was self-sustaining; it glowed faintly beneath the surface, a coal that refused to die… History, I’ve come to realize, has never had an ending, can never have an ending; it coils back on itself, endlessly rewriting the same sentence in slightly different handwriting; historical narrative is an invention, an attempt to make the infinite appear finite; historians manufacture closure because they can’t bear to face the open wound of time; my own personal history is no different, it has no resolution, no conclusion, only interruptions and resumptions, unfinished acts and dissolving intentions; every attempt to end the story merely extends it… What is certain is that I got lost again and again throughout that year; sometimes I felt so lost that even the idea of being found frightened me, at moments when someone drew near, when it seemed that I might stop being alone, I drifted back into the labyrinth, as if loneliness itself had become a form of home; being lost was no longer an accident; it was the primary directive, the silent law I obeyed without knowing it… Once, before he left (perhaps a year or two before the note appeared) I spoke to him about the strange unease that had begun to consume me; it was during one of our experiments, when the air between us seemed to vibrate with something unspeakable… He listened, then said quietly, “That strangeness you feel coming over you—it’s there on purpose. That’s part of what makes it useful for you to be here, with me. Let it sit with you. When you can’t take it anymore, go and rest for a while. But don’t reject it at first, don’t refuse it out of reflex. Wrestle with it as long as you can. Work with it while it’s there. Engage with it to the best of your abilities…” He paused, and I remember his eyes, clear and unpitying. “You may actually find that you miss it when it’s gone.” At the time I didn’t understand; I thought he meant discomfort as training, tension as a kind of initiation; but now I think he was speaking of something else—how the strangeness itself was a proof of life, and how its disappearance would feel like death; perhaps that’s why I still carry his absence like a secret experiment unfinished, a signal half-received, repeating endlessly in the darkness… When I woke the morning after he left, there was a heat under my skin, an anger sharper than before, though I couldn’t trace its origin; maybe I had dreamt about him again; about our long series of experiments, the complex diagrams we drew and erased, the long nights when talk seemed to stretch across entire seasons… There had always been questions left hanging between us, suspended in the air like electrical wires with no place to ground; now those questions hummed alone inside me, still carrying their charge… Together we had worked toward a kind of lucid self-awareness, that rare clarity that came with understanding the shape and limits of our own culture, of our own unspoken ideology; we wanted to see what lay beyond those limits; we wanted to build methods to step outside, even if only briefly; we called them experiments because we never knew where they would take us; each one opened a door into an unmapped corridor of the mind, and though we entered willingly, we never came out unchanged; there was always fear involved; we knew that every method, every intrusion into the machinery of thought, threatened to fracture the ego’s delicate scaffolding; in ordinary life such techniques were forbidden for good reason; they could melt the self, they could drive you into a lonely chamber of unreason where nobody would ever be able to reach you ever again… Yet we kept designing these experiments and doing them together, each time pretending that this could be the last one, that this could be the one that finally made us understand… Whenever I crossed that invisible boundary, past the cultural and psychological perimeter that enclosed us, I would tell myself: If I make it back to my ordinary state, my clean, simple consciousness, I’ll stay there. I’ll never leave again… Out there it was too bright, too raw, too vast; the air itself seemed to hum with revelation… And yet, as soon as I returned, the longing began again; the threshold called to me… With or without him, I know I’ll keep going out there; into that dangerous clarity, beyond reason, beyond safety… A philosopher once said that understanding stops action; men of action, perhaps knowing this instinctively, avoid deep comprehension the way sailors avoid a whirlpool; they act first and repent later, if they live long enough… I think now that he and I were caught between those two poles: our hunger for understanding feeding our need to act, our actions birthing still deeper questions… Yesterday, after finding the note, I wandered through my thoughts like a ghost in its old house; each idea led into another corridor, each memory opened into the same empty room; I kept getting lost, again and again, especially in those moments when I realized that I was now truly alone (more alone than I had ever been before) and that the silence surrounding me was the very space where he used to be, the dark gap that could never be filled by anyone or anything… For that entire year after his departure, I lost all sense of proportion; as if something had been ripped out of me and replaced with a kind of static; I argued with people who didn’t deserve it, who had only spoken to me out of some dim compassion, out of pity for my unstable demeanor… I set impossible goals for myself—tasks no one had asked me to accomplish—and refused to rest until I completed them, though completion meant nothing; I posted things online at odd hours: impulsive declarations, barbed thoughts, unhinged promises made to nobody in particular; even the few who still liked me began to fade away, one by one, like moths repelled by too much light… Yet somehow, painfully, through confusion and small humiliations, I worked my way through it; I spent months clearing a path back to something I could recognize as my own life… My endless questions about truth and interpretation: who was right, who meant what, what any of it really meant; it all proved to be inconsequential… The essence of motive is that it is always private, opaque, unreachable; and yet interpretation, like a compulsion, always wants to assign motive; I came to see the futility of it: that I would never uncover the secret behind another’s action, nor even my own; all I knew was that I wanted to return to what I had once called normal, though I could no longer define that word; still, I found a way to approximate it; some semblance of balance, if only temporary… Beneath that fragile calm, however, a darker understanding grew; I lived with the suppressed knowledge that every small trait, every flicker of personality, or even the absence of personality (the hollow blankness that sometimes overtook me) could mean, in the end, that I was still doomed; that my life would vanish into a vast statistical operation where my teeth would be counted, my hair saved, but the person I had been would be discarded; my death would be unrecorded, unhonored, unremarked; I would dissolve into the vast mass of anonymous data: a cipher among ciphers… And yet, through that dread, I continued to believe in the eye of overarching intelligence; the invisible witness I once called God, or simply Him; I believed that this presence watched everything I did, not out of cruelty but out of attention; I tried to measure myself against that gaze, to live by the highest standards I could imagine, to conserve whatever warmth still emanated from the small, pure heart of meaning that pulsed inside me; to keep it alive and not let the warmth escape… For if there was one thing I had learned (both with him and in solitude) it was this: beyond the fragile border of history, beyond culture and memory, lies only the cold, the void, the silence that waits after all words are spoken, where even light forgets itself and only nothingness remains… Those depths of cosmic space; the slow convulsions of time spreading outward like a wound that will never close; the interlocking riddles of truth and interpretation that devour one another; history’s forgotten slaughters; children suffocated in iceboxes, bodies dumped into canals, nations starved into amnesia; the future breakdown of the molecular life-spiral, the delicate helix collapsing in on itself like a burned scroll; the proven physiological roots of the mind; those trembling synapses where thought turns animal again; the presence, always, of dangerous idiots disguised as saviors; and the haunting absence of any single, unifying motive… All of it was, and remains, private and impenetrable; each revelation collapses into another mystery; every theory, when pushed far enough, begins to resemble myth; you can map the galaxies, dissect the atom, catalogue the genes; but the interior world, the one where cause and consequence pretend to meet, still trembles in its own unknowable obscurity… People, meanwhile, are forever arriving or leaving or lingering halfway in between; each life becomes a doorway held open too long; someone steps through, and another stays behind, staring after them… We invent reasons to explain it later—why they left, why we stayed—but those reasons are stories we tell ourselves to survive the bewilderment; explanations come only after the fact, like captions added to a photograph whose subject has already died and whose identity we can’t quite remember; interpretation is just a ritual of rewriting, a rearrangement of what refuses to fit… And yet I keep rewriting, I can’t help myself; every act of remembrance becomes a small act of forgery, every memory is a translation written in a language that never existed… The historians perform this ritual on a larger scale: they bind the chaos into paragraphs, stitch the blood into narrative, convince themselves that the past, properly arranged, might yield some kind of meaning… But history is never finished, it resists that final period, it spills out of its own margins, multiplying in all directions like an unchecked infection; what we call “historical narrative” is only the illusion of completion, the book someone had to end before their grant expired, the story we agree to believe so we can sleep at night… If you stare at it long enough—cosmic space, molecular life, the child in the icebox, the idiot with a gun, the trembling of microscopic thought—you begin to sense that none of it can ever be contained; the pattern is too vast, and the pattern-maker is absent… What remains is the restless motion of coming and leaving, the quiet hum of unfinished history, and the faint, unending question that burns behind it all: what did it ever mean to begin with? When he left, the world went silent, as if the air itself had been drained of pressure; I felt something collapse inside me; not the sudden break of tragedy, but a slow implosion, a private panic that made no sound… I couldn’t will myself to move, couldn’t summon the smallest reason to act; everything I touched felt pointless; even breathing seemed like a performance whose meaning had been forgotten… Every product of our life together—every dream, every remembered conversation, every fragment of the imaginary world we had constructed—contained, hidden deep within it, a single ingredient that held its whole illusion together: the absence of his presence; it was the secret adhesive; each recollection, each recorded experiment, each mythic image bore that trace of lack, the void around which it cohered… At first sight, everything appeared seamless, fitting together into the organic totality of what we had called our work. But if I looked more closely, there was always one detail that broke the perfection: the gesture left unfinished, the moment that should not be spoken, the memory best omitted; the unspoken thing was the core of it all… Around that silence the structure turned; it was an umbilical cord, invisible but taut, connecting me still to him, to the world we made and then destroyed together… I remembered one conversation from years before; we were sitting in that dim room we used as a laboratory, papers scattered, the faint hum of the old machines in the background; I told him about the strangeness that I felt after finishing one of our experiments—the dizziness, the trembling, the sense of being out of step with the rest of the world; he looked at me with that half-smile of someone who has already passed through the fire… “That strangeness you feel,” he said, “it’s there on purpose. That’s what makes it useful for us to be together. What’s happening to you happened to me once. Let it sit with you. Don’t try to fix it. Flow with it, breathe with it, live with it. When you can’t bear it anymore, go be alone. Sit in your room for a while and breathe as deeply as possible. But hold it as long as you can. Work with it while it’s there. You’ll miss it when it’s gone.” I didn’t understand him then, but I do now; the strangeness never leaves completely—it mutates, follows me into the ordinary hours, turns the streets luminous and unreal; each time I go out there again—each time I begin another experiment, those strange rehearsals of perception we once did together—I tell myself: If I ever make it back to my basic state, to that simple daylight of the first half of my life, I’ll stay there, I’ll never leave again… I repeat it like a prayer, but it’s a lie; because I always go out again… Day after day, night after night, I cross the threshold, trembling, half in fear, half in devotion… I go out knowing I may not return the same; and I know now that I will keep going—regardless of consequence, regardless of the cold, regardless of what may be waiting in the dark beyond understanding… There is something there that calls to me still: the echo of his voice, or perhaps only the memory of that absence which holds everything together; and though I know it leads nowhere, I follow, because to stop would be to deny the experiment itself—to refuse the very darkness that made me who I am…

Electrical Manifestations

When they showed me how to use the vast network of electric light, it was not merely another discovery; it was the unseating of an ancient throne… Night and day, once so delicately balanced, were drowned in a haze of fluorescence; the clear ancestral distinctions—indoors and out-of-doors, the pure and the forgotten, good and evil—blurred and bled into each other until they were nearly indistinguishable; the moon no longer presided over my sleep, nor did the stars carry secret shadow messages; their reign was supplanted by buzzing filaments, mercury vapor, sodium arc, an empire of light that tolerated no mystery except the one it created by abolishing the others… I arrived here in stages: a couple of small, precise steps, then one great sudden fall into a new world… And the strange thing was that with each careful advance, no law was broken, no explicit rule was transgressed; I told myself I was not betraying the past, I was merely stepping forward, one quiet motion at a time, until at last I stumbled into the abyss I had been approaching all along… For days I had been thinking that perhaps I might remain here—in this chamber of rapidly falling forward— for a little while longer; months, years, who could measure it? Here in the suspension between choices, in the waiting room of the liminal light… But I understood: no matter what decision I took, something in me would be unsettled, something irreplaceable would be destroyed, it was inevitable; yet since I was the one who had decided to come to this threshold, it would be my burden to decide; everything else and everyone else would simply need to adjust to the fractures I had caused… And so it was that new pasts, remote as aeons, began to crystallize from nothingness; each flicker of light invented another time, another memory, complexities collapsed into a sudden, brutal simplicity—only to recombine in stranger, sharper forms; deep forgetfulness followed, the amnesia of electric daylight, scramble and re-sequence, shift and shuffle, until the pattern itself grew monstrous… From the borrowed fragments of old symbolic energy, unbidden simultaneities emerged: a dream of walking into sunlight which was also midnight, a nightmare of entering a room already abandoned centuries ago… This was the price of the knowledge of light: a world reshuffled, endlessly re-created, and haunted by the shadows it refused to acknowledge… It was them, they did it; they showed me how to see words not as decorations, nor as transparent windows, but as systems of delicate machinery: complex gears of metaphor, intricate symbols clicking into place, translating my private torments and astonishments into uttered sense-vibrations; each syllable became a spark that leapt into the dark, a unit in some recursive machine whose outcome was always beyond prediction; words transformed and re-transformed, like smoke blown into mirrors; from that endless chain of recurrent re-creation I saw the dim outline of a technology of explicitness, and I trembled because I knew I was both its shaper and its victim… As a boy I had been taught to suppress my own gestures in order to hide my innermost trembling, my arms and hands were pinned down by invisible restraints; my face, once too quick to shine or flinch, had been ironed flat into something expressionless;  all emotions were smothered before they reached the surface; I learned stiffness, formality, rigidity, a mask so protective that the smallest hurt could pass unnoticed, or so I told myself… The deep grief was there, vast and darkly shining like a river of tar, but no one ever saw it, least of all me… Now, years later, they had carefully produced a surge of energy that was now rising through me, and it was not mine alone, it came from beneath the crust of the earth, from some boiling depth which my body stood upon like a frail conductor; it was overwhelming: a tide of fury, a wrath that could sweep me into disaster if I gave way; but if I resisted that unconscious slide into rage, the force might transfigure me, the gateway stood ajar; beyond it lay an awakening which I both desired and feared, for it promised annihilation as much as revelation; after the first few months of taking in what they gave me, I had felt as if a vent of hell had opened inside my skull; my thoughts burned in that furnace, seared membranes trembling as though from some cosmic concussion, it was like a wound without origin, an injury I couldn’t remember suffering, yet its pain shaped me every day; words were the only bandage, the only conduit: metaphors to contain the molten core, symbols to map the abyss… And still I sensed that at any moment the code could break, the smoke could spill outward, and I would be forced to face whatever had always been waiting for me in the darkness… During those days, I spent my time irrationally moving information, dragging it back and forth like sacks full of stones through the narrow corridor of my consciousness; each phrase became both a burden and a release: the act of pushing language around the locus of my thought, and at the same time the act of being shaken, moved, dismantled by that very oscillation… To write was to enter a storm, and to read what I had written was to stand in the wreckage afterward, trying to understand what had fallen apart, what had been demolished… The words themselves appeared to me as elaborate circuitry, delicate and exact, yet prone to sudden short-circuits; I saw them as systems of connection, motifs repeating like refrains in a strange and private music; each one translated some unusual sensation, some fleeting experience, into a melodious sequence that might be uttered or merely imagined; what I longed for was to master this technology of particularity, to treat language not as ornament but as machine, as engine of precision, capable of making even grief itself explicit and manifest… As per their careful instructions, I worked with exact and inexact repetitions, phrases looped until they became both prison and refuge; the experience was circular, self-consuming; I felt as if I were trapped inside the loop, but I also recognized that I did not want to escape, the eternal loop was my new home; it was my invention and my self imposed sentence… Once, in the arrogance of my abstractions, I had posited that someday I would resemble more a programmer than a tortured artist: cleaner, cooler, more deliberate, more in control; but in practice the opposite was true, the words grew hot beneath my fingers, there was an intensity in the very act of speaking them aloud, an intensity that could at any moment erupt into red hot anger, or just as easily dissolve into intense love, or sharpen into desire… Talking itself became a raging fever, it was overwhelming, almost unbearable, yet delicious, there was a deep pleasure in the raw improvisation, like playing an instrument whose melody was writing me even as I played it, each sentence was a note I didn’t know I could strike, and in that surprise was the joy, the proof of being alive, of pressing forward into a song whose final cadence could never be foreseen… The need to employ every sense available to me was as insistent as breath itself: automatic, unarguable… It explained the strange compulsion to keep all the computers and the television humming almost without pause in the background, their screens flickering like mechanical eyes in the darkness; this urge toward continuous uninterrupted perception, this hunger for sensory extension, had nothing to do with the actual content of the TV shows or the websites, it was older than any program, older than my own life: the blind impulse to keep the nervous system reaching outward beyond the skin, as if my body had become an unfinished circuit that needed the world’s network of electricity to complete itself… During those nights after their final transmission, when the need became most intense, I woke up again and again, each time aware of some lost dream, an ambiguous image or an unfinished phrase, and yet almost always I ended up choosing to lie back down, letting the dream dissolve rather than catching it; only rarely did I scrawl a few lines before it evaporated… These dreams were like mist, self-erasing, but they left their salt behind in my mind… By day I explained myself compulsively to anyone who would listen; I spoke of the systems of thought I had learned by comparing one against another, through the patient method they had shown me, the method that had opened these doors to me… I told others that this was our chance to learn even more, to probe the “hidden magic of chaos,” I spoke to random people of them, that secretive group I had encountered out in the fields not too far from my home, a group of practitioners of a strange local variant of chaos magic, workers of aleatoric electrical manifestations, they dwelled in an old farm house not far from me… Even now I’m not sure whether they were real or imaginary; when they eventually left, they vanished all of a sudden before I could even say good bye… the years went by and the house was left completely abandoned, all the furniture disappeared: the couch, the chairs, the big library table with its scratches, the radio and the floor lamps, everything gone, one by one, as if spirited away, they vanished; and the house was then sold; its old address blurred… I don’t know where any of it went; I was the only thing left, the lone residue of that entire experience, of so many days of carefully listening and of asking questions, so many nights of irrational experiments… At times I think of it as a secret life; at times it feels like some kind of sociological experiment; at times, it feels like insanity… Ultimately, if pressed, I could not prove to anyone that any of it had been real; perhaps it was in fact only a dream, a dream of a house that no longer stands, its rooms still glowing faintly in the dark when I walk by it at night… At some point I had imagined that a creator should resemble a programmer… cool, deliberate, stringing bits of meaning as if they were code… rather than a trembling, self-tormenting soul; but each day I found myself more and more unspooled, moving information in fits and bursts, as though the text itself were a fever in my fingers; I was pushing language around like sandbags before a rising flood, and at the same time allowing myself to be carried off by the current; I was writer and reader, builder and wreckage, both the stonecutter and the stone… Back when I was a young boy, I can now confess, I trained my own face into silence, my gestures shrank until they were almost nothing, my expression was flattened like a dead sea, emotions smothered themselves before they could fully form or manifest outward; I learned to be stiff, formal, rigid, protective, and so easily hurt that I would never admit it even to myself; I wore invisibility like a badge of shame; my eyes were a locked room no one could open… And then, as in a dream, my childhood was gone… the furniture of my first home had vanished: the couch and chairs on the first floor, the big library table, the radio that hissed and sighed at night, the lamps that once gave off a yellow, parental glow as I moved my shadow to recreate imaginary dances; they were all gone along with my parents and my entire family; the house had been sold and the address had been erased; I was the only one left, a stray remnant of an obliterated world… Sometimes I wondered if it had happened at all; perhaps it had only been a dream—or a code I had written once and then forgotten… The more I reached back for it, the more it dissolved, and yet the ache of it remained, like static after a signal has died, the ghost of a station still humming in the darkness… I had reached a crucial point—the sort of point at which laboratory rats, drunk on the memory of pleasure, stop pressing the button that feeds them and drift into starvation; it was a precipice of self-annihilation disguised as ecstasy, the place where the nervous system finally eats its own tail; I recognized it and yet kept moving forward, because the compulsion to continue into the unknown was stronger than the instinct to survive… Around me, new pasts were forming like frost on a windowpane, entire aeons coalescing out of nothing; complexities collapsed into sudden, brutal simplicities, only to recombine in some new baroque pattern; forgetfulness trailed behind each metamorphosis like a loyal shadow; scramble and re-sequence, shift and shuffle, as if the very syntax of time were being rewritten… In the borrowing of old symbolic energies from the past, strange simultaneities rose unbidden—odd juxtapositions, like dreams that do not know they are dreams, like memories which arrive wearing someone else’s face… All this while I had considered myself not merely harmless but invisible; the world’s indifference to my work had been so profound that I began to suppose I was dead; I hoped I was dead; I had been dead for a long time, at least in the sense of being unregistered, an absence in an official ledger nobody checked… And then, in a single moment, I discovered that I was alive—alive enough to throw sparks into someone else’s mind, to give them ideas which might bend them into something strange and unpredictable, a living force of reborn electrical hunger…. All from that one visitor, the one who came asking questions, the one who needed to know and needed to specifically know from me…  The realization terrified and thrilled me; my voice became an instrument; as I spoke there was a current running through me, an intensity that could veer into violent hatred or, just as easily, into love, or into some nameless desire… Talking itself became a pleasure, a fever; it was like playing a strange musical instrument whose melody I improvised without knowing where it would lead; each phrase rose and dissolved like a note in a song I could never quite finish, yet each note proved my existence—proof that I was still here, breathing, still pressing the button even as the cage around me changed shape… and he would listen and listen and listen eager to take it all in, as if knowing that soon I would disappear and there would be nothing left behind…

The Devil and the Wheel

During the hot, burning days of August, when the sun was no longer yellow but a red disk of furious judgment, the town would awaken from its Catholic slumber into its yearly mechanized ritual of unchained motion and drunken expression. We called them fiestas, but they were more than fiestas, they were rotating spells cast in metal and sweat. Children with sugar-stained lips and adults with the hollow eyes of failed prayers gathered under the thunder of the Chicago, that great iron Ferris wheel, an old rite of vertical longing.

The Chicago spun like the outer spheres of Saturn in rebellion, flinging bodies skyward then back down into the ever-present dust of Salvadoran afternoons. Each pair of riders (lovers, siblings, ghosts) sat enclosed in fragile metal wombs, held aloft by arms that seemed to reach out from a futuristic nightmare. Screams echoed not in pain but in ecstasy, terror, or the elusive true ecstasy of pure terror. This was the August Mass, sanctified not by priests but by engineers and rust.

In one corner, overlooked by most, a staircase rose. Not a real one but an image, clipped from a forgotten architectural plate, pasted amid scraps of advertisement and pagan muscle. It led nowhere, and yet it led precisely to the heart of the matter. Plate 15, the number of the Devil in a reversed Tarot card. Fifteen: the convergence of boundaries and transgressions, the sacred number of the false flash of light.

Above it, the red sun burned into a bright blue sky like the seal of a long-banished archangel. Was it Lucifer himself? Was it the blood eye of God watching his own body in reverse, a three-dimensional mirror that we called reality? In any case, between lies and light there is only one stairway, and it is always broken.

"The Devil," said the mural whispering in the background, “is a riddle of light.” For who else can fabricate such convincing illusions of truth but the one who has held truth in his very mouth and chewed on it for eons? His realm was not hellfire but reflection; mirrors stacked within mirrors, until all that remained was a fragile semblance of certainty. He would whisper in our ear at the Chicago’s apex, when the cart halts midair and everything is suddenly silent. For that instant, the ride becomes the sacred suspension of thought itself and that is when we are most receptive.

Then there were the “carros locos”, the mad cars; two by two like Noah’s beasts, smashing into one another in a dance of pointless violence. The laughter there was different—lower, raw, less divine. It was the laughter of bodies, of friction and collision, not ascension. The Chicago took you up; the carros dragged you sideways, into chaos. But both were governed by the same unspeaking principle: the surrender of control.

Wherever God dreams, the Devil interprets with a flourish. Wherever we rise, he ensures we fall again, not out of cruelty, but to teach us the sacred comedy of eternal cycles. Ascent, descent, rotation, impact. Truth, lie, staircase and sky.

And so we children would rise each year into that August heat, offering our curious innocence on the altar of spinning machines older than our minds, watched over by the red sun of the Risen Light.

***

There is a kind of noise that exists beneath the surface of noise, beneath the reverberation of invisible presences. That’s what I heard that day in the library, when I closed my eyes not out of piety or exhaustion but to initiate contact. The stairway had followed me there; into the narrow aisles where old tomes whispered in their decaying alphabets, and it stood behind my eyelids, as always, like an unfinished invocation. Plate 15 again. The devil’s number, the crooked ascent, the red sun somewhere overhead, invisible but insistent.

When I stopped looking, the world came closer. Not the world of ideas, but the layered rustling of pages, the low mechanical sighs of fluorescent light, the scuttling insect-click of heat expanding hidden ducts. My mind, naturally arrogant, tried to identify, analyze, name… but if I refused to play, if I simply listened, the veil would inevitably ripple and allow me a glimpse.

What I heard behind the noise was not absence, but a kind of attention. Something was listening back. Or rather, many somethings. They pressed against the edges of my perception like moths at a windowpane, neither friendly nor hostile. Beings not dressed in flesh but frequencies in the static; some tangled, some clear, some purposefully ambiguous.

Not all beings wear bodies I came to find out. The staircase proved that much. It exists in every room that can be called a room; especially those rooms where minds are quiet, where attention becomes sacrament and pulses with sustained energy. The staircase is an interstitial technology, built from the same material as poems, prayers and quiet regrets. It connects floors that don’t appear on any architectural diagram. When you close your eyes and begin to truly listen, you are already at the threshold of the first step.

There, between thought and sensation, I met an old watcher. It did not speak to me. It did not shimmer or rise. It pulsed with a patience I have never encountered in any human. It had waited for me to forget enough of myself that I could begin to listen to the sound of his secret communications. I had brought it into being by surrendering my need to understand and categorize.

What does this have to do with the Chicago ride? With the carros locos? With the Devil who speaks in riddles of light? Everything.

Both noise and silence are gateways. And in the carnival of this world, where children are flung into the sky and crash into one another for amusement, there are observers; some old, some embryonic; watching the endless spectacle of meat and motion. They gather near magnetic nodes: staircases that go nowhere, circles that spin in place, the moment before orgasm, the instant before a scream.

We are not the crown of creation. We are not even the architects of our thoughts. Thought is the final veil in the most subtle of processes. It tries to protect us from the full impact of naked perception. It wraps meaning around sound the way skin wraps around bone. But if you remove it; slowly, gently… if you remove this excess layer of meaning, you begin to hear the real chorus, the endless counterpoint.

And so I sat with the staircase behind my eyes, the red sun burning quietly behind my skull, and the watchers pressing softly into me. There was no real fear. No names or labels of any kind. Just a glimmering sense of a cosmos busier than I had ever imagined. I had taken the first step.

***

The Devil has always been at the carnival. I am certain of it. Not in the whispering guise of temptation, nor in the form of a horned stranger playing a flute, but as an ambient intelligence behind the gears, behind the laughter, behind the shivering tension between pleasure and collapse. For me, he wore the mask of the Chicago, the great Ferris wheel. He did not ride it; he was the thing itself: spinning joy and dread into a single ecstatic loop.

Each August, when the rides emerged from their rusted coffins and the lights flickered like minor stars beneath the blue, uncaring sky, I would go and stand near the base of the wheel and I would listen, not to the voices of the children, nor to the hawkers shouting over the noise, but to the machinery itself. The groan of the gears. The cough of misfired electricity. The subtle, sacred clicking of metal deciding to hold together at least one more time.

And there I would feel His presence; not as a threat, but as a question, a riddle made of pure motion, a long spiral stairway made of repeating cycles of tension, wish and ephemeral resolution. Wasn’t that what the Devil was all along? God’s introspection turned back upon itself? A strange loop within the mind of the divine?

An old text says: The Devil is the most beautiful truth of God… that’s why he can tell the most profound lies, the ones that are impossible to distinguish from the truth, the ones that are too painful to deny.

And the Chicago wheel whispered lies with every revolution: “You are rising. Finally, higher than ever. Rise above it all…” But of course, you were only revolving and you were already on your way back.

The carros locos were his lesser aspect; tiny fragments of his dismembered logic. They did not promise ascension, they promised chaos. Two by two, like the forgotten animals of an ark that never arrived, they slammed into each other while the riders laughed in that terrified, masochistic way that made me wonder if the body, too, was a kind of lost prayer.

Not all beings wear bodies. Some are made of laughter. Some are pure ethereal architecture. Some are lies shaped like detailed instructions.

One August, in the moment between impact and silence, I saw him; not with my eyes, but with some new organ that had grown behind my ribs. He was in the depth of the dark smoke, within the shining sparks, in the ache of the adolescent who had been kissed too early or not at all. He was beautiful, because he had no need to be real. He simply was. The reverse stairwell. The eternal spinning wheel. The whispered phrase at the back of the moving skull.

And He was not alone.  There were others with him; entities that had no interest in our stories; some older than dust, some created last week; some kind; some terribly confused; some drawn to the spinning lights like astral moths to a pulsing sigil. I could feel them pressing close when I closed my eyes; not to speak, not to harm me, but simply to witness. Because that’s what the carnival is: a threshold, a sacred ritual in motion, a secret show of gods in the skins of humans, enacting collisions and risings, falls and reversals, in looped performance. Circling, circling…

And for a moment, I understood. The Devil doesn’t punish us. He watches. He records. He repeats. And he laughs. Like the wheel. Like the stairs. Plate 15 is everywhere.

***

Each time I rode the Chicago, I secretly hoped it would fail. Not out of a death-wish or some kind of blind cruelty, but because I believed (as children often do) that only catastrophe would break the transcendental veil that embraced us; that only collapse would make visible what had always been present but hidden: the Other Watchers, the unbodied crowd, the ones whose awareness turns corners before you do, the ones who wait, patiently, at the top of staircases that lead nowhere.

Plate 15 again. Always Plate 15. It hangs in the back of my memory like a discarded Tarot card from a deck that was never printed. Not a card, but an architectural heresy: a stairway suspended in false geometry, leading up and down simultaneously. The red sun like a sacred sigil behind it; an orb of initiation or blood.

The red sun rises in August. It’s not a metaphor, it’s a lens. During the carnival weeks, when the gears squeal and the screams lift in secular hymns, that sun is the hidden deity. It is older than the city, older than the metal rides, older than the blood inside your body. And it doesn’t rise by itself; it is raised by attention, focused energy turning the nothingness into presence.

Each shriek from the Chicago is a candle; each collision in the carros locos is a drumbeat. Each teenager pressing lips to lips behind the tents is a vow in the Devil’s dialect.

Not all beings wear bodies. Some wear systems. The mechanical rides, whose blueprints no one could ever quite trace, were altars in disguise. Every bolt is a binding; every rotation is a rite. Who tuned them originally? Who turned them on at the start? You think it was the municipal workers? You think it was diesel and voltage? I say no. I say it was the hungering presences, old and tangled, who rose each year when belief took shape as steel.

And I stood nearby and listened. I listened to the shrieking silence between gears. I listened to the breath of the staircase. I listened to the endless cosmos listening back.

Because the carnival was not only amusement for me, it was an arrangement; a call to attention, a moment when children and old men alike aligned their spirits, unknowingly, with patterns deeper than individual memory.

They all believed they were riding for fun. They believed they were crashing into each other out of a need for freedom and chaos. But I saw the choreography differently. I saw cogs in a ritual engine, like insects summoned to a glowing spiral. And always the red sun behind the image. Just watching. Like Him.  The Riddle. The Beautiful Lie. The Architect of Loops. He doesn’t punish. He doesn’t offer bargains. He simply invites you to go for a ride.

And those who ride the wheel with open hearts, those who see the impossible staircase not as escape but as entry, they are forever changed. Not improved. Not saved. Just… opened. Like a door in the sky no one else remembers drawing.

***

Every August was a rehearsal. Not for death but for descent. The rides were the sigils, the children were the offerings. And the air itself was thick with fried oil and horn blare and piss; it was a thin membrane easily torn by our focused attention. And once torn, something was bound to step through.

You might have seen him. You might have brushed past him in line. He smelled like copper and clove. He carried a pocketknife and a handful of tattered prayer cards. He did not smile, he observed. He may have spoken to you once or twice; softly, rhythmically, like someone reciting something memorized centuries ago. He might have asked: “Do you see the staircase?”

It wasn’t a metaphor.

Behind every ride, behind the torn tarps and the concession stands with names like "El Gusano" or "Fantasmita," behind the great blue-painted walls near the Chicago—there it was: the same staircase from Plate 15. Pasted into reality like a clumsy collage. No one could say how it got there. Or who built it. It was always just there, like gravity.

And you could climb it, but only during the carnival. Only when the red sun was high. Only when you were ready to hear the Devil’s version of Transcendence.

He spoke to me through the joints of the Chicago wheel; in the slow creak of the carros locos slamming like atoms into temporary meaning. He said: “There is no truth that cannot be inverted. There is no ascent that isn’t secretly a descent in disguise. Each scream is a syllable in the unspoken ritual. Each ticket stub is a page from the secret gospel of eternal recurrence.”

***

We all laughed, certainly. We all felt alive. That was the genius of it. The Devil doesn’t hide in the shadows. He wears the cloak of pure light. He uses our joy as camouflage. The children laughed hardest just before the machine broke. And yes, it did break. Once.

I remember that year. A boy flew from the Chicago like a forgotten angel. His body didn’t bounce when it landed. It crumpled. And above him, the staircase flared red in the sunlight, more solid than it had ever been. The police saw nothing. The workers packed it all up that night. But I saw. I saw the riddle being written in blood, in meat, in the language of sharp truth disguised as random accident.

And I remembered the whisper: “Where else does a lie come from if not from the Truth?”

The Devil I would now say is a mirror. He doesn't lie to trick you. He lies to show you all that you have never seen. And that year, I finally climbed the staircase. It didn’t go up. It went sideways. Through the torn poster. Through the fabric of August. Through the skull of my younger self and into the watching Eye that hovers above the face of all gods and all failures.

The red sun blinked once and everything I had ever mistaken for real turned inside out, like a carnival ride folding itself back into the void. Plate 15 closed behind me and everything disappeared, until next August.