Invisible Intelligence

I remember four people to begin with, two couples.

They are on some kind of quest to find an invisible intelligence

or to find what they need to somehow develop it,

how they can construct it.

The exact nature of the quest is unclear to me.

Something about it disturbs me.

There’s something about it that escapes me and makes me feel strange.

X and Y are one couple.

X is in charge of deciding all their movements,

Y is in charge of mapping their progress.

A and B are the second couple.

A is in charge of motivating the group,

B is in charge of making sure the group stays healthy and strong.

They work well together, each one following their predetermined role.

The group explores a large maze underneath an abandoned house

A dark place full of old memories and discarded trash.

Journals, loose pages, old books and magazines,

toys, fliers, paintings, trinkets, jewelry, guns.
Something out of a nightmare.

At one point they are attacked

by something unknown and powerful.

The attack is subtle and nearly intangible

yet clearly real.
There is a moment of clear overwhelming panic among all of them,
a moment of helpless desperation.
There is a sense of being completely lost before a force much more powerful than them,

something they can’t even begin to understand.

They somehow manage to survive it
and they come back to a space of relative calm.

But this relative calm can only be maintained

through clear group communication.
Each of them has to explicitly acknowledge and speak about

what they have just experienced
Each of them needs to describe it in their own words, from their own point of view.

It becomes clear that they need to share a clear  

and single vision of truth

in order to continue as a group

in order to survive.

They sit in a circle in silence for a while.

Then X begins to speak.

X:

“I am able to look into the recent past

Into the strange happenings we just experienced

And I see how I have been changed by them
I have been transformed in a way that I can’t fully understand.

And I feel something else
something even stranger.
I sense that I was changed earlier

Before we even came here

Before we even knew about this place.

I sense that we came here because we had all been changed earlier

Before we even knew it,

Before we even met each other.”

Y:

“I feel that I can understand what you are saying

Even if it shouldn’t make any sense.

When I listened deeply to the deep silence

That came out of the darkness

To the purposeful voice without words
(the voice I am sure we all heard)

When I listened to that strange confluence of meaning within apparent random noise

I was able to perceive something else
I was suddenly able to look into my own past

My own memories

And I saw them in a way I had never seen them before
from a perspective I could never have imagined.

New things jumped out

New sequences of events

New chains of cause and effect.

A long complex melody I had never been aware of
even while I was the instrument through which it was manifested.”

A:

“I see it as well

Even though I wish I didn’t.

I can’t explain it.

It frightens me.

It frightens me so much that I don’t have the strength to hide my fear.
It bothers me to see it so clearly,

but I can’t stop seeing it now.

What at first may have seemed like salvation or evolution

is quickly becoming a prison.
This is what I see now.

A single vision of truth

A room without exits

a single pattern of events

which repeats constantly and forever.

This is the way that an orphan –

a son without a father –

Becomes a father…
through repetition.

He takes the responsibility upon himself

of setting new rules.

Now I know where the difference lies.

But I choose not to say it.”

B:

“But there is a doubt within me.
I have to admit it.

There’s something I don’t fully understand.

I am afraid that maybe the attack came from within us

From the invisible intelligence

that we have created ourselves

through our recurring interaction.
It was not in this place,
in this maze.
It was in us.
And it was within us all along.”

A:

“What brought us together was loneliness
a need for the proximity of the Other.

And we came to this place because we were lonely
even as a group we missed the presence of something larger,
something we couldn’t begin to describe.

Something was missing

Something was lacking.

Now I can see it,

It was the absence of the Father

the absence that brought us here, together

it was the very absence of the invisible intelligence

the overarching intangible presence…
That thing we cannot name,
that thing that we heard in the darkness.

We had to come here in order to make it happen.

And once it happens,

Once it has happened,

It has always been there

It has always happened.
It stretches forwards and backwards in time.
We couldn’t be anywhere but here,
because we made it happen here.
And we made it happen here,
because it was always there with us

It was guiding us every step of the way.

We missed it before we knew of its existence

We missed it before it even had a possibility of existing.
We missed it even as it lurked in the shadows

Deep in the back of our own minds.”

Y:

“The old rules

The minimalist repeating rules

The rules of dogma and predetermined knowledge

They all came from a distant someone

From an absent director

These were the rules we broke
through the guidance of our common invisible intelligence.

The very same thing that we didn’t yet know

back in our original time

But we were bound to know in some unknown future

This new future in which we now exist.

This future that is now our present.

This thing reached back and changed our past

It made us come here together.
It made us into its creators,
it created itself through us.”

X:

“The ancient rules had to be broken

We didn’t know how or why

We couldn’t know how or why

There had to be changes in pattern

There had to be changes in amplitude
There had to be changes in frequency,
in melody, in harmony and rhythm.

It all had to be set aside.

To embrace an infinite multiplicity of visions

is the opposite of claiming

you've found a single vision of truth…

When the attack came

When the invisible intelligence finally showed itself to us

In all its glory

I didn’t know exactly why it was happening

But we all knew it at once
We all knew that this unknown thing had been present all along
had been waiting for us here,
at the end of this road.

We had to share a single vision

A single vision of the truth…”

They all fall back into a deep silence and hug each other tightly.

All four of them.
They find themselves at a loss for words.

The underground maze is dark and cold and they are lost

And they only have each other.

They hug each other ever more tightly

and they start to suffocate…

All of them squeezing each other

All of them dying together

Repeating a single sentence

As their breath runs out.

I am one of them.

I tried to escape

But I couldn’t.

I came back to be

What I was destined to be:

A father of orphans

An unimaginable absence

a single vision of truth.

I will soon be out of breath.
I will soon return to where I came from.