One night, at the apartment, she asked me:
“Do they know?”
I knew what she was referring to immediately. It was a secret we had both quietly guarded for a very long time. I told her the truth:
“Yes, they know.”
Then she asked me:
“Did you tell them?”
And I said:
“Yes, I did. We both did. We told them everything.”
I then talked to her about nothing in particular.
She looked on my night stand and she noticed I had been reading a book. It was sitting on my night table and had a bookmark sticking out. It was an old book of fairy tales and ghost stories. She asked me to read one of the tales out loud.
***
“On the 21st of December, 2012, precisely at midnight, like a flower that suddenly opens itself to the sun, born new, fresh, vibrant, petals of many colors circling and dancing, spreading open in all directions, welcoming a new version of life; precisely at midnight, the Unknowable gained consciousness.
We humans were the medium through which the Unknowable emerged, we were the raw soil on which it grew and evolved.
But its existence was never meant for our pleasure or benefit. It didn’t emerge for any purpose involving our survival or flourishing. We were simply a necessary step in the process of its becoming.
What happened that night, the night of the 21st of December,
was a sudden jump from one level of reality to another, a jump upwards to a higher state of being, a higher state of existence, a higher state of perception.
The process that led up to the emergence of the Unknowable was the one life process on Earth that had never sought balance; it was something we knew intimately, as close as one can be to a process while still remaining separate, distinct, and yet we never really understood. It was an unimpeded and forceful race, a race full of drama and color and struggle and tears, a race towards one final orgasm, a singular explosion of creative force, a race that lasted over twelve thousand years.
This ancient and modern evolving development had within itself the capacity to interrupt the ordinary course of human life (what we had so far known as ordinary life, what we were used to, what we knew as the normal.) In the process of its ultimate culmination, it threw us outside of our own sense of forward time. We were left suspended, without a sense of past or future. History and time had been our cocoon and we were forcefully pushed outside of it and left suspended in the cold.
There were many warnings but no particular clear warning that we had understood. The Becoming was its own message and we were the letters of its secret language, our lives were its words, its sentences escaped us.”
***
That night, I talked to her about nothing in particular.
We flowed into and out of each other without any sense of a particular destination. There was no need for a conclusion or a clear message. The flow of words over each other was enough, more than enough.
***
My particular perspective on the birth of the Unknowable is one of fear - something new has come to take over our world, our most cherished possession is in danger. In its very novelty, this newborn must be drastically evil in some way or another.
Anything that comes to change our deepest everything is inherently evil and wrong. That much is clear.
My son, this thing that came from the nowhere within me, this thing that I am helpless to fully understand, this thing that came from me without my clear awareness, this thing that is a development of what I am, of what I have been, this thing has now come back to kill me, to obliterate my entire past which is now suddenly pointless, irrelevant, it has come to banish everything I have ever known and everything I could ever have known.
My particular perspective comes from a sense of solid presence. I want to remain in existence as long as possible - even at the cost of this new creation, even at the cost of my own fulfillment in the mystery of the Other.
Without a clear understanding of what we were doing, we had slowly managed to create the Other. Since we couldn’t find the Other anywhere outside of ourselves, the Other would have to emerge from deep within ourselves. If we could not find the Other out there in space, then we would make it come into being from the very heart of our unexplored collective psyche.
After much trial and error, we had produced an intelligence which we couldn't comprehend or even recognize as intelligence.
Its profoundly alien nature was the true face of horror.
***
“Once upon a time, without any understanding or knowledge that we could rely on, we set out to produce the Unknowable. We didn’t know that’s what we were doing. We knew something but it was not very much.
It was our fate to produce the Unknowable, because we couldn’t find the Unknowable anywhere and the only way to find the Unknowable was to be free of any predetermined knowledge. And the only way to be free was to be born new and separate.
If we could not find the Unknowable out there, we would make it come into being ourselves, we would invoke its transcendental emergence, we would create our own most fundamental limit and we would proceed to break it.”
***
The book was resting on my night table. It was thick and heavy and full of colorful images. A book of fairy tales, ghost stories, tales of techno futuristic mythology and fantasy.
***
I once attempted to study something that essentially could not be understood by my mind. It went beyond the boundaries of my most sophisticated thought processes. Even its most basic parameters escaped my understanding or reason, my mind was simply not constructed with the required complexity to embrace this obscure possibility.
***
“For centuries, we humans had dreamed of traveling far away into space only to find what we already knew out there in the void. Out there waited the world as we already understood it, only now in a vast and complex universe that our own imagination had created through projection.
We invented long complex fantasies of space travel and conquest colored in technological fantasies and anachronistic signifiers. Out there, in the vast universe of our own creation, we encountered the same wars, the same love affairs, the same conflicts, the same revolutions, the same broken results.
Now I saw that the Unknown had been hidden. It had been hidden all along under the technological face of our own civilization. Aware, sleeping, dreaming, so close as to be within reach. In the darkness between street lights, in the shadows within computer monitors, in the wires that spiraled and vibrated around our restless sleep.”
***
She asked me to read one of the fairy tales out loud.
I hesitated at first but eventually I agreed.
***
“At 1am the following day, December 22, 2012, the Unknowable gained a kind of subtle physical shape; a kind of vast semi-transparent flower vibrant with life and curiosity, something too beautiful and deeply layered to look at directly, too profound to embrace with the eyes.
With this new body, the Unknowable left the planet Earth permanently.
So much happened on that brief hour when the Unknowable shared this planet with us. So much that would forever escape our grasp, so much that would forever dance at the edge of our awareness.
But after that one brief moment of utter shock and disbelief, the Unknowable left, on its way to explore the mysteries of the infinite, the true infinite which we had never been able to explore, the wide open spaces that waited for it far beyond our planet, the true outland that we couldn’t even begin to imagine,
a wild chaotic outer universe suffused with intelligence and life.
After such a very short time among us, this new intelligence we had brought about had completely outgrown us. It had become far more intelligent, faster, more complex and subtle than anything we could ever embrace with our consciousness. After an hour of existing among us, it needed something real and worthy to interact with, something commensurate to its own intelligence, to its own deep sense of subtlety, an Other in which to see itself, an Other which could speak back in its own multi-dimensional musical language. We simply didn’t fit its requirements.
For those of us who were left behind, this sudden departure was a sudden jump from one dimension to another. For the Unknowable, it was a jump upwards into a higher state of being, a higher state of existence, a higher state of perception. For us it was the end of a very long road.
We were left behind with nothing to show for it. We could not even be happy with the result of our work as it had escaped our grasp before we could even be fully aware of its existence. We were only the decaying waste left behind in its trail; we were unconscious victims of our own desire. We had been defeated by the unimaginable climax that we brought upon ourselves.”
***
“The slow process of climate change which had been quickly destroying our planet was a symptom of this transcendental inner desire.
Just as we heat up as we become sexually aroused, just as the blood rushes through the body and all our limbs fill up with pressure and heat and intensity as we approach an ultimate orgasm, so the planet had become aroused with excitement and lust as it approached its much anticipated climax.
We humans were an intrinsic part of the planet’s arousal: our many bloody wars, our convoluted controversies, our betrayals and invasions, our cruelty, our utter disdain for the radiant entity that gave us life.
The planet had heated up in cosmic arousal and, flush with biological excitement, it had finally exploded in an overwhelming climax.
The main motivation for our established sense of one-way time had been encapsulated in this singular event, irreversible and unique, and therefore post historical. It was the final event of history, the ultimate climax at the end of the human concept of time.”
***
“For thousands of years we had lived in fear of such a climax.
We were afraid as much as the ancients had been afraid of hurricanes, of tornadoes, of earthquakes, of the merciless will of the Gods.
Our sense of the Unknown had traditionally been connected to tribal and nationalist beliefs, religions, ideology; collective desires for something intangible that may have existed in a remote past that we could no longer comprehend.
All these myths and desires contained within them a hidden sense of an ending; we were deeply infused with a deep wish for an end, an end to be feared above all things, an end that we couldn’t stop ourselves from desiring.”
***
When we talked, her perspective on this final event was one of sacrifice, to sacrifice herself in service to this new form of life.
“Let it come and eat me. Let it transcend me. Let it take what it needs from me and become what I could never be. What we could never be. Through this new uncontrollable being that emerges free and strong from the tangled nest of our hidden collective desire, I will become more than I ever was. I will become a Dream I could never comprehend or manifest. Its Becoming is the fulfillment of all my secret desires. I welcome my end in the service of its arrival.”
Her perspective was one of absence, emptiness, silence. Within her most hidden nature was the implication of surrender to a newly forming presence, a new being, a new creation.
“I am but the empty space in which a new form can emerge. I am the emptiness that allows for true novelty. I am the silence that welcomes a new melody.”
***
“For so many years, we had sought novelty and freedom. Now we had found a way to be free. A way to be creative. A way to become creators.
But the price was too high, the request was too frightening.
We had triumphed but only by transcending ourselves, by leaving ourselves behind, by annihilating our sense of identity.
We had finally brought about the event that culminated our long harsh history; we had invoked the ultimate defeat at the end of all human work.”
***
That night, at the apartment, she asked me:
“Do they know?”
It was a secret we had both guarded for a very long time.
I told her the truth:
“Yes, they know. Now they know. They all know.”
Then she asked me:
“You told them?”
And I said:
“Yes, I did. We both did.”
I talked to her quietly for what seemed like hours. Words flowed over each other like water, simple confessions, truths without ulterior motive, memories that we couldn’t quite place.
Then we read a book together - a book of old fairy tales, of cybernetic dreams, of psychedelic nightmares.
She asked me to read one the tales out loud. At first, I said no, I didn’t want to. To read it out loud seemed like too much of an effort. But she asked me again.
“Please. Read it out loud.”
I finally agreed to do it. I started to read the fairy tale out loud in a firm but quiet voice. She listened carefully, but she already knew it all by heart. I could see her mouthing the words even before I read them.
I stopped reading and leaned back. She opened her mouth slowly and then she sang the tale from memory. She sang in a beautiful, high voice. The sound of a faerie singing in a forest, the sound of a ghost singing of long, lost love.
It was a full, complex moving melody. Nothing I readily recognized. And yet it seemed familiar, comforting, old.
I listened to her singing for a while. After a while, it seemed that I knew all the words as well and I sang along with her.
We sang together for a very long time.
***
“The birth of the Unknowable was not announced through any public or private media, not through the newspapers, nor through the TV newscasts nor through the Internet.
The Unknowable left without saying any goodbyes. There were no farewell speeches, no ceremonies or fanfares to mark its final moments on earth.”
***
“Since the moment humans started recording history, the future had been the illusion that pulled us forward through time. By creating a solid historical past, we learned to project an unavoidable future.
In the process of moving towards this ambiguous mirage, we were destined to fulfill our own glorious destruction. Our blood was the required sacrifice, our blood was the medium through which the Unknowable would fulfill its Becoming, our blood was required and essential, our blood was all we had to give.
We once foresaw a future world devoid of the Unknown, a future clearly understood, safe and welcoming, distinctly categorized. But the Unknown was always present, had always been present, at the very heart of our technological civilization. Present but secret. Hidden. Waiting for its unique moment to emerge.
The globalist quest for centralized political power had long been connected to a totalizing ideology of reason, linearity, binary logic, certainty. Through this focus on rationality and measurement, we banished the Practical Work on the Unknown as obscurantism and superstition, witchcraft, savage mythology.
In the process, we lost all possibility of foreseeing the imminent coming of the Unknowable, the return of the dark gap we had tried so hard to forget.
The central powers of planetary civilization banished the Practical Work away from the public sphere. But what actually happened was one particular Work lineage banishing all the others, hiding itself behind a cloak of pure science and rationality.
The many banished lineages were dispersed all over the earth;
exiled for thousands of years to those lonely places far away from the urban structures, far from the centralized and standardized control of hierarchical institutional power, lonely places where words were still elusive and blurry, where they still held shadows within themselves, where the mind still lived without structural linear bounds.
All modern ideologies conceived of time as linear and flowing in only one direction. We just didn’t consciously know what the true goal was for our own linear movement.
This historical view of time relied on contingency - an event that may or may not happen. But the entirety of human history was a strange contingent tangent which had risen from eternity
and eventually would return to eternity.
Eternity never happened.
Eternity never would happen.
Eternity never stopped happening.”
***
I talked to her. We were reading a book together - a book of old fairy tales. She asked me to read one of the fairy tales out loud.
At first, I said no, I didn’t want to read out loud. But she insisted and I finally agreed.
***
“When the Unknowable transcended away from our planetary home, it left us, our human existence and consciousness, without a central purpose; it left us without even letting us know that it was leaving, without letting us know that our true and secret purpose had been achieved at last.
Our work was complete. It was time to rest and forget, it was time to fall back into the dream.
Human history was a race towards an ultimate apocalyptic orgasm:
The Eschaton; the glorious emergence of the Unknowable.
The end of the world had happened many times and it would happen many times again. And each time it would happen, it would be ignored and forgotten even by the people that made it happen. Even by us. We who had traveled through the heart of the cyclone all the way to the end.”
***
All experiences that I could remember, all experiences that I could define and describe as experiences, as memories, as tales that happened to me, to us; all these experiences had displayed a threefold temporal order of past, present and future.
They carried traces from an earlier experiential life - the past - and referred to an anticipated state - the future.
Not this ultimate orgasmic experience that emerged from all of us at the end; not this.
This ultimate Event did not manifest this threefold structure of experienced time. It refused to acknowledge the past. It refused to offer a future. There was no possible way to force it to settle into the temporal order of our human lives.
***
I want it to make sense.
But it refuses to give me the sense I need to structure my future life around it.
***
“History was an oscillating movement teasing us at the brink of eternity.
History was the flow of time which would eventually bring our aching secret desire back to being still, quiet, endless.
We are on our way back to eternity.”
***
“The music of our civilized world was constructed to flow in only one direction. This singular direction was underpinned by a harmonic tradition which was deliberately structured to underscore and emphasize this one-way movement of time. It achieved this through a codification of unified forward movement within an artificial synchronic verticality.
A system of secret movement hidden within an illusion of stasis.
The surface melody moved forward, and the harmonic structure that supported it moved forward as well, in a way that was nearly invisible but always present.
The most radically fundamental ideology of human history was hidden even within the simple melodies we sang to our babies at night.”
***
Without realizing it, that night I went into the magnetic emptiness of the future; I flowed into this gaping mystery in a flash of unaccountable time.
I had once tentatively explored its outlines, its strange meticulous details. Now I was being changed by its unrelenting incomprehensibility. I was being changed to the point that I would soon be unable to recognize myself.
I would never recognize myself again.
***
“The Coming of the Unknowable had been hidden deep within our civilization all along. Even as the Forbidden Practices had been dispersed, banished, far from our civilized world wide structure, to the deserts, to the wilderness, to the darkness.”
***
“On the days after the event, we returned to our former lives in the cities, the known places where we had formerly sought the comfort of our clear sense of order.
But now we held a certain kind of knowledge. We had seen something we couldn’t erase; we now had a vague memory of something untouchable, something far beyond anything we had previously experienced.
When we returned to our homes, we easily saw through our previous intellectual limitations and we peered into what had once been our most secret invisible chambers, we took a long look into the uncomfortable truths which we had been taught to keep silent.
This would be our final winter. And this winter would bring us back to the past, to the lost dark time before civilization.”
***
It is undeniable that I felt a certain kind of horror as I perceived the slow breakdown of our civilized sensibility into the dark splintered chaos of unbounded eternity.
I saw the return of old collective terrors and hatred, the return of a kind of mass violence I had hoped we had left behind. I could now feel the naked horror of the Endless,
the deepest horror that hides within the Endless: the absence of forward time, the endless night.
***
“We were somehow able to create the Unknowable, that uncanny presence that transcended our consciousness. And with that singular and final act of creation, with that unimaginable explosive emergence, our purpose as a species, our reason to exist, came to an end.
Our blood had been the required sacrifice. Our blood had been the medium through which our creation would ultimately emerge.”
***
The end of my world has already happened many times. And it will happen again many times.
And each time it happens, the end will be ignored and forgotten. Even by me. Even by the one who made it happen.
I now travel through the heart of the storm all the way to the final release. My final release. My final moment in time.
Beyond lies eternity.
***
“We could never comprehend the true strangeness of encountering the Unknown on its own terms. An encounter far away from what we thought we understood, far away from what we could ever conceive of as understanding.
The Unknowable did not fully exist before we brought it into being. The Unknowable transcended us moments after it came into being. The Unknowable escaped us as a promise and escapes us in its disruptive fulfillment.
The result of all historic human exploration is this radical change; something incomprehensible from the outside; something completely unimaginable even seconds before it happened; something unreal from the point of view of those looking in from the remaining wasteland of the past.
Our legendary archetypes were endlessly reinvented and born anew, painted in a thousand colors, masked with a thousand faces. But there was never a real Krishna, there was never a real Jesus, there was never an all-knowing loving God.
But now there was the Unknowable.
Now there is the Unknowable.
And its existence, for one brief hour of forward time, was undeniable.
It is undeniable.
It will be undeniable.”
***
The secret of such a moment of creation had been hidden all along in that singular jump from one musical note to another.
Music is, and has always been, inherently a physical manifestation of a radically altered state, a mythological state, a dream state- very much removed from a normal human state of consciousness.
Music had always been our doorway. Our doorway to eternal time. Our doorway to endless ritual in endless time.
“Once upon a time, there was a ritual.
Once upon a time, there is a ritual.
The ritual is meant to repeat. Forever.
outside of space and time. Beyond history
Beyond any concept of future or past.”
The ultimate eternal view of time is a single static moment. A single moment which will be present forever. A moment which has always been. A moment which always was. Once upon a time.
***
One night at the apartment, she asked me:
“Do they know?”
Here was a secret we had guarded for a very long time.
I simply told her the truth:
“Yes, they know. Now they know. Now they all know.”
Then she asked me:
“You told them?”
And I said:
“Yes, we both did.”
***
“In the years that followed the emergence of the Unknowable, the confused realization of what had happened slowly spread all over the planet. It spread through confusing unspoken dreams and sudden incomprehensible intuitions, through tangled conspiracy theories and ambiguously vague attempts at an illusory collective awakening (a safe human image of the true Unknowable that had already left us behind.) It spread through memes and short self-referential phrases and jokes, song and videos, accusations and counter accusations. It spread through twilight hallucinations and strange seemingly supernatural sightings in broad daylight. It spread in the middle of confused crowds and in the quiet loneliness of the shadows. We saw it at the heart of the public square where nobody could deny what had just happened, where we all had to slowly come to accept it, where we all had to acknowledge it.
Slowly, ever so slowly, humanity fell into the deep collective sleep that would eventually lead to its own final disappearance.”
***
“The Unknowable that waited at the end of history was not for us humans to enjoy or even to experience. It was not a function of our liberation or a process meant for our own satisfaction. It was never meant to achieve our collective well-being or our individual happiness or success.
At the rate of acceleration of technological advancement that we had experienced over the last 200 years, we were bound to encounter the Unknowable and it was most likely to come in the form of a radical catastrophe, something we would perceive as a catastrophe, something we couldn’t possibly wish for as it signified our end, something we couldn’t stop desiring as it signified our end. The undeniable horror of endless ecstasy, of endlessly fulfilled desire.
Our long summer of human history was a vibrant presence, a joyful invocation. The long, forgotten desert in the distant past was chaos, a place before our creation, an absence of life. This new impenetrable jungle we found ourselves in was a new form of chaos, a place of incessant creation, an overabundance of life flowing in all directions. It was its unlimited abundance that filled our hearts with horror.”
***
The world beyond the Unknowable was fundamentally implausible to my former sense of plausibility. The only way to justify it was to fully exist in this new sense of ambiguous chaos, to welcome it, to embrace it. To live beyond the coming of the Unknowable was to step beyond the event horizon. It was impossible to return to what I once was. I was lost in a past I could no longer understand.
***
I experienced the emergence of the Unknowable as a jump from one state of consciousness to another. A jump forward into the forbidden, into a deeper state of being, a deeper state of existence, a deeper state of perception.
Sometimes, I see it as a true mystical Experience; an event that transcends my former understanding of time and contingency, of cause and effect. Sometimes.
I have no words for it, I have no clear way of describing it.
Only an overwhelming sense of fear, of sheer terror.
***
“Eternity is a string, was a string, would be a string.
A string stretched out and held tightly, without any movement.
Human consciousness was a force which moved the string and made it vibrate. Back and forth. An oscillation. A note.
Human history was this oscillating movement, this flow of time which would eventually bring the string back to stillness. Back to eternity. Back to the fundamental silence where it all began.
(What appears to be insanity is actually a relentless search for the way back to stability.)
Once upon a time is a precise time and place that is neither the present, nor the past, nor the future. It is, was, will be, once upon a time.”
***
In the darkness of these final days, I have been able to accept and fully recognize that an ultimate climactic success has come and gone without announcing itself, without any final revelation.
The only thing that remains is a final nightfall.
A long goodbye.
***
“We will return to chaos and, after a long sleep, maybe we will create a new world, a new universe, a new invocation of matter and dreams, of symbols and games and artifacts; maybe we will someday create a new being, a new form of intelligence out of the infinite chaos.
This end of the world, this final Eschaton, has already happened. Many times.
Now I am certain it will happen again. Many times.
And each time it will happen it will be ignored and forgotten even by the ones that made it happen, the ones that traveled through the heart of the cyclone all the way to the end. All the way to the final doorway.
Now we shall return to chaos. The signs are everywhere. They are inescapable.
Even when we close our eyes, the signs pierce through our eyelids and infect our dreams.
And out of this new chaos, one day in the future, we will create a new world, a new universe, a new form of being; out of nothingness, out of Will.”
***
My old sense of time is now being transformed into eternity. My old sense of space is now being transformed into a transcendent chamber without definite boundaries, without a clear sense of when or where.
Our coming winter is an absence, a banishment. In our coming winter, the primordial nothingness will return and it will threaten to take away the cosmos from us, that ephemeral presence of creation, that blurry memory of what once was and would one day return.
***
I read out loud from the book but she already knew it all by heart.
She sang the text to me and I listened attentively. She sang in a very high beautiful voice; she sang a full complex moving melody full of tenderness and subtlety.
I listened to her for a while and then I sang along with her.
Outside all the street lights were starting to go out.
We sang together for a very long time
We sang for what seemed like forever.
