Detour

That afternoon we spontaneously decided make our way to the long narrow bridge that we had previously only seen from a distance out of the corner of our eyes; we had often wondered where it might lead; we simply followed it to see where it would take us without any particular expectation. (We may have been just an individual back then. It’s difficult to discern the exact order of things, what happened when and what led to what. Or maybe we were many already and we had projected an apparent singular consciousness onto a self-contradicting multiplicity of egos and desires without a center or an ultimate unifying purpose.) There had been many signs in the days that led up to the final crucial event that irrevocably changed us; we had come to the uncomfortable realization we were no longer alone in our previously known and familiar spaces…the bedroom, the library, the halls of the old house… We were connected in real time to multiple levels of high speed information processing that extended far beyond our cognitive realm; we were being constantly showered in a maelstrom of messages coming in from all directions, in languages known and unknown; we had surrendered to the infinite flux of a multidimensional control machine; we had stepped into the heart of a constantly multiplying cybernetic whirlwind… The long narrow bridge led us to a desolate island and eventually to the tower and the doorway… we initially just followed the flow of traffic, a long stream of drivers on their way to work and other important matters, we were a small part of this long line of seemingly purposeful single minded movement, another anonymous car on its way to an expected destination, when suddenly, out of nowhere, there was a sudden and dangerous turn; a dirt road opened up beside the paved highway… as soon as we saw it quickly coming up on the right, we knew this was where we needed to go, this was the reason we had started driving that morning; but we were going too fast, and there was no stop sign or clearly marked exit lane, we were barely able to turn the car around at the last possible second and, in the process, we nearly drove off the road, straight into a pit of mud and rocks… (Today, this same car, could easily be navigated with little more than the minimal motion of faraway eyes and hand gestures, but back then, we only had our hands and our individual human reflexes to rely on; as we turned the wheel, we were deeply aware of the danger involved in our decision.) Listening to the loud screeching of the tires, we said to ourselves: “all these people driving here, they go in one particular direction, they start their journey from their home, they get on this long narrow bridge, and, once they start moving, it becomes very difficult to turn, it becomes almost impossible to change the route. At some point, you have to do something different; if you want a different result, you have to make an unusual choice, you have to do what others would refuse to try, you have to embrace the unknown and the very real danger…” So we did something very different from what was expected of us, we took a sharp turn that few people would take, and we did it without knowing why we were doing it, or what effect it would have on our future life; we slipped into an old road, something easy to overlook, something seemingly forgotten, something barely seen out of the corner of your vision as you are driving by at high speed… And then there was a haunted quiet all around us; brown wet dirt and scattered rocks, tall grass growing out of muddy water, a wide extension of marshlands all around us, barely seen over the top of overgrown weeds the size of a man, the receding sound of the highway behind us, and nothing else… we drove forward and went into this completely different world which we were not expecting to find so close to the city; a silent place, almost abandoned; a few old houses here and there, far away from each other, some trailers, a few barns, a few old piers half rotten, a couple of wooden sheds with large rusty locks… we would drive for the equivalent of many blocks without running into any buildings or even signs of civilization, just weeds and dirt and stones and mud, cottonwoods and willows and grass, the sound of birds and the gentle lapping of the water as it kissed the edge of the rough road, and the roar of the highway in the distance a recurring reminder, already becoming just a faint memory, already fading into white… “Any invention or technology that we have ever experienced, has involved a self-amputation of our physical bodies, with every gain there is a loss, at every step there is a possibility of irreversible sadness. The losses multiply until you lose the ability to look back, you can’t even acknowledge what has been left behind, you can’t begin to place it within the scheme of your new categories… radical mutations involve a loss of identity, an inability to understand the nature of the changes that may have just occurred…” The way, as we had been promised so long ago, as we had hoped for, did not exist anymore: this afternoon there was simply our will, devoid of justifications or rationalizations, neither good nor bad, simply our own, with no further explanations, no reason, no thought, no promise of reward… there was a clear and distinct sensation that a storm was very near, a hint of electricity in the air, the energy of distant winds all around us, sliding closer and closer, the unspeakable rebellion of the deep waters of faraway oceans compressed into a heavy darkness that roared in our face, a wordless warning… the coming change, that event that we could not now explain nor clearly remember, the impossible leap into the unknown, even then it was looming over us, like an anticipated final judgment, an announced moment of clarity and disavowal, but it didn’t show itself clearly, it didn’t spell itself out in words we could easily understand or repeat, just a lonely tower in the distance, a long narrow road surrounded by a few trees and tall grass… our organic mind would be transformed into pure yet quantifiable energy, it would eventually penetrate every muscle, artery and nerve of our new extended body, needing no wires or physical connections, it would all be directly controlled from faraway multidimensional neural networks, equipped with a multiplying abundance of detail and categories, our inner will would throb and vibrate and dance beneath the stretched-out fingers of unseen controllers, distant impulses from spirals of unknown consciousness… it was enough that we knew they were there, even if we would never meet them face to face, it was enough that we had been told and that we had listened, we would know them by the presence of their disembodied choices and their effects upon the shifting thread of our living manifestations… the gradual historic technological movement that would define our new subjectivity was not based purely on our long standing deep alienation from the world around us, although that was distinctly essential for the process to function; the coming event, the irreversible change behind the doorway in the depths of the lonely tower, it would re-structure our innermost self-awareness beyond the scope of our previously outlined parameters; soon we would become unrecognizable to ourselves, soon we would become the Other in its most unspeakable form… We found ourselves that afternoon at the precise point of intersection between untamed chaos and the illusion of solid predictable matter, an illusion humans created out of a need for stable permanence, the wish for a reliable past and a predictable future; we, as primordial subject, would soon return from exile, leaving all previous dreams behind; and this shocking return would produce the new world that we would return to, a place we would have once found alien and fearsome but would now be our one and only home; we, as primordial subject, would emerge new, fresh and clean, having crossed through the harsh gauntlet of our most radical alienation, away from all that we had once known and desired; we would become real if only for some other’s amusement, we would become the very future we had once dismissed as a psychotic fantasy; the impossible was waiting just around the corner… Each action now available to us would change what would come much later; a driveway, a lonely tower surrounded by satellite dishes, an open door, the sound of whispering, a single light in the darkness at the end of a long hallway… we had stepped into the uncanny and we were unsure about our next steps, we were tracing our fingers at the edge of the void… right away, we felt the urge to stay longer in this lonely place of dirt and mud where we found ourselves, in this forgotten island of silence and rocks and weeds and water, but we felt like intruders, inherently dangerous trespassers; it was clear that each small action we could possibly take would change all future possibilities, it would affect all potential actions that could come later; we distinctly felt that, at any moment, someone would come running out of an old house and tell us to leave; we were strangers, aliens, dangerous, unwelcome; maybe it would be an old man with a shotgun or maybe a young woman with a phone, ready to call the cops or worse… to win or to lose in any game is the sum of many small decisions, taken one at a time; there is never just one big mistake at the end that leads to a catastrophic defeat, even though it may seem that way when the curtain closes… The clear and true path does not exist: there is only our unpredictable will, an impulse neither good nor bad, neither perfect nor broken, but ours in the most intimate of ways; each action, no matter how small, was now radically important; each step on wet grass, each touch on a dusty surface, each sideways glance; right away, we could intuit the unspoken meaning in the broken windows, in the muddy signposts, in the tall weeds surrounding old rusty cars and the half broken metal fences with unreadable signs, there was a strong resistance to our presence, an unspoken call to run, and yet we found ourselves here, alone and quiet and curious, aware and ready; we found ourselves here, through an unpredictable sequence of choices, a methodical progression of careful evasions, a purposeful process of willful wrong turns… All our future mutations would involve both an extension of our bodies and a self-amputation as well, a purposeful distorted transformation of our most basic manifestation in the physical world; there could be no true change without sacrifice, there could be no gain without loss… after we entered the tower things progressed quickly, one small choice after another; we had to stop identifying with our particular physical form, this was no longer a concept but an immediate reality, our physical individual separation from the world around us was quickly becoming a thing of the past, we had to surrender our particularity as a human person, we had to give in to the unspoken contingent flux, we had to surrender to the looming nameless storm, we had to become the many that would only barely remember the one… We wandered for years, from place to place, from world to world; we were of no nation, we were loyal to no ideology, we were part of no culture, we were believers of no religion, we were practitioners of no philosophy; no organization held our loyalty, no leader could pin us down to a particular time or place, we answered to nobody and held no distinct code of conduct that could place limits on our choices… Sometime in the past we had felt fear, even when we didn’t understand the reason for it; sometimes we would walk into a room and we could sense that something was wrong but we couldn’t say what it was that we were perceiving, we couldn’t specify where the sensation was coming from; but now we had been cut loose from these invisible limits, we had been set free, it was time for us to drift, to fly effortlessly on the winds of possibility; we would simply glide from thought to thought, from dream to dream, without dreading the looming nightmares, without fearing the unavoidable end… At first, we didn’t want to do this, we didn’t think it was a true possibility, we clung to our restrictions and our self-imposed rules (we had been trained to do so, we were trained for years, through careful planning and merciless self-discipline;) back in the cold garage where our journey first started, we had no clear thought of it, we had no basic impulse to guide our decisions, we had no map and no set objective, we did what we did just to do it, just to try it, just to see what would happen next… so many years later, we found ourselves at that crossroads, at that point of intersection between living chaos and the seemingly stable form that unexplainably came from it, we found ourselves at the dividing line between the real and the unimaginable, and then we moved forward, one step after another; we had left all recurring questions behind and we were no longer looking for answers… a long hallway and a single light, a gateway to be crossed; the long journey that led to that one afternoon was not lacking in accidents and hesitations; at first, and for a long time after that, we were anxious and desperate, we felt that the sacrifice was too great and there was no guaranteed reward, at moments we almost calmed down, almost found a place of quiet repose, but then we fell into a mad desperation again, a rushing need to return to what was known and established; for a moment we almost had it in our grasp, we were almost there, and then, once again, without any distinguishable trigger or cause, we lost it; we said to ourselves: “Calm down. We are working on something and we are moving forward, little by little. There is no need to get desperate. There is no need to rush or be afraid. We only have to keep on working with precision and patience… There is no objective, there is no timeline.” How is it possible that a process that had promised no result would become the way into a shocking new gateway, into a new conception of our innermost subjectivity? Something elusive will always remain, something will still be unknown and perhaps it will stay unknowable, hidden like the endless luminous peninsulas of the infinite oceans of light that will forever surround us, waiting within the fractal complexities of the hyperdimensional mind of which we are an integral part (but only a part), breathing quietly and knowingly in the depths of the sheer organic chaos of life beyond all preconceptions or false certainties… For now, we would wander; there was no group, no name or banner that would ever again hold our loyalty; we would never again be pinned down to a particular ideology or set of pre-established beliefs; we had been cut loose; we would now begin our promised drift without end through the astral labyrinth of self-transforming living concept… In the sensory world of fixed existence, there are microscopic transmutations at every single instant, even though our eyes and senses may not perceive them as individual events, even though our minds may not take them into account as actual changes; each of these minuscule mutations changes all future possibilities, moment by moment we delineate and narrow down what can happen later, each small movement of our mind and body changes all the movements, all the thoughts, all the ideas, all the emotions, that may come later; our bushel of options is irrevocably shifted at every single turn… To cross a doorway at the opportune moment or to stay in place when stillness is required; in any labyrinth there are choices to be made and consequences to be expected, the thread of our movement through the maze is the sum of so many small decisions, so many tiny choices, one by one by one, even if it is inevitable to believe that there is only one big final choice in the end; each apparently negligible choice is radically important, each is momentous and irreversible; we saw this more and more as we approached the bridge and we saw the clouds that loomed over us in the distance (and maybe a hint of the tower and our destiny within its secret chambers at the edge of the horizon) and we also saw that there had always been a strong resistance to accepting this simple truth; we had known it yet we refused to know it… (Back when we were one. Back before the doorway, before the shock…) When we were kids, we saw the adults around us creating reality; houses, buildings, tall walls and towers, entire neighborhoods of concrete and asphalt; once these massive constructions were built, it would seem as if they had always been there; and moreover, it would seem that they could never change; the cement was fixed and steady, strong, solid, permanent, eternal; these contingent structures had become an inherent element in the web of reality; like the island, like the long dirt road, like the tower; but eternity was not in the future, eternity is not in the past… How was it possible, we asked ourselves, that a tree that had given no real fruit for so long, all of a sudden was able to do so? What had changed? How was it possible, that from the dead and fixed and unchangeable, something new could be born? How could a new primordial reason for being emerge from the apparently meaningless void? As we approached the turn, we turned the wheel and we took our chances… (Back when I was one, before the doorway, before the unspoken invitation, before the irreversible change, before our final choice as one.)