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…
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