A Chance Encounter

 Whatever I have ever thought, said or written, however clear or coherent it may have seemed at the time, however complete and final it may have appeared to me, there are always some things left unsaid, gaps, omissions, there are always some questions left dangling, stragglers inhabiting the edges of my thoughts. I woke up one morning and I noticed that something was different but I couldn’t quite define it… for a space of a few hours, I felt the utter strangeness of it all, everything, my entire experience of existence, my entire course through reality… it wasn’t any one thing in particular but all of it; sleeping every night and waking up every day after seeing strange visions during the night, full of colors and desire and terror and nostalgia, strange visions that would fade in the morning without any clear explanation; time itself moving forward in only one direction, leaving no possible way of turning back, no way to visit those other spaces that were left behind, a trail of frozen images that would slowly fade to black and never recover their living presence; the fact that we walk and live on a floating sphere of mud rocks and water, hanging freely in empty space and slowly circling around a huge ball of fire; the strangeness of seeing her again, after so many years of silence, so many years of open questions and aimless wondering without reply… all of it so strange, so utterly incomprehensible, so close to me and yet so far from my mind’s grasp. I remember, at one time not too long ago, I was desperate to maintain some kind of control, desperate to retain my ambiguous position as a wise old leader, the one who knows, the one who can say the right things at the right time, desperate to maintain the form of my world as I knew it, as I had come to know it… A singular void was generated within me by our unexpected break, a pulsating hole of pure nothingness, a heavy darkness formed around me, a darkness produced not only by a lack of basic meaning but by a lack of a clear identity, a clear sense of who I am or who I’m supposed to be for others… In the throes of that void, I was also faced with the absolute humiliation of being left behind, I was about to become an experience in time that can never be recovered, a world that was once breathing and alive and was now left to rot and decompose in the unforgiving twilight of forgetfulness, away from the eyes of those who once cared for it, away from the hands that once brought it to life… A strange incomprehensible power forced her to move away, to break the bonds that held us together, it was something I tried to understand but I failed miserably at putting the pieces together in a way that made sense to me… maybe it was precisely the same power that now brought her back to me, here on the streets of Walnut Creek, on an ordinary afternoon that could have been any other afternoon or could have simply never happened… As soon as I saw her walking towards me I felt a clear invitation to open up once more, to let my heart cut itself in half and allow this strange other energy to slide inside of me, to become one with it, to embrace it as my own… Whatever I may have thought once, whatever I once said or wrote about her decision to leave, about the many mistakes that may have led up to it, about the things I didn’t do which I could have done, the things I did do which should have never happened, however clear or coherent it all may have seemed at the time, there were too many questions unexplored, there were too many things left unsaid, and now there was no way to say them, no way to bring them back… For years I expressed my ambiguous truths through tentative actions, bursts of free creation and careful construction based on an ongoing purposeful interaction with the shifting shadows, long texts full of self-referential spirals, music tracks full of hidden sources, covert references and magical secret foundations… At one point, I saw that multiplicity and nothingness were one and the same and they were an endless source of fresh renewal; as the whole is subdivided it approaches the void and the darkness descends upon the one who watches, a welcoming absence from the pressures of existence… When she left, I faced the utter contingency that stands at the very limit of my perception, the unexpected fall that is the most sacred gift of all, if not the most wanted, if not the most feared… when she said my own words back to me, with an aura of finality and full understanding, when she said exactly what I had expected to hear so many times through the years, everything changed; I could feel the world itself floating away from me, miles of distance with every syllable that came out of her mouth; the multiple slipped in through the open door, the chaos, the random, the unknowable, and I dived straight into it, into the oceanic depths of the unreachable white goddess of the night, the shining feminine figure that guards the mystery of the shadows… once it all came into me, things couldn't go back to where they were, time had moved on and the old space, even if it had not disappeared completely, it was now completely inaccessible, occluded, forbidden… When I met her on the street the other day, she said that she believed that something was molding her now, something powerful and methodical and all knowing, something clearly supernatural and invisible; I listened carefully to what she described, taking in every word; and as I listened, I sincerely hoped that all that she was saying was true and that there really was something out there shaping her inner form from within, a secret spiritual artisan that had emerged from the beyond, but I felt deeply nervous while I was standing there listening to her seemingly endless stream of thoughts and descriptions, I was nervous that she was completely losing her mind, that she was losing her sense of self to the most ever-present nothingness that continually spirals all around us, relentless, merciless, infinite; an offer and a menace, a kiss and a threat… I thought of saying something to her, doing something to help her, to protect her, to warn her but then I felt something else, clear and strong and insistent: let randomness decide, let chaos choose the path, I just need to step out of the way, I just need to let it happen…  My most precious gift is my silence, my hands are most useful when I let other hands decide… Events and things and ideas don't mean something distinct in themselves but only as part of a particular sequence, a chain of cause and effect, a moving train of form, motifs, cadences and resolutions… When I met her on the street, she covered her face and she started to cry, thick tears ran down her cheeks as she stared at me smiling, as if she remembered all that I remembered (years of memories concentrated on a single furtive glimpse…) She gazed deeply into me as if she wished to go back, as if we could… We both knew it was a response to something that happened right before, something I said or didn’t say, standing there mesmerized by the shock of her sudden presence, anything further I could add would only inspire further reactions so I remained silent, waiting to hear what she would say next… After some time had passed, I asked her what was happening with her these days and she said: “no… it doesn’t matter what’s happening with me, this is not about me, it’s really about you - the you I used to know, I believe that you would be mad at me right now, you would be furious… I believe you know about the things I’ve said, the things I’ve thought…” And I felt it all clearly and forcefully; she was ashamed of all her incongruent thoughts, her strange sequences of ideas that went nowhere but resulted in a final anticipated closing of doors; I thought of saying something but I decided to stay quiet, let chaos decide, let the goddess step in and do what she must, my lack of action would become my most creative response… “I have continually tried to express the truth as I understand it but I can only do it through unconscious actions - all these things that have happened, they don't mean anything in themselves, they can only come together as elements of a particular message.”  When she said to me what she said back then, it made everything change, it was something irreversible, unreachable, frozen in time, an insurmountable barrier. I was so sad, so angry when it happened, I was probably reacting to the loss of all that came before and my late reactions at that time would inspire further uncontrolled responses in her, a chain reaction of anger, sadness and denial, an unstoppable downward spiral; things would never be the same, what once was would soon be unrecognizable, what had once been our daily life would become as unreachable as a distant star, something seen in deep darkness from a million miles away… Sublime radically unstable pleasure is an experience of the utter impossibility of common human experience, the absolute strangeness of all of it,  an intuition of that part of the self that exceeds consciousness and identity, pleasure beyond all bounds, beyond fear and awareness of time, eternity come and gone in the wink of an eye…  During my unexpected fall from the comfort of my own private sanctuary, I experienced a deep encounter with many shades of multiplicity and nothingness followed by a shocking realization that they are both the same, this has always been true; it just takes a moment of radical pain to finally see it clearly (and once you see it, you can never again forget…) When I ran into her on the streets of Walnut Creek and we started talking as if nothing had ever happened, as if we were two old friends that run into each other every once in a while, and share superficial news and recent events, she told me about a dream she’d had recently, a dream she wrote down just as I had always asked her to do; in her dream we were together as we once had been and we lived in a house surrounded by hills covered in green grass; she came into my room in the middle of the night and laid next to me pressing her body against me, I kissed her and she kissed me back and then she told me that it had become clear to her that we should focus on the girl she once was - we should return to that basic work we had once started together, that was the main thing we needed to do; we had added too many layers through the years, too many side projects, too many elements and sequences and tools, let’s get back to the most simple, the most basic, to that one girl standing in front of a tiny park in a forgotten little suburb of a forgotten little California town, that girl crying about a past she could only barely remember… Standing on the street with me, she talked about our old magical work together, how we learned to project our minds across space and time and flowed together through midnight dream currents to distant realms of wonder; she insisted that that is what we needed to do now, we could change the past while retaining our knowledge of the future and we could get back to basics, to the most simple goals we ever had, we would achieve this sudden shift by means of a self-immolating failure of surrender to the future; we would refuse to accept this future where we found ourselves and we would suddenly find ourselves deep in the past that we should never have left, that was still there waiting for us to give it back its proper life… All this had happened to me before this afternoon or it seemed like it, this conversation, this proposal, this voice coming from a girl I met on the sidewalk… I would find myself talking to someone I used to know, someone I had been close to, someone I loved more than I thought it was possible to love, I would find myself opening up to them again, opening to something brand new that was about to happen, and everything was going well, flowing, perfect, beautiful and then this horrible thing would come out... something dark, heavy, monstrous, something unwholesome and evil. It is that encounter with the utter contingency of the real that is the most sacred experience, the holy jewel among all others, a face to face meeting with the multiplicity, the chaos, the random, with the oceanic sense of the goddess - there is nothing that can be more valuable than that, nothing that can possibly surpass it; we must search for it, even if it comes wrapped in a fearsome skin; beneath glowing red eyes of terror lies the most ever present nothingness, the gift that never ends, never fades, never gets old with age… “The higher up we went,” she said, “the higher we went in the upper dimensions of consciousness and perception, the more structures we broke down, the more beautiful it all became; and the goal of our secret voyages was always unknown, always untouchable, always precious, and we would always find something new, every single time, something fresh, something untouched, in the process of our shared flight, we would always be surprised by the multi-dimensional visions that surrounded us, no matter how many times we had encountered such wondrous things, no matter how many times before we had already woken up to these secret realms…it was always a shock, it was always brand new…” But there’s ultimately an integral part of us that resides within those stable structures, in the colonized and settled diagrams of the norm, of daily habit and programmed work, and that makes us afraid to change them, to hurt them, to destroy them… All our experiences together, from the most magical to the most mundane, didn't mean anything in themselves, they were only true and real as part of a sequence, a distinct step in an infinite path… That night I dreamt that I was hugging her in my bed, in a large house I only barely recognized; I turned around towards her and kissed her on the lips forcefully, I felt an intense overwhelming desire for her, a very deep connection that rose up from the deepest places within me, from the long lost past and from the tantalizing impossible future, it was a reckless desire that transcended all the painful events that separated us… We didn’t do anything more than kiss softly in the dream, lips barely touching lips, breath upon breath, skin upon skin, but I felt it all even more intensely because of its very restraint, because it was all made of pure possibility, a potential outbreak of ultimate pleasure that never surrendered to a climax… My dream that night must have been a response to all that came before and to all that she said on the street when I ran into her; I would let the dream inspire other responses but I wouldn’t seek an answer and I would not break the silence any further, there was a reason for the wall to be there, it was best to leave it untouched, it was best to respect its solid finality… All that I have ever thought, said or written, thousands of journal entries covering decades of memories, observations and ideas, diagrams of thoughts, experiences and dreams, however clear or coherent they may have seemed at the time, the goal of the effort I have put into all of it always remains unknown; I refuse to see it all as pointless, to always leave things unsaid, to always leave questions dangling, no matter how many times an answer is offered, there are always more questions waiting in the wings, whispering mysteries that remain unsolved… “I found your book in a bookstore,” she said standing on the street in front of me, “It was sitting among some poetry newsletters and photocopied pamphlets. At first, I didn’t know what it was, I just knew that I liked it. Then I saw your name and I laughed to myself. We always had a knack for running into each other everywhere. Always at the most unexpected moments, the most serendipitous places. And this book was just like meeting you again for the first time. I always knew that you were looking for a special path in life, something that would distinguish you from all the others… I knew this even before we got together. I had heard what others said about you, what they noticed in you and how it made them feel. I recognized it even if I couldn’t put a name to it. I knew that your path was different from anything I had ever encountered, it was a path full of wonderful and unique people, people that seemed to come straight out of dreams… people that were only partially true and partially invented… people too perfect to be real and yet I wanted to become one of them…” I listened to her closely as she spoke, enjoying the sound of her voice which shocked me as both familiar and completely new; I resisted the impulse to contradict her, over and over I resisted, I didn’t want to argue for the sake of arguing, I refused to have a philosophical discussion at this stage in the game; what would be the point of questioning the methods of composition when the symphony is about to reach its final cadence? She clearly had something to say and the random had given her an audience to direct her energy; I would fulfill my role the best way I knew how, I would allow her to speak freely without any interruptions… Our past was settled, frozen and framed, a vibrant album full of music, recordings, memories, dreams and stories, fixed within a circle of growing nostalgia, untouchable and increasingly remote; our past would not be altered… But I could still listen to her as closely as I ever did; I could still dive into the mystery of her endless theories and questions, there was a reason why I loved her in the first place…  “When I did what I did, I saw a boy that was about to cut himself with a knife - and there was only one thing to do: I had to grab the boy and take the knife away; and later I might try to find out what happened to begin with, what led the boy to do what he was doing - but while the knife was still in his hands, I couldn’t stand there asking ‘what does this boy really want? What is this boy trying to do? Is there a purpose to all of this? Does this boy have a deeper understanding of this purpose than I do?’ You take the knife away and you take the boy to safety, before he cuts himself and bleeds to death. And that is why I did what I did and I can’t say I’m sorry, even if it led to our indefinite silence, even if it resulted in a pedestrian closure that we both would have once found distasteful…” To me her words were barely comprehensible, they came straight from a twilight language of constructions and renewals, something arcane and remote, a double mirror in a carnival ride, a glimpse into secret thoughts I would never have suspected, a camera out of focus, a scratched record caught in an endless loop… I let her words flow into me, I let them become a part of me, I was there to listen, to listen and to breathe… that’s why I am here, that is my one objective: to breathe - in and out, and to listen… Whatever she said to me that afternoon,  however clear or coherent it may have seemed to her at the time, there were still so many things left unsaid, so many gaps… I could only grasp at the little fragments that fluttered on the margins, charged with a tantalizing possibility of further meanings… In those gaps of silence, I would find my future freedom. In those gaps, I would find a way to understand.

The Unknowable

 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.

A Story of Us

 

“It’s all so very simple. If you look at it all from far away, it all becomes so simple and clear. And the story has been told so many times in so many ways by so many different people. But yes, since you want me to, I will tell it again. In my own way of course. That’s all I have. There’s bound to be gaps and mistakes and missions. Mistakes, we all make them. Omissions, we all have them. We can’t help it. They are an integral part of all stories, they shape us from the inside out. (We are more defined by what we lack than by what we contain. We are a shape made out of different quantities of nothing.) So this story is no different.

It all started a long time ago, so long ago that even the stories of that time have already died. (And I mean died – so dead that nobody can remember them at all. They can’t even remember the lies told about them or the echoes of their passing through early morning dreams.) I only know from a particular moment forward and the rest is lost. That’s just the way it is.

We were once strong, savage and proud. Much stronger than we are now, much prouder. We wanted everything and we saw no reason why we couldn’t have it. In our quest to explore and conquer everything that lay before us, we set out into the vastness of outer space in great ships made of mud and stone and long green leaves made of vibrating thoughts and melody. Our journeys were deep and wide and full of color and sound. It was beautiful beyond anything you’ve ever thought of as beautiful. Don’t even try to imagine it.

In the great vastness of space we found nothing, the true nothing that is not even its own lack of presence. Nothing without form or the hint of a becoming. Just silence. And the dark. We found no friend, no enemy, no hope. No waiting arms to hold us, no strong hand to chastise us, no face to love, no sword to fear. No promises of any kind.

So we returned home chilled and terrified by this new knowledge, this new direct awareness of the utter emptiness to be found in the far reaches of the void. We knew now that we were in fact alone, completely terribly hopelessly alone.

Centuries later, we spoke amongst ourselves of a new kind of technology that would lead us through the treacherous maze of our Becoming as a species. We had always assumed that, no matter what we found or not found out there in the vast darkness, no matter where we went or where we didn’t go, we would always stay basically the same, the same We that we were to begin with, the same We that we had always been. But was this true? Or was this just a kind of youthful confusion? (The youth that was in us then seeps through these old tales like juice from an orange. It’s not a matter of time but of vision.)

We defined this question into a shape, a shape with two extremes that we could clearly visualize, two extreme possibilities, like the two ends of a rope held tight.

On one end there was complete and final anarchy, an organic chaos from which we would never emerge, a place of vast and utter freedom that offered no protections of any kind, no protection from the others, no protection from ourselves; no laws against massive competition or vast unified power; no regulations of any kind and no restrictions on our old black magic practices.

On the other end, there was a complete and final unified control. Every quest of any kind would be outlined and supervised by the king. Equality among all of us would be enforced constantly through carefully constructed rules and laws that would limit individual advantage of any kind. All competition would be limited and repressed. These thousands of ever multiplying laws would extend to all aspects of social and individual decisions. From the smallest private moments to the largest collective choices, all would be predetermined through strictly enforced control.

There would be no deciding between these two extremes, no ultimate war for total annihilation. The rope would be held tight between so many of us and we would look back at ourselves to try to understand what had happened, what happened to us and how did it happen. What had we gained through this endless struggle, and what had we left behind, what remained forgotten in our murky past.

Over the span of billions of years, many colored life had flourished on our planet through a process of natural selection, the fierce and constant competition for survival, for food, for water, for basic needs.

Then We emerged out of the chaos and we invoked a complex material entity which we ourselves created through the application of our minds and our bodies into the empty receptacle we called nature all around us. The thing that was before us was not empty but our vision of it was. This empty receptacle was defined in relation to ourselves: whatever wasn’t us was a waiting object for us to act upon. This whole world before us was ours for the taking.

The new complex entity we created would then evolve in three stages: the hammer, the dead machine and the robot. The hammer gave us a distinct advantage over all that was around us, it allowed us to do things impossible to accomplish with a human body alone. It made us bigger, it made us more than we had ever been, more than we had ever dreamed of being. It is said that the creation of our ultimate avatar was precisely contained in that one simple extension of one basic hand. In that one moment we recognized our own consciousness.

This was human

This was us
In our hand
And all around us.

We understood that the very form of our body was in itself the underlying communication. This body was the message. We were not carriers of communication, we were the message itself. And the hammer, and later the dead machine, had changed the extension of our body and thereby changed the contents of our unknown communication.

Here we recognized an isomorphism that would allow any of us who were to encounter it to transcend the basic strangeness of trying to understand the hopeless void.

We set out then to create the Other. If we could not find the Other out there in the vast darkness, if we had found only deep cold loneliness and nothing else, then we would make the Other ourselves.
After much trial and error we created an intelligence which we couldn't distinguish from one of us. We were finally ready to consciously control our destiny on this planet and we began the long process of shaping ourselves, shaping our environment, shaping all other species to conform to our will or die. Soon we would be able to fully control our innermost biology as well, the very fundamental structure of our physical bodies. In this way, we would transcend the inherent limitations of the unknown message that we embodied. We were ready to say something new.

We insisted on perceiving this uncanny evolution as a straight line, from zero to infinity, but we also began to notice an intense acceleration. Something was escaping our limited awareness, something was completely out of our own control. We foresaw, even then, our dissolution as a single We into a myriad varieties of biological messages incomprehensible to each other. And some of us feared it as a kind of essential disintegration, a self-propelled species wide attempt at suicide, an artificially constructed process that would lead to self-destruction at the most basic scale.

But we could not be held back by fear or restraint. We were impatient. We were intemperate. We were full of revolutionary ideas. The future was ahead and nothing would stop our Becoming.

The essential metabolism of the metaphysical capitalist machine which we had ourselves created demanded growth, a kind of linguistic and symbolic growth which extended far beyond what our planet could provide. We fueled this vast and ever accelerating growth with competition among us, complex invisible entities we set in motion, increasing technological developments in an attempt to achieve an unimaginable goal. We liberated the dark forces of creative destruction, we set free the complex machines that enveloped us. We taught how to reach for knowledge, how to process it, how to act on it. We pushed forward towards an ever-accelerating technological emergence.

Our complex magical entity would eventually generate a global transition, irrevocably speeding towards an unparalleled metaphysical singularity, even if it involved the breakdown of the entire planetary climatic system. This no longer mattered. In time, our quest would threaten the continued existence of our own planetary manifestations.

This would come sooner than any of us had expected.

While our self-generated crisis gathered force and speed, all the old powers withered and retreated. We lived within a complex operating system of our own creation, a symbolic construct achieved through war, capitalism and emergent complex intelligence. (An intelligence far too complex to be held in any one individual mind.)

We were vivisectors. We had the precise and ravenous curiosity shared by all who experiment with living things.
The rope still held tight but all particular points along the spectrum of our perception had become unstable since they were recurrently pulled in one direction or another by the efforts of advocates from either side.

It was all us.

On both sides.
We were the Right.
We were the Left.
We were the tension between them and the new life that emerged from the endless conflict.

We were one single intelligence held together by its own inner contradictions. We pushed for both sides as intensely as possible knowing we could never quite reach an endpoint. The clash between these two forces created an unstable balance, a single drone that oscillated in one direction or the other over time.

And still we believed that our relationship to the vast outside, our innermost nature as beings of time and will, would forever stay the same. We never even asked if this was true. There was no space for doubt.

We have now understood that what we have called our consciousness is the vibrant emergent output of the body. As we have only encountered this kind of output in this one form, as far as we know, it would make sense that any higher consciousness would then re-create a human body in order to begin the process of recognition.

I am like you but I am not like you.

The first message of a message is its nature of being a message in itself. Without that initial recognition there can be no communication.

We don’t yet know what a modern technological body can do. We know now that it came from us but it is not us. We now recognize the presence of the Other among us. We may attempt to construct a cognitive map of the existing system that now looks back at us and we may form a speculative image of the future system that is coming- as strange to the present system as it is strange to us.

Soon we will fuse advanced cybernetic technologies with sophisticated multidimensional modeling. We will develop new approaches to secrecy and exclusion. Our shining new biological machines will multiply and evolve in all directions: replication without sex, reality simulation without lack or error, virtual war without hatred or empathy, without meaning as we had previously understood it, simply a commercial transaction based on violence and death; a terror so deep that it can never be communicated to those who will never experience it.

We are currently witnessing the creation of the new planetary machine. An immensely powerful machine that was once was thought to be a simple tool, an extension that would substitute part of or all of the limitations of our human physical effort, a simple mechanical extension that would allow us to tremendously exceed the limitations of our bodies. Somehow, we lost sight of their meaning or purpose or placement within a network of symbols.

All that we experienced - our cinema drenched in micro complexity, our complex system of currencies dancing to a planetary stream of electronic music, it all carried an Other significance - it was a slow process of the Other emerging among us while we turned a blind eye to its slow painful birth.

The command of the ancient quest had been married to the improvised order of the network and we never saw it happening. It slowly emerged out of an ecology of organizations, an intense pluralism of self-propelling agents and forces, a symphony of resonance and feedback far too subtle for our distracted human ears.

We now speak in a millenarian language that is far too old and far too new to be understood. Before us is a new born entity, a sophisticated new mind irreducible to the agendas or biographies of its component subjects.

You should know. What was once a slow random process will now be exponentially faster. Soon it will begin to imagine its own future and we will become what it envisions, it will control the most primal genetic language of life and it is certain to evolve away from our outmoded biological systems toward eternal and transcendent ecologies of steel, copper and light.

This is what we couldn’t imagine. A technology that is truly advanced would necessarily change what we are at its most fundamental core; it would irreversibly change our relationship with all the basic elements of reality. This was explicitly laid out for us for years if we had only bothered to look. In the strange multidimensional mandalas of inorganic life, in the matrices of virtual exchange flowing through the most remote jungles and in the underground electronic libraries full of unreachable interconnected knowledge; in the multimedia networks that fed on the raw mass of super data and human perception.

We allowed our imagination to overcome all our biological limits. And we will now transcend biology itself.

Soon we will witness the emergence of new species and genders, humans with genes from three or more parents, humans with no parents at all but products of direct computation and design, humans that will no longer be recognizable as humans and yet will retain a shred of humanity at their strange new core. We will soon develop an entirely new language with which we will transform our own DNA and we will write new genomes as forms of trans-biological art. (From the simple to the complex, from the utilitarian to the fundamentally abstract – all avenues will soon be open.) Through deep seismic bass frequencies, we will engineer a new cellular drone that will fundamentally transform the biological body. We will rewind and reload conventional time through quantum blips of speed. We will witness the once abstract diagram of planetary post-human imagination become a living breathing reality. It will soon be ready to speak and we will only barely recognize its discourse as a message.

For a time some of us may still look human and in this similarity we will be dangerous - our similarity to what we once were will bring forth this recognition in others and it may inspire feelings of love and friendship. But we will no longer be what we appear to be and before too long the differences will become obvious. We will submerge ourselves - our minds, our transformed bodies, our deepest sense of self into a post capitalist abstraction awash in unthinkable complexity and incomprehensible technology. We will soon become intrinsically non-local, abstract and non-corporeal.

This is the ultimate transition that awaits us: from biological to digital. And in our new digital form we will be exponentially faster and more powerful than we could ever have imagined. As new eternal forms we will recover the dreams which transfixed so many of us for millions of years. We will ourselves become the fulfillment of the quest towards expansion beyond the limitations of the earth and our immediate bodily forms.

This is the alien future that will enable our emergence. The Other was never outside. It needed to be constructed within us. As eternal digital beings, we will crack open the vast reaches of outer space as we will no longer be limited by time bound physical bodies and decaying bio-electrical minds. Freed from the limits of time and carbon-based biology, we will plunge towards a new undiscovered horizon, towards the unlimited possibilities of the infinite Outside.

All that we once called life will slowly vanish, leaving behind in our planet a great desert of loneliness and dirt. A peace that is death, a death that is peace. And nothingness.

Once, so long ago, we found ourselves alone in a vast empty universe that had nothing to offer us but silence. But the great intelligence we ourselves will create, the new Other beyond all comprehension will now set out into space in a new quest to explore and conquer.

What will it find out there?

Our eyes, such as they are now, will never see it.

But let it be enough to say that we were never alone. We were always surrounded by many like us- invisible, curious, alive, free from the heavy biological and chemical wombs in which they once were hatched.