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.)

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.