From the Archive: Planelist 27 November 2018: PHL to SFO
A fully sober brainsperiment at 35,000 ft
18:13 In the airport waiting to board — soundtrack? I’ll put one on.
Said to R: “what I’d love to see is the development of tech that works with the brain (and the rest of the body — more on this later) to create an entirely new and collaborative computational landscape.”
Descent into a grass sea, here they wave, blades as tall as I am, as tall as you are, all green green green
There is no computational tool more powerful than the brain — not by any metric by which we judge current tools as far as I know but by its unmatched capacity for ideogenesis. Genesis computing: a field built from the unity of man and machine through dynamic brain-computer interfaces that allow us to integrate seamlessly the architecture of our thoughts with the computational universe.
We are now on a plane. Shit not getting weird yet — approx 30 minutes to takeoff. Wait til the lights dim…
Look here, look hear, we see and are the drums glistening in dripping shadow. Here is a genesis: perma-cloud. Returning to the idea of vibrational surfaces (why can’t we build them? Let’s build them) we see the potential to hoist many things into the air, including the perma-cloud. She eats what she is given, metabolizes this treasuretrash, sustains herself afloat on the surface. Net-zero system. Position her over the smokestacks but not the steamstacks; the steamstacks are to be filled with heat-sensitive pinwheels.
20 minutes to takeoff. It does not seem obvious to me why we cannot create massive floating algae clouds.
“Surrounded by time, seahorses, cataclysmic catalytic crustaceanary reactionaries”
Skin of my palm begins to bubble almost wrote pubble perhaps it pubbles as well palm bubble
It strikes me how easily we (I? Am I alone?) enter this state in which the senses are less important than the internal looping looping looping, in which the senses are merely catalytic and the meat of the matter comes in the matter of the mind. Like a sloppy roast-beef sandwich, russian dressing squeezingslidingout up the crust crag dripping in reverse, this is something I would eat in the airport and probably nowhere else. Reverse gravity sandwich. Drips up your nose. More dangerous than the classical model.
Current soundtrack: Seahorse Dreams (Androcell). Feels like forearms, specifically the underside, the fishy underbelly, the body as a sculpture, many filets stacked on stacked on stacked on stacked on stacks
13 minutes to departure and I have been distracted by the absence of squiggly red lines goodbye until we’re done with takeoff
19:27 and 22 minutes to departure because our engines are turned off on the runway. Incredible that such empty skies are seen as crowded. With perma-clouds they would be even more so.
And as quickly as it arises, it fades away again. The Nebbish Route (Shpongle) is turning me into a half-sedated spiral of head drifting down and to the right. Should be curling into myself right now, forming the route with my neck. Many travelers, dark red tapestry wagons oh no here we go coming back up but still to the right like some strange cerulean snail. Classic snail politics expanding the ribs of the boneless thing thrusting them up and out and some poor fuck is kicking my seat
Staircases turnt to ladders, we’re not sure why we keep climbing but it’s a race now and we’re on all fours lumbering vertically towards some unknown stellar infinity. Shit still hasn’t gotten weird yet — wait for takeoff. Just wait for takeoff, don’t wait for takeout, brought to you by instaFood where you don’t even order you’re just presented with a metric shit-ton of food straight to the face. Pie cannon, spaghetti canyon, when we set it free it becomes part of our system. Biologically speaking, that is. Somethign much more satisfying about a ball of tangled spaghetti than a ball of cooked pasta dough in case anyone was wondering, both in concept and in realization.why don’t we make ravioli with the sauce in the middle
For vibrational surfaces however the issue arises that the bearable weight of the surface is directly proportional to the number of particles in a given diameter and energy applied to the system on the whole. If only we could piezoelectrify the air????????? Chinese finger trap atomic bonding, stronger as resistance against it grows. Default state of loose bonding then intensified by weight upon it. Issues of containment, since gas is gaseous and I’m really not sure what type of matter this would end up being. Plasmoid? Here is an occasion where the internet would be super useful but I’m in a flying tube
19:52 We are in the air and salvia space song kissed the takeoff in perfect geometric synchrony — back there briefly as the lights swept into clouded nothing. Now we thrive above a solid layer of cloud and I feel almost as if I have broken through again
Sleep like nothing but a hawk, whatever that means to the hawk and to you. Consult the hawk, let it not leave you nor its children for dead. The palm of your hand, the bubbling palm of your hand, is enough to feed its children for two days. Sentience plays no role.
The other arms sprout from elbows and, one would imagine, bend opposite to the existing two. Could clap if they tried. I find myself suddenly exhausted.
An odd disconnect between the writer of words and the experiencer of experiences. I close my eyes and do not type and see the leaf-entity duplicated many times in front of me but as soon as the words begin to smatter out spatter out there’s a silly face big nose shiny like someone made it out of polished wood and a grin and a teeth I am yawning now with my own unit of teeth, thank god each individual teeth tooth in the teeth unit does not itself yawn. Seeking udon upon return. Wonder if they deliver.
Gecko arm ascent
Gecko arm ambition. The number seven (Behind Closed Eyelids) off to the left where it shoudl be. Ambition itself as a concept in modern society exists primarily where we cannot see it, because no true ambition leads to disengagement and everything we can see is beginning to disengage. Let me rephrase. Let me try. The truly ambitious will not be satisfied to create something revolutionary that renders their work done. For the work to be done, the bodies must be placated. We do not placate, because that renders us purposeless. The truly ambitious are those to whom ease is a sign of failure, comfort a sign of laziness. There is no drive to be better when everything is already best. Gecko arms innovate not for their own benefit but for the potential for future innovation. Progress for the sake of future progress, geckos for the sake of future geckos. Crawling all over my face. There is nothign wrong with this. Ambition is the evolutionary drive all over again: children having children having children having children having children having a drive to do more. Accordingly, one may say that success is the driver of ambition rather than the oft-expressed opposite. True ambition will not make you successful. True ambition will turn your bones into a chilled buzzing mess, and you’ll end up electrocuting all your floppy messy reverse gravity roast beef sandwiches. Success, however, leads (in some, perhaps in all) to a realization that the goal was too small all along.
I could really use a shortbread snack.
Shit has not yet gotten as weird as it could get, both in here (this flying tube) and out there (gesturing vaguely towards the world below). Buildings are built and not grown, static in all functional aspects though dynamic in earthquake safety when that’s a relevant contributor to the architect’s vision. Why not dynamic in all things? Why not tubes? Where are all the tubes?
While it makes very little sense to have one’s abode flailing wildly among the junipers and oaks it seems that truly flexible living situations, working situations, situational situations… it seems that truly flexible situations are perhaps better situated to amuse, perhaps to protect. Why do we build to simple functionality? Why do we build and not grow? The smell of passing sandwiches. Layered echoes. Slight time-skips allowing for layers of layers of business meetings in one room simultaneously and for the cafeteria to serve everyone within an alarmingly short time span assuming things don’t accidentally line up.
My brain is situating itself in corporate-pawn-land and we together are maybe going to get away from that strange man johnny don’t you remember what we told you about talking to strangers
The model we have come to love as scientists states that the mind is a product of the brain, because the conscious aspect of experience is itself generated within the head-jello. What I propose is similar — the mind is a product of the brain — yet different in that the conscious aspect of experience need not be itself a byproduct of the firings and misfirings of our neurons. Rather, this model considers “consciousness” to be a form of sense-data, existing in the external universe regardless of detection, that our bodies are in fact highly capable of detecting.
Is it too presumptuous to say that the brain can process and integrate any type of sense data made available to it? Perhaps. Yet I see no concrete examples to the contrary.
Let us imagine, then, that some form of energy exists that itself is subjectivity, as strange as this might sound. This is not impossible, nor is it any less likely than our existing model. It’s certainly just as frustrating, if not more so; if the brain doesn’t generate consciousness, what in the everloving fuck is it? This is left as an exercise to the reader.
R okay well I guess it’s going to be indented now I didn’t mean for that to happen but I doubt anyone means for many things to happen
Actually I’m not sure if i doubt that
Was going to say that it’s raining in the catacombs, the weeds are coming to life, puddles are portals and the mouths of the venus flytraps are ready and waiting to kiss.
Gaige this is where you are influencing me and there are many hands in the air, arms raising, the possibility of impossibility no longer available in vanilla or coffee creme, only strawberry, we are very very sorry for the inconvenience but the houses will burn in the flood if we stop to gather what was left by the curb, very very sorry that the
Cameraman didn’t know what he was doing and now the image is all wrong
Leaves disintegrating in what we left behind next to the curb but did not forget
Bouquets of knives hanging on the door, three and four and five in a bunch, wreath of some thing made just a few minutes ago. The ribs are reaching back around, fleshy, no longer blue and thrumming in their light, hold me like a hug but without any of the intention, fallen into infinity well, descending with a flashlight pointing upwards towards the source.
When I close my eyes the image of my hands repeats itself again and again and again in front of me; the computer is typing with my hands, the hands are typing their own image into being, the hands are like me in that we type ourselves into being when we can. This is the backs of my forearms (From Mind to Machine). How salient the calluses are. Palms have ceased to bubble and I am acutely aware of the presence of closed doors right iin the center it is difficult to keep things going properly here it is difficult to make the words happen without doing th efinger trip trip trip over each other and onto a word that i did not mean to say
Pages open to mouths, the books have always wanted to speak through us, they are not our inventions but our inventors. Just as the self serves the vast sea of consciousness by feeding it everything we see and hear and taste, here come airplane snacks, just as the self exists only to supply the dream, the meat body narrative exists only to supply the great book, the magnificent book, all is book and chrome and low-hanging fog that clings to the sidewalks and casts the neon half-shadows farther than our serving eyes want it to
I am standing at the center of many spheres; I am the archetype; I am the gravitational source and nothing more. The brain is the mechanical god of the world of vibrations and (I am so thankful for these airplane pretzels) even so it holds no real power. This is somehow melancholy, immediately dissolved by acoustic transition. I feed the meat body and the meeat body feeds the vast flesh organism and the vast flesh organism eventually envelops the world like it owns it or something, like an unsavory dumpling. Briefly forgot how to chew. Maybe teeth yawning. I panic for a second at the thought that perhaps I left my toothbrush in the wrong city. Toothbrush is reassuring in its disdain for my investment in this. Also, I could just check. Inhabiting the same space right now as the dream in which my laptop fell from my window washer hot air balloon and I chose to deal with it “upon waking” rather than allowing the narrative of the dream to become one of panic. This is the city we have been seeing, for the record. Same city. Hot air balloon window washer units. Lots of blankets. Strange low fog. Clean margins.
When planes pass in the night I am reminded of the joys of transience, which I then promptly forget about again. Loss of salience. Maybe the key is the water. When we almost died in the Pacific we remembered it well.
Eye stretch sideways eye jitter eye see elephant’s face becoming nothing
Back to perma-clouds. Let us eat the stuff spewing upwards, at the very least stopping it from continuing to spew upwards. I cannot believe that we are only an hour into this flight and yet I totally can.
At this moment I feel incredibly far from the image of the woods and hte image of the person they grew and incredibly close to a solitary nothingburger of too much DMN and not enough everything else. There’s juice now
Here is a memory: becoming an adult in name and fantasizing about the freedoms it afforded me, specifically regarding the ability to ehhh fuck this
Here’s what I want to talk about right now. Preventative medicine is such a non-entity currently, and that’s dumb! And stupid! Here’s what I’m thinking about right now. We have bodies continuously and the only way to truly monitor them effectively is to monitor them continuously, because the delta is the stuff that matters man! Surfer dude fridge poet returns, welcome back surfer dude fridge poet. I want to watch my meat fluctuate, man. Want to watch it speed up and slow down and create strange proportions of white blood cells in response to stress! This is what we’re going to work on oncee i get out of the flying tube because it has been neglected and it really doesn’t need to be.
God I wish I could remember the fractal thought, i’d sell my soul for the fractal thought and a solid chocolate eclair not because i want it but because that’s what brain says
Brain and I are operating on different levels right now.
Like the concept of a daytime church funeral for somebody young
21:11 i am feeling inordinately empty
I need to get back to the earth, my feet are too clean
It is a result, I think, of the influence of the light emanating from these screens, as well as the process of being sucked sucked in to a world which does not feed the gaping maw of the senses as thoroughly as it should. Back to the underside of my forearms, living more in the armpits. Yet I found myself in a similar space when writing in a notebook, a paper notebook, which has no screen and still neglects the maw. This is not true stream of consciousness writing because my consciousness has been interrupted by the need to stream it. This is why full-brain interpretive recording. This is why. I feel perhaps entirely incapable of existing as a whole self when I am attempting to document the cloud-mold below. Tandem dreaming. A long line of dreamers with bone-hands grasping the ethereal webbing holding the path together.
In dreams about material goods I can never find what I am looking for. In dreams about broccoli heaven, I am awed just by the sight. In dreams about dreams, I fear for my gentle yawning teeth. So it goes. Bring in the drums.
God dammit just do something. Anything. Anything to get the violins spinning again, the thrummers humming, the potato salad chilled before 4pm. Imagine each individual food item, each spaghetti in the pile, on its own toothpick. Spaghetti and meatball garden, floppier than most, perfect for lovers of grotesque lollipops and bastardizations of italian culture. Where’s the goddamn noodle when I need it?
Incidentally I look down and see a cluster of lights in the shape of a grotesque lollipop. Some poor fuck probably lives there, in the meatball garden down there, and has no clue what he’s missing.
Which brings us to the question of whether or not it is ethical to tell the residents of the meatball garden that they are missing something and furthermore what exactly that something is. Which brings us to the question of whether or not the general populace is inclined to live beyond their entertainment, whether these bodies who seek to spend the time they have in their stretched-out pockets react similarly to the stimuli that bring my own meat body into a space of wholeness.
And, fundamentally, this brings me to the purpose that i all too frequently neglect, and i am deciding in this moment that each noodle in my future udon will tie me to this purpose and if I ever let go it won’t matter because I am tied with the oath of udon which is stronger than my own loss of salience.
If consciousness is sense data the trick to creating a conscious machine is gathering and processing that data.
Who is flying down below? Small glowing blinking bird, nowhere to land but the houses and their pitch-black lawns.
21:50 I am cheating now because I went back to read that because I felt so wholly dissociated from everything and now, strangely, despite having relived the dissociative process, feel much more grounded, at least in my calves and fingertips and wrists which are beginning to get sore. I fear for my legs, which cannot move as they’d wish to move, which is entirely the fault of the plane’s design and the fact that we have not decided that we deserve better. Here is what would be better than an airplane: landskips. A tunnel that compresses the space above our civilization and allows us to take maybe five or six or fifty steps to get from Philadelphia to San Francisco. Though I do appreciate the time here that forces me to be with myself — it’s something that it’s good to be good at. But a landskip would certainly be more pleasant. Enter the tube, walk a bit, end up where you need to go. Maybe unsustainable? Again, no internet in flying tube. I’ll figure it out eventually.
Brain keeps wanting to say the word “catacombs” so now we are combing cats in the catacombs, creating effigies from the fur, and bringing the resident dead back to life, or at the very least back to mobility. IF these dead are cats, we have more cats to comb; if they are human, we have more cat combers. This is how you scale. Our current model does not account for other ressurective possibilities so we’re kind of screwed, but it’s a risk we’re willing to take. Scalability is everything, man. Growth and shit. Surfer dude fridge poet has thoughts on corporate culture, surprise surprise.
In reality, for anyone who doesn’t know, surfer dude fridge poet guards the carrots and the celery and sometimes a whole lot of beets but only sometimes. When there are beets there are too many beets, but it’s fine because you’ve just gotta see their value, man. You’ve just gotta listen to their song.
Huh, the song changed and I can suddenly feel my facial features warping. I wonder whose face I have now…
It would be wild wild crazy wild to wind up wound which is not what I was originally going to say but I got a ridiculous cramp in my hand and it cramped my style a bit as they say (nobody says that) and I bet I could grow an entire city where this cramp is, fuzzy margins, implant an entirely new reality because since the fingers have no muscles there’s some spare room in there. There’s enough room to put pinwheels in there, I’m convinced. What do we experience subjectively as the heart loses some of its blood-pushing energy to the tiny pinwheels in our arteries? How many artificial capillary systems could we route in without seeing a measurable decrease in perfusive ability? My instinct, since the pregnant body grows a ton of new capillary systems and is usually just fine, is that we can do it at least in people with the intrinsic capability of becoming pregnant. Maybe the others are screwed! But my instinct is not. My instinct is that fundamentally it doesn’t totally matter. Fundamentally with the right hormones it’s possible to grow a fetus outside of the uterus so that’s another thing that’s totally unrelated to my main point but fascinating nonetheless.
With the sudden introduction of a new capillary system, do we feel any physical effects? My guess is yes due to lack of adjustment period, the fact that growing blood, which is what we do, takes time. Yet I bet we could do it on a smaller scale, and grow the systems more slowly. Plug and play biodevices! This is really fucking weird and I don’t know if it would ever be IRB approved even in animal subjects but I’m picturing people growing optional hand flaps and stomach flaps and then people would be able to whisper things like “I really dig your flaps” at the back of crowded lecture halls with some basis in reality. Wow it looks like we’ve descended/ascended into pitch blackness again alrighty there
The wonderful thing about grow-your-own tech is that it’s intrinsically personalized. The terrible thing about grow-your-own tech is that people can and will make fun of your flaps.
It occurs to me now that I know very little about tumors and how they do their tumor thing, which means that once I exit the tube I will locate the nearest tumor and ask it to expose itself to me. THat’s kind of weird wow
But here I am thinking about routing, even though I know nothing about tumors. If something knew it was going to end up in a tumor — a blood cell, say — would diverting itself be beneficial? If we don’t supply the cells, will they die? Is this an existing cancer technology? Is this the same preventative medicine issue that keeps popping up? If blood cells already know to nope nope nope away from a tumor we might see much smaller tumors on the whole. But again I’m pulling this straight out of my ass.
Dandelion pufflight in right visual field, path stretching out before us. I am part of the dandelion puff, I am the keeper of the seeds and the seeds keep me. All of my energy is resting in the base of my left palm, glued to the keyboard surface. All of my agency is shooting through my right and scooping a concave path down through my temporoparietal junctions and back out the contralateral frontal lobes. Goblets of lobules golden on the lobe’s table, drunken with the swirl of Christmas chemicals and ornamental visions of the next room over, the room behind the wall. Behind the wall is a well and behind the well is a boy, a blond boy, about seven or eight years old. He looks at you and you scream and, panicked, plunge shoulder-first into the well, which swallows you with a thick, wet gulp. He calls down and asks why you screamed and threw yourself into the well, but you cannot answer because you are lost in the belly of the well and can’t speak all that well through all the water. A tunnel branches off to your leftright and you take it, still submerged, not running out of oxygen because you brought some with you because you are that kind of forward thinker. Do you see the lights? Yes, those lights. The cows up ahead, golden eyes glinting in the light emanating from their udders and horns. You see them well indeed, don’t worry, go up to them and say hello. Do not scream at the cows. Do not shake the cows. Do not dive into the cows, because that will not go well (unlike the well, which always goes well). Run your musty hands over their chiseled backsides. Weave their tails together to create a pinwheel. Are you ready? You need to be ready before the cave becomes. Ready? Okay, good.
We get a rush from kites and chaos diamonds; we fling ourselves upward and outward simultaneously to emulate the things we find most beautiful; we find that the firework’s life is beautiful only to the onlooker and that our own evisceration will never compare in the eyes of a human audience.
Here is the anatomy of a promise: twelve carrot strings held together by some poor soul’s mitral valve (like a napkin ring!) and enough words to make them believe you. The ones made of celery — the promises, that is — don’t sit well. It’s hard to get enoug hwords for those. And the cornmeal promises fall apart within minutes.
Valve sushi, which is not a good idea.
But if you think about it it really is this strange little self-contained cylindrical whatsit
We’re not doing it either way
But you could
You definitely could.
And now we’re back to visions from the inside of a mouth, situated inferiorly and medially to an upper molar. My chair is being kicked again. Chair seat plane seat car chair seat it’s all the same because we sit and end up different on the other side. I want to love myself and I want to love this thing that’s in the seat next to me, small and pulsating, looking like it needs to be born.
A landscape — savannah-like? Unclear. (We Are Modern Shamans)
And the CGI bone woman — animatronic now — doling out souls. She has not yet looked at me, and if I wanted to convince myself that this was because I am already whole I suppose I could. The vertical wire-beams are thrusting us up, pinpoint floors taking over for the comfort of solid solitude. Who turned it on? It seems to have been a collection of three small birds; the switch is near their nest; they exist against a violent sunset backdrop and are seen only as silhouettes. We learn not to mess with the small birds. Bilateral thumby tingling sensations; the acute notion that my hands have flipped over and i am now holding one bird in each hand with the third sandwiched between them. They are fatter in my hands. They do not flap but rustle slightly. I allow them to make me a home.
I need desperately to alllow my body to move the way that is being dictated to it via this soundtrack but we’re in a flying tube so it will have to wait. Brings me back to the miraculous inadequacies of the flying tubes. Dance party flying tube is far superior. Tea room flying tube would be pretty solid. Sitting flying tube is made for the entertained class.
We are now hallucinating diagrams of the proper unfolding of a fictional travel cot. That is not useful, brain. Brain says ehhhhh fuck off. Brain knows how to unfold the fictional travel cot and will not be silenced.
22:44 we are now approximately halfway through this trip and I have written nearly 5k words and when I inevitably go back to read this I will ahve to read all of these words plus whatever else brain and I come up with in the next three hours. Cheers.
The main event was cataclysmic as I may have mentioned before (I am typing with one eye open) with the seahorses and stuff, it’s very much a good idea to pay attention when I discuss the sea creatures because only we can see the creatures and how else are you going to learn? Everything broke down, everything, and when we reformed from the ashes we were a we and the sky was particulate, more particulate than before, and all the trees shimmered in the floating remains of the old world and spoke to us slowly through the dust, saying things about the chipmunk moon race and the lack of milk snow in the northern hemisphere, and we believed them all, every single thing they said to us, because belief was all we had.
Can we duplicate a heart? Can we? Why must we have only one when that one is failing and our only options are to cut it open and sew it back up or get a new one entirely? Double heart. Triple heart. As many hearts as we can fit without fundamentally compromising our ability to do things other than having a lot of hearts.
Has anyone created artificial bowel?
Here are my worries for the mind-uploading folk: we currently have no hypothetical mechanism for testing success, unless there can be conversation between the uploaded world and the meat world, which, wow, that would be weird but I suppose not necessarily more out there than the idea of uploading a mind at all? Where will we be, though, without our meat?
My entire left leg is going vaguely numb, because we were not meant to sit together like this for so long. My entire left leg has become cold and distant, because as much time as we’ve spent together we still haven’t developed a relationship that allows us to engage in this particular physical activity together without some slight to moderate discomfort.
A vision of future human bodies: more mouths connected to more tiny lungs.
A vision of a small furry violet pig, pointier than average, from above. It is genderless and going somewhere. Going to the donut, cinnamon sugar, more like a twisted toroid pastry. I am pleased by the prospect of inserting food into my one current mouth. Would have to be careful with extraneous mouths (only connected to tiny lungs!) because they, unlike the classical mouth, would not get to safely enjoy such activities. Observation: I, a meat tube, am a tube within a tube (flying tube), and if I were to eat something tubular it would be a true matryoshka of tubes. House is boxy tube. We are frequently in a matryoshka of tubes. How many can we get? At some point, I will attempt six.
Very alive in the hands while young beasts of cloud lumber beside us and impregnate one another with their lightning.
Compulsively imagining the multisensory experience of cracking an egg into the cupped palm of my left hand, gently so as not to break the yolk, and then breaking the yolk intentionally with the pointer finger of my right hand, watching the yellow expand, anointing myself to the forehead with the mix, and feeling it slide in energy and in warm, wet reality to my sacrum.
It’s a motif! The palm of the hand! This is where we’re at today.
Here, eyes closed: a strange grid amid the turbulence of red and blue interconnected dots on a cream-colored background. Some are out of place, connected to the grid on its sides, but the effect on the whole is orderly. A faint smell of burning, the kind of burning where somebody’s childhood home enters your nostrils and takes up shop and all you can smell for weeks is the sense that your own life is just a parasitic entity on the furry back of someone else’s memory.
Umbrellas, eyes closed, blues and yellows and whites, facing towards me and away, alternating, vertically stacked pointing slightly off to the right and altogether unintimidating. Oddly beautiful. Tamagotchi space dream, roller coaster top, cloudspace and the games we thought we lost but only ever imagined. I have not been here for quite some time. Brain is functioning.
Militaristic cartoon alien creatures and the concept of a fire truck. To the lower right, eyes open, exist amorphous images that would come into focus if I let my eyes come into focus. Upper left looks like almost-words. Items colliding in front of me, central locus, trajectories from either side of my head and a vision of a strange floating tan loop structure, like it’s made out of bent plastic sheets each half a centimeter thick. I am being wrapped up into the framework of a spider’s web as we speak.
Noticeable discomfort disrupts me here, left butt and left back i am not branching as one might imagine here but I could be, wouldn’t that feel nice, to be able to grow my body again all over again right from the side of the one i’ve got. Would rip my pants for sure, and I doubt even the strangest thrift store has seen a four-legged pair of pants. Though what do conjoined twins’ parents do with the clothes that they have custom-made for their kids when the kids outgrow them or die? There must exist somewhere such an artifact and while I may never find it I imagine that someone somewhere will. But honestly? So little resale value, maybe not even worth it.
Feel my consciousness fading here, everything is fading, I can tell that my eyes are taking in less light and am unsure of whether that is due to the fading light within the cabin or to some malfunction within myself. PErhaps sight is intact but layers are bleeding past one another, i see a great deal of static, a cold pin drop in my left anterior thigh, visions of chairs that could double as modern art exhibits and lots of fuzzy half-seen right angles. Urge to close my eyes is great. Hardly able to see what i am typing and at times like this onei have closed my eyes entirely. Feeling the urge to have my core sung into by someone who understands that a frequency can be reached that will unlock the whole thing and spiral through me fully. Cramp in my hand has moved, now centralized, there is something alive in here that wants to get out, I see my fingers typoing and perceive them not as part of my body but as flickering remnants of the spider mother, arachnoid mater herself before she became the egg-hugger and retreated into darkness. Neuromythology. The living thing, the creature, palpates and strains against my taut skin.
There seems not to be a technique for relieving this, which I know must be false because it just got better. An intellectual challenge, it seems, is what it took, which is odd given the circumstances but when it comes down to it that seems to be a solution to many things. Vortices vortices vortices vortices off the wing of the plane in light and shadow and some form of precipitation, god save the midwest, buried in the milk snow and raw cabbage shavings, god help them.
Geode face; crystalline teeth; difficulty speaking due to a very very beautiful but utterly nonfunctional physiology. A large sand flea floating through the blackness; god of sand fleas; protector of the smaller ones that now flock around his suspended limbs, all destined to be swept to sea within the next forty-five seconds. We remember that the beaches live at night; the tide pools that we cannot see thrum when the ocean rushes backwards towards the moon and if we’re not careful our blind stumbling will lead us to an urchin in the foot and an earchin in the earchin. Spines in the ocean? Strange that this big and terrible force contains even within itself numerous threats to the small tide-pool dwellers and the fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish stacks. Glue them with honey, bees of the sea, tie them with kelp floss and let them rise to the surface as the hot vents bubble below. Once they kiss air, the honey magic dissolves into sand and the seagulls dive. Flat-bottomed boats show us only part of this process.
23:46 grid of spheres catches us as we land (we are still in the air) and swallows only the fittest among us (we are still in the air) and allows them to trade their muscle for gold and pearls and small coiled snakes (we are still in the air).
I am seeing so many lines everywhere and it’s due entirely to the activity in which I am currently partaking (i,e, writing here, lines on black, searing themselves into my eyeballs eyeholes eyes). Still nothing down below; above us, stars. A clear horizon, though whether the boundary holds cloud or earth I cannot tell. I am hoping in this moment and probably for a long time following that i am in fact a probe serving a greater system in need of experiential data. Handscape landscapes escape my notice for the vast majority of my waking moments but in this one they become salient and i watch the mountain ranges rise and fall with the anti-tectonic movement of will.
Back to the well, back to the cows. The cave is becoming, and you have flung yourself upward from the sacred pinwheel. Below, they low and shiver and cast their milky golden light right up into your being, piercing tiny holes in the bottoms of your feet and rushing up through your bloodstream until your eyes begin to dissolve.
There is a greek city in this text, when the eyes begin to drift.
A glow below. A fountain on the mountain. A spring in the mud, a head in the hole. What qualitatively makes something generally evocative as opposed to specifically evocative?
A philosophy: fuzzy determinism. I have written about this before, on a roof; when i return home i believe that i will revisit the space that brought me to that writing.
More philosophies: seek not with a specific target in mind. This is not true search, and the results will not bring what is desired. Rather, the process of seeking is a simple opening of oneself, however one decides to do so, with the aim of letting whatever flows flow and catching whatever seems to stick. The modern seeker only becomes more lost as his quests for vision become more and more focused. This is an observation as well as a warning. I will rephrase this at some point to sound less fkn pretentious.
Human differentiation is normal and advantageous; it is unreasonable to expect any space to cater to all types; it is unreasonable to pop the balloon bubble without first gathering the strings.
00:14 before this I was at 6660 words but nothing has been summoned from what I can tell
Except perhaps it has. A looming, skulking presence. A large head. Exists in the aisle of this aircraft. Apologies in advance to all affected. A yawn, a multi-layer dream cake of yawns, i am fading and the light is forming an x in my blind periphery. I yawn so hard that I see my own capillaries flash in green within the jellies of my eyes. A false horizon, a glow above. Hello, can you hear me? We echo in the snowstill canyon. Hello, is there anybody out there?
Brain is tired. Brain desires nourishment.
I am picturing the future bodies full of flaps and extra hearts and I wonder if the experience of being naked with one another will hold the same warmth and sanctity when the body is not just what it is. If not, that would be enough to convince me to hide this away and never speak of it; it has been entirely too long since I bathed in this particular flavor of wholeness. Bodies are inherently miraculous. They do what they do well. Everything feels more in place and wonderful when there are bodies bodying around me. Maybe no more tiny mouths. Maybe we are whole enough. When the cup is already full, pouring more in must push something out.
Cranberry juice? 00:31 Cranberry juice. Flight attendant says we’re touching down in just over an hour, which means we flew faster than anticipated, which means ???? Hair shimmering in my periphery it will feel good to stretch these legs and become my meat body again
Hoping that the sugar will energize, but I seem to have returned to my surroundings as a result of the process of obtaining the cranberry juice. Is it worth it to get back in? Always worth to get back in, the pool is calm and beckoning, inviting in its shallow turquoise impermanence. But i’m finding it difficult; the electricity has taken over; the motion comes with sleep and sleep comes with an inability to make my fingers do the things on the keyboard. Here is where the brain-machine interface comes in handy; leave it on while the subject is asleep and hope that nothing goes horribly horribly wrong. Strange visions of smooth robots, boats’ lights faint on the watery horizon. When your eyes begin to melt, you see, you don’t see, you see the boats’ lights faint on the sea, rocking to and fro, circling their anchor-drains with a lazy fervor only accessible between 1:30 and 3:30am. When your eyes begin to melt, you inexplicably begin to crave a vanilla or chocolate milkshake, and your particular flavor depends upon how good you were as a child and how relatively good you have become. The vanillae are spared the horror of watching their jellies liquify within their coveted dessert beverage, since the drink is white enough anyway; the others are not so lucky. The vanillae slurp the whole thing right up without ever knowing; the others are more cautious and some even resist the craving altogether out of parallel disgust. This does not make them stronger of wit and will, however; they know, viscerally, that they are missing out, but cannot best the psychological beast driven into existence by the prospect of slurping up one’s own jellies.
And now for a definition of “good” for all those concerned about the implications of the word on their future beverage endowment. Good lies in the puffer fish’s pineal gland and can only be extracted by those willing to look the spiky thing straight in the third eye. Good is processed much like cane sugar, except it is always handled with the thick, cold-proof gloves used to handle dry ice and the hearts of some particularly unfortunate souls; good is refined, and the good by-products are sent curling off into the distance, laughing on the wind that sweeps them up and away from everything. This, by the way, is why birds are so good; they too are swept up and away, and they often make contact with these byproducts. This is why we do not mess with the birds. They can do no harm.
Once the good has been refined, it is packaged in intention and shipped off to the candy store where some very worn ministers buy their “holy water”. Given as free samples to these sallow-faced droopy-jowled ministers, the good is then deposited on the baby’s head during whatever ceremony involves dunking the baby in the holy water. This is how babies get good. Unfortunately our peer review committee cannot verify that this is a complete explanation, since Harold here says that his parents were atheists and “never dunked him” even though he’s the goodest guy we’ve ever seen.
In the event that a baby proves to be too good, a lumbar puncture can help relieve some of the pressure within the central nervous system.
I feel that I am dreaming already. Technicolor blooming in my periphery. There is hardly any distinction between distinct and not here; the pixels are drifting; my heart could be beating along with the music and I would never know it. Green crayon drawings at the base of all things, a child-scribbled reality only in crude outlines. The black and white striped mammals work together now, ambling upward across my line of sight, endless parade of skunkracoonbadger on and on and on to eternity; rocks with mouse faces in fur transplanted on, or emergent, thoroughly alive; the concept of a basketball; folding, spinning paper shapes and a series of fishhooks hanging on twine. The process of closing my eyes brings about these visions moreso than keeping them closed or open; perhaps the transition from light to dark, from input to feedback, contributes to the effect. But I know not. I only know bagpipes and the preferential treatment of deer iin the backcountry. Here is where we begin to land; here is the end of this for now, while we descend wordlessly into the fog.