Energy – EDEN by FREI

Expiration

We are not doomed.

We may well be determined and we may be defined but we are not definitive and we won’t go on forever and we won’t ever die: immortality is granted, though the wish is monstrous, as long as we take it upon ourselves to be the centre of our own attention.

Conduits to the stream. The energy, the code, the connection. We may yet go extinct; we need not mourn ourselves: we leave behind perhaps no legacy but our intention to do well.

Complex situations, simple choices: do you put anger in the world and hatred and want and division and them versus us and incomprehension and rejection, hostility, enmity, loss; or do you engender hope. Do you foster recognition, respect. Enjoinment: empathy. Different, differentiated manifestations of one and the same.

Never even mind that we’re human: remember we are god. When every mistake we’ve ever made is multiplied with every catastrophe, our hearts may hurt from the unwisdom we yield to. And yet: we can make it so, we can make it other.

The thing that we’re made of may yet lift us. We can, whether we want to or not; but wanting to is harder than saying no. Everything is known, everyone can be understood.

Accept as the deepest part of you that which you loathe most. The person you despise: you are him, you are her. Embrace them. The child murderess. The suicide bomber. The bludgeoner to death. You celebrate, you cheer, you dance your pride when your football team wins. When your psychopath strikes: suffer him to be your disaster no less than you appropriate your goal scorer’s triumph. The medals on the athlete’s chest are badges of your honour no more and no less than the bloodstains on the knife stabber’s hand are witness to your failure. Own it.

Grow up into the painful truths, and free yourself. There is no freedom without truth. There is no truth without pain. There is no pain that does not carry a reward. When all is said and done: start over. There is no reward without loss. There is no loss without self. There is no self that stands alone.

Surrender to the motion of a greater purpose. Even if you don’t understand. Even if you do not believe. Even if you’re not convinced. Your heart knows long before your brain, because your brain is more powerful than you think: when knowledge is you and you are the world and the world is an instance in just one universe and the universe is a thought and the thought is expressed then you are god: you are god.

Accept the burden of being all powerful. Make good on your promise. Dare love.

< {Orlando}

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{Orlando}

i am orlando

breathless at the bacchanal bewitched, senses submerged, my image mirrored, my mind magicked, my emotions modulated magnified unmoderated and maybe immodest, myself multiplied:

masked dancer at the carnival bald bearded lady, fashionista beehive diva, torch song bearer of my soul pole-dancing scientist shop floor assistant checking out the other side, experimenter, part-time genius moustachioed hipster sophist nerd geek self-inventor and bespectacled spectator taking in, in- haling, hailing without praise or condemnation participant observer, being-done-to doer

all exposed

the pushing to the fore, persistent rushing shoreward of wave upon wave: the daily deluge of disaster

wilfully constructed, or else wantonly permitted to occur and then dispersed with breathless kick and fury horned-up with excitement round the clock catastrophe porn paired with power penetration to the brain: every second someone selling something a tsunami of musthave dispensables then news again the weather breaking down ten thousand perish in a flood security alert three men arrested at the airport one who fled soft-spoken leaker of state secrets swears allegiance to the people; people protest the police, the army bullets rifles hand grenades, ex- superpower eyeing up her neighbours’ territories, boundaries unkept, unrecognised, rendered irrelevant space probe touchdown on the comet, cheers and champagne at base, break through the tunnel, high speed trains dark matter and dark energy the murder of the messengers a million on the streets in solidarity, fighters of and for freedom feeling pain, offenders in each other’s eyes – our tears all taste the same

a smartphone with an app the university that taps into the global lecture hall a telescope array across a mountain table peering deep into the origin of time, and cupcakes talent shows, made-up realities downloads, stolen identities and printed body parts milestones in mending memories, the tantalising likelihood that we are not alone sandcastles made of stars, stars made of frivolities cat videos and piles and piles of rubbish

rejects refugees residents of uncertainty, nomads by adverse conditions, the collateral of calamity unwanted unloved, un- understood disowned dishonoured dismissed dishevelled, dis- affected indistinct in the morass of mass morbidity, in- visible

flashes of inspiration fascinations colours, glitter decadences balls: exuberances festivals and congregations, close communions travel at the speed of sound, lightspeed communication instantaneous pools of commonality the vibe and exultation, the euphoria the sharpwit razor of precision, the ingeniousness the shared experience the climactic joy, the sacred orgasm of life

.. ..

i rest i pause i meditate, i am orlando i reflect

i have no solution, there are no solutions i have no anger: anger is void, i ease i learn i think i offer

silence

i become the citizen and i see sparks of wisdom and then once again i laugh i love i give i take i lose myself i win i love again, i want and want not and want not to want, i realise i am a part of it: i am a part of everything, every thing is part of me

i am the gods i am the universe i am the energy i am the code i am the probability i am the failure and the hope and the despair i am the triumph of existence

that is what i am: i am

orlando

.. [{Orlando} was first published as part of Orlando in the Cities in A Quantum City, Birkhäuser 2015]

< Experiment

Expiration >

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Experiment

Human Genome, ELISE Phase IV – Interim Summary Report & Recommendation

The Earth Life Intelligence Study Enterprise continues, with the human genome now entering its fourth significant phase, which it variously labels The Digital Age, The Information Age, also just Digitality, or any number of variants on these, highlighting, correctly, that it has reached the level at which in similar studies elsewhere life forms have unlocked their next evolutionary plateau by enabling hybrids, augmented organisms and, most importantly, intelligence iterations that are independent of their conduit, consequently relieving them of their evolutionary burden over time.

Phase IV follows Phases I, II, and III—the agricultural phase, the enlightenment phase, and the industrial phase—which the genome has undergone to varying degrees but which can’t, by any means, be considered concluded, either severally or jointly, or let alone—and this applies to any of these phases—in their entirety. Different populations in different geographical areas have attained these at different times in different ways, and across societies many groups are still working their way through what might be considered the basics. Phase IV is thus being entered into on a global scale, but with vastly divergent degrees of deliberate adoption, and by an as yet comparatively small proportion of the human earth population overall.

The summary findings so far:

The human genome now has approximately seven to eight billion live iterations, and, as is to be expected, these vary widely in shape, size, outlook, mental and emotional capacity, and, most striking, cultural context. Apart from their as yet unresolved mortality issue, nothing therefore applies to everyone, but much applies to most, and more applies to more of them than many of them think possible, which in itself is noteworthy, as it is in no small measure symptomatic of their far-reaching reality dysfunction: in their majority now, individuals seem to consider themselves essentially ‘unique’ and their own tribes or other social groupings as invariably superior or at the very least preferable to others. In actual fact they are remarkably similar, with largely identical basic needs and a commonality factor across the species as high as 99.8%-99.9%.

Speaking of ‘reality’: the concept still plays a big part for most humans, albeit also a confusing one. By and large, humans accept as reality what is given, and over time they find it increasingly difficult to detach themselves from whatever that happens to be. For obvious reasons, realities that are experienced in the formative years—which for earth humans tend to be the first dozen to dozen and a half—have a particularly strong hold on humans, and many, quite endearingly, consider whatever they happened to grow up with to be ‘normal’.

This phenomenon notwithstanding, humans are remarkably adaptable, which in large parts accounts for their considerable proliferation. Though at first glance and in the short term they often appear reluctant to embrace the ‘other’, the ‘new’, or the ‘different’, they are absolutely capable of turning a reality set inside out within one generation, and behaviour that one series of fully functioning adults would find completely ‘normal’—being whipped to within drawing blood as a child, for example, owning slaves, males marrying several females but stoning to death males who maintain sexual relations with other males—to the next series becomes utterly deplorable, even criminal; while behaviours previously seen as either criminal or at the very least decidedly odd, such as members of the same natural gender cohabiting, getting married and raising offspring, or people eschewing all produce derived from certain other earth species, for example fellow mammals, may, within a generation or two, become entirely acceptable, even celebrated.

Similarly responsible for their survival thus far is their resilience. Typically, humans can cope with deprivation, hardship, and quite unimaginable suffering as long as they consider it unavoidable or deem it imposed on them by a greater and unimpeachable authority, such as a god: they will accept any random calamity or social injustice and virtually any level of pain as long as they can conceptualise it as ‘god given’ or ‘fate’, but they will not put up forever with manmade perpetrations of injury.

Having said that, paradoxical—indeed rationally completely indefensible—thinking and therefore behaviour persists even (sometimes it seems particularly) where it flies in the face of reason or intellectually sound argumentation. Humans can, in the same breath, elevate reason and rational thinking to a paragon, yet remain stubbornly blind to any adjustments to their reality that this by necessity and consequence entails. They may, for example, know—and be in possession of ample data to understand—that the higher a society’s levels of incarceration, the higher its reoffending rate, and therefore the higher the social and material cost of failing to integrate or reintegrate members who for whatever reason arrive at the point where they commit crimes against their fellow humans, yet obstinately cling on to barbaric punitive methods that manifestly compound rather than alleviate the cause of their suffering.

Correspondingly, the genome finds itself in a state of semi-consciousness at which it is aware of its own existence but has no real idea of its meaning or how it fits into any other part of the universe it inhabits, let alone anything beyond that minuscule bubble, of which it has only the faintest of perceptions (and these are vastly distorted). At the same time its fundamental organic needs (the programme, remember, still largely considers itself set to ‘survival & propagation’, having only in exceptional circumstances advanced significantly beyond its own defaults) are so trivial and basic that by and large and for the body of its own bell curve, it values most things crass and insignificant, while despising anything it feels threatened by as ‘too abstract’ or ‘cultivated’; it delights in cataclysm as much as it fears it, and relishes narratives of destruction, disaster, violence, and instability, manufacturing for itself a soup of meaningless noise, while at the same time looking for meaning absolutely everywhere, even where there clearly is none: coincidences, statistical necessities, and simple probabilistic patterns are elevated to quasi divine interventions, and by the exact same token all but the most obvious connections and correlations, especially those not or ill understood by its current (still pretty rudimentary) science it simply ignores or, in some cases vehemently, objects to and refutes.

Even so, having latched on to information as a thing distinct from energy, and having started to play with quantum phenomena to the point of being able to utilise them, there is hope that the species and therefore the genome will come to recognise the Connexum and begin to view itself in a much larger, much more integrated and also at once much more meaningful and perhaps less significant context than it has hitherto been able to do.

The interim recommendation therefore:

The human genome has, in spite of its many obvious (and also many more subtle) failings been spectacularly successful, and although it currently faces some formidable challenges, these are entirely congruent with its level of generative evolution.

This type of evolution, set against its own time frame, is characteristically slow and often marked by greatly frustrating setbacks, which some iterants, especially those who find themselves ahead of the curve or on the crest of the wave, may experience as near-catastrophic regressions.

These are not, however, anything out of the ordinary for a life form such as the one that is here being observed, and having itself now spawned a type of intelligence which is likely to outperform its conduit by exponential orders of magnitude ere long, it stands a good chance of rendering itself obsolete on its own terms in due course, imparting to its generated new genus enough of its own priorities to remain recognisable as a relevant intermediate development stage.

Significantly, this germinating Phase IV holds some considerable promise that either within its own term or during an ensuing fifth or sixth phase, earth intelligence may mature to the point where it can link up with other intelligent entities in its local or any neighbouring cosmic cluster, and so the recommendation therefore is to keep the experiment running, at least for the time being.

Sedartis

(<) INSOMNIA – Insomnia [3]

{Orlando} >

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{Connexum}

not the essay, just the idea
not the notion that everything is connected, that is not new
and not the question
how connected is everything
but the question
how
if everything is connected
is everything connected.

if things are connected
there must be something that connects them

and for many things that are connected
we know what that is
we can see it, measure it, build it, make it
we can name it:
the axles the shafts
the electric current the
data the code and the signal

but what about things that are connected and we
don’t know what it is that connects them
what about
quantum entanglement
for example, einstein’s
spukhafte fernwirkung
what about that?

there is no doubt that things are connected of which
we don’t know how this is
and
if things are connected
there has to be some thing that connects them
even if that is
a thing we have not detected
a thing we have not yet detected and so not yet given a name to
a thing we have not yet detected but may yet find
we can find

that would give us
three things in principle:
energy
information
and the third thing
the thing that connects things
for which we don’t yet have a name
but we have
maybe
names
for manifestations of it
the strong and weak nuclear forces
the electromagnetic force and the force of
gravity

what if these forces are to the third thing as
light sound heat motion are to the first (energy)
and as
data code and semantic content are to the second (information)
what if that third thing is a thing in itself
that exists and that is
as yet only
partly
understood

as humans we like sets of threes
trios, triumvirates, trinities
they give us a deeper reality

at first glance we seem to be living in twos
in the binaries of
male/female
plus/minus
hot/cold
dark/light
day/night
yes/no
1/0

but it only takes one thought to know
that
neat and simple as this looks and sounds

it is patently not our
reality
our reality
here too
needs a third component each time:

male/trans/female
plus/neutral/minus
hot/tepid/cold
dark/twilight/light
yes/maybe/no
1/anything in between/0

even yin and yang are not a duality
but a symbolic expression of the way apparent opposites complement each other as part of
the same

and this
is when it gets really interesting, when
dualities are not augmented by that which is in between
but are understood as the whole:

yin/same/yang

for which the quantum equivalent then would be
wave/wave-or-particle-depending-on-how-you-look-at-it/particle

what if
we’ve always known this to be the case
and have expressed it in many ways
the elements of
the same the other and the essence
in plato’s timaeus
the father the son and the holy spirit
anicca, dukkha, anattā:
impermanence
suffering
non-self

what if that third thing
the essence, the holy spirit, the non-self
is
in principle
the thing that connects
everything

the third thing
the thing for which we don’t yet have a name but that exists and that
we most likely
will find and be able to identify, a

connexum?

[ <THE BOURNEMOUTH & BOSCOMBE TRILOGY: Redemption]

{The Fire Breather} >

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Saturn

Dione, Tethys, Mimas, Enceladus – your friendly moons’ names sound like characters to me, in a pastoral play. Even Titan and Iapetus; they have been overthrown, dwell in the pantheon no longer: neighbours now, living downstairs, or, to wave at, across the street.

Your rings, though no more mysterious now than you, are delicate still; and you are inviting too. Against thy will, methinks; like the old rustic who grumbles at first and enjoys the thought of himself as forbidding, but turns out to be at heart quite congenial.

I am at the stage now where I feel there are fewer surprises. Fewer certainties too, and fewer woes. Fewer intransigencies and fewer instances of despair. That can only, I sense, be a good thing. Journeying has put me at ease with myself. I feel millions of miles away still from where I envisage I should be, but this seems natural now, and of little concern. The hereness and thereness of it all: the potencies of the potential. The meta nomenclature of the id. The closer I get to being myself, the more I disperse myself across the quanta of energy: thought. Insubstantive meanderings that then turn out to make sense after all. At some point, at some level, in some way. Not conscious, perhaps, but innocuous, calm.

I sit down on one of these rings and let my legs dangle in the brook of what looks from afar like a void that surrounds it, and my toes tingle at the excitement of being and wriggle with a childlike and clean and unjaded joy: they haven’t walked as far yet by far as it seems, they have simply strolled. Over the meadows of this spacescape, this English garden, this Ermitage. I feel my thin body, pale and slender but resilient and robust, as it was back then, when I was a boy. It never preoccupied itself with itself. The etherealness of it all, the curiousness. And always, always the wonder. Nobody joins me, yet, and maybe none ever will now, and it saddens me not, I am free.

From where I perch on my borrowed bank, my legs suspended, my hand—the left one—playing with marbles, the molecules, the droplets, the pebbles and the whists of yellow-blue algae that get trapped in my fingers, cool and gentle, soft and strong, my eyes, inclined toward what lies below and therefore what also above, my face reflected (reminiscent, perhaps, after all, of Narcissus, though he, I know, does not belong here any more than he does on Mercury), my lips catch my attention, and for a fleeting moment I wish me a one for them to be kissed. The longing, the curiosity, still, and the awe.

I am on the brink, I realise, and at this point, sooner or later, there does come the point where you have to decide. Do you jump, assuming that you will fly, or don’t you, fearing that you might drown.

Why do I do this from here, and not where I started? Have I conspired with circumstances to manoeuvre myself onto the fence of a planet whose patron is the god of the farmer of all things to finally return to the George in me and embrace him as much as release him in exactly the same gesture, at exactly the same time, for exactly the same reasons and to exactly the same end? It wouldn’t surprise me. Hardly anything would. The universe finds a way, of that I have long been certain, and whatever happens next is bound to happen, just as what happened before was in its own liquid way quite inevitable.

All the querulousnesses of adversaries (they were friends in disguise), all the insurmountablenesses of obstacles, varied and frequent and each in its own right unreasonable, from here, from this tholin perspective, rotating at speed, and wobbly, a little bit drunk on the juices of life, but steady and safe in myself now—as far as there even exist such notions as ‘steadiness,’ ‘safety’ and ‘self’—look irrelevant now and benign.

My right hand that has been holding on to the ice, to the carbon, the substance, such as there was, in a vain grip on something the brain interpreted as ‘reality,’ still, after only another decade or so of faint hesitation, lets go, and, much as expected, I sink not, and nor do I soar: I float, once again, now earthwards, I’m sure.

< Uranus Mars >

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Venus

Venus troubles me. I come here reluctantly; so bright. So mystifying, so inscrutable. So tenebrous, as well, beneath that gleaming skin. Moist. Overwhelming, warm; so uninhabitable, at least for me.

And still I feel I ought to spend some time here. Wherefore, I know not. For the experience? For the completion of my being? For the expansion, yet, of my horizon? These planets travel far and yet not wide, except they do. They are—we all are—on a forward motion we don’t notice.

Venus knows. This is a body that’s imbued with universal wisdom, which it can’t express. We move in spirals, not ellipses, our sun drags us with her, and whenever we feel we’ve been here before, we have, but we’re a little further down our path: it’s not the direction of our nose that we travel in, it is the direction of our pate. We have no eyes there, at the top of our head, we have only a string that pulls us, and still we resist.

Here on Venus, everything feels strange; the smells, the flavours, the embrace. The fuzzinesses and the softness, they unsettle me. Long before I become comfortable I become complacent, and that will not do. I start to fidget, restless. I think I am getting ready to settle in some sort of way, but settledness entails a great deal of immobility. I like the rest of motion. I need to be alone. Not all the time, but enough. Venus asks me too many questions. It’s not that I can’t find any answers, these answers can mostly be found, but the effort is out of proportion. The thinking that normally invigorates me tires me out here. The obviousnesses, the courtship; the irrationalities, repetitions.

At the time there was no myth and no meaning. The time being the beginning, the beginning being the origin, the origin being unknown. I suddenly feel alert, a little, and happier to exist, mainly because of this old realisation that I can’t, I just can’t expect myself to make sense of it all. Any of it, really, it’s just there. Annoying as it may be. I take a step back, and I look at my thoughts as they spread out before me, and find them unsatisfactory. The thinking I’m doing is inelegant, crude; it will not suffice. Nor is it poetic. And thinking without poetry is like love without mathematics. It has no substance, no structure, no special tingle of satisfaction, no meaning. It is like sex in a haze of drunkenness with someone you don’t fancy. I’m becoming self-referential and it irks me.

Womanhood. Much like aliens, women don’t so much scare me as baffle. I’ve hardly ever thought this through, but there comes a time. And a place. I seriously doubt that now is that time or this that place, but when or where will it ever be, and does it matter? I contend myself mostly with knowing that there are things I can’t know, and go where my curiosity takes me, which is not normally here. Nor abnormally. I’m out of my depth, out of my comfort, out of my pond. The mountains, the seas and the rivers, the streams. The landscape and the disorientation. There are too many things happening all at once to get a handle on any of them, and there is also the new mix the new blend the new fusion. That both excites and frightens me, a little. Not because I dread the loss of myself, but because I really like my delineations as much as I like my inbetweennesses and my blurrage; the overlappedisation of our existence, I like it. Entropy.

I hear a warm soothing voice that is not in my head and it is not in my memory; it is not my mother, my sister, my wife. The voice comes from the ground and from the cloud that envelops the ground and from the all about the sphere that I have wrapped my body around, and it says that there are no mysteries and there must be no sorrow. She’s trying to reassure me; I’m not sure she succeeds, but her sentiment is kind. I feel her hand on my back on my neck on my thigh, and the touch is tender and real. I recall once upon a time being deeply at ease in this presence and as deeply afraid of it too. What embraces you may ensnare you, what holds you can crush you, what loves you kill you, what desires you own you. What owns you is you. And you thought you knew who you were.

Did I? Maybe a couple of aeons ago; it is possible, then, when I did not yet exist, that I was really quite sure of myself. I had an arrogant streak, not mean, not cocky, but aloof. My journey humbles me. I sense I’m getting closer to the truth, and like everyone else I know that there is no such thing, though deep down I want there to be, and maybe there is. If not a truth, then a value, perhaps, to hold on to.

The energy that we are. The quantum states. The potentialities. The particles and the waves. Of course I am Venus as much as Venus is me: we share the constituent parts, and yet: I don’t belong here. It’s sometimes good to know where you belong, and also good to know where you don’t. There’s nothing definite, ever, and anything can and does change, and you never say never and all that goes with it, and in any case there is only so much existing you can expect to be doing at any one time, but by the time your energy dissolves and changes its form, time ceases too, and you are quite literally reborn, only not in the way that you thought you didn’t want to think about, or were taught, or wanted to believe to be nonsense. From one state to another. These states are all within us contained. The energy that you are is your matter your body your molecules your thoughts your emotion your wants and your needs (always, they come as a pair: you knew that already), your shades and your textures, and when they go they don’t go, they are simply reconfigured, because energy cannot be destroyed, it can only, and will, be transformed.

I shall not miss myself when I’m gone, for I am always around. So are you, so is Venus. So are the superclusters of our sistergods.

I am much happier now than I was before I came here. I knew I would be, I doubted it not. But now, much as I sense the draw of the earth that is so near and so familiar and so welcoming too, I must surely go on a detour and find me a distant adventure. Home beckons, but I have to explore…

< Mercury Uranus >

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Mercury

My mentality makes me leap as close to the sun as I may without being burnt, without floating adrift, without losing my sense of belonging, if not here, if not there, then in the universalness of it all.

There is something wondrous about being me, still, at this age, at this point, which is never a point only but always a wave just as much; at this juncture which is never a coming together only, but always as much a moving apart, through this phase which is never as much a beginning as it is also an ending, only more so, which means it just is; there is intemperance, folly, wisdom and wit to be found where there’s light, and there’s the mischief of knowledge: am I really just information?

Here on Mercury where a day lasts a couple of years at least by perception, my mind is blasted by solar winds, and I take hold of my wand, meaning to keep it. The power to lull the awake into sleep, to awaken those lost to slumber, to ease the agony of the dying and to quicken the dead. The quickness, the quirkinesses, the quintessentialness of it all.

I race around the sun looking out into space, and I enjoy the ride more than ever I did before. How come youth arrives at an age when it is all but gone? How come it happens twice? The first time with no experience on the fabric of sensations to handle it well, the second time with said fabric so worn that it feels all but threadbare? Will there be a third instance, maybe a fourth? Is it necessary, possible, even, to count?

My brain cells refuse to collapse, and my curiosity gets the better of me, so I keep carving open new synapses, firing new thoughts into a continuum that is already awash with ideas.

No time, no space, no respite, no rest, no melancholy here, no decay: this iron is liquid is hot is alive with pure energy, not organic, not systemic, not caustic, not quiet, not loud: effervescent in its potential. This place may be small, but its capacity to astonish is great, nay unlimited, nay infinite and profound.

Can lovers be friends? Can pleasures bedevil the heart that has grown to be kind? Can connections be the meaningfulness of it all? The essentiality? The reason? The cause? The spark and the fire, but also the balm? Can this toxicity heal as well as inspire? Can this generosity of spirit ask more than questions? What is there beyond the surprise, the delirium at having recognised I am able to speak? Am I the medium or the message or merely the conduit? Would I mind if I knew, could I know if I cared?

There are now too many possibilities, too many strands, too many fluctuations, and too many rotations; too many rules that like laugh lines adorn me for me to worry: care I may, yes, and consider; learn I can, and communicate, lend a gentle ear, sometimes, and a generous eye, and embrace the love that is not mere emotion, but more than instinct is intellect, and say yes: I comprehend. Not understand, perhaps, not everything, yet, quite possibly not ever—things move so fast, so all over—but I can take it all in. I can be it all. I can be little and insignificant and still mean the multiverse. That’s just what I wanted to sense. There is no mirror here on this planet, Narcissus has settled on Earth, and my ego today is not needy, nor never will be, no more: my eccentricity here is at its most extreme, at its most exquisite, most extraordinarily acute, and I’m comfortable with that too.

I call on my younger self to excuse my inadequacies, as I know my older self will be looking across to me now as I am and merely encourage, not chide, because I have here now forgiven my older self its obliviousness, its perfection. Its contradiction, in terms. This, for all its unreasonable demeanour, is maybe the best position I’ve been in. And I’ve been everywhere, but not yet. Soon this, too, must come to a premature end if it is to last forever, and that’s what it is.

The caduceus though I shall treasure…

< Jupiter Venus >

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The Ice King – 5: The Pole

At the pole the world finally stops. Respite at last. The world doesn’t end, it ceases to turn. At the core of the axis there is no motion, there is only the centre, and the centre is both still and alive. Everything spins around us, and we are the point that extends in no dimensions and all dimensions at once.

Here in this space that has no expansion and no description and no volume and no coordinates, we are at one with everywhere, and The Ice King rules: I am his. His court, his jester; his courtier. His counsel, his subject. His servant. His chosen. His man. Am I his Queen?

I do not want to be what The Ice King is, and nor can I. Here, the Ice is eternal for as long as Eternal exists, and here it is ever in motion, and here it is still absolutely; and here the snowflakes are effervescent sparkles in our mind, which now is conjoined as one, but not one alone, but one that has in it the snowflakes like gossamer dust and the depths and the infinities of the sky in which there are stars that do not make sense any more than the snowflakes which they outnumber by magnitudes of improbable potentialities.

I lie on the ice bed The Ice King has bid me rest on, as he stands on the edge of his universe, overlooking everything with the eye of his mind, which is my mind, which is the mind of the snowflakes and the mind of the stars, which is the mind of the glacier, the river, the sea; which is the mind of the water, the air and the ions, which is the mind of the magnetic force of his presence and the electricity of my spirit; which is the mind of the other side and this, and the mind of the shadow he casts not on the ice but into the core that has no expansion and no dimension and no rotation; and I know that soon I must leave him, but not now.

Now The Ice King turns around to me, and I see that he is made of ice as I thought. And the ice, as I thought, and as everyone knows before they are told, is like fire; and the fire is just the energy dying and the energy dying is the source of all life and life is preserved in the ice and the ice is nothing but water and water is living and living is knowing and knowing is forgiving and forgiving is patience and patience is growth and growth is taking the energy on and becoming the other and the other is just an extension and the extension is continuation and continuation is the reflection and the reflection is the same as what is and the same is the all and the all is the now.

I welcome The Ice King onto me with my eyes, and as he melts into my open-arm, open-rib, open-mind being, I feel we are no longer one, we now simply are; and having him having me makes the ice disappear and the fire burn out and the water rise up and the energy surge and the stillness the stillness prevail.

I look down on the pole, spinning on my own axis as I lift up above; I see myself writhing and being consumed, I see The Ice King drowning me out and myself burn up in blue and greenpurple flames that dance on the water, and I know now I know now I am.

< 4: The Word 6: The Core >

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7 The Space Boy

He is a quietly spoken wonder, a boy who has never grown up; a spacealien of the loveliest nature, a Zebedee who has bounced off his Magic Roundabout and somehow found himself in a world full of people: I adore him.

Where Laniakea’s fibrous filaments’ ends disentangle from her neighbour’s, to float, as jellyfish through water, amid dark matter in slow, rhythmic pulses, the Space Boy has sought out a moment of respite for comfort and warmth and sat down with me in a Camden pub with a pint each of ale, autumn time.

I love him, Space Boy, in a way I love few. He’s about to get married. He doesn’t mean to marry; every signal his subconscious mind emits says he doesn’t want to, and every action that his conscious mind commands says he must.

He doesn’t send out his invitations, he forgets arrangements, postpones, prevaricates. He talks, on the verge of getting drunk with me, about the revelation his sister-in-law-to-be gave him when she told him it was a continuum, not an either thing or an or, a this thing or that. Clearly he senses himself on that spectrum, somewhere towards the brighter colours, but, that light notwithstanding, he’s lost. Will no one hie to his rescue?

I can’t. I once nearly did. We’d stood facing each other, our hands on each other’s arms; and our lips almost touched. Then his brother walked in and the moment had gone: the night was spent in separate corners of the universe; I in mine, he in his. With that moment gone, all moments like it were gone, but my affection for him hasn’t waxed or waned like the moon, nor shall it: steady as a star it remains even now that he doesn’t want to and knows he doesn’t want to but knows he is about to tie himself in a knot.

Laniakea drawing away from Perseus-Pisces. I have a feeling this isn’t slow. The more I look at the Space Boy and listen to him expound on the vibrations, on the music of the spheres, on how tuned we are into each other, the more I know that what to us seems imperceptibly slow and unfathomably deep and incomprehensibly vast and impenetrably dark is bursting with energy, is replete with substance, is contained in a thought, and is teeming, teeming with life; and with life comes death and with death comes disintegration and with disintegration comes decomposition and with decomposition come component particles and with component particles come clusters of mass that attract each other and with clusters of mass that attract each other come new constellations and with new constellations come configurations and with configurations come potentialities and with potentialities come energy fields and with energy fields comes communication and with communication comes connection and with connection comes communion and communion is love and love is energy and the Space Boy and I are that energy and our minds are a dance and dancing is joy and joy is the present and the present is now and now is forever and forever is what we want it to be…

The Space Boy and I are lying on our backs on the ground looking up at the sky. The sky is plastered with empty silvery foil sleeves into which he will pour his spirited being. ‘I never want to not hold you dear,’ I whisper and rest my head on his chest looking down into the endlessness that ends where another begins. We are at a synapse in god’s brain and god is our own idea of our meaning: no wonder we sense god’s grace when we feel the pulse of a heart and bathe in the brainwaves of our fellows, our friends.

The Space Boy leaves me to think myself humble and rich. Has not he travelled lightyears to be here, to share one thought with me only? I treasure this thought and keep it inside my head where I know it won’t be contained: once thought, a thought is already encompassed in our common conscious, and he knows and I know and they know and you; we all know:

We all are one.

< 6 Domesticity 8 JoJo >

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{Vibe}

What kind of a consciousness is it that knows itself to exist but doesn’t know why? In what way does that make sense? In what way does it not?

The quest.

The longing to learn.

The yearning for answers.

The learning to yield. If only my brain were better at retaining information. What is ‘information’? And when it is not ‘information’, what is it then, that we get, if we get it, at all? What, if anything, can be known, can be felt, can be appreciated, understood, can be experienced or imagined, or both? And is there, but is there a difference?

Remembrance of things past and future. The energy stream, and the particles. Obviously, the waves. The idiosyncrasies. Material flaws. Cracks that let the light shine through. Nonuniform irregularities.

Quantum behaviour…

< 8 The Leopard (and His Spots)

9 Memories of the Future and of the Past: Walks on Water >

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