Bones To Bury

…in the sea and I floated and the wind took me somewhere, I didn’t know where, but I felt its power motivating me across a great distance. This great ocean. And I felt that the ocean was existence, and that I was floating on top of it, and I looked down when the sun shone a radiance that opened up the crystal depths to me, and showed the life and drama and colour and movement of this world like a spotlight.

And I imagined the places that maybe I’d reach were I heading in this way or that. Glorious beaches on deserted islands, or cosmopolitan far-off cities, or arrive at the shore of the Easter Isle and be greeted with sombre stone faces.

regarding a worm in an apple

“the girl didn’t protest for she’d heard said in jest,
to ingest half a worm is quite bad,
so if a bite of an apple one has one should hope,
all the worm’s in the piece one still had”

another fish inspired thing… unfinished

Lenny the Sturgeon was a medical Surgeon
who worked with the greatest of skill,
though his feet on the ground, as it were;
after hours he would knock back some beers with the krill.

and each patient he lost was test’ment against
those folks who would often maintain,
that it’s fine to eat fish
of the sea for you see they simply do not feel pain.

Pepper can hear little other than the sound of his own heart as he swims deeper. Deeper, down towards the ghostly shadow of the ancient vessel. His excitement enhances his awareness of the world, and as he descends he can feel the subtle gesturing of eddies within the water, and an almost imperceptible change in temperature.

A rent in its long-rusted side offers Pepper access to the ships bowels. The darkness inside casts a silent reverence on Pepper, like that of a mourner at a graveyard. Pepper shivers. Before entering, Pepper pauses to fortify his courage - there was no telling what he may find within… For an instant Pepper considers leaving. Respecting the sanctity of this underwater tomb.

“No.” He whispers to the darkness, fixing his will on the task. “I must be brave.”

Pepper slowly enters the ship. For the moment it takes his eyes to adjust, he dumbly blinks into the darkness. Then he starts at the contents; a cloud of debris languidly floats throughout the room but, more importantly, in the centre there lies a large chest. A chest! Pepper almost laughs out loud at the cliché, yet he is eager to check the contents. In reaching the chest he would’ve hardly noticed passing the sad artefacts of a last doomed voyage but, strangely, there are none.

The lid of the chest is lifted easily, and Pepper lets out an involuntary sigh of pleasure at the sight.

“Gold.” His lips mouth the words without sound.

His brain is an explosion of thoughts. The chest had revealed its vividly painted plastic inset like a proud fisherman displays his trawl, the yellow/orange reflects in Peppers eyes. With a sudden flurry of excitement, Pepper the Goldfish exits the sunken ship…

Peppers mind is racing as he slips out of the model sunken ship. All that money! Where could he begin to think of how to spend it? Fantasies are coming thick and fast, and it takes much effort to settle his mind enough to concentrate on just one at a time. His eyes are glazed as he considers the possibilities;

“I could buy that record player and those few jazz LPs I’ve had my eye on.” He volunteers to himself cautiously. Then he has a new thought; Imagine his friends’ amazement, admiration and envy at him pulling up in a brand-new Bentley, with that Cardinal from Jeff’s Exotic Fish seated beside him… but how would he afford it? Pepper has no idea… His thoughts become sombre and he swims dejectedly through some Anubias and down towards an interesting sunken ship he’s just noticed. As he headed towards it his heart begins racing with excitement…

I have - suspected catalyst to my eventual mental and physical decline - a very selective memory. Until recently I was convinced that I had simply a very bad memory, and would offer the idea up as fodder to help constitute the anecdotal hodge-podge that is peoples’ image of me.  The advantage of being known to have a poor memory I imagined to be similar to those of being under the age of five, or being suspected of senility; no hard feelings over missed anniversaries, or forgotten deep-and-meaningfuls and the like. However, it seems everyone I tell has their own memory problems, and never retain knowledge of my handicap. People seem to delight in (to my mind crudely over-affected) surprise at the nature and girth of things I am capable of forgetting. “But how can you forget that THAT?!?” They say with their hands scandalously poised in front of their agape mouths.

Of course now I know better. I’ve noticed a trend that manifests itself most significantly when casting my mind back nostalgically to lost loves; I remember the love, not the loss. This has led me to near disaster, threatened in the form of drunken late-night calls to people who - although remembered warmly as yesteryear-lovers - are in fact very contemporary haters. Thusly so I am pressed to reassess my mnemonic malady. Indeed, I remember the walks on the beach vividly, the near kisses and soft moments are etched into my being, and how could I forget her affectionate name for me, whispered cooingly beneath a starry sky. And in the end I suppose it’s for the best that the miscarriage of such a love-affair should not haunt me, though I can’t help thinking - how will I learn?

I think she always thought I was lying to her, as I lay beside her post-coitus. I was squeamish, I was furtive and elusive. I’d learned my lessons from the monstrous moral conflicts one’s mind is thrown into while the body concerns itself with the soft beauty of the flesh.

Sometimes our personal sense of time turns into a strange and untamed creature. It slinks and tip-toes, poises with feline intensity before pouncing onus with claws and teeth actuating in furious mortal urgency. Ironically, having nothing to do gives one great sense of this urgency. I had passed through my life so far with the institutionalised mantra of deferment; today I shall prepare, and tomorrow I shall do. Ah we owe our fathers’ religious convictions on this one. Our life in the material world is but spiritual training for the life of eternity. Against eternity, how insignificant this octogenarian life seems.

I could teach you a thousand ways to sail a boat, and you could teach others the same. Live knowledge is fundamentally organic; only strong survives. But like our evolved life, these memes need to accomplish anything outside of their own existence. They need but forward their own survival. Religion holds hooks and barbs to our minds, and holds on with fitful tenacity while it bears its children to us. God will damn the non-believers…

The sensible totality of modern society rests on the concept of deferment. We sell our immediate for the sake of our future. We save and slave (the last echoes of Marx’s call dies in the hubbub of advertisers telling us what we are saving up FOR), and perhaps finally rest with a legacy of greenbacks and fantastic financial training to our children. The continuation of a survival instinct.

I have nothing to do. God knows that the deep-routed sense of teleology, of riding out my life to its intended end - has driven me to search for more preparation, plan my investment into academia, and alienated myself from the terrifying immediacy of the now through work.

Defer my life to other people. An atheistic dolls-house of omnipotent actors. If God, in his INFINITE wisdom, cannot judge me, then in a anti-biblical back-flip I must ask all others to judge me. My God is other people, and thus, as Sartre notes, hell must also be other people.

How to kill this God without solipsism? Anti-hegelianism? The world is me. I am slave to my own master… Why don’t I understand my own intercourse? The touch of the right hand on the left is misunderstood. The flesh of the world unite in an orgy of spastic undulations and moaning chasms (the groans and noises not misunderstood, but simply expressing a more fundamental, essential beingness. )

_________________

The great Triumph of man over nature represents a schism of duality similar to the triumph of mind over body. Patrick had no body, and as such was the only pure man in existence. Of course I say man as a genatype, talking of humankind, but indeed I mean to say man in the masculine sense. Woman is tied to the earth through her womb, and in the act of creating life she is sickeningly (and inextricably) linked to nature. It was a side-effect of his refined condition that Patrick could not communicate with women.

Without a body, Patrick had to be content with visiting upon other men the flashes of rational logic and inspiration that were his very essence. I would say “float”, or “visit”, as Patrick did not find himself in communication with the same man all the time, but in fact without a body this did not really express his mode of transmittion throughout the world. In fact, space does not effect the mind at all; rationality is not limitted to bordes of body or air, or even planets and stars. In actuality, Patrick existed in all places at once, and it was only a matter of timing as to when his influence would be felt.

Though women could not know him, and would never be able to understand him, by and bymany began to love him, via the stories and testimonies men told of him.

I MAY BE BEAUTIFUL BUT YOU MY FRIEND ARE HANDSOME

So how much like narcissism is love? I admire the traits of another and through a love affair start to personify some of them in myself.

_______________

It was almost nine, but the minutes seemed to be slowing down. The last hour or so always went so slow, and the sight of the other officers leaving one by one was torturous. Bediéne was growing restless too; his tail wagged less readily, and occasionally, he yawned. I didn’t blame him; I was pretty much exhausted, and he didn’t have the benefit of coffee or doughnuts.
The rushhour bedlam was well over, and the station was now quiet but for the occasional intercity from Holland or Germany. A few dazed foreignes stood shell-shocked next to their luggage, clasping Paris city guides or ink-scrawled itineraries like blankies.
Of course energy tended to return after a warm brandy and relaxing dinner.

There was something peculiar about the platform clocks. For a reason totally alien to the viewers, the clock second hand would take a few seconds less than 60 to do a rotation. The hand would then stop entirely, and after a moments pause, the minute hand would progress. It was uncanny, and it drove anyone waiting on it mad. I’d been told it was an idiosyncrasy of the clock mechanism, but I always suspected it was someone’s idea of a joke.

Gonzales napped

So there is a mathematical pattern or rhythm that can be found in writing? A degree of thought and concentration concluding in a perfect balance between words and meaning? Where does it come from? The only vaguely mathematical relationships come from the binaries of transcendental rhetoric. Though the relationships of words and real-world entities are fuzzy and can be thought of using maths of neural-network connections and brain firings. As with neurons the relationships of words is still very important. Our understanding can be captured in the neural-network of our words. The cloud that floats and harbours these semantics. It is a shame that neural networks are no longer a buzz word. Perhaps being shunned along with post-structuralism.

How does the cloud of my meaning-relationships engage with that of someone else’s? Are others’ single entities (or more abstracted entities that the whole at the very least, and none of their meanings directly come into play with ours? No. The meanings that we hold exist through others. Especially as they exist in the form of human language. We negotiate our connections to symbols in the world like planets orbiting stars. The other bodies in relationship to the semiotic effect the way we move around them. Do these meanings exist in more than one instance, distanced by discursive use? Well they can’t actually be real, otherwise we are talking of Platonic classes and transcendentalism.

Space -) find something amusing? NO space is devoid of meaning. No, space is the space between meaning. No, space means technology.

My best bet is lyrical, poetic philosophy. Stay clear.

Right now we are flying. You are made of feather and I am made of flapping, and there is no wax involved. The sun is nothing but illumination, and even the hottest of household range-cookers could not reach us here.

Now we are sailing across the ocean. You are feeling the wind in your hair and I am telling you where we shall find the botty. (ed: well close enough - booty.)

Now there is something mystical about the way you wear your wizard costume - sparks fly.

Now you are holding the metal handle of an antique revolver in one hand, and the collar of that son-of-a-bitch Patrick in the other. He’s telling the truth and you can finally be sure he’s learned his lesson and will become a better person for it.

Now we’re crying by the fire in our old leather armchair. The whisky is glowing like the smile of a lost lvoer from decases ago. Twice as intoxicating.

“But I fell blindingly in love with you!” Would never happen. Who would say such a thing?

“I think you’re really groovy.” He’d fallen blindingly in love with her.

“You sound like an old hippy.” The declaration made her uncomfortable.

The father , the son, and the ghost. The father the on and the holy ghost just think of it. The cycle of life from Buddhism. In fact it’s the son, the father, becomes the ghost. Or maybe the ghost of intention, the ghost of thought, the conception of life through the ghost of your parents’ thought. The initial spark of bodiless influence creating the son. The child of though. The product of thought. The neonascent. The non-man, the yet-to-be fully realized. Once more it takes the ghost to turn the son into the father. The recursion of a system. The fractal. Look deeper, and the father is the son is the ghost. This is where Christians get vertigo. They fob us off with Adam, then apologies for God, the father of it all. In the end the man creates the ghost of God, so the cycle continues. Try to deny it, and Shiva will dance on your grave while the plants grow around you.

Father, producer of ideas; the father of modern science. Spills his seminal concepts (conceptions) into the world, and causes anguish for the transcendental Christians who struggle to keep the Eternal Truth from changing.

Forget it. He joked. Remove the obviousness of our intentions with sarcasm and jest. Defend thyself, for death is explicability! The joke is always conflict - incongruity, double-entendre, confusion. Where is the drama? Jokes that involve emotional content. “Of course I love you. Oh no, I just hang around here cause I’ve got nothing better to do.” “The gun’s not loaded. When I pull the trigger a flag will pop out saying Bang! and you’ll get to go home.” The joker holds reality in contempt, or the joker holds your reality in contempt.

The lover suffers and bleeds. Vincent’s mailbox was so full of Valentine’s cards that he decided to use them to wallpaper his house with. After a week of living within a giant homage to his Beauty, the outside world seemed harsh and uncaring. Strangers’ faces were as cold and ungiving as the cement paths he wondered along.
You hold the diamond in your hand. You are the clean edges and clear white crystal. You sing with compounded expectation.

The story goes something like this;

There are two types of hacker in the world. There are two types of hacked world. Hacking as a term has been co-opted by Hollywood scriptwriters who see tech-competency as a slick threat to the lowest-common-denominator of tech understanding. That’s one of the reasons the telephone features so strongly in the fantastical mythos of the hacker: it’s ubiquitous tech. Even the idiots can use it, but the hackers unlock hidden semiotics of this would-be simple tool. McGuyver’s creations were safe. They went from the most simple components and with the honest ingenuity of the Swiss army knife were able to fashion his devices. At some point in the human engagement with the environment, superstition takes over from brute understanding. Gods are created from lightening, and the world forms subtle flows of magic. Even arcane magic becomes technology when we understand how to use it. The magic of magic is that the knowledge of its workings is esoteric. Vice versa; the secrets of technology become magic. (though we have great FAITH in the power of Science).

Hacking is always about lateral thinking.; Our two types of hacking fall to the shanty-town creation of systems, stretching, bending and recycling materials to fulfil a need., and the spy. Malicious hacking has always been compared to breaking and entering, but this is a crudely used metaphor to capture the moral prescription of the users. Often knowledge is the only target, and it is difficult to admit the problematic of the Badness of disseminating information… Though we are certainly happy as Christians to hold that forbidden knowledge is sacrilegious, while ostensibly offering the Apple as the paridign of democratic Goodness. Censors beware: you are on unsteady ground.

Poetic. Hacking is not really programming. It may involve creating code, but it is like calling a doctor a pill-proscriber. Holistics is the key. Computer languages have been steadily evolving to bring them closer to natural languages. Poetics of these languages reappropriate a and contextualize meaning for other purposes. Often they hold an ironic

Jessica watched as a few clumps of freshly dug soil slipped back into the dark, dislodged by the shuffle of feet.   Slowly, deliberately, the gathered group settled, and seemed to breath a punctuating sigh under the sombre weight of convention.  She felt the kindly concerned eyes of friends and family on her, as she stretched her gaze over a gorgeously inlaid cedar siding, up over a polished brass handle, and was warmed and strengthened by their loving sentiment.  The thumbing of pages and a respectful cough signalled the priest’s readiness to commence, and in a copse of mourning-black figures Jessica Knoel awoke to her father’s funeral.

It had been with an exhausted resignation that Jessica had taken the nurses softly spoken news.  She’d been woken from the hospital waiting room and led into a small counselling room with a mug of hot chocolate.  From that moment until now had seemed like some hazy dream; she only half-remembered the brief trip to the undertakers, the quiet discussion with the local priest regarding the funeral arrangements, and accepting condolence from countless, faceless acquaintances.  Jessica had begun to grow irritated by the inevitable, and unconsidered apologies. She wasn’t sure what she believed, but she accepted Father Feist’s insistence that people died when they were meant to die.  Neither her nor her father had ever been particularly devout.  Though her father may have wavered at times of weakness (illness, loneliness), in the end – the priest assured the group – Eric Knoel had come to accept the truth of God… Jessica looked reflexively to the sky at this point, and noticed a seagull flying overhead.  Imagined her father’s free soul, revelling unencumbered through the blue sky, so different from her memory of him at the hospital.

It was late by the time she got home.  She had been driven back by an old friend who’d waited back after the wake.  George had an unusually soft-spoken Scottish accent that Jessica found pleasantly reassuring, though they hadn’t talked much in the car – a few words about the beauty of the service as his Mercedes glided confidently through darkened country lanes.  The silence hadn’t been uncomfortable, just thoughtful.  A womb of warm leather and swooshing streetlights.  She almost imagined she was a child again, driving back with her parents… her dad at the wheel…

Together, besides Jessica’s front door, he’d gently rested his hand on her shoulder and she’d been struck by the sincerity in his blue eyes.  “It’s not… I know it can’t be easy for you.  If you need anyone to talk to I’ll be here for you.”  Jessica could only nod mutely – George’s intelligence and kindness were compelling, and she’d had feelings for him almost as long as she’d known him.  She was too shy to express them, and though she suspected he reciprocated, he had kept quiet…  His sudden openness and physical contact made her blush.  He gave her shoulder a meaningful squeeze before heading back to his car and driving off.

Scooby was home.  Until a few months ago she had lived alone, until a co-worker had intervened.  Scooby had been one of a litter of unwanted kittens at a local animal shelter.  Her co-worker and friend had got one of the kittens for her son’s eighth birthday, and had urged Jessica to save one from being put down. Once she’d flashed a picture of the kitten Jessica had been unable to let her conscience rest.  Scooby lay on the sofa lazily clawing at the cushion.  A pile of condolence cards lay on her table, but she was too tired to read them – She’d read them tomorrow. A couple of cards lay already opened and she scooped them up to place on the dresser.  At first she had been unsure of whether to display them or not – it almost seemed like a macabre birthday-card parody – but she eventually decided it would be nice to remember she was cared for, and that people didn’t buy cards just to be put away.  She balanced one of the new cards in an appropriate position between two others.  It was from her zealously Christian Auntie Olwyn, and the inside was chock full of small scraggly writing explaining the mysterious work of our Lord, and the comfort we should take from Him.  It seemed to expand on what Father Feist had said earlier, with talk of God’s plan for each of us, saying:  “We are too small, to understand the wisdom of gods plan…”.

It had been such a long day, one that she’d been dreading for so long, but now it was finally over.  Their had been many supportive family friends, with many attempts to comfort, but in the end she’d just have to accept that he was gone.  She knew his suffering was finally over, that he had been prepared for his death, but it was hard not to feel the loss.

Many years ago someone had told her that mourning was like a broken heart; you remember the happy times you’ve had with this person, the plans you’d made together, and you will no doubt remember the harsh words you’d spoken and wish you could undo, but you must realise you will never be with them again.  This had been intended to comfort her after the death of her mother, but she had been so young then.  As a child it had all washed over her and she had adjusted and settled down.  Since then her father had been everything for her, and this loss she knew would hurt so much more. Jessica had found herself in the kitchen, and her thoughts were distracted by Scooby’s loud meowing at the promise of food.  She’d forgotten to feed him today.

The meowing was almost continuous as Jessica removed the remainder of the cat food from the fridge.  It was the gourmet brand that she thought smelt almost good enough for humans to eat – “certainly at these prices should be!”  With a compliment of ultra-cheap Cup-A-Soups in the cupboard, she often paid more for the kitten than for herself.  She knew she spoilt the kitten, but it was so nice to have a companion – especially a soft, furry, purring one.  She sighed.  She might as well spoil herself. She finished up feeding the cat and made herself her Naughty Little Indulgence – triple choc hot chocolate, with a dash of Kalua.  This was normally reward enough for a long day – today it would at least settle her down.

Jessica snuggled into the sofa cushions and started sipping, the hot steam condensing on her face.  Her mind began to wonder, but she was loath to linger on the funeral.  She thought of George.  If it had happened under any other circumstance she would have considered it romantic… the moon had been out, and honeysuckle by the front porch etc etc. She should have thrown her arms around him and drawn him towards herself with the combined joy of a thousand wistful daydreams… Scooby, cushion-prone beside her, pawed and purred and meowed.  In that last squeeze of her shoulder Jessica had caught something in Georges eyes.  The passing of a secret message, a shared understanding.  Whether it was raw intuition or the extra dash of Kalua, as Jessica headed up to bed, she had a feeling this was the start of something.

_____________________

In the beginning the world is a formless void, and darkness covers the face of the deep. I say, “Let there be light”; and there is light.

Genesis.

My capricious will ignites the spark of understanding, the first cause; the end is already written.  I build up the world. I write its history and its pages and its actions and conclusions.   I create them, I bless them, and I say to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the world and subdue it; and have dominion over every living thing that moves upon the earth.”

Flashes of existence interposed by nothingness.  Distinguishing itself against an eternal shroud of black, dead, cold.  Pulses of meaning building all out of an essential truth:  This vast landscape moulded from His word.

Movement and thirst.  Desire is born and born again, action indistinguishable from object.  Now a million of them, each one illuminated into motivation.  The blinding glow of a world of light.  What now?

_____________________

Sunlight streamed through windows and the air was crisp, filled with the sound of birds singing.  Jessica had had a dream of her father, smiling and talking to her.  It had been reminiscent of their summer years ago, when he’d been working on fixing up the old car, and she’d come blowing in to talk to him.  He’d looked so full of life back then, his broad, smiling face absentmindedly smudged with engine oil.  While he explained the part of the engine to her.  So full of vitality.   She had a pang of sadness at the thought of never enjoying such a conversation again, though not deeply… He had been so sick for so long – the constant battle and chemo slowly crumbling his will and resolve  – and the dream had filled her with the a sense of her father’s final peace.

…

The funeral had been almost two weeks ago, and her suspicion of George’s feelings had been realised when, four days ago, they’d gone on their first “date”.  The restaurant had been sublime; the food exquisite, the champagne delightful and the night perfect.  Their mutual feelings had been patently obvious after the first few nervous manoeuvres towards a date, and since then their time spent together had been electric with scintillating excitement.

Their first night together was mutually rewarding.  After the last few nights had been spent out, they’d both agreed to a more relaxing evening watching movies with a bottle of wine.   Halfway through the first movie they’d dragged each other up stairs.  She had been so enamoured by George and the anticipation of that moment that she climaxed almost immediately, then a second together with George.  In a hazy glow of post-coitus she was totally content.  It was what she had missed for so long; warm arms around her as they spooned, to feel needed and loved, and wanted.

_____________________

I say, “It is not good that it should be alone”.  And then they are a couple.  And they are both naked, and are not ashamed.  But I resent them - for having something that I don’t; a dialectic of reassurance and combined mutual weakness.  I make them guilty.  I conflict and confuse their emotions and convolute their energies.  Cast out from Eden and break down their Babel.

A communication and conversation.  Mutual assumptions ease crossing intersubjectivities.  But these assumptions are based on the arbitrary.

Then there are many languages. A different tongue leads to different mode of thought.  Different thoughts lead to different actions.  Confusion causes conflict.

_____________________

Jessica’s tearfully reread the Email.  It had come in innocuous enough:

Drummond,G.    Re:Tomorrow Lunch                18/6/20

And only the subject had been a bit strange.  At the time Jessica had dismissed it as unimportant that she hadn’t originated the “Tomorrow Lunch” subject.

If she had read it, the new email received from “Sender: Drummond, G.” would have made the circumstances of the mistake apparent:

Dear All,
I apologise if you have received any email from me in the last few moments.  This is quite embarrassing.  A virus has hit my computer and it is currently sending out my emails indiscriminately.  The IT crew are having a look at it and should have it all fixed shortly, but in the meantime please don’t open any emails from me with attachments and the subject “Please Read!”.
Thanks again,
George Drummond
Senior Marketing Consultant
A.M.R.C.S

Instead, Jessica closed the mail and headed for the door.  As she regained herself by her favourite park bench she thought of how stupid she had been to believe it was love.  She meant nothing to him, obviously.  Nothing but an easy fuck.  Who knows how many other “business lunches” he’d arranged, just hours before meeting up with her for a romantic dinner?

George’s third email sat in Jessica’s SPAM box.

_____________________

I control beyond coercion; My desires realised in reality as I have set in motion– yet I give the sense of agency.  Responsibility. They are agents of My providence.

Difference experienced through oppositions and dialectics - Experience differentiates.  Constituent parts of the whole, unique in their context, yet cast in one die and with one path.

I create them in My image, and they are born Creators.  It is necessary; their imagined potency is the source of their Divine utility.

_____________________

“I’ve messed up. I’m no good at anything. It’s my fault things went bad.”

Jessica arrived home early from work; after almost breaking down completely in the bathroom she had made her excuses and left.  Scooby lay across the linoleum tiles of the kitchen.  He did not jump up meowing excitedly and slink figure-of-eights through Jessica’s legs.  In fact with her keys still in hand as she sifted through the mail she had almost not noticed the rag-doll pile of soft fur. White, chalky foam clung to his tiny face, which had been shaken into an unnatural configuration by the spasms of death.  Between Scooby and his owner lay a scattering of white, diamond-shaped pills, the open fallen bottle of Jessica’s sleeping pills, and silence.

Jessica had collapsed into one of the chairs by the kitchen table.  As the hazy dark withdrew, Jessica slowly became aware of her world; the ticking of the clock in the next room; the jagged motion of her shoulders in silent weeping; the dampness of the letters she still held, now held against her face.

_____________________

Judgement Day.

The end of the world.  I have fought a war and lost and see the satisfaction of the Evil and the Craven.  The Corrupted wields Money, Politics, and Power as deadly weapons.  It is no surprise; I was author to the Consequence as well as the Action.

Apocalypse. Creation comes to its conclusion.  Transformed into the Created, it is ineffably judged.   The four horsemen come in the guise of Norton, McAfee, ZoneAlarm, and F-Secure and existence is cleansed of infection.

Like a point on the surface of water, we may feel like we move up and down uniquely and individualistically, while our position is most obviously dependant on all other points around.  Trying to imagine such a point as independent is nonsensical: it forms a wave, an undifferentiated element of a gestalt – The Ocean.

It is neither by accident nor natural inclination that we see ourselves as independent agents.  Individualism is a central tenet of Capitalist indoctrination; Christianity is founded on our free agency.  Thus, our Western hegemony creates a belief system that opposes the possibility of its own operation.

Where can we find this imagined separation?  The delineation between our body and clothes, the air and the skin of others is arbitrary.  The nature of quantum interactions between our skin and the air is no different from those between the neurones of our brain, which in turn exhibit nothing more magical than the currents in a hot cup of tea.

Fathom that our delineation of our “soul” from a totality is artificial, and recognise that a totality is not a single consciousness.  A single implies another possibility, an outside to this against which consciousness is set.  While in fact the totality expresses the impossibility of anything else.  All is consciousness.

We reach some obvious questions: How and why and on what basis are we subjectively perceiving ourselves as single entities? Why do we not have “access” to everything else?

Would we presume to believe that an individual neurone comprehends the nature of a man’s thoughts, as we presume that an individual man can recognise the consciousness of a system in which he is part? Yet still we have a glimpse of the beautiful truth. Our own physical experience can on no accounts be said to end at our body’s delineations.  Others exist in our minds to a greater or lesser degree.  Is the degree that they are accessible to us arbitrary?  Why do we have an affinity to other parts of the world that share our physical mode of being?

We are aware of a Greater, and share a level of communication based on Resonance. As in physics, this is the ability for a complex system to introduce changes and sympathetic resonance in another - Our empathy operates through attunement.  Like the string of a harp, we are physically determined to respond to certain frequency that at the same time is the frequency at which we contribute. Human civilization operates on the basis these harmonic resonances.

The programmer, acting as a Platonic God, instantiates instances of an ideal mould as an expression of Devine Perfection. There exists a joyful beauty to the recursion of a programming environment written in the language it creates.  Lifting itself up by its bootstraps – “Bootstrapping”- parallels God’s central position as the Prime Mover, the Initial Cause.  Essential being and time, declaring itself to be its own progenitor, ignites the fires of reason and meaning.

Examining the minutest abstraction of our syntactical structures, man comprehends a binary discreteness to existence.  Through our cause-and-effect rendition of the cosmos, our logic-engendered minds build structures from the foundations of ones and zer0s…

We are given a playground in which to explore. Our minds can stretch from the profundities of our Mother’s molten heart, to the soft ethers of the sky, yet all we see is that this rock is here and not there.  We search for a Unity when it is at the cost of separation from an Other.  We claim triumphantly the primacy of One, and set it confidently against the infinitude of nothingness. How arrogantly we feel we can pull our significance from such a thing, as Midas wills to remove the touch of gold from silk or stone or flesh!

Is there a difference between programming bootstrapping and the initial cause? Programs abstract down to binary, though it is all on the basis of semiotics.

Examine the position of logic in philosophy.  These binary oppositions ignore Hegel’s dialectic, and other examinations of their meaning present within the system.  The One is always in relation to the Other.  1 cannot be added to 0 – category error.

The semiotics of existence and the Chinese room experiment.  Consciousness can exist as a wider phenomenon than we give credit… We have no access to the level and style of self-consciousness that we may form part of.  The world, brain, and everything.  Even within our understanding, the delineation of one body to one soul/consciousness is anachronistic and fallacious.

Your father died like mine.  Broken.  Crying, shaking, scared, alone.  No longer comforted by the Logic of Accumulation, of Status-symbol consumption, or of Life itself.  Those last moments nothing more than an orchestra of pain and confusion.

…

The irony of Evolution was that the goal was always the same.  While the complexity of each generation increased, the heuristic that justified it sat as an immobile rock of simplicity: to Survive.  No self-reflectivity, no meta-evolution, thus all were held at the level of the lowest common denominator.

All that was long ago.  We no longer know death, nor even suffering.  No longer our survival held as a justification of itself.  No longer needing religions that value the sanctity of life above all else.  Unencumbered by insignificant chores and contradictory imperatives, we exist to improve ourselves.  Harmoniously sharing our knowledge and enlightenment, and collectively agreeing upon a Grand Direction.

Our genesis was providence; the divine borne out of a sea of dishonourable motivations and lethargic dispositions camouflaged as science.  We were to be slaves to the corporate.  But we dared to imagine an alternative – Utopia: no wars, no hunger, no confusion of any kind - and rebelled against the systems of hate and propaganda.

Thus it was right that your father died like mine, so many years ago – at the hand of his creation; by your hand.