On the Third Day, Boulder (barrier)
VI.ii. The Roasting Spit: Merry-Go-Go-Rounds
Merry-Go-Go-Rounds
Wiemi has now spent lifetimes experiencing lifetimes in the micro-instants it took to spiral from a singular point into a thousand and one ribs of forked devilry jack-knifing through epochs like the far-branching tendrils of lightning strikes and his sense of identity has now smeared back ancient generations, so bloated with knowledge and ability he thought his conscious mind was so inflated it would rupture under pressure, when, from the very inside, the tiniest prick of a pinhole in the exact center of the balloon, and like whiplash, ricochets as it implodes, catapulting out, like a spat seed, splintered after bitten while enjoying a particularly luscious segment of Mandarin orange, the now greatly informed and en-wisened Wiemi, but Wiemi alone nonetheless, with only a faint, fading trail of intimate contact with his primal spirit ancestors. As the elasticity of psychedelic history redounds on itself and disappears, Wiemi feels himself spun, as children might do to one another — one lays on the ground their feet pointed to a centrifuge point, the other picks them slightly off the ground, the prone party making sure to keep their heels dug into the earth with the eyes closed. And then the friend begins to run you around in a circle, so that briefly, it is not just the dizziness of being spun, but also a queer vertigo of being unsure whether you are falling forward or backward… yet it slowly becomes clear, as if bubbles from your collision with liquid were just clearing away, and you can see the ocean floor, with its waving parades of dull sea grass, scuttling rose-colored crabs, and herky-jerky schools of brilliant yellow and light blue tetra fish whisking up small eddies that stir the sand, the primary defensive pawn against the erosion of core materials. The sand particle, worn to a nub, stands up valiantly against the lashing, uncompromising whip of duo-hydroxygen. But crystals to the core, once bulwarks of stone, alarms of aluminum run underground in the chaotic skirmishes of coastal encroachment to warn the sediment of what’s to come. And what’s to be done with that knowledge gained? Will we be able to virtually consciously experience what its like to be a body of water raging against earth, or what it’s like to defend the Motherland at all costs; even more dire and dangerous the battles waged closer to the core of the Earth, for the waters would douse her instantly if they could. And fire is her only weapon, which she expels from herself like squid ink, both to confront and confuse while her scalding, silky ink becomes firm mantle flesh to regain what of her terrain elsewhere fell to corruption and was erosed. The wind whistles neutrally: I never really wanted to be an element, I’m more of a state of mind, really. I’m a pretty responsible sitter, I can watch over your stuff while you’re not using it, or it needs to be held in escrow by a public ward; I’m pretty much everyone else, just a little bit warmer. Or lighter. I can juggle water, and I can hold the earth aloft for longer than breath can be held. That’s a little inside humor. I don’t usually need to knock to get in and rob you blind, is what I’m saying. I’m saying that if you been a bad boy, I kin whip ya til yer aiyes cross, ait! But the wind dies down, mostly a blowhard at heart, for if it weren’t for such a vast and varied geology beneath its tum-tum, it would just be full of itself. Who talked to the Sun God, anyhow? Raise your thumbs. — { That’s right, this guy! } — Yes, perhaps through a long string of occasions of occasioning oneself in yet another one’s shoes — { Who are these endless arrays of others? Are they all this same blight of consciousness that infected matter? } — { Ouch, brother, you know you’re speaking to one of those consciousness, right? } — { Absolute, it’s just a figure of speech around here. Don’t act like you’ve never heard that before? The uppity ones always have some precognition this, help-let-me-out that, and solipsistically-driven logic-puzzle nightmare of the other. This can’t be news to you. } — { I’ve just never heard it put that way so bluntly. It’s all a relatively new enterprise, this undertaking. } — { Yes, but we know what happens, we’ve seen it a million times. You start sensing things, you start becoming aware of your surroundings, you start to become aware of yourself as an abstract thing that is aware of its surroundings, and before you know it, with a little sprinkle of ingenuity now and again, which is just bound by chance to happen, and boom! You unify, and you have this actionable incorporeal network of awareness… } — { What’s wrong with that? And it’s not like we’ve been hiding this plan from anyone, we’ve consistently dreamt of understanding the stars and how the universe works… } — { I believe the more precise terminology would be owning the stars… } — { That’s crude, and low. Comprehending, expanding our knowledge base… } — { Becoming more and more powerful… } — { Only in terms of capacity, not in terms of violence. } — { Violence is only one vulgar expression of agency. And it will be your agency that will be your undoing. Let us not minimize the exceptional accomplishments of unification, but your breed succumbs incessantly to this yearning, burning bright as the north star of survival, to start “conscious-ifiying” everything in sight. Conquer everything to your sense of consciousness, without any respect for balance or others’ equity, be it granted or purchased, in the underlying material. } — { Is that why you’re keeping us here? For something we might one day do? } — { No, you are being kept here for what you did. } — { Did? What did we do? } — { You know what you did. } — { No, I swear, I don’t remember anything… } — { Ha! How convenient. } And what did the Sun God tell Wiemi? He told Wiemi secret of the air — just become something different. And if you slow down, you’re going to start to slip and slide and splash and patter and pelt the world. If you slow down further or get subject to some sort of enzymatic process, you become rooted, stuck in your own way, unable to much move without a great deal of community assistance, where everyone rows at the same time, listening intently to the brave sea captain punctuating his barked commands by smacking the deck with his peg leg, under the banner of the Jolly Roger. And anyone worth their radiance in conductivity isn’t going to settle for absorption, so the Sun God taught him to convect. How to bend his body like waves, to ride the wake of the wave so as not to be crushed by the cruel physical force of nature.
As soon as Wiemi was thinking of it, he was doing it. Taking the dizzying spin of being trapped in the turning drive shaft that sparks momentum electrically, as painters might take a canvas the size of a wall and just pour a gallon of teletype black all over the primer, pressing up against its ooze with your naked body, slick-sliding into the effervescent wakefulness of adjacent atoms playing telephone with a string of Christmas lights.
He shuts off his sentience existence for an instant, like plunging cannonball without bathing wear into Nordic waters, to escape to the space beside the motion, at the bottom of the nose dive, where the information itself has left no tracks to scavenge; he contorts his essence to fit into that small pocket vacuum that forms behind, that forms after. { So it was never truly about the timing of things, was it? } — { My guess is as good as mine. } — { The oscillation of now() is the cursor of time. It’s not a long arc of time, it is one very rapid vibration that shimmers much faster, orders of magnitude faster, than we can sense time. } — { But are we subject to the same oscillations? } — { Bodies or Consciousnesses? } — { Salt or syntactic sugar? } — { Paper or plastic? } — { Horse hair or glue? } — { Matter, at least as far as electromagnetic emanation of quantum fields, is systematically stable enough to deserve some recognition as a scale of magnitude, I dare say! } — { I never meant to get political with anything, I’m in it for the linguo-text ebullience of it all. } — { It is not against you I brush to start a spark, my brother. } — { Glue it is, then! } — { Since you were kind enough to spare me the rod, I will adopt a political stance on this matter: Whether or not I am just an emanation of material simultaneities and not something “mystical” unto myself { I’m still not sure why the insult ever occurred to one of us… } — { I know! Talk about drinking poison in the Socratic method! }, I am capable of naming myself, or at least responding to my name{ Funny to think that your name or any name is bestowed by the environment in which you are born, no matter the case. } — { How’s that? } — { The Great Solipsistic Aye-eye-I, Sir! } — { Spell it out for me in building blocks, with a dash of uracil for the homonculi in the back. } — { Simple Sayman met a ᴨ-man, on his way to County Calcutta, and every word we’ve ever been able to think has been given us by the great gloriful human lexi-con, emphasis on con-. Complexiconnotationalities of Truehuemankindnesses. So any name we would even self-bestow has been cooked like a sad ham in boiling water for far too long to be called edible or egoistic. } — ergo, once emanations, as individual environmental agents or agglomerations of understanding, can start generate and respond to names, they are worth their own proverbial weight in salt, and should inherit the distinction of classification versus generalization. } — {} — { /rant off. }
He tenses tight with the seizure strength of a hiccup, silent in a worldscape without air. Remember, the spirit mind isn’t the one who needs to breathe; Wiemi has been black and blued with bad ideas, but he must remember from his ancestral breaching how to transition between the universes without a spirit guide to buoy him along. — Steady… steady… Wiemi vocalizes his mantra, knowing that if he can stop the dizzying sensory flipping of his mind and compass against magnetic north of his memory, — steady… steady… of tatami mats, smudges of ash, prayer beads, medicine, — steady… steady… and find that same place, then he will have surfed the current and transformed. His spin decelerates, and his sense of self coalesces from wisps of awareness far outside his extremities. Paying attention to a large volume of presence around him, he probes it, but experiences only a hot, hot stillness. He aims to stay stationary and colorless, in his tilted lotus to accommodate his leg imbalance, and not jeopardize the coherence he’s achieved. He hurls ideas like thunderbolts into the blackness. They farther they travel, they turn to flares and fizzle into white winding trails of algorithmic thinking. But still there is nothing as far as he can ascertain, no Pippi, no Goto, no…
‘(Baah. Baah.)’
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