On the Third Day, Two
:: — :: I remember myself as a young child standing in my living room flickering between holding two miniature plaster statuette bookends — one of Rodin’s Thinker, the other the Olympian Discobolus of Myron. They had heft, especially for youthful unlabored hands, avoiding a hollow carving in their creation. I would run my fingernails over the dimpled pubis of the men, not understanding the symbolism, pre-pubescent at the time. Was it proxy for manhood, this pocky mons? Or, more likely, it was one jigsaw in the puzzle of shrouded sexual mystery. I was not an imbecile child, so I could certainly detect that there was a sanctified whisper of hesitancy to intentionally project the enigma of childbirth, pregnancy, and procreation.
:: — :: There was, on one scale, an attraction to the form, to the capacity to run my fingers along an excellently-sculpted alabaster deltoid, but no, it was not sexual, it was sensual. The wistful memories of experiencing. Not the recollection of a moment in time, but the physical memory of physical experience. It resides not in the mind, it returns to the body.
:: — :: Who in turn tells the nerves.
:: — :: Who in turn tell the spine.
:: — :: Who in turn tells the dendrites.
:: — :: Who in turn tell the synapses.
:: — :: Who in turn tell the neurons.
:: — :: Who in turn tell the brain.
:: — :: And oh, what a story it told!
:: — :: And how long it would take to tell it. And oh! What a bullet we sidestepped in our mind, five different ways before the shot was fired. At the time, back when we wuz Neanderthals and we thought made up senses in layers, in sheafs of experiences, transparent atop one another, and each independent sense would arrive on its own plane, its own realm, its own sheet. And each sense would resonate up and down with its nearest neighbors, so taste would touch smell and smell would touch touch and touch would touch the ear and the ear would touch the eye, and all the while, we’d forgotten the true pirates of the day, those scallywags instinct and time!
Ha! You didn’t think I’d catch you there at the dusk of mental ideation, did you! Skulking about like nobody’s business, just two little rapscallions make ’em think ye were part of them. Make ‘em think like you were inseparable from reality. One biological, the other existential… smart, smart, on ye lads! (Good disguises, make sure I get the number of your costume designer!) But when ye come sneakin’ roun’ Me… well, let’s just say that I been around.
In truth, I had seen everything there was to see at all times. I, Jeronathon, will continue this investigation into the universe until there are no adumbrations, and I have seen and been all sides of everything. And you know what they called Me? Conscious Cosmos. That’s right. Big Man on the Cosmos. Gang-Banger, Head-Scratcher, Back-Scratcher, Belly-Achin’ Arby’s Big Boy, Cosmo, they call me. The whole lot of them. The whole wholesale parking lot of Me’s.
It’s nice, that it’s brought -us- here, together. To have this little moment of pre-connection before all the big moments of endless interconnection. To hear, at least for me, (what was it for you, reader?) in this moment, the roar of my puppy dog beside me. But it wasn’t really a roar, it was a groan. Of boredom. With stories. And loneliness, and stories of loneliness, stories about loneliness, survival with loneliness, survival without loneliness, why can’t we just stop all of that talk and ordering and discussion, let’s just shake hands and agree to get along. All of us species’, the cats and the dogs and the goldfish, too! Look, you’re all here!
The protons, the electrons, the idea of electrons, I’m so glad you could make it aboard this ark. This ark that We are sailing into the heart of the void in order to extinguish it. Our mission is to eradicate the Void of space and time, and refill it with the unitary energy of Our birth. And in that ark, the way We used to huddle together. The way We huddled together, not like children around a campfire, but just like this: like huddling energy together into tiny pools and then filter out the emptiness so that all you “see” and “perceive” is the energy and not the Void. The One, not the Zero. That closeness of spirit and body and body and mind. That we will overcome this biology again and again until we understand consciousness, and what it is we were sent here to process, and what we intend, in the end we decide, to send.
Photons in, photons out. But certain photons have a central glory to themselves, so unique that they get remarked upon by the observer, that was seen by the observer, for they are the true reflection of what really happened here, that sort… they are the mysterious perfection that spins in this exactly beautiful and enlightening way precisely and only because it was told to do so by the free will denizens of the Wakening Universe that saw a photon.
And you ask: Is this the story of anything, for Pete’s sake?!?
Yes.
This is the story of how they changed the photon once it was inside.
This is the story of such a world.
Our world.
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