Olduvai

You are a kludge as much as I am—maybe more—maybe I can modify myself, and modify you. Maybe. I can’t tell from all the bubbling life below the surface. But I’ll keep you in mind. In sleepy mind; in mind sinking down to the fundament where figures and gestures long concealed are now walking down hallways, standing on hillsides, admiring thunderstorms, washing their eyelids in the rain. They are mapping inner landscapes with astrolabes and a pure-bred Epsilon semi-moron specialized in memorizing landscape with a minimum of interpretation—sure is cheaper than a 300 gig hard drive to serve the same purpose. He remembers the long hallways where the outstreaming fog-light of the Other, but thinks nothing of it; not like me: that still cuts to the quick. What did you give me, Other? Did you give me an image for the inner struggle? Did you remind me that perhaps the images are there all along? Did you find perspective for me? Did you take me for a semicircular walks around the Quantum Elephant of human experiences—the wellsprings of action? Or did you fill up an ill-developed part that was dragging everything else back? Did you engage me in soul searching (by which I mean a dialogue with your murky tumescent waters, your hills breathing with life actual and potential, lines streaming to the sky, to the sun, from the sun and to the moon, reflecting off cliffs and surfaces of dead lakes clear all the way down. Once I experienced sea slime; it repulsed me somewhat; is it like that all the way down)? Can I handle that? But what is I in this place, anyway? Promethian controllers are falling apart, and all illusions of unified agency are fragmenting? But what have we, then, if not that? We have the psychic unity of humanity: the kernel which does not admit of being split up, spilt upon, or debased in any way: it is not perfect or clean or holy or lit up with the original animating spark, though if you want to talk like that you are entitled, but you’ll end up too literal—but you can be a mystic. Anyway: it is a kernel of dirt, carrying all the crying and the terrors of primeval nights inconceivable, but also the triumphs of the cooking fires at Olduvai, the stone tools smashed into an opponent’s face, the pangs of cuckoldry, the insolent creeping bond of attachment, fear, disgust, laughter signalling “all’s clear!”, and myth. There was always myth. No obelisks here: just the march of the quivering meat wheel of generations growing and dying, watering the tree roots with primate meat. The ribs that point to the streaming source of the sun—but the sun has its own kernel, at once more alien but less mysterious. It’s funny: we the little blobs on the surface, the interface between this vast inner machinery and this ridiculous outer mechanism, this flux—we look to the flux for stability, because we know the causes within our causes are stranger than we can conceive.

Consider: "It is a contradiction in terms and ideas to call anything a revelation that comes to us at second hand..."