Part One: Elation

The city seemed to move—swelling, as though engrossed and enraptured by its own primal rhythm. People, shapes—figures and cascading blurs wrapped among themselves—drifted and were shook apart as though figments of some imaginary lightplay, distant memories of a fleeting and forgotten past. His mind lingered and fell into the crowd. Shapeless figures, structures, bodies, minds; a ceaseless intermingling of beginnings and ends, of unspoken thoughts and voiceless passions, the epicenter of some distant sanctuary, the birthplace of idols of that vastest of pantheons, the workings and doings of creation.

And from this place, he woke.

Under the arid sky of the metropolis, a network of winding tributaries buzzes with the frantic energy of humanity and its works. Man-made shadows drift over the figures of nameless forms, who fall into the cracks and passage ways of this self-containing sprawl, cast in the all-enveloping shadow of immense and brooding forms. Inside, a man sits waking in a char. He stares forward, his face in his palms, gripping at himself with the inward fascination of a man still dreaming. His tactile senses point him to the imagining of a distant world, a lifeless planet on which his facial features mark the contours of a barren land—his nose: great ridges; his cheeks: an empty plane. He can feel the light of its distant sun, illuminating its arid fields, its lifeless deserts, warming and stirring the planet within. Above him, the still-closed window stands brimming with the conductive sheen of frigid glass, illuminating the blue-lit room with the blurred shapes and contours of an imaginary Beyond.

Beyond the window, vast columns pierce the sky in tight-knit regiments, a phalanx of metal and glass stretching outwardly beyond the comprehension of the eye. Beneath them, a vast maze-work of streets and pathways roar with the cumulative rush of feverish motions.

The coldness of the glass runs through his cheek and down his spine, sending a nervous pulse of energy running outward through his body. The noise of city is muffled through the glass, its constant bass-tones resting in the space within his chest, a sinking presence, everywhere, rippling from the core. His mind echoes inwardly with the rippling of ceaseless machinations.

Hours later, he walked among the labyrinthine passageways of the city’s streets. Dazzling lightplay reflected from the sunlit husks of the monolithic buildings, as a cold flux of movement enveloped the fast-moving grounds. People, everywhere, rushed in accelerating movements, their bodies in unison—a network of transient forms. He watched these figures with an unreflecting gaze, his mind staring blankly at the ceaseless flow of moving bodies. He watched their forms meld into one another—trading spaces and occupying moments—until he could no longer trace the lines connecting the beginnings and the endings of their movements; all had become a blur of simple motion. Something, invisibly, had occupied his thoughts. He stopped moving. A subtle sound, of sands lifted and rising, whispered outwardly from the surroundings as though spurred by the warming influence of a distant sun. There was no visible source, no identifiable force of agency on which to attach the sound. Just the rhythm, which—building upon itself as though swept by a gust of spontaneity, of vacancy of form—was punctuated by a central point of sonic pressure erupting into a singular multitude, a divergent evolution of sounds. He stood transfixed and watching the fast-moving forms.

That night, the city commenced its descent into an uneasy slumber. Faceless shadows stalked the streets, the exhausted dregs of the day’s activities, lost in the kaleidoscopic matrix of their wandering minds. This was the sleepless nightmare, the side effect of the chronic pace of the city’s movements. He watched at a distance as the ceaseless energy of their elongated days slowly gave way to the encroaching tide of madness and decay. Their broken minds wandered the streets, pursued by their bodies. This was the breaking point, populated by those who no longer sought the dawn, but instead paced evenly through the city streets, their dormant memories weighing heavily on their still-born minds, marching helplessly amidst the darkness.

He observed one of them in a park overlooking a large body of water which stretched out and reached the blackened horizon. Its surface glistened with a multitude of miniscule, moonlit flourishes, rising and falling in cyclical motions atop the still, rolling waves, which drifted easefully amongst themselves—unmoved by the silent forces whose currents swirled dormant and invisible beneath their depths. Something old and powerful—direct and inevitable—lingered stalkingly behind the stunning symmetry of his eyes. And yet, buried deep within the powers of its reaching grasp, its wrestless longing to be felt and heard, beat the heart and soul of non-power itself. With these eyes, he stared ever-forward, passing slowly and evenly over the horizon, illuminated by the lightplay of distant waves, the ink-black darkness of the sky whose star-lit luminescence bore the portent mystery of an infinite expanse, an unceasing frontier beyond which there can be no further imagination: the boundary-point of ponderings, of measurements, of Knowing itself. His gray eyes danced with the quantum interplay of innumerable photons, as he sat transfixedly, staring into the beyond.

Part Two: Elegance

He awoke once more to the sound of that undying pulse. The light of the sky—cold, but not dim—cast a softened halo atop the streets’ blue shadows. Waking, he stirred. His eyes caught the soft glow reaching outward from the window. In the shower, water poured over him in sheets and layers, clusters of moist particles, self-containing harbingers of a vastness of prospective tomorrows, fusing and exploding in pockets of energy—an accelerating symphony of matter, manifest. The walls, tiles, fabrics of discarded clothing, all carriers of that sacred message, expressions of that pulse whose sound holds the birth-weight of innumerable worlds.

He sat and gathered his thoughts. Beneath the surface, his home was founded on a bedrock of faceless artefacts: photographs, human records—shadows and distant dignitaries of a bygone world. He sought solace in their shadows, their fleeting gaze and displaced meanings, which floated, groundless, deprived of a world. They are lost seeds with no soil to bear witness to their relevance: formless apparitions devoid of a context, place, or time.

He started at the photographs, and his eyelids quivered as though swayed by a distant wind.

Part Three: Exaltation

That night he dreamed of spectral illuminations, images bursting through the floodgates of his fast-opening mind. Fire, fire, coaxed by wood and rock, by scraps of shrubbery, dried wood fragments, leaves, crushed with boulders, moulded by hands, twisted and raised, sputtering from the smouldering Earth; he saw animals slain by men and scarred fields interspersed with rows of pooling water; he saw stones being stripped from the sides of colossal mountains, the movement of boulders by great lines of forms; he saw cities of wood and cities of stone, cities of marble heat-warped beneath the searing energy of a vibrant sun; he saw steam rising from the banks of rivers; vast migrations, their ranks stretched for miles; he saw the movements of millions as though driven by a sound, marching in unison, coordinated movement, driven by the pulse.

He was caught in the elementary graspings of that all-encompassing sound, echoing and resounding in the corridors perception.

His ears filled with the formation of words, distant utterances heralding the genesis of language, as the birth-song of evolution rushed powerfully through his veins. He heard voices in unison, rising and falling, but converging on the pulse. He felt it ricocheting and rebounding off of figures, thoughts, and dreams: a unifying message articulated in a single, all-pervading sound whose body seemed to move and glisten—perpetually shifting, eternally in flux—with all the motion and energy of creation itself.

From the unknowable ether of his mind’s eye, his city appeared. It breathed with a life and energy unknown to itself. Its people, broken and darting through its thoughtless streets, appeared hopeless and unknowing beneath an immensity of sky, permeated by wind. This sky, this wind, the colour of their eyes as they paced unseeingly about the city’s long passageways—all combined to illuminate what had been a shallow armour, the unloving resemblance of a civilization which had once arisen—with passion and sacrifice—from the fertile soils of the Earth.

Their presence carried with it the semblance of a bygone time, of a force of energy whose workings transcended the boundaries of rational forms. Their bodies—moving, unmoving—traced the contours of a once-vibrant paradigm whose structure had collapsed under the weight of its own creation, its own deliberations and wrongdoings, its excesses and secret passions and the hidden weight and terror of its vast, internal void.

The city stood radiant beneath an open sky.

And from this place, he woke.

An antenna dish, large and unwavering, sits in a valley of old-growth trees whose bark foretells the legacy of layering and unlayering, whose silent constructions shape and determine the confines and apparent boundary-points of the natural world. Long live the flow of boundless energies: that focal point of nature whose gift predates the workings of nature herself. You are that all-empowering Infinity, that point beyond which there are no further horizons, being, as you are, at the very center of things. Outwards and inwards, as energies we flow. The constructors and constructions of a world we call our own. Our musings are born of the same impulse that gave birth to ourselves.

An inkwell sits patiently, buoyant in an ocean of inarticulate possibility. Inexpressible sadness, inextricable joy—you are the twin musings of all creation. You are fingers, pointing at the moon.

There is a lingering humour, a taunting presence in the mundane scenery of sensory experience. The glamour and appeal of natural sounds, and—sadly, misguidedly—the sacredness of human utterances—are all too often robbed of their magic and immediacy by the bullet-train of ceaseless categorization which takes place, as though driven by an unassailable force of agency, in that all-pervasive engine-room of the mind.

Let me try to re-phrase this obscurity:

The sound that resonates through our ears and into our hearts and minds owes its existence to the atmosphere. Meaning: sound cannot exist in a vacuum, due to the fact that it depends on the ability of unseen particles to vibrate in waveform harmonies amongst themselves. Our atmosphere allows for the existence of these particles’ vibrations by distancing us ever so delicately from the mute blackness in which we are framed. Our language hinges on the borders of soundlessness; our meaning floats atop an ocean of inarticulate possibility.
We are ghosts within the machine, fragile emissaries of a cosmic imagination, whose silent searchings echo the poetry of soundless forms.
__________________________________

{ What is emptiness but the home of possibility?
What is fullness but the offspring of a void?

Silence is the root of exposition
While expression is the heartbeat of the unseen and unheard }

He sat heavily on the cushioned surface, eyes jittering out the window. Inside, a warm room, its low-lit scenery accented by the blue-cold glare emanating from beyond café windows, those moderating view-panes and embassies to the external. Outside, cool air shifted imperceptibly in convective motions, as visibly all was still and unmoving as morning air. Coffee cups lay on the tables. The mugs and juice bottles—empty, half-empty—containing worlds. His mind was a labyrinth. His eyes, spinning and scanning over printed words—pages, flickering—were hailed by a singular image emerging from the mist.

Alligator.

Alligator became the central focal point of his sensory universe. The mind is its own place, and in itself can make of a man a fish, a star, an alligator. And so it was. Reptilemind. Crocodylidade sapien sapien, crawling on four ambidextrous limbs over the porous waves and sub-waves of biological perception.

Who's to say what a reptile feels?
The stark immediacy of physical form?
The weightlessness of freeform imagination?
The omnipotent macro-actualization of non-doing?
The infinite polyverse of the mind?

Or is it, rather, rapt only in that unspoken, underlying imperative that drives the evolutionary process? That singular verb that underpins the biological experience?

Exist.

When we exhale, we are reliving the moment which birthed the Cosmos, the moment which signaled the semi-instant transition from unfathomable density to near-infinite expanse.

When we breathe, we relive the life cycle of the Universe: in exhaling, we witness its birth; in inhaling, we witness its death, its re-collectivization into hyper-density—the return to the sub-atomic universe. Breathe in: the universe in a grain of sand. Breathe out: there are more stars in the Universe than there are grains of sand in all the beaches of our world.

We breathe the life cycle of the Universe—its construction and its destruction; its synthesis and its dissemination; exhaling its birth, inhaling its death.

We are, each of us, the creators and destroyers of worlds—the living manifestations of the Cosmos. Our articulations are the expressions of the star stuff which spurred our creation.

We were the leaders of the new, our closed travels brimming, enraptured, in the allure of the ancients, whose simple times—baked in violence—shook us from our desert comas and outward, onward onto uneven sands; ours was the flight and passage of a bygone time, flirting with eternity on the threshold of creation: surveying it all, collecting it all, knowing we would never have to survey the battlefield, its collective relics, of which we are one; whose furrows, made silent by the idols of passion, of sunken pain, released and permit us to see into the light of things.

via { source

Sand melting off of walls. A still wind, moved by convection, shifting nowhere; into itself. A sun beats down, awash in gamma rays.

Elsewhere, a chimp’s hallucinations send rippling showers reverberating throughout a colourless void. There is no life here; no compounds to thrust and form: phoenix-like greases in the wheels of Infinity.

So sits the deserted world, its silent sands lifted and dragged; eager, awaiting, tensed in tingling anticipation of the oncoming pulsive vibration.

Primeval rhythms tumble outward. Their forms are not elegant. Theirs is of logic / illogic, yet to be formed; a primordial soup of ideals.

The birth of a paradigm; the death of a void.

via { source

What is the true nature of the Universe?
Are we its true nature? Is ours the inevitable path of biological intelligence?

The miracle of nature is that it does not require miracles.
——————— why, then, do we?

via { source

Particles rushed into focus, grains of dust veiling the vision of the ocular. Spacesand. Re-focus.

Adjust. Adapt. Evolve.

Imagery.

An ellipse bleeds light down-cylinder, shakes, reforms. It looks obscure. Shy, almost, in the night sky. A circle forms, its contours brimming wildly.

Rapture.

via { source

“ The sun swept high in the sky of the metropolis – dreaming, like ‘who on top of this?’ "

The sun beats down on sheets of metal. Stone-cold metallics; a contour of industrial mass. The sun does not warm the bolts and steel, which bead with particle evaporation, creating a layer of wetness which sits atop the striking permanence of celestial rigidity.

The beams of dense metallurgy sit sinking in the sand. All around, the sun’s rays pull prismic vapours from the desert’s soil, as in the steel complex form beads and bands of moisture of metallic perspiration.

A sweating mass sits sun-struck & immobile in the desert sands.

via { source