people who don't exist Jul 23, 2009

No, I don't know anything about that. River (chalk sky bark) boots-(brown laced) grass cool clean air (revitalizing!) walk stomp rocks (muscle burn) grasp (hand contact) (eye contact) (A paradox of the same contact the different contact) pull, pinnacle stand. Gaze. (A paradox is when your ignorance blinds you to the truth.) In her eyes I do not see, as you do, a pronoun. My mouth is filled with pronouns, I choke on them, they gush between my teeth in purple streams. My face is bruised. (We marked our trail on the trees as we came.) My mind is filled with nights and days and touches, words, phone calls, conversations, blurrinng feelings and places where there is no ground or sky or walls. Places impossible for us to actually be: behind eyelids, along the optic nerve, flirting with myelin and brainfluid. Yet.

The trees--our friends still clinging to their low ladder rung and now we just use them for their waste and their bodies (and soon they too will be superseeded by our creations, the Machines and the Plastics); few pursue beauty, it seems, when faced with efficiency utility pragmatism. The world is cold and we are abuzz, radiating ourselves into the environment by design (by accident?) and always trying to scoop up our lost entropy, gulping it down in furious denial of the Second Law and working growing processing--our Creator and Life-Giver is a full-stop awash in the laws of the universe (manifest: photobulbs and tables) scattered but self-organizing. But the mountain was lost for the portrait of God.

Knives are where we went wrong. Of course, we also may just be able to slice through the Great Filter because of this horrendous mistake. The sun is as important as we always thought it was. It's pretty important right now, slicing across moisturebanks to play among the fallen leaves bustling at our feet. It's just you and me and God and the world is much more alive now than I remember it, upside-down in the winter and bundled up stuck to an infinite white plane suspended above an infinite white abyss. That's what the sky looks like when you lie on your back in the winter. But right now everything is right-side-up and the sun is going down (shadows, as if they actually existed, are now joining the sun's frolicking) and five fingers are so close to mine that the molecules are binding and unbinding with each other, not like the frantic wandering of a call stack but more a rarified longitudinal symphony in the air (but of course, two great walls instead of a vast gas of planets in dosido).

Purple is the highest energy color. But of course there is no beauty in randomness (temperature is just a word for average molecular kinetic energy) and so purple is the ugliest of colors and red, orange, and yellow are the most beautiful. Human eyes cannot perceive the lowest frequencies of light but what wonders they must be to behold! (Now we waste a few words or maybe a sentence on a familiar pattern (of speech, perhaps) and soon I imagine entire paragraphs (we already do this of course) and papers will be written wasting our trees away in forests where nobody but the loggers have set foot (stood) for going on centuries now. We are sure to end up stranded in a vacuum with nothing but magnetic tapes imprinted with images of our planet's now-gone glorious attempt to become the King of Atoms. (What is the world, any way, if there are no atoms? Shall we dwell in the real forever or eventually discover that there are not so many numbers as we had imagined (infinity being in our heads--purely), we shall find that one cannot (in fact!) always find another real between two reals, the irrationals are complete bunk (and consequently there are no perfect circles) of course this would decimate our spherical lifestyle and so (cannot be permitted) will not be pursued. We all have much learning to create / ideas, some more than others. We are not all created equal.

We have much learning about how not equal we are all created to create / ideas. Remember that when you die, you may find yourself in a bubble in the distant future, existing by pure chance for some short time or perhaps finding yourself on some planet populated by the most fantastic combination of life forms--but always by chance you exist. Even now, the forces at work in your life are completely determined chaotic and full of what most would consider chance. This is not to say that nothing ever changes, as clearly there are skunks and bathtubs full of tomatoes and pie stuck to the wall, and that stuff just doesn't go away.

So you find yourself on a mountain in the sunlight and there's somebody else there and it's just the best nicest moment you could have imagined. It feels that way, anyway. You never would have imagined this moment if somebody told you hey, imagine the best nicest moment ever. That's how life is. Full of intention sound (fury) the wind, at times, bones light (bleaching bones) grass, fields (the lost forgotten found forgotten) spelling errors. We all make mistakes. Except me, because I am perfect. Perfect is the sound of wind among the leaves and the leaves brushing against one another in an immeasurably (except by our perception of its sum or product) complex manoeuvre.

The leaves are coming down now. It would be frightening. For once, I watch you abandon your patterns and revel in the strange world and colours. A fog is not so much lifted as nowhere or ever, and bright eyes in morning light are placid reflections of the active joy in your smile and slow turns amid the change of seasons. (A stock image, surely from a movie. It is always scary to wake up, no matter if from a nightmare (though the fright is normally immediately appeased, the real disturbance is in the realization that you were safer in your nightmare than you will ever be during your waking life) or a pleasant dream (a tinge of sadness, even if bathed in the light and cool wakefulness of new morning). Transitions are sinks for fear, and what greater transition can we experience than one of consciousness? This line of inquiry cannot end but in ending.

Wait, you mean what actually happens matters? (No, of course not, it's the process not the product.) But the process is the product; she proves that to me every time our eyes meet or whatever. (Unreliable narrator, You Don't Know Me.) She wears those knitted kind of mittens with the tassels hanging off and matching cap. Not much is more human than honesty in a smile. This is not a book about humanity. Just shut up and read. What percentage of underwater caverns will fill with water when the ice melts each summer (winter leaves defeated) and show me the skeletons of those divers who went in without a golden thread and I will show you a thousand stars that are farther away from us than anything that looks really far away.

Of course, while you are sleeping you are completely vulnerable. But you don't know that. You don't know anything except how lovely the trees are and how beautiful she is. Like gravy, dreams are better when you're drowning in it. (When Mondaugen talked about temporal bandwidth I knew goddamn exactly what he was talking about. Memories without any width. But that's neither here nor there.) The real and obvious truth is that I am living in a tenuously extant world--that of your mind. I could plead for my life (disguised as your continued readership) but how crass! Such a thing has neither precedent nor conceivable justification. Do as you will. For now, I will savour my more numerous (but silent) companions and my more significant (to my self-centered Weltanschauung) compatriot both.

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people who don't exist

links to:
- Where to go for help with punctuation
- blank slate
- cold star
- forgotten things in space
- quiet evening snow blown with silence
- uncountable

all writing, chronological
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