“While humanity may be far from the best representation of the cosmic unity to which all belongs, we do embody a certain struggle by which the whole of consciousness seeks not only to persist, but to appreciate itself.”
“We are not the individual wave, but we are the indivisible sea that eternally fluctuates to give rise to an endless variety of shapes.”
“Isn’t it odd that the same ratio that generates infinity also generates self-similarity?”
“Humanity has been fetishizing the end of the world ever since we invented its beginning. It’s just easier to destroy it than to heal it, I guess. Chalk it up to our intellectually lazy nature.”
She had poofy, teased-out brown hair that bounced off her shoulders with every high-flying skip and on her t-shirt was a spiraled sun with little wavy lines jumping off it to match the little wavy distortions in the air that were jumping off her. It was pure, unbridled energy and the sound of it hummed in his ears like when standing dangerously near a power transformer. Or maybe he was witnessing the origin story of the world’s first real superhero, and if so, she was probably going to draw her powers from the electromagnetic field itself.
“All that flickers across the screen before us is nothing more than an illusion of activity, of change and process, and of things happening or stagnating. In truth it’s all just permutations of energy from within a vacuum in which such excitations shouldn’t even be possible. Of nothing in want of something in want of nothing.”
But then one voice arose from the babbling clamor to silence them all. It was a voice he hadn’t heard in a while. Steady and self-assured and not really worried about what bad things may or may not happen because bad things and good things seemed to always be taking turns anyway in what was really just the harmonic polyrhythm of an intrinsic symphony perpetually flowing and interweaving.
“This is what we used to think of as the human spirit, which, as we found, is really just one of the diverse ways in which the cosmic soul exercises its creative impulse.”
She finished cleaning him off and then held her baby boy up high to behold this new wonder in his full glory. The brilliant glimmers dancing upon the restive sea as his halo and the winged legions to announce and to extol his arrival and the eternal tide rhythmically whispering of deeds long foreseen. The light and the song and the abiding heart. Creation in its purest form. It was to this divine ensemble that Isa lifted her voice to give name to the precious enigma that she knew would elevate the harmony of all things to realms transcendent.
For while the individual currents were volatile the totality of them were omniscient and the intrinsic flow knew only the way of destiny.
“The next revolution won’t be about the hydrogen molecule at the leading edge of the wave that shouts, ‘that’s right everybody follow me!’ It will be about the groundswell that caused the wave to begin with.”
And then somehow the faint echo of a question brought it all converging in a frightening rush toward the epicenter which was really just another hidden nexus in an infinite web of them. A profusion of warmth followed by a spark that ignited a cloud of impossible color and luminosity—swirling and rippling and churning and strobing—and singing! An excitation in search of that subtle and rhythmic order by which new ensembles were always finding ways to expand the expansionless.
“And while we may never be able to wrap our minds around the thing itself, it is by the power of a story that we brush against it. A story somehow perturbed out of a harmony imperturbable.”
He thought about the loss of humanity that was eating away at the world and the loss of the connection to the self that ate away at the consciousness which animated all into being. He thought about how the collective psyche was teetering on that knife’s edge between a desperation to live and a desperation to die. And here he was at the cusp of it himself.
When unreality is the very basis of your existence, there cannot be a stronger drive than to uphold it at all costs, even and especially at the expense of confronting naked truth.
“That is us. We are the slag of creations far greater.”
In this case Karen’s child was her story. And all the world was waiting greedily for its deliverance even if they didn’t yet know its name or the uncomfortable shape of it and the peculiar contours that altogether were sure to test the foundations upon which they had built their holiest of houses and coziest of dens. They only knew that all of history was in want of a definitive accounting and that such had already been written and then ensepulchered by prophets unsung and that its eventual unveiling was nothing less than the birthright of all humankind.
But in that moment, they already saw him as a lucid vision from the nostalgic past like when a deceased loved one visits you in a dream and you wrap them up in your arms and refuse to let go until you wake up tightly clutching your pillow and crying into it, and still you refuse to let go.
Every adventure allegorically retelling the same essential truth, which was that we are all so much more than we have been led to believe. We are the random spark in the vacuum and the eternal ripple that spreads infinitely from its serendipitous source. We are all of it. Everything that has been, will be, or ever could be.
It seemed she should be the one in hiding. But no, she was making television appearances like she was some kind of celebrity scientist. A veritable Neil deGrasse Tyson of shadow-tech fuckery, here to make the dismantling of the pillars of shared reality into something upbeat and relatable.
Joshua took another small sip from his wine glass as his gaze and his thoughts drifted away from the flat-screen television mounted above the marbled fireplace to ponder a roomful of sports jackets and pantsuits and in some cases cocktail dresses but only of neutral tones and minimal detailing if for no other reason than to avoid becoming the subject of the next petty scandal that would nevertheless send shockwaves through their haughty and insular world. The way they stood in their intimate clusters. Their drink glasses held in various poses of sophistication. And whenever they did bring glass to mouth in accordance with judiciously preset intervals it was also for show, as he believed was true of their subdued conversations, which, from where he was sitting, appeared to be nothing more than the unintelligible murmurings of barely moving lips. A whole list of observations came to mind. Not one of them flattering in any way. The atmosphere thick with that certain stuffiness and elitist redolence of an ivy league alumni fundraising gala. Of course, he readily admitted to himself that out of everyone in the room he was very likely the most materially bereft and least credentialed and that this stinging truth undoubtedly inflamed his plebeian impulse. But that’s not what was bugging him.
“When the unrepentant and undeserving powerful are against you, it binds you into a common fate, transforming you into something entirely new and uniquely capable.”
“Well, there is one thing that does actually matter,” she said, a hint of agitation in the way her lips seemed to want to bite down at the words as they passed through. “And that is, you finally start to respect the artist within you. It is the same artist that breathed heat into an interminable coldness, stirring movement where there had been only inertness, and infusing breathtaking light and color where there had been only implacable darkness. And it is the same that will stretch and bend and compress this cosmic masterpiece into a featureless oblivion, wiping the slate clean for the next work of wonder. Again and again and again. Never satisfied. Never smitten.”
The book closing on the days and the years and every slowly released hug and quick kiss to the top of the head and all the other acts and moments tabulated and tallied for the binding of the seal inalterable.
The next revolution is knowing that you are dead already. I, Joshua Newton, am dust. I am blowing across continents and oceans. I’m an exploding ball of fire, hurtling through space in a million different directions. I am distant light and distant worlds and distant life.
“Stop obsessing about ups and downs and hopes and fears—of all things wondrous and calamitous—and just let them happen, because they are all equally wonderful and equally awful and equally inevitable and most of all equally irrelevant. All is your canvas, your raw lump of clay, and your will alone shall be done.”
“And if I had even a nanometer of extra cleavage for every time someone stroked my hair without asking, I’d be Cardi fucking B by now. Needless to say, shit got weird.”
Traffic slowed as they entered Fort Washakie with everyone rubbernecking the spirited powwow taking place in an empty field just off the main road. Most of the audience gathered round was non-native. But everyone there was stomping and clapping and surrendering themselves to the rhythmic spell of the drums, much like the performers themselves, and the dust of the earth which coalesced with their smoky breath to envelope them together in a billowing cone of palpitation. And Joshua sat there at the stop sign a little too long because he couldn’t bring himself to look away. But no one inside the VW or in the other cars cared, or even noticed, because they were doing the same.
Truth is everywhere but so is falsehood and neither is discriminating.
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