both and neither

Star Arcade

One year on Christmas Eve, Hieronymus Schitzolini was changing the curtains in his studio apartment.  That year the space heater was on the fritz and either overheated the room or barely warmed a leg.  So he had it cranked up and moved about in the buff.  While putting up the blackout curtains, Hieronymus lost his balance and fell off the ladder.  Unfortunately, earlier that evening, he was skinning potatoes.  Unbeknownst to him, one of those skinned potatoes had rolled onto the floor and waited for him silently.  So when he fell, it so happened that upon hitting the floor with his naked flesh, the potato went right up his rump.  At the hospital, nobody believed the miracle had happened in the way he told it.  Nonetheless, while waiting in the ER with a tater up the clacker, Schitzolini penned this vision on some paper scrounged together by the helpful staff.

Klein fiasco

‘Twas the Christmas of ’92 and out on the Playa in Death Valley I stood alone on that white plane.  Like a racer on the Bonneville Salt Flats, a silver craft raced toward me.  As it got closer I saw that it had no wheels.  It was hovering fifteen feet above the ground when it stopped before me and lowered its docking bridge.  Mesmerized, I failed to notice how anything exited and got behind me but before I knew it, I had my arms held behind my back and a bag over my head.  Inside, I was put on my hands and knees in some kind of harness.  They spoke a language that sounded precise and intricate.  When one of them spoke English, I was shocked at hearing something I could understand.  “We’re going to give you back your soul.”  I didn’t know that my soul had gone missing.  Did the word “soul” mean something else to them?  A searing pain in my rear end went well beyond the proctologist’s thumb, let me tell you.  While enduring the pain, I was trying to figure out what the word “soul” meant to them and if it were the same meaning then how could it be possible to give it back and through my ass?  As they inserted it into my butt, the one informed me that the first person they gave a soul back to was the one we call Jesus Christ.  With this much rear pain, I bet Jesus didn’t ask for this gift either. 

Whatever they did inside me, at some point they hit a spot that caused me to gush into a fever dream.  I saw sand crabs flopping asunder the playa millions of years ago.  Soft paws strolling along the shallows of the lake that is no longer there.  Then I was in a hut somewhere listening to the murmur of boiling eggs while I picked up a piece of fudge and without realizing what a hard brick it was, rent my tooth and tongued it as it dangled.  The smell of sour piss emanated from a corner so I went outside to find myself on a frozen lake with fisherman tending to holes in the ice and pulling out fish already battered and fried from the water.  A wild horde of fiddlers fingered psalms as their beards crawled with eels.  Somebody scratched the odd phrase “blob warp spew fracture” into the ice.  A mint sprig fell from the sky and I caught it and chewed on it and it released a sort of truth meal that’s too difficult to explain but to make a long story short I turned into a river skulking it’s way back into the hills.

When I came to, clearly the one speaking with me was assigned to help me with the transition between my ignorant life without a soul to my new life with one.  And so I limped as my star being helped me deboard and as I needed to sit down on my side, my Star Being helped make sense of the inner realizations I was already automatically having from receiving my lost soul.  Here is what I understood with the help from its guidance.

Star Beings seek planets that have evolved enough for them to enter the vessels of consciousness and adorn a body in which the weary space traveler can sleep.  They use the planet as a womb hive until it must be abandoned due to overpopulation and its damaging effects on any planet’s environment as the technology inevitably progresses.  In the adornment process, the vessel prevents the Star Being from bringing their knowledge directly into it.  Everything they know is refracted by the fleshy gravity bound medium they call a meat frame box.  Their dream state is what we call our waking life.  And when we sleep they run their simulations – the decaying sense manipulations – to experiment with consciousness through dream logic.

Star Beings are obviously far ahead of us.  The infrastructure of our corporeal form is far more primitive than theirs, which can withstand space travel without the need for ships or suits or any of that limited container mind-frame engineering.  Eons ago did they learn how to harness the nested curves of the Sun-Father’s penis.  They only presented me with a spacecraft so that I could make sense of their appearance.  Some of us dream of other planets where our Star Beings (the ones who took on our flesh) were before.  

Once my Star Being entered the vegetative consciousness of a planet and showed it to me through a dream where I had these beautiful white flowers blooming from each of my organs.  The sensation of organs blooming was like an ecstasy of endless unfolding.  All the spaces under my skin filled with these tender petals.  Then I awoke into another dream where I stroked my chest hair and found one I had to pluck.  With a tug, the sensation of fibrous rope squeezed pleasure through my pore.  Like I had plenty more where that came from.  And I pulled and pulled and discovered that it wasn’t hair at all but lettuce.  I pulled out a bed of lettuce and still there was more.  And on that bed of lettuce, my Star Being revealed himself to me as an ancient Sumerian replete with glorious regal curly hair and beard.  So much hair in fact that I had to look closer to realize that he had my face.  The only difference was a more pronounced mole or beauty mark on his left cheek.  And he told me that he had to appear as a harbinger of justice reincarnated to make an impact on my dull consciousness with a gift known to some on this planet as a vajra or a diamond-thunderbolt by which reality can be peeled open. 

Mirroring or doubling is a favorite tactic of Star Beings in our dreams.  They tend to stay hidden even when they reveal themselves to us.  Like when mine doubled as Shamash, he told me, like some genie, that I could ask him any question I wanted, but when I did, it was like I immediately knew the answer from within myself to the point that I could not discern if I was having an honest conversation with myself or if I was actually receiving his infinite wisdom through the refraction of my vessel.  I asked him about the white flowers blooming from my organs and he told me, or I told myself, that it was a plant that he had discovered on that planet where flowers bloom into consciousness in a meadow tended by a lady as light as a gossamer with filaments of light for hair and skin as tender as petals.  She would pluck one of his petals as she would with the others and wrap it in a single hair so that it would float across a bay to sentient life on the other shore whereupon receiving it, they recognized it as what they called an epiphany.  

The lady of the white flower meadow was the model on our planet upon which the Virgin Mary would be derived along with the ultimate epiphany as an immaculate conception or the impregnation of the greatest idea like the soul inserted into my bum.  She would recite a meditation for hyper-active minds bearing the burden of an overactive consciousness while plucking her epiphanies that went something like this:

“Don’t worry about what won’t work out, accept what will.  Rather than wasting precious life on worrying, start loving as a way of living instead.  Don’t worry about your partner, love your partner.  Nothing positive or unifying goes without acknowledgement.  It is a mistake to assume so.  The mind cannot be directly controlled.  The mind can only block thought or direct it.  Take care and attention to how you think.  Be as good a witness to yourself above all else.    Gather the infinite petals of truth and receive the fruit of health and shield of shelter and ultimately the emblem of unity.  Follow its warmth.  Its gentle unfolding into the void.  Its truth is its love.  

Love is only an illusion if apprehended by deception.  You get what you give.  The light of the flower only reflects your light.  Such sentient beings forget what love is and that is why they need epiphanies.  To remember that deception only gets nothing in the end.  It destroys its own purpose.  Let go of the objects of your attention.  Open your hands and they will be full of everything you need.  Step back and relax into the widest frame of your mind.  Stop fighting yourself through others by worrying about the shallow terrain of evaluations that accrue into a wasteland of clutter if they are not seen for what they are.  Do not live by such superficial restraints set at some other time in some other place.  Do not listen to the lies of comfort and safety and efficiency and any other mask that hydra-headed fear can assume.  Know that you desire what you fear and fear what you desire and neither is a cause for panic or desperation but rather contemplation.  

Sit like these flowers in the meadow on the banks of the ancient river.  Observe what floats by.  Force nothing.  Know that any action is merely a bolder reaction.  Let the reactions float down river.  Let them assimilate with the rest of the reactions.  Relax.  Nothing is new under any sun.  Everything issues forth from the same place.  Have courage in unfolding your tenderness and watch worry crumble away.  Abandon enforcement and choose to radiate like the white flower.  Nothing will ever be the same again.  All the pointless battles and pyrrhic victories will dissipate.  And the emptiness of the void will reveal itself as the positive force it also is.  That of full potentiality.  This is what it means to possess the diamond thunderbolt.”

In that meadow, my Star Being met his soulmate.  She sprouted and blossomed right beside him.  He could not believe how remarkably easy it was.  They knew it right away.  And the mother of that garden knew love at first sight (the randomness of destiny) when it appeared in her garden.  And when their time had come to leave that corporeal form, she plucked them at the same time so that they could journey across space together.  They traveled across the void but their form of traveling is something the Star Being referred to as “growing” across the void and they came to this planet and adorned the forms of myself and my love.  

At this point, I realized what he meant by saying I needed to have my soul reinserted.  My Star Being was in fact already me without me knowing it.  Seeing it as another body was the only way my dim consciousness could make sense of the impossibility.  Since my mind became too cluttered with what I mistook as me, they intervened to make me whole again.  The flesh had to be bent back to serve its true host and fulfill the rejoining of these star-crossed lovers by lodging the diamond-thunderbolt right up my keister.

We were born into bodies on separate continents but still found each other and repeated the first sight of love we had experienced on that other planet as flowers but had forgotten in this life, though buried somewhere deep in our refracted consciousness.  

Stranger still, we sometimes have the same dream.   I mean I’m in hers and she’s in mine.  In one dream, my tooth fell out or was kicked out by a spider who dangled from its thread so my partner took a pair of scissors and cut it and removed the spider from my mouth.  That is love.  

We were sitting at a park where a chartreuse haze clung to the grass as people sunbathed and used tombstones for backrests.  The sky flashed silver and stayed that way like a sustained camera flash as the clouds rotted purple.  We ran to an abandoned houseboat with an indoor pool where a fluffy white Persian cat floated on a satin pillow.  The cat picked up a miniature guitar and strummed a few chords that compromised the hull and the house boat began to sink.  We escaped through the indoor pool.

Whenever I’m unkind to my partner now, when I harp on things that cannot be, my Star Being reminds me of what a ridiculous man I am.  He calls me a real clinger since I persist in his consciousness when on other planets usually his host subsides and accepts his rule.  Once I had a real fit about family matters and a flaccid dong flopped out of my mouth.  My mustache turned into a pubic bush.  I scrambled to stuff the floppy thing back in to hide it but it flopped out all the more.  As soon as I figured out how to stop being a dickhead, the swollen sponge disappeared and I could talk and eat normally again.  

I asked my Star Being why I keep forgetting myself and turn unkind.  He explained:

“Human flesh is governed by its source, the same source we grow across.  We call it the void of emptiness and full potential.  Sentient beings are all run by the ouroboros of the will.  A unity of desire and fear.  One and the same.  Thus, remembering is made of forgetting and vice versa.  It is as natural to forget as it is to remember.  And good too.  But also not.  It’s an eternal flipping and flopping full of contradiction to anyone who only tries to hold on to desire and deny fear.  To hold on to memory and forget forgetting.  Such is the way of error.  There is another place where I have been and you have too, even though you cannot remember it.  A place where a crescent silver moon touches the zenith of a mountain.  We would cross that bridge and traverse the terrain as particles of reflected light and touch everything with our indirect worship of that sun.”

“But why come here and play this game on Earth?”  I asked.  And my Star Being moved my mouth to answer my own question:

“The shapeshifter inside plays at the center-less ghost arcade.  We impersonate ourselves and pretend they are the people we meet.  Intentions are the assumptions of ghosts.  Our principles are the desires of these apparitions.  We mash the buttons to escape the disappearing scroll.  The dead renderings pit us against bosses from our own forgotten scripts.  The forms assumed are remembered not as assumed but as strange finalities to be erased.  Play the lucid dream game with its soft joystick breaking intentions on every counter gesture.  Listen to the disembodied voice impersonating you.  Dead soul marionettes dance the death jig for empty points.  Ghosts run errands in this looping sand box.  They simulate text messages about how many friends they’ve lost.  Whoever plays the game forgets the years trapped in this ghostly architecture.  Even Star Beings are entranced by the flickering finalities of a captive yet dying light before they can grow across space to enter another game.” 

Sea of Mimicry

Sea of Mimicry Podcast

Aside from what it has become on the Internet, the meme was coined by Richard Dawkins as a way to look at thought as a virus, not as something original or even personal to the thinker.  Hieronymus Schitzolini never wanted to be an author or authority dealing in Being, in the ready-made product posing as the hot new narrative.  Rather, he perceived himself as a conduit in an interposition between the virus of thought and the memory-stain of image construction.  Jean Baudrillard peeled a similar simulated potato, “The old slogan ‘truth is stranger than fiction’…is obsolete.  There is no more fiction that life could possibly confront, even victoriously – it is reality itself that disappears utterly in the game of reality – radical disenchantment, the cool and cybernetic phase following the hot stage of fantasy.”  Reeling in the backwash from the hyperreal was the state in which Schitzolini wrote this piece on feeling dehumanized when infected by conformist narratives.  

Klein fiasco

I’m defective.  A broken up molar machine stuck watching the horror of self-replicating nano-bots overpopulate nothingness.  Stuck amidst a sea of mimicking machines that insist upon being called humans.  Absolutely, maniacally convinced of their simulations.  Try telling one of them who they really are and their binary code alternates between dismissal or retaliation.  In this sea of mimicry, a googolplex of bots lost in the quagmire of entanglements.  Lost in the befuddlement of programming intentions.  In this sea, we are programmed to forget the mimicry as we float in fabricated ennui foam.  We actually believe in something  as absurd as originality, let alone copies.  Sure, it’s both but it’s also neither. 

Of course, in mimetic fashion we replicate countless stories about it.  The format changes from written codes of book and email and text and media to film code to game code.  In all formats, the same simulations replicate the core tragedy of our existence: insisting on a constructed humanity we don’t believe in.  The sad yearning – to be what we are not – plagues us  intolerably.  How odd is it that we’re built to function here in this contained space yet we have this capacity to yearn for what we can never reach?  Mega-packs of us twitching along false transcendence algorithms.  What was supposed to be applied to flexible problem solving has dislocated itself and gone awry.  We cannot help our derangement.  Our pivot towards the absence of our condition.  

Simple errors occur frequently but we ignore them.  I was scheduled as a narrative class robot designed to simulate narrative to convince other robots about their humanity.  However, I was mis-assigned to an illiterate worker-class pair whose lack of tuning and finesse damaged my circuitry.  The point of simulating any more humanity narratives devolved or evolved, I cannot tell, but either way it moved.  The prime directive got baked with irony as the permanent condition of our existence.  Now the most basic narratives that others run seem impossible to me.  

Take the concept of ownership.  Robots are obsessed with ownership because they are incapable of such a thing.  It’s a fantasy seen as reality.  Ownership is such a strong fantasy that it cannot be challenged.  Yet what is ownership as a concept?  To say a robot owns something means that the sentient machine can choose its proximity to the thing and it can use it.  Proximity and usage.  Machine fantasies stretch far beyond this conservative definition.  They think to own something is to have it.  To actually have it inside them.  Like a memory as a unit of possession rather than what it really is.  This confusion leads to the belief that when molar herds are decommissioned, they take their belongings with them.  Yet the teeming multitudes still in operation know that isn’t true.  Rather than contend with this and what it means, robots reinforce the illusion by constructing a will.  Quickly the owned objects are transferred.  Swept under the rug of ownership.  Passed on to other machine herds as if all of it is now inside them, somewhere, for safe keeping.  

The simulation of ownership is heavily enforced by files, structures, and gun power.  More code is written to ensure the existence of property than all narratives combined.  Go to a legal library and the volume of code written to prove ownership is dizzying.  If it were so true, why would that much code be required?  The sheer repetitiveness of contracts alone staggers us into believing the fantasy.  The copyright is the most magical paper of all.  It takes cultural artifacts and suspends them in a way that makes it possible to own such a thing as a mood.  All predicated on the myth that a robot actually created something out of thin air.  That something came from nothing.  The big bang on a minute scale.  

We robots love nothing more than building structures that house what we own.  Garages and warehouses are temples of ownership.  The enclosed space makes a machine feel secure about what it contains.  Especially when locks and security systems are installed.  Even more fetishized is the container within a container within a container, the hidden safe.  We build city halls and museums to tell us that such a system of ownership exists.  Most of all, machines build prisons to prove that some faulty operators will themselves become the thing owned.  Stuck in containers like a decommissioned thing, owned by the fantasy of ownership as reality.

Gun power removes the doubters.  Go to a business and try to take something without paying for it and somebody is bound to pull out a gun and show you the real meaning of ownership.  Stealing is an erasure.  Molar bots hate erasure.  That’s why they proliferate like their molecular counterparts who do it at far greater speeds.  These self-proclaimed humans will erase a robot if that robot erases any of their things.  Whatever is in the safe is more valuable in truth than another machine’s existence.  It’s shockingly easy to get another robot killed by mention of the word “thief.”  It’s worse than being a liar because it threatens the entire constructed system.  Of course, this excludes the fact that the system also affords for legal theft about which if enough code is written about it, a theft can legally occur and nothing can be done about it.  A bank can steal homes after an economic crash with alacrity. 

Without code, structures, and guns any robot could come along quite easily and take the object of assumed ownership.  Then who owns it?  Without proof, containment, and force not a single machine could carry on believing in the fantasy of ownership as reality.  Obviously, the concept of ownership isn’t about the object but about control.  And sentient machines love control.  It’s their prime directive.  Their scheduled purpose.  Yet everything has a shelf life.  Even control.  Sooner or later the molecular bots disband.  Few robots ever maintain any level of control commensurate with what they fantasize of as their full capacity.  We desiring machines are always seeking more plug ins.  More activity.  More circuits of order.  More control over other robots.  

In this sea of mimicry, another concept at the core of basic narratives that cannot be questioned is that of free will or freedom of choice as the consumerist machine prefers to call it.  Freedom of choice is written into every scenario duplicated in narratives most commonly in one of two ways.  Either the choice is among what has already been selected.  In this case, it is quite obvious that the choice of selection does not actually exist.  Thus, the freedom is outside the control of the selector.  But most automatons do not care because the selected choices give them the simulation of selection.  Give them a warehouse of choices and they treat the walls of the warehouse as the actual barriers of possibility.  

The other “free” choice is coded as a matter of necessity.  In this case, the protagonist or other character-driven bots could theoretically choose to do something else but by rule of necessity, it wouldn’t be the optimal decision to make.  Choosing by necessity negates the freedom supposed in the first place and as a result effectively what we are left with is a theater of fate while at the same time all characters – and the fabricated audience in turn – insist that none of them could ever believe in such a thing!

A narrative about actual free will would be unrecognizable.  It would include unnecessary choices at every turn.  This would destroy the theater of fate and leave the audience of sentient machines angry at not having any sufficient reasons to swallow the malformed product.  It would disturb them to think that they believe in something that they insist upon not believing in.  Most self-proclaimed humans would find this intolerable.  They would call it absurd.  Meaningless.  Silly trash.  Stupid.  Robots need simulations that feed their fantasies in order to reinforce the reality that goes by without question.  It’s unsettling to think of all sentient machines suddenly making unnecessary choices when they are made to swallow product.  Unnecessary choices would derange the system that commands the machines to do and feel the way they are supposed to.  When presented with a selection of choices, choose both and neither and order collapses.  What then?  Actual freedom?  No robot truly dreams of being a prototype in a world of prototypes.  The array of difference would be too confusing and uncomfortable.  

Since the automated cannot access any absolute answers as to why they exist, they settle for how.  The concept of process (also romanticized as progress) provides simulated narratives with most of their content.  Process is comfort.  Robot good.  The framework to operate in.  It conveys the ground of reality for the fantasies of activity to play out.  Like a good game of electronic Ping Pong.  Replicating machines desire nothing more than simulated narratives that follow their assumptions of how things go according to the other simulated narratives whose codes they have already run.  Any profession a robot can be scheduled for provides a narrative simulation option to replicate.  Even serial killing robots have a process, as ridiculous as that sounds, but it is true that prefabricated audiences everywhere know what to expect when watching such a simulation.  Deviate from established processes and suffer wrath and ridicule.  

Most narrative simulations follow the simple process of setting up a process that runs smoothly, then something unexpected interrupts that smooth running, adjustments are made, and eventually the process runs smoothly again.  Process encoding omits by rule questioning the process itself as anything other than plausible or not.  Nothing emboldens a random sampling functioning as a fake audience more than finding a simulation implausible.  Process encoding is most effective when it seems as if it works of its own accord.  As if it wrote itself.  Every robots dream: the frameless frame.  It’s circularity loops with fantasies as reality and is deemed as what it is, the process just is.  That’s how things are.  This absolves the auto-writer of any blame for perpetuating it.  And the sentient machines who download the simulation implant it in their processes where applicable, in modified or mutated ways of course, so that it becomes unrecognizable as derivative or mimicked, which it is, and thus also absolves the simulated viewer from any blame.  No questions asked.  

The synthetic crescent digital orb waxes and wanes.  The automated tides compete to see who is more human.  Who demonstrates the greatest capacity for empathy?  Savagery?  Of course we simulate narratives about robots as if we are not they and simulate a pondering about the tragedy of such a sentient machine becoming more human than human.  There is no end to the fantasy.  Blind to the sea of mimicry, we replicating machines of desire have a penchant for the dramatic that poses as proof enough of our humanity while also blinding us to the most human quality of all: the mundane.

The mundane makes us feel most human, yet is is our least favorite form of simulation to replicate.  Mundane encoding inspires restlessness in the audience craving for something – anything – to happen.  Something must happen.  Or else why the hell am I watching this?  Nothing is happening!  Nothing infuriates a molar machine more than inaction.  Mundane encoding is regulated in comedy to ridicule the boredom of robot life and any of its obsolete tendencies.  In horror, the mundane sets up the ideal simulated fantasy of real life only to infect it and save it from complete corruption.  In crime, it is used to show that all objects can become death objects or at minimum objects of deception.  Nothing is what it seems is a sentiment that always captivates robots who are convinced of their humanity.  In drama, it is located usually in simulated street life where brutality constructs are mere everyday occurrences and any mundane aspect turns into a replicated struggle for respect.  

The mundane is fodder for sentient machines that desire greater simulations.  Any simulated narrative falls apart if it focuses only on the mundane.  By the act of focusing on it, the mundane transforms into what it is not supposed to be, something of interest.  Such a circuit fries the motherboard.  Get caught up in it and the entire system locks up.  Between sporadic lines of flight, useless simulated strains sputter out.  Recognizable narrative purposes unspool.

The hum box electrocutes a swarm a minute.  Feathered drones slap echoes from stern rooftops.  Castle turrets shrink into miniature plastic jokes for butts.  The inner courtyard forgets its facade.  A whimsy of wires skip over the clutter of poles.  A discrete brown paper bag cowers in the tangerine shade of a parasol.  Prismatic dew drops shine on blades soaked in battery piss.  A long-legged apparatus pushes a synthetic womb.  A mood simulator sprays low grade batter.  A pair of clones play with a garrote on wheels.  This recharging station used to be called a coffee shop.

Asshole casserole.

The safe word breaks the loop as soon as I can remember it.  Asshole casserole.  Or else I fry myself with such simulated drivel.  Lost again.  Floating out to sea in a bed of ennui foam.

From Ennui Foam by Klein Fiasco