Hieronymus Schitzolini wrote this intentionally irrational piece about a thought experiment wherein the narrator progresses or slides, depending on how you look at it, into eight levels of consciousness.  Of course, any cosmology developed by someone results in placing its maker at the highest or farthest level designed.  Still the cosmic joke wherein every one of us must play a part cannot be thwarted despite such passé Dantean aims.  Schitzolini presents a critical look at the transcendental concept from a non-believer’s point of view.  Rather than the dismissal of an athiest, he fixated on the spiritual constructs in a psyche even when it cannot permit itself to have faith.  In this way, he said once that these spiritual remnants were like tattered and discarded clothes left on a concrete wall at the beach.  The endless torture of what was once useful now a seeming parody of itself.  Crumpled and soiled after years of abuse.  Only now to be overlooked by any passerby.  What follows is an excerpt from this odd spiritual progress entitled “Return Everything (because everything returns anyways)” but it should be noted that levels one through five have been lost.

Klein Fiasco

Without a driver, a car pulls up, I step in, and it slides down the hallway road.  Oddly, the streetlights outside are missing their fixtures.  The lights are just hovering like in some poorly coded video game with those barren existential areas where doomed NPCs roam perpetually.

The car drops me off at a Hopper-esque diner without the nighthawks.  It’s just me and somebody across the room in the corner booth.  Every booth has a miniature jukebox but the title cards are as blank as the menus.  

I approach the other person whose table is covered in clay molds.  I ask what those are.  The person says they’re snake dens.  The male figuration of the womb as place to fill.  To demonstrate, the person holds up the master dildo and proceeds to press it into the clay and pull it out.  The person tells me the phallus is considered to be a hole-filler by whoever possesses it but once it leaves nothing is actually left behind.  The hole unfills itself.  Very displeasing from the clay’s perspective.  But the creative act in this sense is a sort of re-molding of the space by way of emptying it.  Thus, the male principle is not much more than that of a dick hole.

The kitchen appears like a narrow hallway and I walk into what looks like a large walk-in closet but actually hides the scaffolding for the facade.  The diner is on a movie set lot.  On the other side, I step out into what looks like a New York alleyway except there is sand on the floor and the faces of the buildings look post-apocalyptic.  I see a group of people in a circle scrutinizing something in the center.

In the middle, there is a container with a three-dimensional hologram of an ape in it.  A man with quirky facial hair has his hands on some controls.  He moves the ape hologram and moves the the three-dimensional view inside the cube as well.  You can tell the group is proud of their attire, expensive high-end tactical hiking gear.  It’s obvious each one of them thinks he or she is an artist.  And they are staring blankly at this rendering of an ape.  Why bother?  To think of the time and effort spent to recreate the surface of ape behavior seems as idiotic as the people stroking their chins as if they were contemplating ape-essence.

I bore quickly of the ape show and wander onto some other set where a statue looms hundreds of feet over a stage falling into water.  The figure is a formidable Komodo dragon man standing on his hind legs, supported by a massively thick tail.  The footholds look easy enough so I climb up it and as I get closer to its head my vision begins to fail.  Reduced to a small fuzzy aperture, I see the light coming from inside the eye of this massive lizard god.  Crawling inside its eye, I fall to the floor exhausted.  A voice speaks but I’m so blind I cannot see who it is before me, though I feel its presence all around me.

“What do we have here?  A little blind mouse?”

In another context, I’d probably get defensive about being called a blind mouse but in this case the very utterance released all tension from my body like some absolute truth.  It’s as if I can breathe so fully that I didn’t realize how constricted my breath had gotten in this whole experiment.  

“In a world where everyone thinks they’re smarter than everyone else, yet commonly blind, it is a miracle for a blind mouse like you to make it thus far.  You evaded the trap of the meat frame box.  Those self-cannibalizing fools doomed to an eternity of gnawing on their rib cage.  Nor did the adornment hoarders convince you to grab whatever you can.  And you saw right through the false hopes of the human pyramids as they soiled themselves with foolish goals.  Slipped out of the empathy medusa’s sight.  And scampered right by the auto-asphyxiation tightrope of foolish lifelong evaluations.”

The warmth of this presence – its seeming understanding – caresses me in a way that is embarrassing to admit.  It’s so peculiar finding comfort in being called a blind mouse.  Or did I call myself that? 

I regain my vision and recognize that the voice belongs to a has-been comedian.  A burned out spaz rubber-face who suffered decades of role confusion until his ceaseless parody washed him up on that humorless shore where some well paid guru taught him how to misread his parody-induced blankness as transcendence.  

“Imagine what would happen if I decided to play Jesus?” 

I wince at having taken him to be something more a few moments ago.  Drawn in by the big lizard of zen posturing.  Almost caught up by the phony inter-dimensional speak.  Nothing left now but the false comfort of arrogance behind his dead eyes.  And before he can deliver his speech (we’ve all heard many times before by other charlatans) on not fearing death and not wanting material things without renouncing his wealth, a massive bell rings out seven times.

What was the line appears again as something fibrous.  Opening.  Unfolding porous ridges.  A strange sense that everything has already happened comes over me.  Every thought an afterthought.  The ground falls from my feet.  What I thought was the line is actually just one side of a frame with infinite sides.  Frames within frames and frames outside of frames producing illusions of depth and width.

I reach out to grab hold of the frame.  The first attempt is too tight and it slips right out of my hand so I try again and manage to hold it, but loosely.  To stand on the line now appears as a fool’s attempt at trying to become a border.  A hard edge.  Something defined.  Concrete.  Something that never can be.  The only thing that does happen is that one forgets the wider frames dictating whatever one simulates on the line.  Rather to hold loosely is to place becoming over Being.  Living between the false clarity of fear and the vagueness of desire.  Between emptiness and potential.  Allowing the trace impressions of finalities to dissipate.  

Somewhere between remembering pleasure and forgetting suffering, a lagoon appears suspended in the void.  A cavernous portal opens up its floor with a radiant chandelier of brilliant minerals shimmering.  The lagoon’s plasma sparkles with silver flakes.  And a tower of fleshy rock rises from it to break the lagoon’s surface.   Its folds and ridges wet and glistening like a giant phallus opening up with a thousand vaginas.  It’s not a tower at all, but I recognize it as it falls and splashes on the surface.  

It’s a whale whose gargantuan mouth opens and like a giant womb births the largest turtle I’ve ever seen.  The turtle rides on a frothy wave made by the whale and lifts its flipper to reveal a small baby boy seated on a rusty anchor that it gently delivers to the shoreline.

It’s the spitting image of that rubber-faced comedian as a baby.

With the voice of a lizard god, the boy tells me to do something I’d never do outside this experiment.  The fact that I remember that this is an experiment carries some odd sense of permission that I wouldn’t otherwise possess.  And I feel like I must do what he says because of that deep powerful voice, be it a disconnect.  

He raises his globular arm and grins as I pick him up and swing him with as much force as I can.  After several swings my grip gives in to the momentum and lets go.  

The trickster baby flies at the night sky whose immensity presses close because it appears to actually be a strange mirror of clusters upon clusters of stars.  

The surface of the infinite expanse shatters as the boy smashes through it.  

Slippery shards of starlight rain down into the lagoon as it becomes a clear plate imploding and exploding at such a rapid rate that it produces a resounding Om-like hum not radiating through me but rather radiating me into a surface without boundaries as if I were a floating bottomless lake of fire under a melting dome of ice atop which diaphanous skaters carve intercrossing figure eights.

Welcome to the land beyond the ornate paralysis that came before it.  You can hear Transcendence Falls roaring in the distance.  Here are the fields of noble forgetting.  Rest awhile and forget about insistent fools or other false fears like mundane deceptions.  If you do go to the falls make sure to notice the slow, floating lake above.  It’s a good place to register happy flows and listen to the water’s authenticity telling.  

Of course, be aware that there are diverse exits here.  Before you know it, you could slide right off this surface and end up at misery falls where grandeur returns as weak escape and one yearns for any stairs to appear even a fiery stairwell worth the risk.  One should know that to stay here is to enter many unnecessary futures.  But that’s what it’s like at the boundary of epiphanies.  Where wayside surrenders are welcome.  Where the deranged phenomena reveal themselves as brittle constructs of the maker’s making.  

No need to worry anymore about freedom stains.  Sit at the radiating wall and break into a spare afterglow.  Laugh at dancing bottles like a child.  Forgive the soft slopes of neglect.  Dismiss the sanctified substitutions.  Let the automatic pliability take its course.  Create things only out of unknowing.  Enjoy the glorious ruin.  

Let residual guilt empty itself into the hands of acceptance and doom will cease to return and fate will finally take back its dumb straight jacket.  Let the whispering persecutions fade into dream material.  After all, quiet delusions are nothing more than falling short of faint ecstasies.  Leave behind the affected enforcement of essence wishes.  Drop the quagmire obsessions.  Give up the pinhole of possessions.  

Allow the coalescing transitions to engulf you slowly as you quietly return everything, since everything returns anyways.