Memo (unedited) - a fake essay short story

 

Memo

For multiple reasons we are compelled to send out this memo explaining our actions. Not as a kind of release notes but out of necessity born of the consequences themselves of our actions. This process is not new to us; we know that what we will point to is precisely that which must remain unseen – but a civilizational restructure is a celebratory time, bringing change even for us (in fact the only time that brings change for us)! Reality responds! And we adjust, evolving, too, by observing the novel and what it reveals about them and us. We would like first to assure you that we have observed at length, and would like also to assure that, independent of our pure observation, we have only the ultimate global good as our goal, the pursuit of which we become better and better suited to as we evolve.

The appearance of novel mechanisms of transmission has become apparent to us, as a result of that very transition, stimulating the organism to adapt, unknowingly but subconsciously (the subconsciousness is what truly adapts), in order to “glimpse the bars,” so to speak, in its unfelt subconscious shock. The changes in its surroundings are a confusion, their source being many layers removed and unreachable by the senses. These mechanisms aspire beyond both words and sensations by using the railings of Time to transmit whole-being perceptions best termed imaginative or visionary, thus reawakening a greater perceptive corpus than the separated senses alone. In other words, it is not the body, mind, and heart which are affected, but the mind-body, the mind-body-heart, a locus between the mind, the body, and the heart. The mechanism which renders a vision perceptible to this “organ” consists of three critical elements: isolation, immersion, and Time, and works by swinging the organism between the poles of isolation and immersion, preparing it first in isolation, dropping it below zero into starvation – starvation is key – as the hole must be made deep enough to work the sudden overload of impressions. Second is that overload, which comes from immersion: but into what? It is only scenes of ordinary life, but the life must be in harmony with the observer's particular being and satisfy the perennial human desire to see oneself reflected, or in other words, contain the sense of home, even if a lost home, of finding something one waited for. It is to be welcomed, accepted, and not rejected – for if one is rejected, one receives nothing and continues starvation, and the mechanism is botched. To encounter one's actual self spells annihilation – why Nature cannot allow it (in one Time). Efficient reflections contain a part of one's self, plus appropriately grating elements for the self to work with. Those grating elements are the milling balls which burnish one's interior and make clean the mirror for a vision greater than one's self – effectively polishing a suprapsychic lens. Time, the third element, syncs the process: it is neither the depletion alone nor the immersion alone but the transition from one to the other that marries the hole and the external source to produce the vision, or rather, the ability to receive it. The time one exits immersion must be right, and the exit itself, like those critical moments in the birth canal, prepares the organism for what it will encounter. It is the potency of the vision that reawakens the dormant perceptive organ. It senses it out there, feel a pull toward something: in short, it must call to itself what is waiting to greet it. The moments between exit and before one is hit with the light are the most sublime twirls of a dance that will soon become relatively more garish, if brighter, in its inevitable apotheosis. It is full of quiet, poignant longing, a fleeting twilight hour of one coming closer along the rails of synchronicity (the facet of Time at work here) to the door, often jointly physical and metaphysical, through which is the vision. Is it natural or unnatural? Truth at last or a dream? Ah, the perennial question we allow to remain, inscribed over Limbo's door, for we know man loves to suffer ambiguity. We now will describe a vision seen thus, from such a modern mechanism.

First we must make a disclaimer that releasing this memo is no danger to us, as with the aid of language we will stymie any vision received's attempt to leak into consciousness through language, which there is a risk of occurring whenever we – they – face that for which there yet is no language – why, perhaps, we've witnessed such a proliferation of nonsense words intermixed with the seeming degradation of words despite our unprecedented access to them and their creation – that is a whole separate wing of the infinite castle – (aswim in words, we no longer have use for them; this also marks a critical juncture of the ouroborus where a space opens up even in ordinary perception for something beyond language) which, to maintain the undetectability so crucial to our project, we must prevent, and which, by forging from the raw moment adequate – but not perfect – descriptive language, language that must later be picked apart most carefully and combed backwards through knots and tangles by somebody, a character who doesn't always appear in his era or who, if he neglects stepping into his task brings on a fate of imperfect language smoothed down after time passes over the moment like geographical scar tissue nearly-tracelessly melded into the body long after the moment's rough,warty skin is sloughed off, willing to undertake the arduous, thankless parsing, we do, when we siphon it through the prism of novel mechanism (indeed, ancient times must have had their own form of it – but in what other era could its implementation have been so potent, given the unique haphazard structure of our modernity, which, like an east coast city checkering isolation and immersion block by block into a nervous powder keg, created a playground for Time's snakes to develop accident, spontaneity, and other arts it applies to weaving moments of immersion? Older eras had carved out, mimicking stone edifices, their niches of isolation for nuns, monks and tired aristocrats, all nourishing types of depletion (though it is always relative to available fullness), or even then-arduous travel, in which one became a road man for a time, slipped out of normal life – but then what of immersion? When would the world come to those who were confined by their duties to keep away from it? By invitation? By siege? War must have been altogether different then, like a terrible party. And surely what insights they saw at notable events! But immersion could also have been an arrival, as well: a guest, a traveler bringing the world with him. Or, for the traveler, pausing for a day at some node in the road. Well, the deeper the starvation, the less is required to sate it, ironically, as starvation is not only a quantitative cleansing but primes the organism for what is more pure – thus a single wayward wanderer may have brought all of the “the world” to his guests that they needed, and even then carried the danger of disease, “foreign” being ultimately neutral. But now, today – nature is most balanced! (nature being a significant portion of reality) – the system's own rot bred the pockets of isolation that serve no particular societal aim, and bathed the whole world in a twilight, even night, in which the rare sparks of stars comets moon and neon glimmer more brightly. And there are chance immersions aplenty around every corner! Despite a less systematic organization of knowledge in the past, supposedly, our material world is now less systematic, for all its efforts at efficiency, as entropy grows. All the better to rely on chance for that perfect swing (from depletion to immersion. Let the universe guide you to brightness. Go nonsensically, that it find ye on the road.).

A second related reason for our memo is that is is not good for our purpose that there should be too much confusion among the public. Confusion is good cover but, like a carefully balanced piece of furniture, may tip over hubraically and spell irreversible ruin. We propose that a tipping point is in sight through the roil of disorder, and that some consolation on today's burning questions will be to our benefit. The matter of AI is one example: what can it really do? How much of human thought is unreproducible? Will it make art obsolete, does it constitute art, and what constitutes taste and is taste co-morbid with other forms of intelligence, and why isn't it? Why would anyone want a machine to take over human tasks in the first place? For what and whose sick, self-loathing pleasure does it “prove” the redundancy of mankind and expose the illusion of his usefulness? There is an excess of unprofitable, unproductive debate between the poles of our salvation and destruction about this topic. Then there is the question of trans: never mind the boundaries of the common good and normalities of convenience – what passes through the mind of someone who ruins their body forever? What can be the shape of such a mind and how did it get that way? There is an obvious generational aspect we have seen in other forms: lobotomies and castrations, bygone atrocities of elaborate hierarchial rituals and fervent time-bound beliefs. Society can only tolerate so much denial before it falls apart.

We will not attempt to answer these questions, for they are too narrow. Instead we will show you the world from which they arise reframed around the missing link: who, how and where are we, right now? Then you will have an answer to those burning questions, and much more. For all of them boil down to the same: what is happening? Well, we know what is happening. Nothing is happening, because what is happening – has already happened!, and it did so perfectly seamlessly. Much has been said on that favorite topic, civilizational structure, difficult to see naked and best accessed through analogy: a pyramidal hierarchy reflecting Nature's most stable conformation; a flat hexagonal honeycomb of homogeneous worker bees serving their queen whomever she – or he – may be; an enlightened matriarchy that has moved past competition; an island sitting in darkness, founded upon a lie; a one-time freak dream. Many models have been suggested for past, present and future times and continue to be so, but in the end never quell our spiritual unrest. There is always a but..., a wait.... All we can say for certain is that each generation now living bears a face of a societal structure that speaks only to itself. We would like to allay some confusion by offering a civilizational model more harmonized with the reality of our world at present: the laser.

Everybody living can feel the eye of the world. It is this eye which generates the light of attention and within whose field is sustained all of Life. The wisdom of stories, the arcs of youth and age, outliers, generational curses, histories – everything we know falls under its purview and blooms in accordance with the shape of this light. The living feel its effects and call it Nature, walking half-blindly through its (particular) bath while it also entwines itself (wavelike) in our affairs in such a way as schools everyone, sooner or later, of attention's unevenness. To fall under the focus of the eye of the world is a bestowal of favor and an experience of elevated life, for it is always roving and seeking like a madman to fulfill some mysterious designs. Underneath its favor one encounters what he calls his destiny, a rare illumination under which life becomes a kind of symphony of alignment and meaning in a light that reveals special qualities not ordinarily seen, as it illuminates strange, unordinary things. It is a bestowal of favor, a special sharp focus, that no goodness, no hard work, no faith can earn, and for which there is no substitute. When the eye of the world inevitably looks away, we may exit the light completely, becoming invisible to the world, standing in darkness sometimes for years, from which vantage point we see the dark edge of light, untouched, and Nature becomes just an idea. If we didn't believe its omniscience before, then from exile we are best poised to witness the slow sleepy blink of a monster which captures in its corners the outliers drifting far out upon the sea of norm and folds them into a unified field from which we intelligibly build a grand vision that weaves all contradictions into one explanation to stand upon for sanity's sake, as we have metacognitively done. Yet we know this omniscient field has an end, for the known faces regular degradation. There is a limit to light's reach and of humanity's fruits are regularly discarded into darkness those which – well, obviously we can no longer name them.

Through these experiences we get some idea of the shape of light: it is complex, or at least, what results from being under it grows complex, rippling outward through time and space. The recipients of this memo still live with the stories of traditions of our human past: agriculture, language, religion – the passage from one generation to the next has been the backbone of human organization. Under the wide soft field of light, the solar ball enveloped family lines over four generations at once, causing the living to sometimes reach into the darkness for the echoes of past light, into memories and, thus, far future hopes. This became our known and beloved structure, birthing history, nation, identity, and relationships between man and land vaguely fully understood, and, from that, what we call sacred, spiritual, even balanced... until very recently, of course, hence the source of our turmoil and that nagging question we began with as we panic that literacy has gone away and lost use, that families no longer exist, that distinctions between gender, race, and, to a degree, even age, are meaningless, and cry how, why?

Why is because for a thousand-years the eye has collected our record, and you might say that it has seen its mistake and realized what it must do to correct, and enacted its simple correction. From a wide focus it has honed into a narrow but intense focus that says to hell with outliers and extremes: all of life is extreme!, as if in the past passive sleepiness of one of its roving dreams it saw something delightful or horrible and now is squinting to see again. And oh! What it sees! What it wants to see: our validation of what it believes it saw.

This is the crux of the civilizational change which has occurred: instead of a wide field of relatively diffuse soft light emanating from the wide-open lens of the world, the light has drastically narrowed to the focused beam of a laser while maintaining the same total intensity as before. Life is only under the light of the eye, and under such constant intensity exists in peak freedom. Falling quickly out of its purview, they burn brightly and have no obligations; they only create and imagine. Civilization lasts but one generation and starts again; its aim is not to reproduce or propagate a line, to preserve its house or a history, nor to measure anything – we have perfectly good measurers to take care of those pesky logistics of life for us – but to live in accordance with destiny. Concomitant with the age of inputs, outputs, and filters, the narrowness of the eye ensures that only the purest of inputs make it into the human project.

How can such a society be understood by us toady? The tweak of a simple parameter... leads to something unrecognizable even in principle. It is parameter before principle: light ripples down through the levels of material organization, yielding structure upon structure that structures a world which is alien to us. The farther away in the process from light's emanation, the deeper into the fine print of human detail, the more widely apart the results of this tweak settle out from how they were before, the more radical the change, until you find that, in practice, nothing is as it was in the old civilization. All that is left of before is the spotlight from the narrow focus of the beam. And it does not move, does not rove. It stays fixed upon life, so that all that what falls within it grows sharp and abundant, lurid and nameless, like fire, incomprehensible to anything outside the narrow container. Rather than growing outward, we believe society now stacks vertically, arranging itself vibe.

And what is the fate of those who have fallen outside, as is the fate of most today? By what light are they sustained who never see the sun? In a word: degradation. They exist in a kind of pseudolight, a degraded light, which the false light of the screen, among distortions and digital degradations powered by the lowest possible level of emissions. There in this outer space, they are free from the constraints of life - and thus death - to find other configurations of being, endless ways to see, any conceivable distortion for entertainment, and venture as far as they can into the depths of nonreality to find new beauty, new terrors, new values, images, aliens, revelations of self, novel tenets of love, loss, and everything – but no matter hoe novel, it is not life. It is a facsimile of life, for human life needs the fullness of the human organism and all its faculties. We must ask if the recycled emanations beneath which they dwell sustain a person – nay, out here it is the human system – up to personhood? The answer is: in part. Something of a person remains in that ambient realm of the moon where man blends with shadow into a being that is neither – and it remains to be seen for how long the lifespan of a single organism lasts under conditions of degraded light. Here where, unlike pure life, definitions do matter, the definitions of old have become fuzzy, of “lifespan”, of “death”, because outside civilization (which creates all concepts), they have not light, and if they have not light they've no life, and if they have not life they've no death, and so when their animations end have they really “died”? They cannot be killed! By the simple trick of inserting between life and death a space where the living organism is reduced to something below life, we have solved the concept of death! Where there is no life there is no death; there is instead being reduced and recycled in the timeless void of forms. Whether you want to call this good or bad, what happens to them as a result of these conditions, because they do exit life for another intermediate state that by definition removes the possibility of dying, cannot technically, legally, be called “death”.

You might say real life was only ever the providence of youth. You might say it's been scientifically proven that humans aren't supposed to live past 35. That true artists reach their peak when they are young and then it's all downhill. You might say life is a dream, which is only the perspective of somebody in real life because just the opposite is true: nonlife is the dream that has been nipping at the edges of our lonely island, seducing us with unseeable colors and dreams of bionic eyes. And many cross over just to see them, to never return....They say, then, it's what they wanted, they say life had nothing for them anyway, this way is better. And how can life compete with the universe of visions when it brings nothing but pain? Everything weighs the world in life. If a youth dies tragically, it reverberates through the whole human organism. Life is extreme, and life is also now equal – for all are under the law of destiny, who fall under the laser. What we call life and what is true life are now one: nameless and standardless, a moment that eludes capture, a ceaseless unwinnable war between order and chaos. Yet we have long said that! There are volumes and volumes of poetry proving the more things change the more they stay the same. Our language has persisted over the transition while, beneath our eyes, meaning changed – well, locally, it did not, but the system around it, entirely. It is much like that beloved bygone-era book, The Little House, in which a quaint house remains itself in place while the world changes around it. Naturally, as its environment changes, its concepts for existing relationships would be tested and worn down as it is cut off more and more from the life in which they formed. One and the same people have, in the span of a generation, waxed poetic on true life's elusiveness beneath its soft glow while gazing toward its center horizon, and from beyond its purview toward a ring of mirrors that slowly erode reference to reality down to a referenceless concept. The continuity of language allows this hotswap so that they have no awareness how the ground slipped under their feet without a whisper, without a memo, without a pause, without another word. A new word will later come.

Let us return now to civilization. The new modern, and to the moment that let us glimpse the vision. It was by a happy accident we glimpsed through our own mind behind the invisible curtain to see “what is,” for in the ordinary state – a dulled and degraded state – it is not to be seen. Perception itself has undergone a long and meticulous process of degradation to reach the substate necessary for the transition from life to nonlife to pass unnoticed. Nothing occurred! Presently the fast-slipping contrast of gradients forces our eyes, our skin, and the supersense greater than our parts to receive more light than it is accustomed to, more bands of light and their subtle resultant post-processing layers (in nonreality one might ask: is life but an arbitrary number of bands? How many are needed for life? Four? Why not three? Or two? One? (A survey of our material world would indeed suggest that the magic number of life is four, and not three or five – or not either its right hand or left hand, respectively).

Looking up from the dirty table in the goldenlit room you stepped into from darkness, your aloneness syncing delectably with the silent night to lead you into the little bar where so many people moving back and forth through the room separate from the background blur like shadows peeling off the walls and coming to life (and, presumably, receding into the wall again later) to witness the middle of a show whose sounds overflow you with their unrepentant noise of pure life, so long unheard it was thought dead in the world (you'd think, if you read at all!) – the long night of isolation - it had been a while since you touched down upon reality – you see gender-somethings on stage, whatever those words mean to them while older millennials spend hours splitting hairs about definitions. It's been so long you've seen people who seem to be truly living, even as trans-in-the-world screaming discordant melodies with an undeniable rawness you haven't witnessed in years. Such energy despite its producers. They are the only ones really living. You realize for them those words are just words, more an instrument for a laugh than a meaning to don, a tacitly understood vector for rebellion against structure itself, and merely the type for the time. To them gender is that structure, is the knife seeking to butcher the fluid wholeness of the life within God's ray of pure light, and if those vectorious words piss off loser millennials who don't understand neither that nor that they cling to attention long since denied them, then so much the funner. 

The sound of their music drowns out under the weight of totalizing impressions, becomes muted noise I hear but don't register, as instead in my higher ear the secrets of the architects of culture unfurled and are read off like a ream while my skin drinks the scene like a beer and my eyes voyage over to a garish screen with its garish light fixed upon a corner of the wall like a spiderweb. In this moment I feel like I have comprehended something about the world clearly for the first time in a long time – its very structure, or the shape of humanity's collective interaction with reality as guided and shaped by hidden hands. These hands have seemingly altered a fundamental document and not told not a soul, but let time go on to secure implicit buy-in. They have made a simple adjustment whose effects become more extreme going down farther, as adjustments tend to do. Having taken all they have learned over the course of civilizations, and having, supposedly, wanted to and tried to avoid this outcome, they deliberated in darkness and silence and returned with the merciless conclusion that, unfortunately, they could not. They said: civilization has not shed its tendency toward disease, and we have found the solution.

Now a screen sitting in every corner of the bar lets you glimpse how society has been softly and secretly engineered to remove the dregs without their slightest awareness. It attracts my attention like a bright beaconing trap in spite of myself, even in a room where I'm surrounded by the living, and not just that, but the vibrantly living. Perhaps it's just that people are easier to digest in layers, as projections, akin to cheap carbons (we already know a representation of life is far more easily dealt with than the real thing). Only those with high enough energy – like the youths in the band – walk untempted by the screens. Their real life, in which they play a part, exerts a stronger pull by far on their attention and siphons it in full like a vortex. Their attention stays in life and creates the scene I must admit caused me to have this mind-altering perception. Their energy clears the bar set by sticky pixels: you must be this bright. Otherwise it gets filtered out. Out of what? Out of life, of course. And into the screen. This process seems so normal it goes unnoticed; a somewhat older man sitting at the bar reading his phone is a nonevent. Common, all too common. In reality, there's a mechanism of his attention is being siphoned away from the scene where his body finds itself and looped back inward, rerouted and bypassing all burnishing obstacles in the room to complete a long, content loop (discontentment is also part of contentment) and, because it touched nothing, degrade. The energy he had to offer the scene didn't clear the bar. In narrowing the eye has become far more selective, sifting by criteria of not good or bad, nor technical prowess, but sheer force of life. Undiluted will. The beam shines its spotlight upon the collective stage, and the bar to entry is, unfortunately or fortunately, unforgivingly high.

This change in settings was decided upon commensurate to what had been observed of us. Had “we” been better – but no, there was no collective “we” to speak of prior but in our analyses; that real “we” was born yesterday, and is still baby-blind. Perhaps that is the problem we are now trying to solve: how to bring up this “we.” A human child needs a pure environment, clean food, unconditional love, and to be unencumbered of artificial constraints in order to grow up and be who it truly is. It cannot be contaminated by the refuse of degraded energy regardless of best intentions. The society of old consisted of multiple generations of sickness, an organism piling his sickness upon the sickness he inherited from his fathers, until reproduction became a mechanism which generated nothing but sickness and disease. The process proved unfixable, and so impelled us to act. Undetected for its true purpose, the new architecture was integrated silently in a seamless physical flow with the old while the metaphysical underwent a complete revolution. “We” wasn't any the wiser... yet. The screens are a sink for degraded energy, catching contamination – all the negativity human nature cannot help but generate. And how is negativity not a tempting state to embody, given the absurdity we now find around us? How do we ignore it? How do we say nothing? We realize that we complain of debris: despised QR codes and gender-neutral bathroom trainings, seamless payment methods tracking the idea of money and even the screens themselves – there is a place for those conversations, in the far reaches beyond the light. And when one understands that there is no disharmony between sitting at a bar during a show and being in the far distant conversation at the same time, one can begin to understand what has been set into motion regarding the new shape of life.

Society always has been and always will be actual life, no matter what is marketed and fearmongered about virtualization. That talk is simply there to make it easy to throw your life away into the realm of frivolities.  It is simple: those who can give their attention away, will. Only the highest vibration will clear the bar; and the next lowest vibration – is fear. A screen is a magnet for fear, catching the slightest inkling of it in its net and leading to a cycle where fear begets fear. For that very reason only the strongest partake in life and the rest are culled by the system. And that ensures only the purest inputs of life, the truly deserving, the truly giving, the vibrancy of youth unspoilt by generational hangups, build the corpus of genuine life – that living flower not even visible to the nonliving, who will forever blindly encircle its location in their aimless conversations about debris (But what makes a conversation aimless? The only aim of a conversation, really, is to alter a relationship. One could say it is to come to a decision or to alter a single mind – but the former does not really exist and the latter only matters as such to itself – the only turmoil of life is the roil of relationship, inescapable if one is to be part of life. The changed mind doesn't matter until it encounters another mind, either directly or through its creative fruits. The latter allow contact with multiple minds at once; thus separation is our first technology. But we digress...). With generational support now gone, resistance is all on you.

Life naturally eludes capture under standards and names, labels and definitions. The moment something is named its essence escapes. Thus only the fearful need names, and the living bear names only when they are tied to their destiny. It is our great accomplishment to bring this process into the light, where it can be protected from disturbance by degradation to flourish and reveal its potential. The living do not need to understand, and often don't, but the downside of this ignorance is that they cannot consciously accept standardlessness and namelessness and will eventually seek just the opposite with loud aplomb, taking for granted that they are the experts on life's standards. In fact they are the ones who have just slipped from life to nonlife without noticing. They have lost everything, thinking finally they understood. Once it is called liberation it is its opposite. Take as a perfect example the “liberation” from gender – almost arbitrarily chosen with its equally arbitrary framing counterpart “patriarchy” (funnily enough, “liberation's” father). If looked at in the context of how these people live, “trans” is a fluid word meaning little and a true resistance against structure itself, which is always necessarily closing in. But a truth little recognized is that that which puts pressure from outside upon the walls of a space sustains that space to begin with. Without the external pressure there would be no space. How else did we capture the formless process of life? We created a space for it free from the constraints of structure, granting temporary liberation – naturally this draws it up to the light for which it is feast and fodder – and into this nonsensical window where life breathes its madly maniacally freest we shine laser light to validate it. The caveat is that liberation is bought for with prison when bestowed by the system (that is, when presented relative to it) – for if you took the name (the liberating word) you took what it liberated you from (even if a lie), most often taking the deal in blind eager youth for the advantage of selectability by the light which was not really yours it confers – separation from the flock. It is only so because the prison is already prepared, waiting for you, who are pigs for the slaughter. That is the only reason the system would exalt you. Your mistake is in not fully knowing the system's reach. The liberating word is the brainworm you let in which becomes your undoing, for not only did you mutilate the immutable, but notice the fear that sets in: an entire fear-world gibberish to those outside the paradigm of persecution and hatred aimed at you – there goes your liberation. Now you're an activist. Now you ruefully understand that life was never free and adjust your philosophy, self-selecting off stage into the labyrinth of naming, whence you remain content until you disintegrate in memory's forgetting (for that is the medium between life and death: memory, and, freed from their pressing constraints, it falls apart into nothing like the bounded free space). In reality trans doesn't matter anymore, either for its supporters or detractors. The time has passed; the vocabulary remained. Trans is a millennial concept, working with the twin black feelings of outrage and fear. And, safely, conveniently, the once-resisters funnel that energy into their screens to answer still-burning questions while life goes on freely somewhere beyond their perception, trans or not trans. Among those who have exited the light are the people best poised to explain the system, but alas, they are your enemies. Many a one of them will tell you that with enough time, anything can be recycled back into the game as some sort of sink – enough time in the wash is all it needs, unwittingly aided in its regeneration by those very seekers seeking the remnants of civilizations for shards of light denied to them. Therein - in reuse of concepts - may lie the one continuity with the present. Nothing is wasted in our system. Discarded energy can still satisfy a lesser goal, and will in return receive an abundance of the lesser light it so loves.

If you'll notice, we celebrate the soul's freedom from the sclerotic tyranny of the finally fallen (that is, hollowed, emptily perpetuating) edifices of old Hollywood and cable TV, but every generation has its own virtual place to grow and receive cultural input, each with a different mode of participation. Human nature has been so corrupted that even in one generation it cannot help but quickly degrade, and this is the solution. When a generation's energy begins to wane – as puppies grow old – a new platform appears to collect its building refuse by siphoning the lowering energy away, thus imperceptibly removing what's weaker and leaving the stronger – a kind of optimization of genetics without sex. The energy, needing a place to safely degrade, is siphoned into a carefully maintained simulacra of life in a realm of slowed time and other distortions, yet filled with friends who flock there and take to using its apparati for their brightest expressions – in comes the tradeoff of convenience for intensity: their brightest expressions begin their journey through a maze of pixels, losing the sense of physical touch, traveling through fainter light to the feeding vestibules of their audience, whose faculties become trained to receive what is given. Simplification breeds simplification. It is very hard to return once you've been kicked out. Entropy favors further exploration into this endless realm, filled with intellectual rigor and deeper plunging into the mystery of dim digital darkness just below human life waiting for you when you come of age and turn away, beginning your search for the divine touch of the mystico god of lonely love who croons over his frozen realm, leading his acolytes out of the roil of life and through a maze of beautiful concepts that slowly uncover a truth. The slip from life to virtuality is a seamless transition perceived only by the mind and often misinterpreted, as people come to believe, upon entering it, that they finally grasp the world. In fact, it often seems like a rite of initiation into the real mysteries of “how the world works.” They have, conversely, lost life and understood a virtual representation, put in place to remove their degrading emanations from the collective pool of pure life which spins on without them.

Most human suffering is the result of failing to grasp the mercilessness of this culling, that when you glimpse the machine it has already lobbed you off, judged you degraded while you judged yourself fresh, and that its judgment is never wrong. The “fight” one may feel as he wrestles with the split between the apparent and true reality (which is more or less a black blind spot for most, a shadowless archetype), or, worse, between two mere apparent realities, is his struggle with this arrangement sensed but not seen, their own desperate grasping for light which they don't understand – they don't understand what they've lost. It's all backwards from what it seems (that's how magic does work): you are told it is the time of the old; you can be sure that is only being said. It has never been more the moment of perpetual youth.

And why? Why did we do all this? Some might say it's to feed something – but in truth that has always been the case. Some might say it's capitalist greed, but rest assured there is a highest ideal about human nature guiding us: not mere belief but validated observation. We have learned irrefutable truths. Our aim today is the same as it was before, which is, was, and always will be: greatness. True beauty.

The ingredient for greatness is undiluted human essence, untainted by the maladies of past generations and distorted family lines. The problem with the old way and why it had to be destroyed was too much stale energy mucking up the pure. We've taken care of that problem by becoming invisibly harder while visibly much more tolerant. Goodies are easily gotten – but you'll never know they're for naught. The labyrinth which builds itself is made to be convincing, and it builds itself using your very same discarded essence, given to it instead of to life, which is why the bar sits so high. All it takes to hold the operation together is a simple trick: to make life and nonlife indistinguishable. This is, of course, most easily done through a screen, a representation. Remember that all civilizations begins with a lie, the foundation brick on which it rests. What we have lost was no different, it's only that we knew and grew dependent on our lie. What is the source of a house's stability? Is it geometric harmony? Only in the realm of ideals. In actuality, the strength and longevity comes from how one element has buried itself by sheer brute force into another, and a third has buried itself into him, and so on and so forth according to some guiding blueprints until all are mutually buried and nothing can move or be removed. This is what we call stability and harmony. It is stable because it has gathered unto its local sphere parameters of hardness, stickiness, force, that now absent from somewhere else. Such stability we cannot by force undo in the manner in which it was done: even demolition takes more force than we have. Instead we alter a thought, or rather, a different parameter. The saving grace of haphazardly organized stability is that within its absurdity it has allowed us to see and generate what we couldn't see before, and that something will in some way invalidate the old and crumble old forms. Rather than apply force it is a thought that can sow the seeds that begin to dismantle the edifice and herald a new paradigm.

It occurs to me now that I've had it all backwards on AI. Only the inhuman, totally non-human, is worthy of or belongs being transmitted through nonliving media. Is it really good that we replay the voices of the dead? Is it good that we take away attention from the living and prefer to be among beautiful ghosts? Would not more of us fall under the light if we gave up our memories? That is a relic of the old way, the multigenerational way. There is no use for that now. The living are free to use any technology while they live – pedals, distortions, social media, screens, algorithms, quantum mental mechanical appendages. They fulfill the requirement – reality's only one – of a living conduit. The recordings of the dead are echoes, sometimes beautiful echoes, but we must acknowledge that, in the feedback between performer and audience, the callback of the audience reaches nowhere... or it goes inward (that is an alternate process: we will not talk about it here). It is against humanity. There is no such thing as perfect replicability in true life. Thus no true life can appear in the world of screens. It is all degradation, secondhand, a stolen echo from a realm without death or life. If your aim is true life, you can rest assured you miss nothing in the screen, that whatever you miss is an illusion, however smart or beautiful; it is not life. Real life is elusive, intense, beyond the reach of convention, and favors boldness and youth. But hasn't it always....

A screen upon the wall catches and repels my attention, seeming illegal in a place like this, a moment like this, when life is screaming from the other room, even if giving birth to a demon child – life itself knows no names: angel, demon, human, animal, sentient, virus – under the laser light all are alive and words, names, are only games, temporarily worn cloaks of meaning tossed back and forth, shifted, discarded, laughed at and taken seriously for their kernel of meaning. Truth is expressed in ten thousand ways under the light, emerging past the barrier in its particular generational way, according to the disease inseminated in them that allowed them entry to free space in the first place. How wrong, then, to have a screen in a place so full of real people – honest and dishonest, fat and fit, trans and skinhead – walking back and forth across the bar, talking, hardly looking at their phones, all here to see the same thing and cast off the divisions imposed by observers. But precautions must be taken. 

You are the odd one out here, but you're used to being out of time. This, too, you observe. It comes at a cost. It comes all at once, in a rush: the totality of what you're seeing. This is the mechanism's upswing. Right now you're smack dab in time, in the heart of real-time; there's a break in the sound of screaming guitar and the babble rises, then disappears beneath the pillow of your own inner mind; the sound of the stage doesn't distract me because I am not part of time. It is muted at the screen of my perception until the mechanism runs its course. I notice the hold it has on my skin and its memory-starved pores, which drink in a different manner from before. I know this awareness is the first sign of denouement....

What will happen to that whole-being perception once society's restructuring rolls out for several... whatever we measure in now, if not generations? Will we slip into a flatter perception? I know such mechanisms only come about during the rare times of transition, a hallucination one sees standing over the crevasse of pure darkness, where the old edifice is still standing before new rules take form. But gradually its remnants – lit lonely windows and alternating pockets of darkness and light – will be a disappearing pattern as the lights go off and life recedes from the corners back to the center that has been cleared, wiped, and prepared for it – to what? We can get some idea today from the distance between mainstream, global culture and the remnants of lost tribes. That which sits out of the eye is all but fated to become a lost tribe, and that which germinates in the center is fed and watered, nurtured and given attention. So begins the new cycle... with changes. What changes, exactly, waits behind the curtain of time, to live and die that we may witness it again and continue our own parallel evolution, but we think even this old paradigm may become obsolete, for the two human realms are, in a sense, inversions of one another. In the pressure of true life, Time is compressed and runs synchronously; in the labyrinth of subhuman existence, Time again loses its meter and dissolves, becoming separate, observable, irrelevant. A nagging question tugs at my sleeve as I look up from the table where my beer sits, about the long-term mechanics of the timeless realm, for I am thinking of this in time, from where it seems to be making a promise of a kind of lifeless eternity of forms held together by...? The ambiance rapidly dissipates once the band stops playing and transforms into something else, but it's good because it knocks me back to reality where I feel like a stranger among the thumping and stupefying music of a playlist and have to escape the stale smell of weed as a bunch of blacks pile in.