The Cadence of Idealistic Romance

We had something together that was just our own. When we were together, the rest of the world…the outside world…simply did not matter. Believing in one another was freedom.
On Sunday afternoons we would lounge around in his cubic third-story apartment and lay in bed like creatures in hibernation. He would bring me tea in bed and make me peach pancakes every morning. That apartment room housed his entire soul, I swear. Even representatives of my own contributions to his self-concept hung upon the all, which was adorned with several drawings and photographs I had either made with him, for him, or given to him. Speakers, guitar equipment, a fancy audio amplifier home theater system – all black, of course – lined the circumference of his room. A few drawers of his dresser were always left open, along with his closet door, and I wondered if they were even capable of closing completely. His “bed” was composed of an old futon mattress that I had donated to him lined with a few large pillows, a sleeping bag, and a white blanket that always seemed to release fuzzy threads that would get stuck in my hair when I awoke the next morning.
His apartment was essentially in the junky suburban side of town, not far from the city, but it nonetheless conjured fond memories from my childhood every time I visited him. I felt youthful and alive in his side of town. He brought out the daring side of my identity like no one has ever since.
He made me laugh at silly little irrelevancies common to daily living for the modern individual. He had his own character completely, a style which he owned and expressed in all aspects of his being and behavior. I feared for awhile that he was unbreakable in an unhealthy way; he never seemed to smile naturally and instead his smile seemed to be a forced and uncomfortable stretch of the facial muscles. For god’s sakes, the boy didn’t even like cookies or sweets! He had these chocolates laying on his windowsill for months after the holidays, and I would steal them bit by bit every time I came to visit.
There was a lack of honesty, at least in the sense of openness, about Cadence. I yearned for the opportunity to sit across from him, calm, and break through the layers of metal-enforced glass which surrounded him inexorably.
I snuck out to see him one night. I thought I needed an escape. We had decided to cook together that night because for whatever reason I had decided that I wanted to learn to cook at least one of the nine meals that Cadence was capable of concocting. Roaming around the grocery store like two adolescents finding their way through the dark tunnel which leads to adulthood, we brought the cheapest version of all the necessary ingredients.
Cadence usually managed to embarrass me in public. I always assumed that people would look at us and think, “What is such an intelligent, mature, and sophisticated young woman (well, maybe they wouldn’t have a chance to see the ‘intelligent’ part) doing with such an obnoxious young boy?” Thus, I would always try to be romantic with Cadence in public situations to make everyone jealous of our love…sometimes it worked and sometimes not. The total came to eight dollars and five cents. With a subtle hint of blunt enthusiasm, Cadence announced, “Ah, shit, man…now I guess we can buy something else, too” and then he flashed me that fake, tense half-smile of his. I shrugged, uninterested…for I couldn’t really see what more we could buy for three dollars. Flailing about and ferociously digging through his pockets, Cadence droned, “Oh, nevermind – I thought I picked up all the change off the floor.” Waltzing out of the store, I could not hold in my laughter. A few feet from the register, Cadence must have noticed the smirk developing on my face as he mumbled, “I guess that was kind of a bum thing to say, huh?” I nodded as my laughter became louder. By the time we arrived back at his apartment, I still had not resumed my laughter.
Cadence was not a bum, mind you. He wasn’t an idiot, either. Cadence was different, to say the least. He was more of an individual than anyone I have ever met. He stood up for himself, naturally, and overcame everything in his life in ways that I had never before even known that an individual could persevere. Physically, he was golden. All of his features radiated his inner strength in a fierce and intense way, yet his presence was always warm and indescribably comforting.

Sentient Patterns

It was something that would never really happen, now suddenly happening all at once.  It was a contagious vibe of energy and we all caught on to the flow with exuberance.  Time seemed irrelevant, transfixed by our own surge of interactivity with one another.  Finally, the whole human race seemed to be collaborating.

It all started with the tick of a clock, or so they say.  I am not sure, to be honest, but the version I heard was that Dr. Krone was sitting up in his attic one day and he accidentally knocked over his cup of coffee when he heard the tick of his clock amplified to a magnitude of ten times its original volume.  And then it happened: time looped, or fell backwards and forwards at the same time.  The subjective experience for everyone was simultaneously enriched.  Every aspect of the world which can be sensed by a subject resonated through multiple prisms, as though each separate sense existed in a vacuum, pure and complete.  We all felt it, too.  Even the dreamers awoke in a splendor.

Personally, I collapsed, being all too personally overwhelmed to fully engage in the moment.  Or, well…should I say: I tried to collapse.  It was impossible.  I closed my eyes and saw more.  Those blazes of fire exploding in neon stars that you usually see when you close your eyes — those were now  rich images of everything that I had ever seen in my entire life, superimposed, and in bizarre neon glows and bright flashes of a flickering cacophony of images.  It was an irresistible experience, though, once I opened my eyes.  Light seemed to reflect off of every surface as though everything was covered with pellets of water delicately arranged in tiny diamond or circle shapes.  This melody filled my head; it was more than music, just a pure blare of sound: intense, smooth, and just…there.  And then I thought of everything I had pondered in the last four or five years, at least, and I understood my thoughts interlacing into a grand web.  Suddenly, something made perfect sense.  In fact, it made so much sense that it almost killed me.  For perhaps the first time in my life I felt like I had something to say for myself…to the whole world.

And then it was gone.  Just that one fleeting moment, transient and precious and unforgettable.  Yet, because everyone experienced it…we now all had something to connect upon, and for once not out of fear.  All of these different interpretations of one common event; all of these private experiences fitted into a phenomenon which engulfed and engaged everyone equally.  The individual’s voice screamed louder than a thousand voices.  And we were piecing together our private revelations with an eagerness, a need…laziness no longer dominated.  Apathy, the greatest pandemic the world has ever known, was obliterated completely in one second.  We finally expressed the fact that we were alive, each of us representing a distinct singular force in a vastly interactive world.

Patterns began emerging faster than our minds could track them.  It was intimidating and exhilarating all at once.  The patterns became self-generating, or at least…so it seemed.  Fear returned.  Individuals retreated to isolation.  I guess it was over-stimulation or something…the mind looking back exactly at itself, and it was just too much to bare.  I think people really felt like they were giving up a part of this cherished human quality of “uniqueness” by seeing their every mental activity reflected in an all-encompassing pattern that was more than the sum of the parts of every individual’s greatest efforts of thought and conjecture.  Perhaps humans have to compete.  That was one theory.  We have to assert ourselves and act in our own self-interest, or else we lose a sense of ourselves and no one knows how to exist like that.  Not yet, at least.  I guess you could say that perhaps the world was not ready yet for all that it experienced, and that it all happened too quickly.

When individuals started retreating back into themselves, the great pattern began eroding.  It was to be expected.  Those of us, those rare ones amongst the pervasive masses, who cherished the unity clung to the pattern trying to fill in the gaps by our own means.  It was irrelevant, though…for the pattern was never about mental gymnastics or who had the strongest or most imaginative mind…it was about taking parts of every individual’s experience and henceforth weaving together a comprehensive web which would arrange itself into the pattern. Conducting thought experiences to try to mend the decaying pattern was a meaningless effort leading to absolutely no end, and it induced only stress and frustration.  Apathy returned.  Laziness spread like a virus, critically poisoning humankind’s vital spirit.

By the time the pattern was gone, few of us remembered.  I was lucky.  I have no idea why, for I have never really thought there to be anything particularly special about my mind.  They say that it involved a willingness to remember.  Or some sort of awareness beyond yourself, which I think is weird because right now I am pretty sure all I am aware of is myself.  Everything else is gone, I swear.  Once you see all and become united with the world as a whole, all of the previous component parts you had once known to compose the whole lose their meaning.  For me, I became somewhat blinded to everything that had once been there.  My senses became somewhat numb, aching from over-exertion.  They say that you cannot see something if you do not know what it is, if it’s completely outside the realm of anything you have ever been exposed to before.  What they don’t tell you is that the same principle works in reverse: if you see everything  you never knew could exist then you can’t go back to looking at mere subparts which had once been so familiar…anymore.  I was trapped.

Just when I was about to give up on everything, Josephine entered into what I conceive to be within the proximal range of my own presence.  Josephine was one of the few, like me, only she remembered almost everything and in elaborate detail.

“The closest you can get from here…to that great thrill of being alive more than we ever knew we could be…is through dreaming.”

I didn’t care about dreaming.  I felt like I was dreaming all the time.  I wanted to wake up, not fade into a persistent dream reality forever.

Josephine sensed my hesitation.  “No, you see.  It’s not like traditional dreaming.  You remain here –”  She touched my arm and it felt like someone was whispering to every subcutaneous cell in my body, trying to awaken a dead spirit.  “And project your conscious activity out.  You keep it with you at all times, always dreaming while navigating about in the real world ad still remaining relatively…present…to both worlds.”

My eyebrows perked up, or some tension overcame the upper portion of my head.  What the hell does it mean to be relatively present?  Does that mean that I can be kind of here, but also somewhere else?  Kind-of here.  This is ridiculous.  Am I really even thinking this way?

“In this world, you can interact with others…but no one can share in your dream experience.  Everything in that experience is…essentially…created by you.  Try it, dreamer.”

She put a hand over what I presume to be my face and closed my eyelids for me.  When I opened them again, my perception (and perhaps my body, too) was oriented at a right angle to where I had been seeing from before.  And then…I saw myself — or some version of myself — sitting next to Josephine.

A voice came from beyond my head; I think it was my voice.  “Do you know where you are?”  I hadn’t the faintest idea.

A Dream Upon Waking

First  her voice fades off, not quite into the distance as she is still only a couple feet away from him, but it mysteriously lingers slowly as it recedes from his auditory awareness and echoes into an undetectable, albeit gentle, whisper.
Her face becomes a reflection of a thousand tiny fragments of every light in the room and then slowly shatters and crumbles into the dust of her being as soundless energy.  Her hands remain poised on the table as they transmogrify into lifeless prosthetic limbs.
I awake to the sound of my own dream self’s piercing scream and my mind becomes engulfed by several injected swords of pain and I want to cry as hard as any human ever could cry because it is so painful not to be able to access my own mind, my own memories, and my own selfhood.  I am mentally parallized, reborn in every new moment with the same biography that never progresses.  I am a novel of my own creation attempting to breathe life into a body that refuses to acknowledge it.
My mind operates in very unusual ways.  My memories are all scattered sequentially and contain many personal anachronisms of objects and people present in memory settings that do not add up properly.  I often confuse my memories with dreams, and thus I am uncomfortable in every waking moment, entirely void of a personal tale which has brought me to the current moment.
It is only in my dreams that I experience the flow of time in a regular pattern.  It is the only time I am ever at peace.
My head fell upon the pillow as I fell into a desperate sleep, struggling to obtain my selfhood once again.  Perhaps if I can achieve lucidity in a dream than I can exist, completely, in that grander sense of full presence emotionally and intellectually, once again.

Automated Silence

It was almost sunrise when I ran through the garden towards home.  Grass and weeds twisted around my ankles, anchoring me to the ground and away from my destination home manifestations in a dream, haunting you while your immobile body struggles to escape.  The hem of my dress caught on a twig and I got caught for a moment.  I knelt down to the ground and tore the bottom of my dress away from the stubborn twig and then I started sobbing slowly, holding my sunken and desolate head in my hands.

Even in my dreams I cannot escape my physical and emotional paralleses.

No Fellow’s Fool

There is almost nothing worse than being made to feel like you cannot trust your own memories.

It makes you run within your own head, doubting yourself, and furiously wishing that you had carried a tape recorder around with you all along.

And…when you invest a great deal of trust in someone else and then they make you question your own memory…for some reason you long to opt towards self-doubt.  Dementia.  Psychological distress.  Because…in that moment, the trust you have invested in that person is more valid than your own memory.

It is not the first time someone has made me question my own memory.  In fact, it’s happened many times…to many times.  It could be possible that I have somehow learned to doubt my own memory…my long term memory, at least.

Ugh.  There’s more to say, but I am emotionally exhausted.

On Consciousness and Film

Currently, there is an ongoing fad in neurology which involves focusing on how the brain processes music. This fad was strongly reiterated with the release of Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia, which once again allowed Sacks to triumph the bridge between non-expert and expert readers and achieve widespread literary recognition. With my studies, one of my goals is to lead neuroscientific studies to a new frontier, exploring the effect of the film medium on the brain and defining film as a function of consciousness. I think that film is the most encompassing medium to represent the whole of what the mind is doing, whereas music or visual art singularly represent only isolated aspects of the ways in which the mind remembers, imagines, and processes external events. Also, I think that the ways in which film represent consciousness (such faded out scenes for memories, or the subvocal voice monologue in voice-overs) are affecting the way people reflect upon their own consciousness, which is a critical aspect of self-awareness. All of the aforementioned topics and ideas need to be understood through more research, and I have elected myself to be the pioneer of this research. I think that in a world dominated by technology and perhaps approaching the singularity, it is imperative to study the effects of these technologies on consciousness and on the subjective experience of the individual.

Island of One Liberation

“Island of One Liberation” — The random line that popped into my head as I waltzed into the blazing ray of sunlight illuminating the hallway corridor. Why? I have no idea. I thought it would perhaps make an interesting title of a book. I’m not sure what it means, exactly. Perhaps I have just been indulging in too much thought-provoking instrumental modern classical music lately, namely Explosions in the Sky. I confess, I’m addicted.

My father has this way of making it seem as though..no matter how bleak things may seem, there is always a way to make everything still work out in the end. I’m getting there.

Although I was, for the most part, fiercely disappointed with the film Into the Wild (I admit to having very high expectations for the film), there is one line in the film that continuously replays in my mind: “Happiness is only real when shared.” Ironically, the night before I watched the film, I had made a mixed CD entitled (yes, I title each and every one of my 2-per=week mix CDs) “Alone is the Greatest Sense of Home.” After spending almost an entire day yesterday in utter solitude and social isolation, sending not even so much as an e-mail to a single person, I realize the truth of this statement. I tend to enjoy my own isolation…my own private moments to pursue my own singular consciousness, yet all of this conscious boiling means nothing unless I have someone to share it with in the end. My greatest moments of pure joy are with others, though my passion thrives when I am on my own. It always interests me, and I am still figuring it out. Nonetheless, I wondered: how much self-transformation can a person undergo in one day? I think that self-transformation is my new obsession; tales of grand self-transformation are almost always my favorite stories.

The Wonders of Roving the Internet

How can I sleep when I am so excited about the world around me?
The internet allows me that opportunity…perhaps, to some extent, it always has.  The internet allows me to access artifacts being created or that have been created in the world that are so rare and beautiful.  I cherish them like close friends.  Songs, stories, films, and paintings all embrace us in the same way; finding a beautiful or inspiring song or “meeting” a character in a book is like finding a soul mate or having a memorable conversation with a complete stranger.  The internet expands the options for what an individual would typically and feasibly be exposed to in a regular “real life” environment.  I love it.  I have found myself…in art…mostly via the internet.
Tonight I watched a trailer for the Sigor Ros film Hiem, which means “home” in Icelandic.  Wow.  Perhaps we find now what our ancestors could only come by in books, but the fact that we can sit still in one place and mentally travel in the externalized cultural brain (the internet) is…magnificent, to say the very least.  This video trailer showed images of Iceland paired with perfect “travel through the attic” memory-conjuring piano music.  I really want to travel to Iceland.  Seriously, wow.  That was the first “wow” of the evening.  I’m thinking about buying the DVD, but…I’m not sure.  I have mixed feelings about Sigor Ros’ music.  On one hand, I think it’s beautiful, ethereal, and great…on the other hand, something about it bores me and almost bothers me.  I should probably give them more of a chance.
Then I found some other really strange and interesting artists, the most memorable (that I can recall offhand) being Amiiana.
Eventually, I found the film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.  OSDFJAKDAJSDKLASJLK!KJKLJALKJSD!!!!!!  Yeah, that really says it best.  WOW.  I am rendered agape.  What can I even say?  The trailer blew my mind, and then I watched an excerpt on youtube from what I think is the beginning of the movie.  It’s based on a true story??!!!!  god, I love neuroscience…tales of neurological conditions which cause individuals to become heroes of their own brains.  So, I looked up information about Jean-Dominique Bauby on wikipedia and then…I found that the movie was based on his book, which he communicated via eye-blinks.  jalkjsfkjasdjaksdlfjsd!  I faint in my own awe.  I’ve begun reading the book on amazon, and I intend to buy it soon.
Another film that I am really looking forward to is Into the Wild.  The story looks incredible.  I love the basic philosophy of the lead character, and it’s another book I would love to read.  The only aspect of the film that worries me is based upon an interview that I saw with the lead character; I was not at all impressed with the actor in real life.  Something about his style of communication was very offsetting for me…he speaks so slowly, vaguely, and indecisively.  I can’t officially establish my point about the latter two…but he definitely speaks in an annoyingly slow-paced manner.
Other films I am looking forward to are The Kite Runner, which releases on March 25, and August Rush, which releases on March 11 (the trailers I saw on TV for this film, in my opinion, completely trivialized the story).
I should probably go to bed.

A Fictional First Person Account of the Singularity

There were flashes of light all around me. I seemed to be walking through a maze. Distorted surfaces seemed to reflect aspects of my physicality, though they were very abnormally reflected. For instance, a curved puddle reflected an enlarged portion of the iris of my eye. Another reflected my shadow, and then underneath the reflection of my shadow there was another sheet that stared me in the eyes from a perfectly level reflection of my own eyes. I could not recognize anything. My whole environment was foreign; I was a stranger to myself, and I had no idea what physical form I had taken. I heard voices and melodies without a single source. I was not sure if I was in my own mind or if I still had a separate mentality, somewhere.

There was a dream I had at a young age.

In the dream, I was walking through a maze and my entire world was painted over with an indistinguishable hue, a mirage with faded splatters of colored lights.

A new beginning

I remember finding the note that he left behind.  Overcome with a contagious bliss from the experiences we had just shared, I unfolded the note casually.  As I read and reread the words, I wondered what they meant: “Lose yourself and you shall be spared.”
Born too passionate, too sensitive, too aware…we struggled through this existence, desperate and disappointed. And yet, we were both too thrilled by the status of being conscious creatures present in an overwhelming existence; we could not ignore the potential of what could be through endless thought and persistent action.