tokamak symplegma

always having suspected that i was one of those of the missing and having found myself solidly halfway through life and still not missing and not wanting to miss my fate – at least not absolutely – i began migrating down a path of simulating being one of the missing and i would like to write about this migration but haven’t yet found the right language and so all the writing i’ve done is a kind of attempt to write about wanting to write about it

we decreate our way to ungreatness – to paraphrase a fortune 100 executive who paraphrased a management guru who no doubt paraphrased someone else. in my case this means learning the obscure arts of babbling, acedia, hallucination, and a calm franticness (which is not as much a contradiction as you might think) … not as anything to fear or scorn but as a lifestyle as legitimate as the rich and famous, the common bourgeois, or the common activist

the discipline of this learning is i admit a peculiar study and practice. to learn to experience these typically shunned arts as normal, good, desirable, even progressive requires a complex rewiring of the brain that no therapeutic advocacy or pharmaceutical aid could accomplish, as these aids and advocacies are most frequently designed to happyize (how else do we describe our novel culture of Smile except to conjure a verb from an almost enforced obsession?) active willing participation in the production of names … which is the religious orthodoxy of the day : the requirement to be seen. that is, to not be missing

a side benefit of this discipline is that it introduces (or reintroduces for those who believe in some sort of original face, core identity or soul – the language is less important than the orientation) us to some externally-contextually unreachable timespace of our i (our plurality or pluralities of i) … those languages and mores our interiority would find naturally compelling were they to exist in externality … where we would find our true place, that spiritual-physical home of dream and desire where, as some greek philosopher prayed, the inner and outer would be one

unfortunately these sorts of practices can’t be taught – even speaking about them in the way i’m doing lends itself to interdisciplinary quackery. every instance we see of these principles and movements being systemized and communicated for emulation (regardless of how sophisticated or earnest any student or teacher might be) the enterprise quickly turns into a parody of itself and the rationalists are right to shamelessly mock. for the time being and perhaps always we strange pupils resort to actualizing only in aspects of desolation, incommunicability … those spaces between the interior and exterior realms that reach for both but never touch either

metamorphosis without end

i made a bed for myself of books and slept on it. it was 3 meters high and 2 meters wide and 2 meters long and i used

no sheets but slept on the books directly. i built a staircase of books to climb up and i learned to influence my dreams by the placement and relation of books, their proximity to different parts of my body. i let no one see my bed and no one slept with me for i had become tired of love.

i no longer read. after decades of voracious reading, after

being overcome by books so much the world in its dimensionality became ugly, clichéd, with neither grace nor vision, human society a risible heap of battling bugs insanely proclaiming its grandeur and supremacy, i stopped. i had lost the ability to absorb books through sight and reason, through the act of cognitively and imaginatively interpreting text – these weary servants of a wearier culture, of a sickened literacy. i needed a different way to bring books inside me, i wanted a new relation with them. what better way than having full bodily contact and absorbing them more directly, during sleep. for the best books are written as though in a dream and surely the best way to read them is to take them in through our skin as we’re dreaming. using our cognitive capacities while we’re awake is an obviously inferior method, a legacy from the primitive age of knowledge, and i grew excited again about encountering my favourite books in ways i never had before.

i dreamt new dreams – sprawling phantasmagoria. colours rewired and dripping down architectures that redefined

science. narratives so disturbing, coherent, irrational, seductive i woke up with the top layer of books drenched and would have to carefully dry the affected volumes out.

i began building a house of books to house my bed. a modest affair. bathroom, kitchen, bedroom, a common area for eating and hanging out and working, a sunroom for whatever. everything of books. the sinks, toilet, bathtub, furniture, trinkets and decorations, bookshelves. books are all.

in time – the reader will have expected it – i became a book.

like gregor. i lived by myself so there was no external drama. i lived grounded in the totality of books so there was no internal drama.  there was no story. this is the story.