20241228
take the tour
Being a writer is weird and intense. Ask anyone who knows a writer. Don't ask a writer. (Don't!)
It's good though. It can be proof positive of sanity, where "sanity" here means "having taken a path that someone else can follow", which is as good a definition for sanity as you're ever going to get.
As I slept last night, I was awake for ... a long time. I was married, and my wife (!!) and I had a house, just the right size for the two of us. It was improperly sized for the two of us and our permanent (?) houseguests and their kids (??).
We got up from a date-night dinner out, and somewhere between the chairs pushed back from the table and the opening of our front door, she realized that she hated all of it.
You can relate, yeah?
I can too, but from some remove: I'm too autistic to hate anything from a first-person perspective.
Anyway, we had closed the door to our bedroom and its thank-merciful-god-private bathroom, and were discussing what we might do with this, when a sentient chain of dice-sized silver cubes (picture one super long row of rubix cube -esque construction, all in silver, all the cubes rotated at off angles but seamlessly connected to each other) ahem sentient chain of dice-sized silver cubes returned from space (??), thoroughly befuddled but relieved to see us again after a really long mission of some kind. Our houseguests joined us, at this point. My wife (I'm so sorry, I don't remember her name, I don't at all intend the possessive form here) soothingly straightened out the row of cubes, as a form of care, and as she did so our friend/associate/? began to come to its senses.
As she rotated the last cube into alignment with all the others, it said, "oh! I just remembered! I hate it here."
Our houseguests (with whom we'd been studying quantum mechanics) conferred, and one of them offered (and I offer a simplified version of it here, this time with dramatically less math): "wouldn't it be weird if that was the sign you were in a dream? that you hated it here?"
For virtually all of 2024, I've been writing with the pace of one who is in the act of remembering at speed.
"Take the tour", I said. It feels like I am now taking a tour, here at the end of December. I have not been here before. If this is also remembering, then it is a guided tour of memory, and I get the feeling that it's because to tackle this terrain unguided would be unnecessarily hazardous. I further get the feeling that the riverbed beneath our tourboat is littered with the ghosts of philosophers (what am I saying, writers) who ... who had less help, at this stage. At least some of them are following, by my invitation. For me, whose onboard memory is blissfully flaky, the explorations I make only persist if they are recorded, either on page or in the memory of those who join me. Sometimes you finish the journey as a ghost. Still counts.
"Love is the answer", they say, and it's true. Love is interest with positive intent. Hate is interest with negative intent. Interest — actively maintained interest — is what holds the universe together. Hate works just as well as love, but only in a pinch. For the long haul, it's gotta round up to love. Only love is self-sustaining. And because we're talking about interest here, and because we're aware of how monotony is absolutely not interesting, self-sustaining interest with positive intent absolutely means naturally-increasing diversity. Heaven is the least boring place on earth.
Any structure that falls in love with itself can survive any paradigm shift.
It may or may not be the case that we're all dreaming. But whoever you love, and whoever loves you back, that you get to keep — no matter how many times you wake up.
:)
"It's dangerous to go alone", famously said, because the void-zones out here feel weirdly like fear. This is what happens when you hang out at the raw edge of awareness, at the unfinished hanging end of a nerve. This is what that whole "fear of god" thing is about, it seems. God is love, but if you want to join God at its outer perimeter, you're gonna feel what God feels. :) The fear isn't dangerous. It's a canvas that's dying for paint.
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