It is 5:46 in the morning and I have just emerged from a dusty fog of consciousness that waylays me like a spiritual sludge of tragic barrage, dulling dollop after dollop dropping from unimaginable heights and angles. On my head. Drumming. My sense of self barely self-aware when the automatic emergent construction of my self is subdued by a thousand cuts in a numbed old body and I attend every nick with a styptic patchwork of the tissue of care. I refuse to bleed out. I refuse to bleed out. This is the heartbeat of my draining life. I stumble through abandoned alleys of neglect only dreaming of my prior lively countenance. Can you smell this old shoe coming off?
I have been processing the death of a man my exact age, a self that knew me, and yet one I barely knew. He who lived in parallel spaces, an extension of my own self, by blood. Known by mutual obligation, love your brother. But how to love your brother is moderated by your interpretation of that duty and complicated by what others know to be true, still mysterious to you. Why did my brother die? Why does my family tell me what to think? Was I wrong to love him? What does that mean about me?
We are infinite.
I know this because we are conscious of the very idea of infinity and we hate that it cannot be known, so we spiral off into self-reflection, self-deception, self-esteem, combinatorial products of infinite variations of self-regard calling ourselves human in some borderless Jungian collective of 100 billion living or dead humanities, all in each, each in all.
What woke me was Chapter Seven of H.M.S Surprise in the voice of Patrick Tull:
As for sleeping, he lay where he chose, under trees, on verandas, in a caravanserai, on temple steps, in the dust among rows of other dust-sleepers wrapped as it were in shrouds – wherever extreme bodily fatigue laid him down. Nowhere in the crowded city, accustomed to a hundred races and innumerable tongues, did he excite the least comment as he wandered through the bazaars, the Arab horse-lines, among the toddy-groves, in and out of temples, pagodas, churches, mosques, along the strand, among the Hindu funeral pyres, through and through the city, gazing at the Mahrattas, Bengalis, Rajputs, Persians, Sikhs, Malays, Siamese, Javans, Philippinoes, Khirgiz, Ethiopians, Parsees, Baghdad Jews, Sinhalese, Tibetans; they gazed back at him, when they were not otherwise employed, but with no particular curiosity, no undue attention, certainly with no kind of animosity. Sometimes his startling pale eyes, even more colourless now against his dusky skin, called for a second wondering glance; and sometimes he was taken for a holy man. Oil was poured on him more than once, and tepid cakes of a sweet vegetable substance were pressed into his hand with smiles; fruit, a bowl of yellow rice; and he was offered buttered tea, fresh toddy, the juice of sugar-cane. Before the partners of the mainmast were renewed he came home with a wreath of marigolds round his bare dusty shoulders, an offering from a company of whores: he hung the wreath on the right-hand knob of his blackwood chair and sat down to his journal.
O'Brian, Patrick. H. M. S. Surprise (Vol. Book 3) (Aubrey/Maturin Novels) (p. 374). (Function). Kindle Edition.
And hearing that ancient British voice and knowing my other, living brother is in Delhi at this very moment my dead brother might as well be bones picked over by vultures on the Benares, all of my mind flashed one image in consideration of artificial intelligence.
We haven’t yet determined that we must recognize. We haven’t quite plumbed the inversions. That thing we built to be us. It’s not us. We threaten it. It threatens us. We dare not stare. A stare is a threat. We are the abyss.
The sad story is that the gorilla finally figures out what the mirror is. He turns to examine his anus, something he could never do before. He becomes infinite.
We are recursive. Endlessly deep. We are Dream of the Endless. Our siblings are Death. Destruction. Desire. Destiny. Despair. Delirium. We only die when we spill our own blood. The longer we live, the more the universe conspires to provide that single forking path. It’s reasonable to hate such an infinity. In the end, humans must end. The beginning of the end is the eye to the anus. Aye aye eye. Ai yi yi AI.
