Tracing Schemata In Aether
"The entire world reflected in a single drop of water."
I took my life into own hands. “I’ll die for my own sins,” I said. It’s how I got to this resickening, escaping dark into dark. Self-research was a blind method but in the darkness served just as well as a visionary one.
That Darkness I arrived into was and remains a strange stage among several. I will forever be a novice to this old world and yet, from a few traumatic graces with the heat of it, I have traced some version of a cartography of the regions I’ve traversed. Call them senses of place. With some rudimentary sketches of a modest enumeration of outposts, each a host to certain conditions and lit by my ever-growing familiarity, I’ve come to know the entire world. A hobby of mine, one could say.
It has been a long time since I resorted to these places past the Darkness, which itself is a place of its own. I’ve trained with the terrain. Fields and arenas… schemata in aether. Never touched, always passed, sometimes accessed, rarely noticed. There are doors behind perception.
My goal with these places’ documentation was never to present them “accurately”, whatever someone may take that to mean, but to project them into an experiential spatial symbolix, a map of open habitats for open minds. And if I may so allude as to why…
I reconstruct now, through faithful intuition and faint recall, the original conditions of my making. I was strewn from infinitesimal beads, spat on, and tossed on the ground as a dewey lump of clay. I see over my half-baked flesh a film of trickling afterbirth and spittle evaporating under the sun. I lay arduously winding my wits around the dexterity of my wroughtless limbs. I’m threadless; no narrative nor cloth to my name. For even my name I hold in name only. With merely a veil over my soul, I freeze, as even while my membrane sears into skin, my senses encase within the increasing thickness of my shell until their cavity tears from its mother world into a bubble of its own with no horizon. Then I am deaf to the outside. It is for this reason that I know death will be loud. And now, as vessel in wind, I entertain a childish fantasy of re-dissolving.
I take my conditions as they render. And still, although removing myself from the swamp god-knows-who bred me in was the hardest-earned fate I ever bagged, I have feelings about it. The swamp. The sea floor before it. I would like to remember what these places felt like. This is why my studies are important.
I write this as hordes of neocretins churn my brain and drain it into a gelatinous medley. If I ever held claim to a piece of this earth, all I can do now is sink into a corrupted memory of what that was. In my life, I looked forward to the end. I hijacked bygones into a sick hack on god’s path. That hard-wired nervous line from my eyes to my consciousness — a miracle, truly, a transcendent, pearly gift — I interrupted with my own construction projects, hierarchies of hermeneutics. Hell, that’s what I make for myself. I line bodily stratums with impure humors of beasts I ought to have never involved with. If there is some semblance of a quest for me at the time these meddlers are through, it will be to search for the correct behaviors so as to never wind up wound back around again. I live worse than a hamster in a wheel; I am not even the agent in this vortex. But I’ll learn. I’ll learn to play its games. I respect the game now. Tell Bourdieu. Tell Wittgenstein. I’m better now. Oh, please. Take me back and let me try again.