Most recently in the middle of my breathing exercises, I believed to have recognized a pattern of thinking that's standardized in my process of decision making. Or not decision making.
It seemed that when left to my own devices, my breath would follow one of four patterns relative to each other by depth and rate. I recognized this when, quite unconsciously, I cast them into four regions of a quadrant upon the binocular darkness behind my mind's eyelids. I immediately sensed I'd just got a glimpse of being witness to something I do as a matter of course.
I don't have any other examples to test that sense, but I also have the feeling that I cannot be responsible for my interpretation of it. It reminds me of another time I projected light along this side of the black screen.
Already decades ago now, I was doing this bedtime routine where I would do as I'd do when going to sleep, but instead I'd sit upright and balance myself in as relaxed a state as is possible when sitting upright, so that my head would jerk me awake if I nodded off. I wouldn't call it meditation though it looked like it and did have a tendency to elicit a certain state. This was how on a couple of occasions I had either a vision or visual hallucination, which, in short, was spiral display of tiny chains of light in and around the confines of my skull.
It began with what appeared to be a blip. Then another. I'd soon see each light as an impulse, but like a binary switch, each along a chain, each in response to the one that preceded it. The impulse would either illuminate, or stay dark but pass the signal on to the next. Segments would take on colors according to the pattern of the last several in the chain. The colors would trigger a response that either made a sharp turn or branched off into another chain that continued in parallel but occasionally in the opposite direction.
Not long into it, I identified branches of light whose origins I construed had been triggered by my recognition of the initial phenomenon and then more upon the recognition of the recognition and so on. My focus of observation seemed also to determine the rate at which the tale end of each streak of light would fade as it went, or when individual blips in the fading row would intermittently with my peek here or there flicker up to the brightest position.
The experience was so alluring that I feared an acknowledgment of its depth of meaning would snap me out of it, in the way something as routine as a dream of flying might devolve into a dream about not being able to fly the moment I declare, "I'm really flying," So I made a concerted effort to observe without too much focus, though I had no idea what I was doing. Sort of low-key albeit desperate grasping while not grasping at straws of my own imagination.
Anyway, my interpretation now foists upon my interpretation then that this light display was an advance look at the computatonal work behind the logic of the quadrants that would come.
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Herewith belatedly I pay respect to the defaulty towers of the collective recollection of history. Once again it's a kind of porn that impregnates the special editions, with scores of stories from one score ago, merely, so in terms of historical perspective, barely any can be found. It's buried beneath the rubble of an opportunity that's under a pile of opportunistic bullshit.
That people have their thing to work through is not in dispute here. Each has his or her own way of coping and I cannot claim it could or should be any other way. However, a vow not to forget can take on so many forms, foremost of which I observe the redoubling of a refusal to learn.
In what seems like weeks ago already, though probably only a couple, the remembrance porn smacked me in the face when it made its way into my paper of choice. After several days of 9/11 branded content, they "launched an appeal" to their readers to share their memories.
Without going into too much detail, I just wanna say that my immediate reaction then was to the immediate reaction. The same image recounted by almost every story I read now was that of the image on a television screen. The stories in like manner contextualize the experience thus. "Like everyone else I was glued..." etc. Transfixed. Hypnotized. Petrified. You have no choice.
"Horseshit!" I thought at the audio that accompanied the imagery everyone has described, which encapsulated the ultimate obliviousness to irony, yet was as predictable as ever, derived of American exceptionalism pure. This, it was declared, was an unprecedented event that would immediately and forever demarcate time and change the course of history. Part of that prediction would be demonstrably true, the child's play of personal prophesy, the default setting of self-importance. From now until the real end of history we will observe the reference marks of this set of numbers, even if its initials haven't reached Christ status.
I took issue with the "never before" aspect that would eventually prove me as correct in my view as it would everyone else in theirs. It was the first preemptive strike in the coming chain of events that began the narrative that said history is no longer a chain of cause and effect. It said that this was an outlier to be allowed no context. Circumspection was blasphemous.
Of course, this was predictable, was my reaction. It was as easy to foretell as its looming result. Its pattern's played out. And indeed it did do. But a controlled narrative has a way of diminishing details that would shed light on a subject that doesn't serve the narrative, which rose to the level of the most absurd dare when I heard the claim that America had lost its innocence that day.
I won't diminish details that are inconvenient to my own narrative here. Conveniently enough for me there are not too many. We kept our appointments that day, which included a performance on the radio at noon and a cd release concert later that night. Stephanie released hers that night, too, and played a rendition of the following, which I dedicate to the nameless casualties of history's unmentionable causalities.
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