Sometimes, when I feel very very good, I feel that we are all tiny wrinkles in the universe, folded over to perceive itself. Are we any good at that? sometimes we see things that aren’t real. Sometimes we don’t see things that are. What does it look like when we wrinkle back, when we try to perceive ourselves? When we try to perceive the ways we perceive ourselves perceiving the universe? I see nothing. I feel nothing. Is what happens in our minds any less real than anything else? Are we not forever trapped in our own minds? Must we establish reality by majority vote? I suppose we are not sometimes perceiving ourselves–we are always perceiving ourselves, and nothing else. Sometimes reality percolates through this recursive loop fairly uncorrupted. But often, I think, the errors compound until what we hold onto is wrong, false, or simply empty. Maybe “real” has to go on the trash heap of words I don’t really understand anymore. How long is that list going to get? Is the whole world of other people slowly becoming incomprehensible to me? I used to be better at meditating, but now it feels too echo-y, too loud. I can’t even tell if my mind is clear or not, because the recursive collapse of my thoughts washing up on top of each other like waves on a beach or cars piling up in a crash has become the low background hum of my mind, omnipresent and yet imperceptible.
Even though I couldn’t immerse myself in the movie , I still didn’t recognize the face I saw in the mirror.
I’m moving through headspaces all the time. Such that the things I think and feel and see in one moment may be totally incomprehensible an hour later. Before my memories begin to fade, they are first flattened, projected into a limited dimensionality. Some of those memories are so distant that it’s hard to imagine that there ever was more to them. This writing, then, is like little notes from one brain to another, trying to capture the important things before they cease to exist. But it seems futile. Do I try to capture the wonder of walking through the dunes at night, surrounded on all sides by millions of points of light? The sound of the waves whispering upon the sand? The sensation of holding a firefly within my hand? They can only be felt. No memory, photo, or description will revive them.