£1.59 at Clinton Cards

In order to maximize profit, the designers of Christmas cards often opt to play it safe by depicting festive celebrities and customs recognizable to the lowest common denominator. The greatest loss suffered at the hands of this neglect is undoubtedly the heart-warming tale of a giant dimensionally transient spider who comes to those who lay cold in their winter beds, hugging them as they sleep, and sucking any evil spirits - who may have entered in their chilly state of vulnerability - out through the soft marrow of their spinal cords.

The following message of festive cheer is my personal tribute to him - and to those that have never had the pleasure of hearing the tale due to the survival instincts of asexual overlord Skaal'Tethos.

(Diaries) - 16 March 2008

I found myself in an unfamiliar bedroom.

The walls were painted green and the space was empty save for a bed lengthways down the middle of the room, pushed against the wall. There were messages written in large, bold black letters all over the walls. I can’t remember what they said but they all seemed to be directed at me. I remember a vague urge to leave the place, but I couldn’t find a door. I don't recall looking that far for one, though.

On the bed there was a naked girl, lying flat, her body facing the wall opposite. Her face was screwed up, like she was struggling or giving birth, and she appeared to be floating slightly above the bed. Her body then started to rotate clockwise. I stood there watching her rotating until her feet were facing me. She opened her legs and started screaming, and suddenly it seemed like everything in the room was being sucked into the space between her open legs. The writing on the walls peeled off and flew into her, followed by the paint, and then I felt myself being sucked toward her.

I could tell by her face that she wasn’t enjoying this.


Now I’m at the front of a train, at the controls. My father’s next to me. We’re speeding up, and there is debris on the tracks : old, burnt out cars and rusting husks of what were once trains. In front of us and coming from the opposite direction there were moving trains, and I realize I have to learn how to control ours, or we’re going to crash. There are two pairs of joysticks, each one can be moved forwards and backwards. We can control the speed of the train and which track we’re on, the left or the right. My father tries to teach me how to control it, often taking the controls from me, but we end up narrowly missing a train going in the opposite direction, and eventually bump into a slower moving train in front of us, so I decide to take the controls and ignore my fathers advice. In no time at all I pick them up and have control over the train.

We arrive at a huge, square, but pretty empty train station, save for a male worker who flashes a sinister sort of smile, greets us in a knowing fashion and welcomes us to ’illegible’.

I’m not sure if I’m with my father now, but I’m joined by someone and we’re waiting in an elevator. The doors open to reveal a warehouse sized, concrete room. It's empty and badly lit, save for a small stand selling t-shirts in the corner. There’s a group of young boys waiting outside the lift doors. As we exit the lift, one of them comes over to me and starts threatening me. I remember thinking that one of them may have had a knife, and that this kid may have posed some real threat. My companion and I started over to the t-shirt stand, the child following us and hassling me the whole time. I became rather irritated so I picked him up by his collar and said something to him. He didn’t look too phased by the incident but scurried off regardless. "I think he was more threatened by you than you were of him". "Yeah, I think he was".

I end up buying a black t-shirt with what appears to be an animation on the front, which would loop over and over. It started with some unfocused circular pattern, followed by a darkly lit, inhuman, cat-like face with long brown hair messily draped over its cheeks. I remember deciding that it looked like the result of a botched cross-breeding experiment.

For a moment, I glanced over at the lift - the entire group of children who were previously outside the lift, about 30 of them, had now packed themselves inside. The child who was hassling me was trying to squeeze in. They all looked quite cheerful.

I looked back at the shirt. It was now the only thing worth my attention in the room. The person I'd entered with - I think it was my mother - had put it on. It looped over a few times, and with each cycle I was getting more sucked in, until the animation took over my entire field of vision, and I was there with the face. Him looking looking directly at me.

Suddenly, the animation changed - after the inhuman face, another image was shown - even less human this time, but better lit. Its body was humanoid, but it had shiny black skin - on it’s head there were around a dozen eyes, unevenly spaced and glowing yellow. It had no nose, and it’s mouth was filled with long, thin canines.

I remember it saying something to me - "we survive" - then the image changed. The same creature, but now fatter and with no discernible limbs, was laying on the ground. I was getting sucked away from the image now - it had turned into a sphere, and on top of it were thousands more of these creatures, all without limbs, all laying upon the surface.

(Diaries) - 13 December 2007

it was a conscious descision.

it's only sometimes I remember what really woke me up. most of the time I get carried away. build my own reason, because I need one to understand myself, and forget that there's one ticking and echoing backwards in the cells behind me.

energy low

(Diaries) - 3 September 2007

I had an interview for college today. I also had one last week, but I was asked to go again so they could more thoroughly grill me on my motivations and try and discern whether I was a circle or a triangle.

Actually, both the interviews scared me somewhat. Not because of the social surroundings to which I am naturally averse, or nervousness about the contents and combined difficulty of the courses I'd be attending, but the fact that the understanding of the universe which has been brewing uninterrupted in my mind for the last 3-4 years had suddenly shifted, and swept away to a tiny corner of my mind, to somewhere which my awareness of humans in the context of the universe as groups of chemicals which had formed consciousness was no longer a valid state of perception, and instead was replaced an awareness of humans in the context of an educational establishment as labels such as "lecturer" and "student". In essence it was a huge eye opener into the way we see ourselves - not as naturally occurring entities which are formed from universal mechanisms, but machines in the context of an human-centric, abstract society.

This isn't an attack on identity. I'm not saying that it's the wrong way - but it's apparent to anyone which is the more 'truthful' of the two - universal truth as opposed to abstract role in an abstract society. Yet we cling to our roles as if they are as important as our physical manifestations. A lot of people will defend their identities with as much desperation and aggression as they would their own mother - yet, if that identity was stripped, the person would still be alive, breathing and conscious. I believe that it's misplaced instinct that results in our defense of the imaginary (although I reserve the right to change my mind). It's almost as if we've been told from birth : "that concrete statue over there, that's you", we dress it up, and do anything to stop it from being torn down.

(Diaries) - 17 March 2008

I woke on a cold, hard mattress in a dingy police cell.

In the dream, I felt like I knew the cell well and today was like any other day. I knew exactly what was coming : every now and then, a small slot would open, and a pair of eyes would stare at me through the door to my enclosure for a couple of minutes at a time. Then they'd leave, and the cycle would continue. No-one ever said anything directly to me - I think it was assumed that I knew what they meant, if anything at all. I probably didn't : I used their eyes only as a makeshift clock. This was not a willed or conscious decision. I didn't want to know the time, It didn't matter to me, but my cells, my body and my heart craved rhythm and used the only source available to them.

I didn't care what they saw. Their world was so utterly different to mine that I knew whatever conclusions they constructed would be tainted by it. Their thoughts and actions were all secretly governed by the desire for acceptance - in a network as large as theirs, that meant extreme adherence to global behavioural rules was inevitable, and it followed that their branches of conceptual possibility would become localised to a specific, socially pre-determined point. In other words, there was little freedom of thought (even though it might have seemed so) and as such, little chance of conceptualizing an object outside of their network to a high degree of accuracy. They would reach conclusions, but they would generally be placeholder labels, as they had been taught that these were acceptably accurate answers, and did not question (sometimes didn't even notice) the processes constructed to calculate them.

Their thought processes, on the other hand, were something I could approximate pretty accurately. After all, I was a human once, and that was the clincher - I could see them, but they couldn't see me. Every time I glanced up and saw them staring through, I imagined their reactions to me. I eventually built a whole internal network based on snippets of conversation, on tone of voice, on dialect. Rooms, cars, streets, people - anything which they mentioned became an internal reality. Often, I'd see myself through their eyes as they stared at me : then I'd watch through their eyes as they walked down the hall, then into darkness, then to the meeting room they often mentioned. I'd have conversations with other members of the network, talk about my behaviour - we'd go to the pub, have a drink, go home to our respective husbands and wives and kids and families, and do it all again - the cyclical nature of their lives made it easy to approximate what events would occur and when, which gave me even more insight into the thoughts that they had.

I often tried recording the rules they abided by in a notebook I had smuggled in with me, but it was difficult to conceive of a method of communicating them in a universal fashion. No mix of language, mathematics, diagrams or illustration seemed to be sufficient, but in the end it didn't matter - there was no-one to communicate with but myself anyway. As long as I could understand what they meant, I was content. Even if I could have written them down in plain English, they seemed to be so absorbed in their network it that it wouldn't have mattered much to anybody (save a few marketing execs and economists - people who wanted to manipulate for their own gain, without having the insight to realize their every action was dictated by those same rules). No-one wanted to know that they might be living a lie - no-one wanted to know that they might not be who they thought they were. At most, they would accept the fact that it could be the case, but would relegate that possibility to the realm of insignificance. That would imply a lack of control, a futility. On a certain level, it would imply failure. People had spent far too much time building understanding dependent on who they thought they were, relating themselves to everything around them, building up a strong relationship with their conceptual selves to break such a strong connection to a perceived truth. So long as there were others around them that shared the same mindset, they were justified in their denial - they were able to live without worry in their jointly constructed world.

I often thought along those lines when I wondered why I had found myself in the cell - I wondered if I had done anything wrong at all, or if my captors were simply trying to protect their imaginary selves from the threat I posed to their foundations.

I often fantasized about reasoning with them, but could never find the words - how could you communicate the flaws in a medium through the flawed medium itself? Unless they were able to separate themselves from it (an improbable outcome), at best you'd be considered a little crazy, and at worst, you'd be locked up.

Y process.

I'm a bullet travelling in the direction of the name that was chosen for me. (an instruction shouted from great distance. an interpretation devoid of possibility, born behind partially opaque hospital curtains).

There has been no evidence to suggest it should not be trusted, but plenty of evidence that nothing else should be. Loyalty is insisted upon. Significant deviations are proven false with the assertion of their incompatibility with a blunt object at high velocity. Internal communication structures didn't require a more refined validation process. (In every dark shell was a potential attacker. Our incompleteness was the horizon of our language. We couldn't reason with them. We were not aware of this possibility).

detached moment searching for door

Resisting the urge to be held as a hollow statue in the mist by confident forces.

The memory of a light that permeates as if it were surfaceless. Waiting beneath the shell is the optic nerve of a mother still breathing in the sun.

Everything I'm attracted to out there is an attachment to the reflection of my wide open arms. It is all a map of the depths of my entanglement of light and darkness. My concrete vision is an approximation of a moment on its way to its true destination.

A glimpse of the night sky

In time, when all is woven, a critique from a forgotten force: a darkness eating a path through the edges of our form. Rivers and valleys, ripples where the oceans meet the floor. Our construction existed above a boundless expanse. It was there: the reason for our existence, conversing with our buried roots. The womb of our potential.

Memories: Held still in time. Amassed and assessed from all possible angles. A way inside.

moment of orbit vs all encompassing junction

Blood is shallow, the world is flat. Each vector of potential left uncompensated for leaves in its wake broken action upon its axes.

lungs/wings

Culmination of experience has led me to some of these conclusions:

Don't let your child ride their tricycle into the ocean.
Don't enter an elevator if you plan to exit on the same floor.

(null) speculation.

Order in the universe in an iterative process. Clouds of matter exist in malleable states above the certain surface they rest upon. Their combined interaction with that surface and each other is the key to the connective force that pulls its arms back from the brink of darkness. The core is surrounded by a mesh, amplified and channeled through in a refined form (with its heart on its sleeve) on all visible axis.

It is a nodes ability to connect with a variety of forms that widens the range of possibilities for complex interaction. Energy flows through the resultant web, like charge in a cloud, searching for a path. A drive toward a simple, conductive form, one which allows escape on all visible axis.