93. Lossitude

There are minutes where I feel lost. I call such times moments of lossitude, when feelings resembling those of an abandoned child cling to me, despite my age. Minutes that see the annihilation of experience, a life falling into helplessness, ready to implode and then disappear sucked by the compactness of my mood. Instants neither melodramatic nor emotional. Just burning fast inside. A physical pain. A blistering heat wrecking walls, those divisions keeping thoughts in order. Igniting the partitions that protect mental categories, the mind suddenly in disarray, most cerebral enclosures safeguarding my sanity incinerated to ashes.

Long minutes of lossitude. I think many would label them anxiety.

Havoc. Bursts of entropy. A radical but silent collapse, for it can never be spelled out. Words simply run away from the disaster zone.

A few minutes only.

That lossitude is not a weakness of mine. It is a danger. I must always treat it as such.

Laolao

92. The morphology of fortitude

I need words. I need lots of new words today. An obsession/compulsion. All the words I see are old used ones. I want new sounds. New syllables. I want to read an unknown lexicon so to discover it, plunge and sink into meanings I’ve never heard of. Learn again. From scratch, to see if ideas that were unthinkable till today can now be clearly articulated. Shaped on the screen. To point at things I could not imagine before these new phonemes came to be. I want new letters to express what waves beyond the reach of my vocal cords can sound like. New expressions to indicate the states of things we haven’t yet discussed. Something about extent, proportions, magnitudes that have escaped us. New measurements. A special language for subject matters we haven’t studied. I need new words. To hear how they're pronounced.

I need a different vocabulary, to break away from the poles of delusional pessimism and/or optimism maybe. To make promises that can be kept. To get rid of motivational speeches.

I want new verbal signs to transform mindsets. To better support images for what they are, and to help stop visualizing ourselves and our desires for success. No more positive thinking, wishful thinking. Just a nomenclature unable to tackle topics such as self-confidence, and aspirations.

I want a non-ethos phraseology. A tongue foreign to crowd-pleasing messages. I want risks to have clear names. I want to have idioms that fit the needs of courage, dimensions where the good side of hard times need not be reinforced. A jargon allergic to lies. No self-help recipes. I want realistic, lucid, well-enunciated disaster warnings. I want words for that. Not the ones with a double entendre. Not threats that end up feeling like reassurances. I don’t want sentences sanitizing bad news. Castrated words, pasteurized discourses. Terms whose main function is to disinfect meaning. Sterile dictions that have nothing to disclose.

I want words of the kind capable of creating understanding, acuity. Meant for information gathering. Plugged into insight and details. Words for perception and penetration. For our mental capacity for reconnaissance and exploration. For the dangers we encounter. I want words to designate particulars, not generalizations. I want a grammar meant for audacity and bravery, not for delays and detours. Words that do not retreat. Made for moments of adversity, words that know what it is to endure. Intrepid, undaunted. I want unflinching words. A language with the moral fiber of resilience.

Then, of course, I’ll listen.

laolao

91. The flâneur

Looking at the world around me, my eyes given a virtual reality overlay. Thoughts superimposed, the transparent part of my field of vision imprinted with out of sight ideas, undetectable wireless enhancements. I see souls and navigate through the wrinkles of personality identifiers. Counting the genes dictating the particular evolution strategy of a number of individuals. From an adaptive point of view, how our usefulness may eventually run its course. Or in the eyes of nature, how we survive predation among ourselves. So many memory cells overstaying their welcome. Fleshing it out, the non-mystical process by which we’re untreatable as people. Unmutated. Engineering our own devolution. The machinery of vulnerability characterized by immortality. Having absorbed our inorganic precursors. Replenishment being a powerful matter of material animating forces, to paraphrase Bergson my own way. Not even ourselves within our grasp. In a hidden corner of the mind, the cryogenic preservation of unrealizable expectations. Alchemical approaches extrapolating therapies for our frozen frailties. Bypassing the need for an interface between emotions and intelligence.

Oh no, not EQ again. Pervasive downloads into our biological storage devices. High fidelity to being increasingly dumber. Dismantling sensory channels to reconstruct the non-essential information that allows a maximum degree of human control over unwanted transcendence. From a bioprogressive perspective, the hybridization between our extremely-evolved-limitations and our indispensable humanity. Always running in parallel to the idea of being constantly smarter. The same quantity of crap immediately available to all for perusal. No nose, but a flash drive. Bits of data about chronic and self-replicating paradisiac disabilities. Biocompatible with our behavioral tendencies to perform solar-scale computations about the human race as a special singularity. Hacking more markets to better exploit them. Our technological genius just another financial instrument. Rapacious games played in the cul-de-sac of our brain to overcome alien competition. Wall Street as a parallel universe. Or ideological science fundamentally broken. Invalidating rules.

The fiction of ideas is so marvelous, my darlings. Modeling my internal state after entities with little experience at economic interaction, going for decay-prone probabilities. A strong feeling of temporal compression to unzip. Flying computer nodes, easily distinguishable from magic. Imagining we're simply part of a tool-using specie wearing puzzling glasses to enlarge sensorial bandwidth. Abstract symbols for objects and their super-conductivity. Rearranging syntactical input, countering the plasticity of implants education has grafted like roadblocks on the ground of my research on the ingression of synthetics.

I will not explore the fast roads to fabulous new media. I think we only get smarter over time by having lots of sex and making babies. It’s a slow process, I know. Messier also, since AI developments for neurons do not need diaper change.

Convergence and offspring, genuinely both outmoded and futuristic. A vehicle for the building of narratives over many generations, the stuff passing through our creative membranes without architectural rupture. Experiencing a sense of accomplishment. Inducing a potential for immersive learning. In its midst, just to be a flâneur.

But then, it’s true, if it doesn’t work, I won’t hesitate to use my repulsion ray gun on all that internalized biotech precognition that horribly runs through our modern veins. And I’ll move forward as a female freak on her own ethical terms. Flâner would then be for later.

90. Smoke signals

Like a cigarette hole where there used to be a face, that picture carried in one’s wallet, void has burnt, raged edges. A round scar through the layers of a Polaroid paper, plastic curling against the pressure of an intense incandescence. Souvenirs replaced by what can be seen through the punctured photograph when it is held in front of an inquisitive eye intending to face an eclipse. Ashes stuck to the perimeter, threads of cellophane intermingled with debris as vacuum suctions explosions of static scenes, all that’s captured without the need of permission.

I blow cigarette smoke through the holes. It comes out on the other side, the floating empty rings encircling the disappearance of the sun. Memory plumes, volutes of smoke joining cascades of clouds crazily diving into the horizon. How lost can I get before I ask for directions from migrating birds already far away. Their wings washing the day. Childhood monsters letting go of their cries and pain. The destroyer in me under hypnosis, keeping its balance on the youngest branch of a family tree. Never has love been so authentic. Oxidizing softness internalized like mad.

(There’s never any justice for the weak. Everyday the phone rings to repeat this. No eye contact, but hysterical balloons losing their air fast, whistling, flying out of control, crashing into the dilated tunnel of an iris.)

A drunk manual typewriter gone violent, hammering in red the prose of cryptic captions zigzagging under cultural illusions. The undecided descriptions of collective follies. Ashtrays crammed with cigarette butts, with yellowed filters crushed into mute accordions. Stained glass bringing fractured light to one’s anatomy and its long list of alibis. Shreds of tobacco sticking to the fingers holding the eraser going over one’s much needed solemnity. Perhaps not an eraser, but a hunter after the invisible circulation of ideas in search of a sound purpose.

The flame of the lighter at it again, brightening sunshine from behind the dark disc. Nicotine wrapping neurons with the very strings holding the stars high up in the sky. Tentacles of illumination networking their viewpoints. Interlocking their insights. Fine meshes for thoughts to bounce, a trampoline hosting mind-games. Untraceable veins of ruminations in the heart of the brain.

But then, I blow through holes only meant for the vapors of reverie, passages, for twists of contemplative cogitation, to allow reflections to reach the mirror site of airy suspensions.

See the mental trellis they weave. I rest on that foggy hammock. Safe, gently rocked by the white puffs escaping from my lips. Messages for distant people to read. Since today you’ve gone back home. While I return to loop-shaped writing habits.