97. Crepuscular lights

One of my earliest memory, I must have been three, perhaps four, is about amazing red lights gyrating in a room. I woke up one night in a bed that wasn’t mine. My parents’ I guess. I’m alone. The window of that room faces the street. Although the glass panel is covered by wooden slats, fiery flashes of light find their way in.

Noise must have interrupted my sleep. Metallic sounds from the hallway. The room’s door is shut tight. I can still hear voices, loud, urgent, from far away, probably from the kitchen at the back of the apartment. Despite the distance, they’re audible, I even think they might be shouts. But all I care about through that din are these red lights gushing through the blinds above the bed.

The rays move in rapid sweeps against the ceiling and the walls. I’ve never seen that before. It’s so beautiful. Everything around me becomes a bright rare red. A colored transparency that instantly shares its tint with whatever it touches. It comes and goes, swiftly turns in the room. I’m blown away by so much splendor. By the dazzling whirlwind in front of my eyes. It’s extremely bright, but not blinding. It’s powerful, but not scary. It’s omnipresent, but takes no space.

As the red light brushes against every object in the room, it highlights them with an exact sanguine contour. Every detail goes from darkness to a clear crimson presence. Everything flickers, winks. Bits and pieces blinking around me, while wide stripes of red glide in a circling movement on larger surfaces.

I’m in that bed and feel absolutely privileged to witness such luminous apparitions. To discover that red can be like that, slashing and unreserved. An unquestionable color, decisive, thorough. Outright clear and manifest. Of course, at that very young age, I don’t have that many words, but that’s the way I feel.

I’m so proud of the experience that I tell myself that’s all I need to know for now.

I’ll ignore the commotion outside the bedroom. I won’t acknowledge there’s an ambulance by our front door. That my mother is being taken away on a stretcher screaming, once again for it’s a pattern. Not the stretcher, but the ear-piercing laments that she’s about to die.

It’s usually my fault. But not that night. I was asleep. I couldn’t have done that. I’m sure I’m blameless, therefore I can fully enjoy the lights without any other thoughts. I’m free. No responsibilities. I can be sensitive to the dancing bright color. Even believe it's there for my sole amusement.

Better still: The world outside the room sounds so busy, turbulent, a raucous affair, that so occupied it will leave me alone, totally forget about me at least as long as the red beams keep their glaring pace. So I pray for the light show never to end.

I’m telling you about this incident because as I grew older, I became quite interested in the visible spectrum. I studied it, fascinated by that precise range of shades the human eye can perceive. I made collages out of my passion. In a table of opposites, black is juxtaposed to white, but to me, it was always red, the longest wavelength we can discern. It’s our extreme. The end of our ocular journey. We can go no further. When you see the color red, you are at the boundary of your visual space.

In terms of atmospheric optics, the red crepuscular rays that had entered the room I was in that night, these twisting shafts of lights adorning the walls and furniture, they were like the safelight in a photographer’s darkroom. Allowing the view to unfurl with immunity. It had meant security, refraction and scattering of distress, columns of sheltering light. Streaming through the gaps in the window, that luminosity had radiated around the dawn and the dusk of nightmares. Penetrating, finding holes in blackness. It had made the shadows flush. Given a rich ruby glow to all I could see.

That’s why so many of my collages are in red. I thought you might want to know, how much I appreciate that color. Beyond it, I'm sightless.

Laolao

96. In sync

Curving back on myself in three dimensions and a fourth. Fictionalizing a global positioning system to locate the wormholes that would connect distant points in my thoughts. Figments of my imagination lighter than nothing, repelled instead of attracted, floating in deep space away from meteors. Deviating from the past. Each of my seconds never absolute, but fluctuating according to how experiences can move me around.

Spending most of my time at the subatomic level, I find an infinity of infinite answers, an affinity to them, because they're always dying in one place to be reborn elsewhere. Since their two moments vibrate in unison, I can retain some coherence as well as information.

Teleporting photonic ideas, applying beams of dense matter to explanations, and force fields to the atoms of my train of thoughts before they tumble down to an absolute zero temperature.

Suppose extreme entanglement. Suppose it’s traversable. That a theory of everything can make sense of even meaninglessness. Suppose we’re speculative entities meandering across complex spectral molecules, time traveling through dark times, ourselves our own event horizon.

Suppose that our throats can get crushed by the negative masses we swallow as we try to speak at the speed of light. Suppose we’re the creation of mathematics, of an abstract science, its very experiment as it tried to calculate radiation effects and disorders when establishing deep connections at micro-distances.

Wave amplitudes shaping electrons, one at a time, back and forth, no particular location, unable to tell differences as humanity keeps overlapping itself, an eternal folding and refolding of copies and originals. Transferring our bizarre state of consciousness into pulses of light occupied at shedding their energy away, to prove that bright bodies of knowledge can defeat the art of the impossible.

We’ve managed to attach our machines to nature, we've e-mailed ourselves over the wireless system of a Vedic philosophy, with a cc to many gods, transmitters-receivers invalidating each other. In sync. Repetitive signals from an electric storm. Telluric currents as evidence of partial sanity. Hitting the resonant frequency of our own fears while, simultaneously, we complain about it to the police.

Our volte-face are mind-blowing. All our tergiversations occuring at the same rate, our reversals as unescapable as a black-hole. And time is no arrow.

Laolao

95. On levers and catapults

I tell you, this Wednesday was an excellent day for the blossoming of stupidity. I won’t mention the events, they’re not worth our time. Instead, I’ll reflect on my fear that the future may not have that much of a future if that interplay between clinging to ignorance and practicing its deployment doesn’t hit one day the principle of entropy. Idiocy, indeed, seems to be gaining energy and finding new adepts all the time.

These are the moments when I truly feel lonely, walls encircling me, airtight. My thoughts vacuum-sealed. My speech insulated. My hopefulness in a zip-lock. Potential hermetically cut off, with nowhere to go. Surrounded on all sides by a wide, vicious, high-risk cluelessness. Unenlightenment unfurling more of its thick darkness.

I tell you also, the tradition of vigorous debates has vanished.

The only light on the horizon is with Archimedes. Solutions perhaps available if we address the problems of our reasoning (or absence of) from a down-to-earth mechanical perspective, as burdensome as these issues may seem. Matter-of-factness to describe human dilemmas, as intractable or heavy as they may appear.

It is true that a huge weight can be moved by a tiny force. It’s our only chance. These fools out there aren’t equipped to understand that, unaware knowledge can affect lives.

It ensues that intellectual transformation can come from simply having a place where to stand, a firm position, given that we know there’s a precise relationship between the weight that hinders judgment and its distance from the fulcrum.

The exact place where a dash of cleverness can pivot, like a simple, efficient machine.

That would be my advice for today.

Laolao

94. Recto-verso

Always wanted to go behind words, filled with expectations as to the physical reality of that hidden space. For space is the substance I would be interested in if I could get close enough to see, to experience the wave structure evolving on the far side of any word that can be.

What do the fundamentals of physics say about such a realm, the one beyond discrete things, separate things ending up interconnected through, for example, a sentence? The notion of time suddenly vibrating, combining its essence with its properties.

What would happen to understanding once it became an act of pure invention, of pure logical simplicity, an act evolving on the scale of parsimony?

What kind of knowledge would I then possess on the other side of words, the simplest explanation patiently awaiting to be? Probabilistic discourses gone, but the mind in attendance.

Behind words, there would be no meaning, only the irrelevancy of gravitational pull, the superfluousness of finite or infinite qualities to time and space.

But there would still be something that exists behind those words that I keep scratching, in that stubborn hope to reach their rear surface. There would be matter eternally. Redshifting, interacting bodies, mental events organized as occurrences in motion, finding their mass and solidity in the relationship they’d have to each other.

I would no longer have a need to seek meaning. I would be outside an expanding world. Out of reach of the Big Bang. I would be behind words. Where nothing collapses. Where there’s only activity. Only curves. No sound, although plenty of oscillations. At last, a part of the universe. Formed by everything the universe is.

Like all there is on the reverse, much further away than a noun or a verb, I would be a plain, uncomplicated rhythm.

This is what I truly hope to find behind words as I exhaust them with a relentless spherical beat of the heart. Energy exchanges and cosmological constants defining the field of codicology: The art of touching the verso.

Laolao