Something Hopeful, Something Terrible, Something Sad, Something Funny, Something Weird: Part Five
Between belief and revelation is a wicked womb of weird.
We have arrived at the end of this series. Thanks for sticking around. All of it is leading to a work of fictional world building that has been gestating since early 2020. The idea from here is to share its birth and development, wherever it leads.
I’m not very good at plans and goals. I’m full of passions, awes, and wonders, none of which are methodically industrious. Part of me has always resisted thinking and living in a structurally enforced manner dictated by authority, especially once it has shown itself to be manipulative, injurious, and false.
It’s a hard path to reject our constructs of artifice.
For you, the reader of my chaotic works, it might leave you confused and frustrated. Bored, even. Maybe you’ll find it validating, inspiring. I tend to paw at sacred urns of belief and linger in dark corners of the human condition, so I imagine many cannot tolerate it. I don’t get to decide how my deviant thoughts are received.
I’m just exploring the shadowed woods of our shared reality and howling from ridge tops along the way. If I pick up some companions on my wayward trek, all the better.
Public expression is a vulnerable space. It can be a magical experience, and it can be humiliating, too. All flaws and limitations are on display. Fear creeps in and gums up the works. At some point you accept that creation is a process of failure and favorable outcome, and that you’ll never be quite sure which is happening.
The process is the thing. Everything else is transitory.
If it becomes something that can feed and clothe and shelter me, that would be wonderful. But in the end, if it in any way helps create a more vibrant and vital world for all (human and non-human), well, that’s the highest hope of my unruly intention.
This is a journey without conditions. My unorthodox perspectives are not meant to inform from an implied position of superior knowing. If it rubs that way, please know that I’m an unending work in progress. The wise and honest will tell you that life is terrifically messy. They’ll advise you that failure is a gift, as long as its heeded.
We will all need to be more forgiving in the coming years. Finding grace will be key.
As much as I resist identifiers (we are inherently permeable and multitudinous, dammit!), I was born into the dominant reality as a white American cis het male and that means acknowledging that there are many other realities besides the one I was taught as default.
If I am to be guilty of anything, let it not be of the cursed desire to “save the world.” May it be of the desire to illuminate destructive behavior and belief so new worlds may be born.
Existence is a plurality. The human condition, a spectrum. It forever unfolds, flows, becomes. There is no high ground, no righteous path. There is only everything.
Be humble, be open, help others. This is my code.
Onward.
PART FIVE: The Great Weirdening
When I hear modern people complain of being lonely then I know what has happened.
They have lost the cosmos.
― D.H. Lawrence, ApocalypseThe story of civilization as we know and practice, except for a speck of remaining uncontacted tribes, has assimilated the rest of humanity. Our claimed differences are superficial. The consequences of our story are universal.
It is a story of power. It uses traditions and standards and categorical definition to dictate winners and losers, what is righteous and what is wicked. It decides what lives and what dies, what has value and what doesn’t. It breeds penal rule and cruel hierarchies. It thrives on the cultivation and retention of control. Its organs are totalitarian.
It alienates. It does not abide, it occupies.
Worst of all, this story, our story, has an insatiable desire for stasis. It’s virulently contagious and self-reinforcing, making it insidiously resistant to change. Abandonment is its only cure.
When our particular insanity began is open to debate. Perhaps it was when we first built cities and then empires and religions. Maybe the Enlightenment was really the Maddening. Certainly Imperialism was rabid in its means and ends. The conjoined ghost of Industrialism and Capitalism is clearly insatiably mad.
And what of the existential accelerants of our delirium? Coal and oil? Nuclear fission? Neoliberalism and its grifty billionaire whims? The Internet? The pursuit of artificial intelligence?
Djinn bottles. Monkey paws. Devil’s bargains.
Perhaps instead of pinning guilt on a particular event/place/time, we can observe it as an accumulation, a feedback escalation. One path out of many became a road. The road became a highway. The highway became a freeway. Then it drank oil, grew wings, and became everything.
Modernity’s dominating story is so eclipsing that we accept it as the logical and inevitable outcome of human evolution. This is what it means to be human! Spoiler: it’s not. It’s obviously an outcome because here we are, but its not the only one possible.
It’s a way. It’s not the only way.
Fate is a choice you didn’t know you made. Weird is the place where you experience the creeping realization of what the choice was. It’s a zone, a space, a threshold where unassailable consequence and dissonant awareness intersect. Known surrenders to unknown. Mastery rusts into incompetence. Technique is devoured by obsolescence. Intellectual and emotional bulwarks fail.
As this weirdtropy eats its way into every aspect of our lives, those holding tightly to power and cherished belief are desperately pushing a menagerie of schemes in attempt to reinforce their crumbling realities. Some are brazen. Some are underhanded. Some are conspicuously ridiculous but shocking in the level of acceptance. And when the dog and pony shows fail, there’s always violent acts of retribution and control to fall back upon.
Fundamental change is not an option for these double-down minds. They still think their gambit has legs. Stopping is heresy. This is their hill. Do we have to die on it?
Extreme ecological strain and economic stratification are the canaries screeching that of our particular civilization is dying. Call it the Ouroboros of Empire, if you will. The rise and fall cycle has met its limit this time around. The ecological and economic consequences are not localized, they’re global. There’s nowhere to go to rebuild.
Climate chaos and its children are for everyone, everywhere.
And yet Tomorrow continues to be the place we’re told where everything is going to happen. Present and Imminent are inconvenient aspects of time as the cognitive bargaining continues to rage between our ears.
Fundamental change is here. Now. It will be chronicled: Faster Than Expected.
However it unfolds, whatever the outcomes, we will be witness. Our time is one of epochal finality AND unheralded possibility. The stakes are boggling.
We’re in the uberweeds now, man. That’s how chaos rolls. Anything can happen.
What a time to be alive!
Greater Forces
In short, the hyperobject convention is in town, dragging us into Chapel Perilous to break bread.
Hyperobjects? Chapel Perilous? What?
Strange concepts are born in strange times. These ideas aren’t new, they’ve just lived in niche communities waiting for the rest of the world to get weird enough to hear their call.
In 2008, “environmental philosopher” Timothy Morton made up a word “to describe all kinds of things that you can study and think about and compute, but that are not so easy to see directly: hyperobjects.”
I don’t want to reexplain. I’m just a layman (lameman?) pointing to ideas I think are important while incorporating them into my creative process. Morton has written a short essay explaining the concept of hyperobjects and I hope you will read it.
Journalist Charlie Warzel has written a timely essay about grappling with hyperobjects too:
“Even now, I struggle to find the adequate word to describe the moment. It makes sense: our 21st century existence is characterized by the repeated confrontation with sprawling, complex, even existential problems without straightforward or easily achievable solutions.”
I disagree that there are not straightforward solutions. At this late stage of our cultural gambit of living as lordly assholes of the planet, I agree that they are not easily achievable. Power never cedes the throne willingly. Our ego blindly built a castle of consequences because it thought it made the rules. Now, brutal lessons are blooming in our walled garden.
Hyperobjects defy capture and control. They are immune to our human-centric mythos. We ignore and dismiss and disrespect them at great peril.
“Chapel Perilous” is a whole other beast that has a history that stretches back to the year 1485 where it appears as an actual chapel where Sir Lancelot faces an intense trial to save the life of a fellow knight in Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, a famous reworking of the mythic tales of King Arthur.
Eventually the term becomes a psychological reference coined by cosmic weirdo Robert Anton Wilson in the 70’s. In part, he describes it as such: “…a stage in the magical quest in which your maps turn out to be totally inadequate for the territory, and you’re completely lost.”
By association, the psychedelic community integrates Wilson’s idea to describe when a tripper’s ride goes over the cliff and reality is lost to ineffable currents that transport the psychonaut to strange realities that range from the wildly absurd to the alien to the divine. And sometimes into the darkest dark, where the journey becomes a terrifying ordeal that must be endured until mental footholds return.
If you ask me, it sounds a lot like the state of our current affairs. We’re all in Chapel Perilous now.
If you are interested in a more thorough explanation, writer Matt Cardin has got you covered in his essay, Initiation by Nightmare: Cosmic Horror and Chapel Perilous.
The Return of Wonder and Awe
The Great Evergreen Mystery crypt and nursery in which all dances and dies Potter’s wheel and reaper’s scythe life from death death from life Life within life within life Stylus and groove recursive, its moves transmission / reception creator / creation From inanimate, the animate From corporeal, the imaginal Life within life within life Particle and wave perception's gaze To and fro ebb and flow The Great Evergreen Mystery endlessly, it dreams
Wonder and awe manifest in experiences that challenge our grasp of reality and agency. It’s not always pleasant. We are in for a deluge of extraordinary events from here on out. Our stuck and brittle psyches will be savaged.
The scene in the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark where Nazis dare to open the Ark of the Covenant is a full-throated lesson in the aspects of wonder and awe. To watch their foolhardy faces change from hungry rapture to flesh melting terror as the supernatural contents of the ark do their thing is delicious.
Such are the perils of the unyielding pursuit of power.
Existence is an unfettered gambit. We can leverage our attributes however we wish but arrogance will end our play sooner or later. There are rules, and we don’t make them.
Only time ripens outcomes. 2020 is an example we can all relate to.
After decades of scientist’s warnings, it looks like the scary global pandemic they’ve been telling us to plan for is likely here. Politics, already a mature wildfire burning in our heads, is mirrored by literal wildfires unprecedentedly turning the land to ash in Australia. Antarctica sets a record high temperature of 64.9 degrees. And the year is only the young age of February!
As you know, we only go deeper into the weeds from there.
Maybe clinging to and fighting for past certainties is the problem. Maybe when things get weird, you’ve got to get weirder.
So it should be no surprise that in the midst of these tectonic ruptures of perceived physical and psychological constants, I had a supremely uncanny personal experience.
On a whim, I ate some psilocybin mushrooms one evening while alone in my apartment. Not a lot, maybe a little more than what is considered a common dose…but in hindsight it seems likely that the mushrooms were more potent than expected.
What happened next is very difficult to explain. I will fail. Nevertheless, I’m going to try.
Before I do, maybe you’re wondering: WHY WOULD YOU DO SCARY WEIRD DRUGS WHEN THE WORLD IS TURNING SCARY WEIRD? Indeed! A proper explanation is a story all its own. In the context of this piece of writing, it relates as just another tributary of weirding that is converging with the rest in this young, terrible decade.
The War on Drugs was doomed from the start and we are finally coming to terms with its deeply destructive consequences. Laws and sensibilities are changing, and interests of all stripes are exploring psychedelics as the fear of judgement and threat of persecution and exile wanes. There’s potential promise with the compounds in the field of mental health. There’s also looming exploitation. Capitalism is always thirsty for new frontiers.
I mean, capitalism has been perfecting its mindfuckery for some time (i.e. the very real science of marketing), but psychedelics are new territory. With the environment, politics, and technology already contorting to extremes, mainstreaming psychedelics within capitalism’s parasitic paradigm is going to be darkly strange.
Speaking of strange, let’s talk about dreams. The commonality of this phenomena belies the fact that it’s a crazy weird thing we (and other lifeforms) do and it’s still largely a mystery why and how this happens. We have some “rational” ideas and data, but the phenomena of dreaming refuses disenchantment.
You know how a vivid dream can seem indistinguishable from the waking world? Now imagine witnessing something that challenges every aspect of what you normally accept as “real” in its quality of “realness” while you are awake.
Yeah. What could be more real than reality?
So, I’m lying in bed, eyes closed, and I fall into a state that feels like the verge of sleep (this in-between place is known as hypnagogia in science circles). I can still hear the sounds of my apartment: the hum of my refrigerator, the clicking of the HVAC thermostat, the whisper of heated air intermittently blowing out of the ceiling vents. I can hear the muted din of the nearby freeway outside. I am conscious of the world around me.
It’s in this state the ineffable begins.
Behind my closed eyes colors begin to flash and take vague shapes. This trend slowly intensifies, sharpens. The colors cover the entire spectrum, their glow ranging from muted to neon to laser intense. The colors and shapes organize into moving geometric patterns. At first this appears flat, as if projected onto a wall, but then becomes three-dimensional.
This prismatic geometry becomes more and more complex to the point of the unspeakable. Its constant morphing is infinitely emergent, boiling with sentient aliveness. It breaks out of three dimensions into a scale-shattering “cathedral” of precise alien hyperdimensionality. It becomes a realm, a plane of existence, a beyond-reality of otherworldly consciousness. “I” am within it, part of it.
I don’t have a body. When I try “move” within the realm-scape, either to travel or to pan my gaze, the vision fades. It appears I am a fixed observer, not an actor, so I stop trying to interact.
At some point I become aware of a vibrational quality to the impossibility I am enmeshed within. I can “feel” it but I don’t recall actual sound (except the continuing background noises of my apartment). Whatever sound is without the sound is the closest description to what I experienced.
Throughly gobsmacked, I spontaneously ask for guidance. Who am I asking? Fuck if I know. The telegraphed response is: “we are working on it.”
Uh, ok.
And then I have to pee. I open my eyes, a little afraid of what I’ll see, but it’s just my dark and very ordinary bedroom. In a way this is a little more disturbing to my sensibilities than seeing a continuation of the WTF that is happening with my eyes closed. It’s such a drastic difference.
I make my way to the bathroom and take care of my corporeal needs.
When I lie back down in bed and close my eyes, I’m almost instantly back to the impossibility that I left. This goes on for a couple more of hours, slowly fading until I drift off to sleep.
Words fail at conveying how mind-blastingly astonishing this was. I feel like I should have freaked out at some point but oddly, I didn’t. Instead I was filled with a deep inquisitive joy and wonder, enraptured by the inconceivable beauty that somehow I was able to witness.
It reminded me of how I felt as a child relating to the world. There was a pang of sadness of what I’d lost over the long years since, and also delight that I had found it again. You exist in a wondrous world that you barely understand, I thought.
Never in my life have I had an experience that came close to this. I am changed. So what do I do with it?
Even the knee-jerk materialist rationalization “you were just tripping balls, dude” has a bizarre connotation: my brain + a chemical compound can somehow generate and project a precise, infinitely emergent, hyper-dimensional geometric reality that far surpasses my cognitive ability and also the rendering power of supercomputers?
The sense of sight is both a receiver and a projector? WTF is going on?
Short answer: we don’t know. But it brings up a lot of weird questions about perception and the nature of reality.
There’s a strong pull to create a story, an explanation, for my encounter with the otherworldly. Instead, I want to be comfortable with the wild mystery of it. I don’t need to supernaturally deify it or kill it with scientific materialism.
I choose reverence and gratitude.
This extraordinary encounter was a catalyst for my ongoing fictional worldbuilding project. Could my creativity have been spurred without psychedelics? Perhaps. But drugs as inspiration is a cliche that’s been beat to dust too. I think it’s better to focus on what happened rather than how it happened.
Remapping the Terrain
If we share this nightmare
We can dream spiritus mundi
If you act as you think
The missing link, synchronicity
—The Police, Synchronicity I[Caution: foolish speculation ahead]
The extremity of current events are showing us, individually, collectively, that our cherished maps of meaning are inaccurate at best. Foundational truths are making themselves known, revealing that our human-centric mythos is but a speck in an inconceivably vast pantheon of… I mean, what else could they be?
Gods.
Not the anthropomorphic supernatural beings from our traditional stories of the divine, I mean real gods. Non-human life and forces and structures and systems and phenomena from which we were born and are cradled within. Their scale and enmeshed depth defies our cognitive ability to see fully, truly.
So, who are these gods, these greater forces, these hyperobjects? While by no means do I think it’s definitive, I’ve thought about it and came up with a list:
The Cosmic/Quantum
Time
The Sun
The Earth/Moon
Consciousness
Humanity
Culture
Family
The Body
“You”
It might seem like I’m describing a hierarchy. The wording “greater forces” certainly points to that, but what I’m digging at is that these aspects are all acting simultaneously, congruently. Some may seem more important or “higher” or more essential, but I don’t think that’s the case. It’s all essential. Instead of stratified levels of power and influence, perhaps think of it all as a Matryoshka doll.
Alas, I started to address each one of the list but I realized quickly that my words would just keep sprawling. This post is a long jumble of weird already and if you made it this far, you get a gold star. Go find one and pretend I gave it to you.
Also, thank you.
Until next time, maybe ponder the list yourself. How do you imagine each plays a part in the making of the being affectionately known as “you?”
And now, here’s your moment of terrible awe:
“Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.”
― Leonard Cohen