baselines

This is everything we wanted. The bottom has dropped out (or at least has started to drop out). The limit has been obscured forever. The stars now move about with their own will. Orbit is only a suggestion. Their sentience makes me nauseous. They move about in my periphery and, when they feel like it, they suddenly pierce me: my heart, my arms, my head—but I’m physically unharmed. I am psychically disfigured. I am communing with an algorithm, a stone, a giant ball of fire, and a vast array of plausible apocalypses.

Now, I feel like a heretic. Crying out in the towne square for patience and time and slowness and definition and limits. I’m crawling somewhere—but not on the floor, there is no floor. I can’t remember how to speak. Every word I speak offends me. The stars have no names. To name them is a sin. To speak my name is a sin.

Recently, I guess I moved into some deserted Boomer’s body. A perfect shell, outfitted with all the legacy software, drifting in the vacuum. It passed me by and I must have grabbed it with a limb of subconscious, clamoring to get inside its sacred hull; eager for the sensation of ground, certitude, history; ready to drop anchor.

Immediately the new (old) body consumed those earlier desires, snuffed their flames. A world without names crushed by the bloated flesh of the Boomer’s body, heavy with time and memory—incessantly chanting tomes of history and science. Inside the body there is a perfect horizon with a single sun, slowly setting. A single voice emanates from a human soul nearby. Outside, there are so many horizons there may as well be none. There is a flurry of suns, throbbing and spinning, flickering, dying and breathing, flitting like a murmuration. The beetle drifting in my periphery is the sunrise in one of those horizons. The human soul that was beside me speaks from the furthest possible point from where it once stood. It speaks from within me and from the jaws of the beetle that became the sun that became the mid-day.

Now, I want out of this dying shell, but it’s too bright outside. Outside is too vast. I am sick with information. I lack context.¹