curvature

by Monkey Leap

  Upon this thought a furry of birds strikes up into the air, carrying it away.

  Chaos Theory

  “Physicists have determined that though the universe is expanding there is no actual center from which this expansion is taking place, or, more accurately, the center is everywhere. At any point in the universe, it is expanding in all directions.”

  Argent carries the “any point in the universe” to a fluid point mid-air, and weighs its possibilities streaming out from there. He wonders how many cross-referenced maps are at this very moment cross-referencing on this center. He had recognized that he could understand this simple blueprint of such a deep-seated web, this diamond nature of this looking-glass macrocosm. Wherever it gazed, in whatever it gazed at, all else was reflectively connected. Heads or tails, the reflected became the tangible. “The Butterfly Effect” coined this interconnectedness, the flapping of a butterfly’s wings affecting weather systems so sensitive that it can change tomorrow’s weather. An interconnectedness so sensitive to become alchemic, that the mere act of observing it can change its outcome.

  He responds with great generosity, recognizing that the inception of this thought process has itself become a center point expanding the universe.

  He moves with grace and reverence to where it lands.

  Alcheringanijina

  He sits in his prison cell awaiting his permanent outcome. He has circled in and around his conscience thoroughly. He’s retraced that movement that led up to that moment. Everything seems to run in a big circle.

  Yes, he just may well be half-man, half-animal as others claim.

  The moment he had helped the girl onto the boat a series of events unfolded. He didn’t know what they were, nor was he able to understand where they were coming from. All he knew was that they had an undeniable sense of completion to them, as if everything had lead up to that moment because of a series of circles, each one resembling the previous, setting the pattern for the next.

  For some reason there always floated, way on the horizon, some whisper of some other voice. That whisper never seem to get any louder, and somehow seemed further out of reach as the repeating circle. He surmised these series of circular events would explode into some exalted Something – and that Voice would then become a clear and lucid version of The Truth.

  This voice of truth, he now saw, was now nothing more than a series of events that exploded into Exalted Nothing.

  But that was enough to decree some definitive change had occurred – “The Evolution of My Entropy” he called it to himself.

  Her draw had been overwhelming to his needs. She was many things, almost all things, but mostly, he noticed, she was the exact things he needed to expose these shadows, now elevated, waiting to awaken. He thinks now that perhaps the fact that they had risen was his initial problem – particularly being that they were the unutterable kind.

  This resultant reality now lay claim to his soul. The courthouse was always brimming with reminders of that – a slew of angered crowded faces. And then there was the media. He’d been allowed to watch the evening news one night, after his death sentence had been handed down, and he was astounded to see so many people involved in his life’s aftermath. But it wasn’t so much that they sensed a center to it. It was more that this all now seemed to carry a whole new life to it, a separate universe.

  All he knew was, he had the same life he had all along - a string of gray events. No one seemed to notice this except him. He had become no more or less. It seemed that everything always was just a “going along.” His mom and dad, schools, peoples lives only a reflection of a string of events. His dog he remembers the most, although the day he disappeared was perhaps the deepest reflection of confusing emotions he had ever experienced, and he would now describe it as a moment in a terrifying sense of aloneness. He returned from that experience never really having evolved any part of its circumstance.

  His head is aching now, and he tries again returning to the target circumstances of that day. Yes…

  he held her hand as he lifted her onto the boat, then swung her over by the catch of the other…

  …She was so light in that moment…

  Maybe she made the moment feel so light…

  In any event, he remembers them both laughing effortlessly in the lightness of the moment.

  He felt this must have been of some relevance, and so he made a point of telling this to the psychiatrist, but he just skimmed over it, when in fact he himself felt that it had huge meaning.

  She sat on the front of the boat, while I stayed in back, steering. I watched her, mostly the whole time. In truth she seemed to make everything feel unreal. There was something about her that made me feel altogether unreal.

  I watched her stand and descend into the hull, to use the washroom I suppose. Suddenly it all became transparent and floaty. I switched the motor off, and followed her down. I noticed little of any moment then. I only remember the feeling of the sensations. The crack of my fist against her skull, the swirling, driving force of necessity to overtake her body, the competition for the rule of her. I never once felt as if what I had done was wrong. This purpose was just running its course to dead end.

  His prison cell suddenly embodies a pressurized cabin. He feels a slight motion sickness as he paces the perimeter …

  Now I could hear her breath. It was shallow and slight. I looked into her bloodied, dying eyes, and suddenly I could clearly see

  my reflection.

  I became overwhelmed with some form of terrorizing fear that began to well up. I started to throw up. It was then that a sense of my own death seemed to overtake me, and I knew I had to kill it.

  The dropping of her body into the ocean was the final end to it.

  I don’t remember much of anything after that…

  because suddenly it felt as if everything turned off

  … a play outside was reforming …

  that I had an abrupt new part in…

  Two worlds, with one mirror between.

  My name is “Marasmus.”

  Duende

  “…The sea touched with each thought, that truth its wave, their waves the prophecy…”

  philter

  Argent looks clear into the eye of the passage. It reads for him.

  “Any system repeats itself with information from the previous system. Under observed laboratory conditions a mouse learns a new behavior. It will now be easier for the second mouse to learn the same behavior. Consequently the third, and so on. The ability to learn the behavior accelerates the more mice involved. Mice separated by distance and without any contact have been found to continue this rapid learning process.

  He remembers reading an account of endeavors to crystallize glycerin - through heating, super-cooling - but it remained liquid. Early nineteen hundred and a shipment opened had crystallized. No one could explain how. Chemists borrowed bits and started to seed their own samples and soon glycerin crystals were abounding. But much to the surprise of the chemists stocks of unseeded glycerin, even those that were sealed airtight, began to crystallize spontaneously…

  A mind seed exists…

  Many evolutions of realities. He plainly surmises a balancing weight between choice and outcome and evolution.

  Argent has thought long into the source of his own creation. Inching slowly through dark doors, coming to going, always weighing the balancing, to the original germane seeding of his own evolution.

  It was recently he noticed that when he wished for something it appeared immediately, seeded into a creation of design and purpose…

  Nothingness can become Something.

  This, he thinks, is Immaculate Conception.

  thoth

  He’d long ago memorized all rationalizations in order to break down preconceptions quicker. The group was always larger than a minute ago. He captured them quickly, by side-showing and slight, delayed intention on timing. He was personable in his common approach.
<
br />   Lekjas was uninteresting to look at. He was simply interesting to others by title of “Magician”. He remained always within this conception.

  He wasn’t one to pull a rabbit out of a hat. He was much more likely to do the unlikely – like magically Change you Mind.

  He migrated across a stretched stage of life as if gliding. He’d float through the streets of New York, appearing and disappearing between the shadowed cracks. No one quite ever knew where he was, if and when he would show up, if he really even existed. There was lots of “talk” of his appearances here and there, and each time he had drawn enough of a crowd to verify amongst the group that it had all happened they could not agree on exactly what had happened. He could not be looked up, or called upon to verify, and often he would depart, it seemed, before he’d appear. But for all the mystery he left an impression all could agree upon. Each was left with feeling as if they had just spent a large lifetime all in that small, shared moment. As a direct result, as is often the case, they distinctly felt as if they had a friend for life. Because when he would appear it was as if he were meant for you and only you. It would always seem to coincide with a passing thought of wondering, and he would appear in that empty bench seat next to you. And suddenly, magically, linear life was lifted. Wish-like you felt you could cast into its sea and pull forth a better version. Lekjas chose to enchant with mythical proportions, propelled by the everyday disarray, through this underlying magic cloak. Rearranged in a moment, uplifted and remembered as a child’s desire.

  Lekjas grants wishes that are waiting to be found.

  Chin-jo

  California is magic, its nutritious, ether-rich soil, growing ancient mythical giants and lush, opulent variations on enchanting themes, with candy skies, and metabolized water lapping up against its skirt. Alice sees the population has been infused by its extreme. She feels this pressure from under the ground, and some days it makes her feel claustrophobic and she finds herself crying. In her growing time she found herself wanting to escape on the next minute flight out, but evolution has dimmed its effects on her.

  Alice returns to the beach each day, and atop her rock, observes.

  Bodies lay scattered about, sinking into the sands, weighted by appearance. Implanted breasts are farthest forced-out. All use of the beach is taken, and by the end of the day it will hold discards of this conquering.

  Interchanges through doors of perceptions…

  The man, spliced from the woman on the bench, continues to ply in his denial with quiet long-separated sentences, hoping one will strike clear and clean and ignite a spark. She remains on the bench beside him.

  The diseased woman sits propped in the sand. A hat and umbrella and sunglasses filter out any seeping light. Her bathing suit hangs, eclipsing her emaciating body. Her attention remains fixed. Inside she is becoming hollow, slowly being eaten away by shadows no longer remembered.

  The boy, finding himself abandoned to the world becomes the soldier, he’s cutting and tromping through, to now devour a hotdog.

  His mother oblivious to his world, contrary to her own, for in amidst her sweltering weighted body she longs to be anything not of this human reality, but something far more sublime. Something splendidly superb, like ice cream on a stick, and each lick more of her lost to herself, until nothing remains, she melting into someone’s pleasure…

  Next to her, her husband, long removed, is content only to become more of himself, adding more to himself through large amounts of food he invites to join in.

  Receded behind, a homeless man sits, having long ago lost his appetite for anything, even himself. Withered and scorched from the sun and life, no one notices.

  A schizophrenic man stands in the water, sure he’s not even there, not sure if the voices coming from his mouth are his, seeing everyone as ghosts that they really are.

  Groups of people watch him, checking their reality. Except for a group of girls who shift and check and recheck only their bathing suits. A score is tallied without ever adding.

  Erroneous sits nearby, eyeing their squandered movements.

  Squished between a dog sits, a rope dangles from his neck, the end tied to nothing. He has long ago lost the urge to run and run away. Those that come upon him are drawn in, and so he has been beaten and torn apart by their history and his own.

  Alice always waits for the sand sweeper to come through at the end of the day. She references it to a sand mandala being swept away. Near end of this day Alice discovers a sum of money lying on beach. She recognizes by the neat pile that it has slipped out of someone’s back pocket. She remembers play money looking just like this, but as a child the exchanges were always so much more appreciated, and given much more freely. Back then money had a funny feeling in your pocket, like something wondrous.

  She culls the money with the scoop of her hands, and moves towards the small girl sitting quiet in a pocket of her own sum and substance. Her senses are synchronized with Alice’s approach.

  Alice lowers her hand into the little girl’s beach pail and releases the money.

  In the distance the sweeper is moving closer.

  Alice crosses the sands between circumstance and timing, picks up the nothing end of the rope, and leaves with the dog.

  Homeorhesis

  “I sent a message to the fish:

  I told them ‘This is what I wish.’

  The little fishes of the sea,

  They sent an answer back to me.

  The little fishes’ answer was

  ‘We cannot do it, Sir, because—‘ “

  “I sent to them again to say

  ‘It will be better to obey.’

  The fishes answered, with a grin,’

  ‘Why, what a temper you are in!’

  I told them once, I told them twice:

  They would not listen to advice.

  I took a kettle large and new,

  Fit for the deed I had to do.

  My heart went hop, my heart went thump:

  I filled the kettle at the pump.

  Then some one came to me and said

  ‘The little fishes are in bed.’

  I said to him, I said it plain,

  ‘Then you must wake them up again.’

  I said it very loud and clear:

  I went and shouted in his ear.”

  “But he was very stiff and proud:

  He said ‘You needn’t shout so loud!’

  And he was very proud and stiff:

  He said ‘I’d go and wake them, if-----‘

  I took a corkscrew from the shelf:

  I went to wake them up myself.

  And when I found the door was locked,

  I pulled and pushed and kicked and knocked.

  And when I found the door was shut,

  I tried to turn the handle, but-----“

  FOUR

  EROS

  Manna

  “…Split open from the heaving chest the hyaline pores forth its fruits, eaten and enveloped, and once more the ripened rot being pushed underground, nature’s seed is spit out to its bitterness, sees itself, and becomes once more…”

  Manticore

  “Bottlenose dolphins have exhibited the capacity to recognize themselves in a mirror. Reacting to reflective glass walls placed in aquarium pools, the dolphins were shown to be able to distinguish themselves from other dolphins. Researchers had previously uncovered this self-recognition ability in our closely related large-brained primates – chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans. This is the first definitive study that shows a convergence in the capacity to self-reflect from a different animal.”

  Hypostasis

  “Every body placed in the luminous air spreads out in circles and fills the surrounding space with infinite likenesses of itself and appears all in all and all in every part. This is the real miracle, that all shapes, all colors, all images of every part of the universe are concentrated in a single point.”

  – Da Vinci

  The Wake
of Imagination

  Arable crosses the sand with delicate joy. She swings her beach bucket with the pendulum gravity weight of the coins; their tolling – their jingle and clink, their something shiny, a marvelous world.

  She has something wondrous.

  Arable has been reborn recent in this ancient evolution. An extremely tiny but powerful pull, this bubbling of matter back to gravitation.

  A novel, new, unconditioned creative impulse of possibility beyond now, given over to great span and traverse.

  This breath she breathes exchanges a world.

  Four years in and still holding close to original seed, her reflection is of clear future memories. These will become a lapsed dream that will rejoin. Déjà vu when the laminate finds the mirror.

  She will become a spirit of cycles, a lifelong skill of the illusion of remaining constant while breathing dissolution.

  All lines of boundaries are impermanent. She will balance on them like an acrobat. Until her equilibrium is challenged. Whereupon she may fall, and die a long death. Or she may grip the line and cling and cling, passing it on and on. Or she may slip off the line again and again, to once again regain her balance, clear about her illusion of this moment.

  Or perhaps she will realize that there is no line at all.