Song of Echo
Come back. Haven't you seen thematic solitude for as long as you could?Come back. There's merit in comfortable vanity where comfortable vanity is mimetic music.
Come back. Tell me all the abstractions you've found. Let's rebuild with them.
Come back home. You've been roaming long enough.
ETERNAL CONSTRUCTION SITE ONLY MUCH BIGGER
First I must say where I have been.
Imagine a mansion in eternity. Would it have a make immaculate or ruinous? The merit to perfect bricks is aesthetic, its mode ideal: a perfect brick is what we aspire for bricks to be, with edges sanded smooth and corners exactly pointed; a mansion constructed as such will be a perfect mansion, but would it describe an eternal one? Immaculate polish, maintained according to immaculate conception, does not stand alone without manual upkeep. And a mansion, as a construction, must stand alone (or else we are describing not a mansion but an eternal construction site).
So then, the bricks must be ruinous. Crumbled, imperfect, whittling away towards nothing. Right? Does that hold up for eternity? In a matter of time, the mansion would be a heap of heaps, and later still not even that, the grains of dust blown by wind(?) into the grand temporal circulation patterns, more a part of eternity itself than of the intended construct. Does that describe a mansion?
Obviously this exercise is linguistic, then, and there is no clean answer. Surely? But, if there is no answer, where have I been? An abyssal plain? The unanswerable strand? The perpetually temporary Street of Roads, on the outskirts of the center of fabled underscore? I exclaim, I have been in eternity's mansions.
In truth, I still do not know which of the two makes these mansions were (ideal, or dilapidated), and I present the above to you as condensations of suppositions that had entertained my mind in moments of lucid contemplation. I know only that these were mansions-- at least while I was in them. I was not only in the mansions. My pilgrimage has been winding, and you can find my footprints on many an eternal sand. I am here now speaking of the mansions.
Did they have purposes, or owners? What purpose does any mansion have but to present its inhabitant? A house is designed to be inhabited, and so if a mansion only needed to be inhabited, it would have been a house and have no need for the extravagant size. Adding extravagance to a house, even simply making it much bigger, is like installing a frame onto a canvas: it brings explicit presentation, it emphasizes the presence of presentation. The eternal mansion eternally presents whoever inhabits it.
I inhabited, for a while, an eternal present. That's a slightly different sentence where "present" now qualifies "eternal" rather than "I." The future could be seen from the back windows, the past from the books I'd read. For me, the inhabitant, it was hard doing to focus on either of those at all. The mansion, trappings and all, took up my time. I suspected, and even now think back and wonder, that I was not the only inhabitant. Maybe there were others, maybe there were to be others, and I was alone during my allotted stay. Maybe I was not alone and the mansion was simply that big. One is allowed to question-- anything, in fact, including-- whether I was "the inhabitant" and not a guest.
Where did the mansion come from? Where its materials, its constituent parts? Suppose an eternal mansion has eternal parts. Well, which kind of "eternal mansion," the immaculate or the ruinous? Whichever one the bricks, that one the parts: either way, they came from Earth, from Time as we have known it. I did not stay long enough to be absolutely sure of the specifics, though I have made observations. They are all of this sort:
- I slept on a bed.
- It remained the same bed for a number of days, months, more.
- It would eventually change to a different bed, and never back to a previous bed.
- I never saw it change, though I was not in the same room as the bed all of the time and did not make a concerted effort to see it change.
- It was not always a particularly comfortable bed. Sometimes it was.
It is reasonable to assume the nature of the eternal mansion's bricks is the same, with imperfections being replaced when necessary. I did not observe those changes happening either, which on one hand may be more surprising, as there are a lot of bricks in a mansion and I ought to have seen the change happen at least once, but on the other hand may be just as you'd expect, as I do not make a habit of regularly and rigorously watching specific bricks in a wall all day every day. And, for that matter, this is rooted in an assumption. Perhaps the bricks operated differently than the materials of the interior.
I was not the perfect witness to the mechanisms of this mansion, as I spent the greater portion of my stay invested in my own thoughts and activities, those activities usually being further thoughts. I do not have a list of the things I thought about. I was there for a very long time. Many of the things I thought about, I will bring up in natural course in coming posts, blogs, websites, compositions.
It was, they were, mansions.
Yet it was not peace.
Nested
It was not peace, because I spent my days thinking without words. I was interested in this development at first, as it was a relief to change away from the constant words and noises of the brain to which I had grown so accustomed. This persisted, though, and after even a year of this I was now accustomed to mental silence, and words became rare. In that environment, the fluidity of the eternal, I wanted to maintain a pace of words in my head; I saw it as like a vitality without which I became at risk of transforming into a statue, or worse, a feral creature unrecognizing of humanity.
Consider the impossibility of being a writer of words, including the words on this very blog, when there simply are none. This wasn't your everyday lack of words, either. This was a mind that, from birth, was always buzzing, and growing, had many words, through life's chaos, plunging forward, often failing but always trying to articulate happenings and emotions in 26 characters and 9+ punctuation marks (the plus sign not even included in that 9), now sick of fire, weary of change, bruised by strife, aching, so aching, could keep going but instead decides to... stop, temporarily. "Temporarily" turns into "for a while." "For a while" turns into "from now on." Stories, what stories? Those stories? Those were written by a different man, and so they appear as such to my brain now. How can I proceed? How can I describe what went on in my head?
It's not that there were no words. Words in the head are more like.. abstractions of stimulus that calls for decision, they function in that role. Whenever something would happen that called for my decision, the words were there, eventually. Therefore, when I found myself in the eternal mansion, when I settled down to rest my aching legs awhile, I had nested within an environment of negligible stimulus, and my own psychology trapped itself. I was in trouble. All inertia had ceased; there was no more drive. But, do you see? There was nothing doing. Willing myself back into having words, in that place, would not happen.
Not without the dolls.
In a Silent Way
The dolls helped me find words. I did not find the dolls at first, not for a long time that may have been a year. They were tucked away in a room of the mansion I did not venture around. The mansion was huge, and its interior felt like many different houses and structures strung together next to each other in one architectural design, so that after a little bit of preliminary wandering, I had settled on a set of rooms that could serve as a comfortable "house" for me to live in, and there was no reason to explore the rest (beyond curiosity, which the desire for rest at this point overshadowed). Any exploration would quickly run into the issue of exhaustion, as the true scope of that mansion had to have been on the scale of square miles.
The mansion's interior plan, as I eventually got a sense, had modularity to it. A bunch of rooms make up a "house." A bunch of houses are neighbors around a "courtyard," which in some cases is a literal open-roof courtyard (more like a whole park) and in other cases is an assortment of unique rooms. I had no reason to call them "houses" or "courtyards" other than my own need to name them, so don't get caught up in the names. Fundamentally it was all rooms, rooms, rooms.
In any case, my house bordered one given courtyard, and the dolls were in a room several courtyards away, so it was inevitable that I wouldn't find them for a long time. I spent that long time perhaps a little aware of the dolls, paradoxically. I was aware of the mental trap into which I had stumbled, an unequal venting of inertia until starting myself back up again proved more effort than all sense suggested, and furthermore I was also aware of an irrational Hope emerging from the wordless patterns of Tired... a hope that this lack of inertia which had itself come out of inertia would, itself, one day resolve. A hope that I would one day again move, spurred on by some hypothetical curiosity. I reasoned that a mansion like this must contain many curiosities-- many things that I would find curious. Surely. And it did, of course. But even in the profound period of laziness, I still had a hope that I would find some of them, and that I would react appropriately, find them.. curious.
I'm perhaps getting away from myself here. But this style of ramble is appropriate for the contents being narrated. These words fit the wordless, as it's not really about the words, but about the rhythms and structures, the inexhaustible exhaustion, the round-and-round roundabout riddles, every promise of a new subject seeing interruption as the discursive voice sinks into an old whirlpool. Really, it is no wonder that I spent much time resting, but now imagine these whirlpool sentences carrying on even when the words have ceased, imagine a ramble of empty sentences, a roundabout of punctuation-- then you will have considered the chamber music of my everyday life in that mansion.
, , , ' . , . , until self , ... inertia inertia , , . , . -- . . , . the , , , .. .
That, for (I want to say "several") unbroken years, was my mental landscape. Some words, memories of words, washed up from the waves of blank, flotsam from a skillset I once had. It is vital to me now that I have or am retraining my articulation that I try many times to retroactively describe what it was like. Autobiography is a priority, and I am too spiteful to have gone through that and let it remain unspoken.
But the dolls.
I'm still not ready to talk about the dolls yet. There's a bit more I have to say.
The Formal Cause of Metaphysics
In a mind without words but shaped by the memory of words, time's passing is experienced elsehow. I felt it like emotions. In an environment without stimulus but shaped by the form of where stimulus might be, emotions are experienced without obscurity. I saw them like clouds. In an emotion without subject but remembered like any emotion with subject would be, time passes long-long. The proof is in the putting.
In talking of this now, having to pull my memories from back then and put words to the wordless, I fall back on the mannerisms of smart people whose works I have read far more recently. All this time, I've been speaking in the style of Samuel Beckett, and in the last paragraph I recalled some Michael Stevens. There simply are no words to adequately convey this, only references and signs, and signs signifying signs. What was that one. Umberto Eco. Of course.
There was a time, at the very dawn of protohistory (i.e. long before this blog or even the whole series of blogs, long before I even had the "protohistory" reference I just made), when I spoke like this too, pulling from contemporary sources, signs signifying nothing but their own technicalities, and fired away my sentences like and as the teenager I was, tasked with describing a past far bigger than any of the words I heard. And the word of the day then was "abuse," unsatisfactory but at least a container of those fires that escaped my brain (far better described through signs like "the eldritch" and "cosmic horror," signifiers of the impossible). The word of the day now is not quite as simple as that, though it's one I recognized even then:
"Isolation."
It's the theme, you see, of all this. Here I sing, you see, the refrain. It's isolation. All the books I've read talk about it, and none of them capture it. How, then, can I capture the unspeakable? How do I speak of where I've been, for eight long adult years, without merely repeating the readily-dismissable forms of the past? It's the refrain, I sing. How do I write about years spent unwriting my own brain?
Well, as you can see, I elected to begin with a conceit: a conversation with a personal god that frames a longer expansion. That expansion treats the allegory, an invention, that is the eternal mansion. Within this expansion, there is a maze, barely mentioned. This composition is set within a maze, in contrast to other works of mine that have been mazes. There's still more to be said, and my pace in setting it all down has been slow, so I can't tell you how long it will be before I'm done. But that's alright. I want this composition to have a slow tempo anyway. Every word must be taken into the mind, considered as an effort. What you're reading, my EAT, my sweet, my last mirror, my lost reader, is the product of the resolution of its own conflict. I am writing now because I am no longer in those mansions. The writing treats a foregone conclusion because it's not really about those mansions. It is about finishing a long thought far bigger, too bigger, than the shadow of a name.
Now I have to kill the You again and try, but only try, to speak of I again. End the refrain, but we will return.
The secret is in the emotions. Isn't it always? The emotions felt in those mansions, devoid of any stimulus that those emotions would otherwise treat as subject and color, in the absence of any natural form, gradually and with conscious practice over the course of courses of times and time, must take on-- must reveal-- the form of emotions themselves. Cut out all distractions, and the form even of the formless may be discerned.
I saw them like clouds, and necessarily like rain and the rivers too. Therefore, I saw emotions, in their purest form, as water. "They come and go like weather..." said one memory of a creation of my head. "Picture yourself by the rushing river of human history as the flotsam of memories drift by..." said another memory of a creation of someone else's. "The Cloud of Look-Like," said one more memory of a creation of my head, "does not exist, yet those who behave as if it does manage to get something right. Therefore, existence is not the only form that our reality accepts..."
Emotions, being of a similar chemistry as that of memories (in fact, what are emotions if not memories stripped, with time, of their content, left only with their form?), move. They enter our focus, color whatever thoughts and sensations are in front of us, then carry on, leaving us to reckon with the consequences of our actions taken under colored impressions. "We are left holding the bag..." says a nameless memory, but I must disagree with that premise, as it supposes that emotions do this on purpose, out of some design of our greater suffering. We are the ones with the designs, we are the ones who create those designs over the course of years, and we leave emotions to hold the bag. Emotions do not have intent. Emotions are like clouds. They come, they paint a sky that we then interpret forms out of which we call "weather," they go none the wiser, neither the more foolish, only the dumber. (remembering what "dumb" actually means)
It is not inherently pleasant to stand within a rainstorm. It is neither inherently depressing to stand under an overcast sky. A sky devoid of clouds, beautiful to look at, leaves my body exposed to the ultraviolent rays of the Light of Knowledge, the Sun we must in our time put down. The rubrics of nature were set before us and did not presume our needs; to change them for one is to change them for all. We must be certain that we know what we are doing. We must understand, and to stand under that Ideal Sun is to exert more effort than life had before prepared me for.
To stay in the eternal mansions, without words, meant watching the slow flow of emotions go, never to know, only to low, never to yes, only to no. Observation yes, composition no. Forget all I know in hopes of one day remembering when I have a better emotional foundation. And that.. may never happen. It may never happen even with the fount of all human knowledge to drink from, it may never happen even with the solidarity of friend and foe engaging me on the daily, it cannot happen when devoid of all drive and alone in rooms I will not describe. I figured that much not long into my stay. And yet, without drive, there is no movement. This situation would resolve itself only painfully slowly, all the while watching my emotions... watching them go.
It was scary in the way that horror stories never know.
Setting
So, the dolls.
I had had enough of watching the slurry of emotions wash through my vision over and over, and over and over and over and over, going endlessly into the walls like a sadistic ghost's thralls, and I knew I needed to move my body around and see some new stimulus.
I walked. I limped, a bit, as my legs were now accustomed to long periods of rest (and I have a history of leg problems beyond that, though there was once a time when I would walk for hours and only want to keep walking!), I kept an unsteady pace and left my "house," left my "neighborhood," left my "courtyard." I think I was looking for trees, or leaves, or dirt, or water. I must have been thirsty. I can't place how I wouldn't have been thirsty... Had I been drinking this entire time? Had these mansions contained sustenance? There were pipes carrying something; there were more pipes than rooms, which is to be expected! And there were so many rooms.
There were so many rooms... many of which housed furniture, mostly chairs, boxes, counters, tables, surfaces. Some rooms had divots in the walls where one might put a lamp, some knickknacks, a painting. Were there paintings in that mansion? Yes, I remember seeing lots, arranged with no consistent frequency. Some of them may not have been paintings at all but instead windows. Maybe some of them were paintings whose contents moved according to eyesight, to give the illusion of a window. In the entire courtyard (and neighboring houses) where my "home" was, there was only one painting which contained anything humanoid. It was in a corner house far from where I slept; I did not like looking at it or being anywhere near it. It wasn't even all that focused; the humanoid figure was, I think, in the background somewhere? I still felt anxious seeing it. But other courtyards, other blocks, had more frequent instances of paintings featuring a humanoid subject. Only very rarely did more than one painting seem to represent the same subject. I am being careful, of course, not to outright say "human," as I refuse to presume. They didn't strike me as monstrous either, mind you. Some of them were shadowy, but often they had details that were clearly some kind of flesh. And, anyway, more often the paintings were strictly abstract-- uh, I presume-- with.. shapes, tones, textures, structures. I didn't think much of the paintings, even when words came to me. In that place, I just took them to fit in with the overall theme of "resembling familiar interiors." Paintings are furniture more often than they are art.
Speaking of furniture I glossed over as fitting the theme, this is actually where the dolls first come in. I did not pay them much attention. On my explorations, I did occasionally see dolls in some rooms, and I was thankful that they generally had no eyes, as that would certainly have startled me. They were infrequent enough to be reasonably figured along the lines of those aforementioned chairs, lamps, tables. Just... things, in a setting consisting of things. Perhaps if I had made a point to keep track of these dolls, I would have been less surprised later on, but of course I didn't, as these were still early days with sluggish thoughts.
Mostly I remember the sounds. The ticking of paint chipping off the walls, the thud that's a type of creak as architecture settles, pitter-patter in the distance that reminded me of small animals but was far too frequent to be anything other than pipes. There was a sporadic noise that rushed through the mansion, resembled a thick wind but moved very slowly, came across more like a large sheer object being dragged along walls-- and, of course, there was no wind in that mansion anyway. I can only speculate on what all these sounds were, and they did alarm me for a while in the early days, but they never seemed connected to anything alarming, so they just became the background mood of memories.