#ignitedink

Excerpt:

You stand on an unfamiliar street, across a familiar mural. The pavement is dimly lit, blue warring with orange between the shadow and light. The streets are populated with faceless shadows. The sky, indistinguishably and eerily hazy, holds the morning moon and the dawning sun distantly together. The world is fading… smearing at its edges.

PERCEPTION — The mural is the only thing you recognise here, depicting featureless silhouettes: one in white paint, engulfed by one in black. They are lovers leaning together, heads meeting in a kiss. A circle of red paint forms a halo around their heads, enclosing that moment of tenderness.

CONCEPTUALIZATION — Despite being close enough to melt into one, the lovers remain distinct, separate, impossibly apart.

REACTION SPEED [Medium: Success] — Like The Next World Mural, from your ledger.

PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT — Wasn't that one about a man and a woman?

Is *this* Grand Couron?

Is this... the next world?

YOU — Is this... the next world?

INLAND EMPIRE — No. A previous world…

PREVIOUS WORLD MURAL — True love remains impossible. We are not new people.

PAIN THRESHOLD — There is no escape.

VOLITION — But you can, and you have started anew.

PERCEPTION — Either way, the silhouettes *are* too ambiguously rendered to belong to the Next World Mural, so…

YOU — "I've never seen you before… have I?"

PREVIOUS WORLD MURAL — Of course you haven't. Look around you... Where were you, and where are you now?

ENCYCLOPEDIA — You have no idea. 

BLOCK ??? — Before you is a towering, utilitarian structure, built to shelve a massive population. This building is one of many, its sequential sign obscured by the mural.

There are 11– no, 12 floors in total, including the ground floor, which has been obscured behind sheet metal barriers.

PERCEPTION — The scent in the air is unfamiliar. Despite the fumes of traffic and paint, the distant cigarette smoke, the wet pavement, the damp grass…

INLAND EMPIRE [Formidable: Success] — There is nothing haunting in the air. No ghosts between the molecules — not for you. The wind is silent of her sighs.

Sleep is healing. Sleep is rejuvenating. Sleep is the inevitable journey your consciousness makes to the bordering verge of oblivion.¹ Sleep well and wake up anew tomorrow, dear listeners… or don’t. Good evening listeners, and welcome back to REMnant, your nightly guided meditation exercise, where we practise visualisation to relax your body for deep, uninterrupted sleep. 

As we begin this exercise, you will trust only my voice and my guidance. Before we begin, please find a private, comfortable resting area away from sources of light and noise. You are recommended to use headphones to minimise external interference. 

June 15th, 2001. Episode 12: Rebirth.

Let us start with a breathing exercise. 

Breathe in. Feel the cool air travelling through you. Feel your lungs expand slowly, feel the dust within rise and settle. Feel the breeze clearing the cavernous space inside your chest, light from a gap timidly illuminating its smooth walls. You know each grain of sand and earth beneath your feet and hum with the wind that whistles through each crack in the walls. You feel drawn to the entrance and nearly take a step... 

Breathe out, slowly. Feel the warm air rush from the cavern and out through your mouth. Return to your body, where you have two lungs and a gently beating heart within the walls of your chest.

Inhale. Feel senses out of your reach sharpen. You are opening your eyes to the world I create.

Exhale. Let your involuntary existence secede. You are oblivious to your reality.

Continue to breathe and listen.

Imagine for a moment an unformed, flickering light, holding within it the unlimited creative potential of life. Residing within the cavern inside your chest, inside your ribcage, inside your heart, it is housed in the universe inside of you but you cannot interact with it. As you breathe in it brightens and as you breathe out it dims, its life tethered to your own.

You nurture it unwittingly, for the universe outside of you is reflected within. Everything you learn, every choice you make shapes the world within you. 

Is this fragile life a child to one day be born and leave you behind? Perhaps, but you are deeply mistaken if you believe birth is finite. With each breath you take the nascent consciousness surfaces briefly, the cries of its birth echoing through your changing thoughts... its carrier dies and you are born and so you die for the next to live.² Your future lives intolerably within you waiting ceaselessly to become your present, each infinite option you may take extinguishing countless of its iterations without care.

But why should you care? Creation necessitates the singular elimination of all other possibilities.³ An artist finishes their painting by discarding all previous drafts - though unsatisfied, though in mourning.

How would you explain the continuity of your selfhood? Even a video fills in with imagination the gaps between each frame, mere snapshots of linear passage arranged in close succession. Each frame birthing the next faster than our eyes can perceive. It is in these gaps that fear arises - what losses do memory suffer, what changes go unrecognised? 

We are defined by our continuity and we assume a singular source... Don't stop breathing now, listener. Clasp your hands together and rest, deathly still. 

The gaps in our consciousness are as infinite as consciousness itself, but today we are only to speak of the fissure that is sleep. In the following visualisation exercise, escape for a moment your frail, inactive body and give in to my voice... Listen and envision yourself in my place.⁴

When I was a child I was afraid to sleep. Drowning in worn mattresses stacked atop one another, I breathed in and out. In, steadily, and out, the way you are right now. Your lungs expanding… 

Do you see the rhythmic whirring of the fan, gentle as softly stirring curtains? They were blue and sheer against the dimly orange lights. The distant sounds of traffic were muffled through the bubble of height. Your room was so far above the cars and the trucks and the speeding motorcycles. Sunken into the warm sheets and curled around a pillow, you were the only child in your world. 

But when you were a child you were afraid to sleep. You stayed up every night, straining your eyes open in the dark and fighting for consciousness. Still, you never would catch the exact moment you slip, slackened into that sirenic grip. 

Eventually, all succumbs to sleep. 

You never dream. It seems as though you are pulled directly from your body and replaced every morning with a fearful spirit. You wake up feeling utterly disgruntled and estranged from your body. How can you know for sure you are the same person as you were the day before? 

It is a naive thought that sleep is the only break in continuity that plagues your fleeting life, but it is the only one you cannot ignore. Our memories of the past are distant and uncertain even though we know we are formed by nothing but the past, just as we will form entirely the future.

You complete your morning routine while gazing uneasily at the mirror, memorising each freckle and flaw that you are sure was missing the day before. Even the materiality of your existence is subject to change.

You've heard it disproved: the myth that cells in a human body are entirely renewed every seven years. Some cells like the ones in your heart can never be replaced, while others die and regenerate every day. Could you take reassurance in the cells that stay constant? Do you hinge your identity on some parts of your body more than you do the rest?

You know the body that is yours is not the one that stays the same, just as the shape of your consciousness cannot be quantified in frames. But you doubt.⁵

Every day, we die when we sleep, with each blinking lost, absent thought drifting without pulse in the natural rhythm of death and rebirth. Each night we dream enclosed in the dark, inside the body of a god that is neither holy nor kind, destined to die every moment we surface.

What was the origin - our origin? Our birth, the moment of conception, the origin of existence? or the spark of life, then awareness? Do we begin when we first learn of beginnings, or when we first know of death? Is every change a new beginning? At age 8 so sure of who we are only to tear it all apart at 10, 9, 8, 13, rebuild at 16, restart at 18— What continuity is there for children lost to memory?⁶ Who are we now? And where did that begin? 

You're not here today to learn that you can reshape yourself. You're not here to learn how to change. Like everyone else you know, you are helpless against your nature. Change will happen whether or not you try. You will awake different - despite and regardless of your efforts. 

Listen and accept, for all you can do is believe me. Change is random, change is predetermined. Is a child, weakly breathing, a result of fate or accident? Is birth freedom or damnation? You are born moment by moment despite yourself, and always will you seek to understand the origin that moments ago was yourself.

In that world inside you, your future sleeps uneasily, restless and shifting and flickering beneath your gaze. If you relax and breathe out, can you imagine emerging from yourself? 

A neverending origin story where each change is a new birth, and time and time again we die to emerge and surface only to disappear. As for the past that bears our present, we cling to traces of their passage, evidence of our extinct existence. But our birth cleaved us from one another, and the past lay dead for us to devour.⁷

Your shoulders are still tense, listener, your brows are furrowed and every muscle down to your feet. You will never return to the cavern inside you, and you will never find the light that you seek. The past ejects you while the future eludes your grasp, so all you can do is devour. 

You lay awake and cry.

Why can't you sleep? Why can you never sleep, pathetic listener, awake still and listening to me? Though I offer no words of comfort and you have made no amends? Until the desperate outpouring stops, you hide beneath the blankets, foetal and miserable, waiting for tomorrow to birth another you.

End of Episode 12. 

———

¹ [Underlined by annotator.]

² All of us like gods with worlds of our own, harbouring a consciousness that inherits the fate of creation and responsibility of conception, again and again, each world nurturing a god that will create a world, within which the same creator will have been born, worlds within worlds, gods within gods, I know I know but how metaphorical can this be when my heart drums in my head with the truth of these words? I need to sleep I need to be asleep

³ [Highlighted by annotator.]

⁴ There was a sound here, some kind of interference or a slight change in sound quality. I don’t know. Maybe I imagined it? Memory is deceiving and right now the only sound is how I read their words aloud to myself and the sound of pencil against paper as I annotate. Whoever receives this - you won’t mind marginalia, would you?

⁵ [Both highlighted and crossed out by annotator.]

⁶ God help us but surely there is continuity! Are we not inextricably connected to our origins? What succession of cause and effect tracing back without end, turtles all the way down… and when I search, never to reach the centre of the eternally expanding gap, unending birth with no severance. as the origin of my originator, unfolding in paradox in search of the beginning like a god within a world of my creation fighting inescapably to emerge from myself