The Wolf Street Fiacre

Some types of golden bitter liquid require more metal circles than others. It is not all the same, you can tell by the different coloured containers. For some it is infinitely preferable to drink golden bitter liquid that has required a lot of metal circles to obtain. However, for a certain fraction of this town’s population the designer lager is the cheapest and comes in a green and red metal container. If you clutch it to your chest and your chin rests on bare knees poking through damaged fabric, you are automatically permitted to engage with another who’s doing exactly the same.
Numerous members of this very demographic could currently be seen lining both sides of the cobbled street as the temporary destination of Whitetrash and Jimmy Tennis drew near. Like the charge of the light brigade into the valley of death, it seemed their approach had been tinged with a vaguely threatening quality. For some reason, perhaps something to do with the colour of the containers they held or the possible thoughts running through their heads or the way they behaved every day or the cuts of cloth covering their natural form which may or may not have looked better than his or simply because there were so many, Whitetrash felt a growing sense of unease by the very presence of these others and was just grateful that there was enough alien molecules helping to numb his mind to the point where all of this mattered slightly less. 
Apparently the name given to this particular gap in the vast geometric structure making up the town was that of a wild animal. Throughout history this animal had been much maligned and feared to the point where it was said, but never actually believed, that at the same point in the orbit of our only satellite, when one complete half of its surface can be seen to reflect the rays of the Great Source, certain others would adopt some of the features and exaggerated characteristics of this particularly ferocious beast.
The special kind of party Jimmy had promised was happening right here at the convex angle of two intersecting gaps where a door could be opened into another familiar world of various sonic vibrations, dried burning leaves and others making noises with their mouths.

A dense and humid jungle of dead leather and living skin, a constantly shifting self-consuming shapeless organic generator of divergent nervous systems and plus and minus signs. Whitetrash and Jimmy Tennis stood out like sore thumbs. A band was getting ready and if they wanted to stand in front of them they would first have to step through a door and if they wanted to step through the door they would first have to give three metal circles to someone else in exchange for a small piece of paper. They decided instead to position themselves at the end of a bar where absolute strangers, bored to death, crushed the lives out of one another for at least ten minutes before hugging plastic containers of golden bitter liquid close to their chests and walking away. At the end of the bar stood yet another of Jimmy’s many distant friends, like the Aging Thespian’s identical nephew, he too was large and effeminate and even more unusual. With thick lips curled between full jowls and lazy intoxicated eyes resting on prominent cheeks he appeared to resemble an overweight reclining Buddha, perching himself on one dimpled elbow, surveying the goings on. Apparently this was all his doing.    

Jimmy Tennis - The Early Years

Jimmy didn’t always have useless legs. There had been a time, far back in the distance, when the young Jimmy would leap in the air with the graceful strength of a ballerina; would stretch and contort his form into numerous fantastical shapes, seemingly beyond the realms of physical possibility; would be as ready and prepared as the coiled spring of a clown-faced jack-in-a-box to shoot off in any which way he felt necessary. There had been a time when Jimmy Tennis was a Champion. The chalk limits were his home, his stage, his dominion. For the time it took a small illuminous ball to bounce once and begin its second decent no distance within those thin white lines was out of reach.  

The Machine Tree

Whitetrash woke from his latest dream. He'd dreamt of the machine tree again. It loomed above his town like the all-seeing deity of a god-fearing world, a steel colossus of heavy, clunking, moving parts. They used it to feed their machines.
Ever since it grew he and his fellow citizens had begun using different words, unintelligible glossolalic nonsense of pure anxiety to the point where alliances depended on who you understood the most, all the others were deadly.
The machines came under the veil of darkness when the town had long since taken on the aspect of an elaborate cemetery. They floated in from the periphery in a thick luminescent swarm, slowly descending on their common objective, hovering intently like wasps round a half-rotten fruit. The machine tree ground into monstrous mechanical life to accommodate its visitors. Sprouting from its central trunk of rusted iron and steel, a multitude of limbs protruded in all directions, almost reaching the wealthy outlying neighbourhoods cowering behind their high walls. These limbs branched off eternally into ever smaller vessels and capillaries like the neuronal pathways of a giant robotic brain. The machines attached themselves all along its vast network of tributaries to silently slake their parasitic thirst.

The Average Man

He tried to see how long he could go in that fixed position, no need for distractions or a change, just how long he could go without thinking, without caring, none of it mattered, repeat.

But was it really that beautiful? Was it even worth it? How good actually was this? And how much better was it than the alternatives? Were they any less risky? Physical danger appeared to be a recurring issue. How safe was he? Would it have been any safer over there? Well the answer to that, if he was to believe popular opinion and everything he read and heard, for which perhaps there was quite a lot to be said, was a thoroughly resounding “yes”.

The fact remained that Whitetrash had never been forced to come here, it was completely his own decision and he didn’t have to do any of it at all and the ones who genuinely did care, completely and unconditionally, just wanted him to stop all this nonsense and go back. They just wanted to worry less that’s all. So did he really have to go back?

It hadn’t taken long to start thinking and caring, just not about what he’d previously expected, now it appeared necessary to worry about the future as opposed to lament events of the past, an equally disconcerting activity and highly similar in the emotions it manages to conjure up. Negative memories seemed to affect him in very much the same way as potential future traumas. Could it be that all this came under the same basic heading? One that, for the purposes of clarity we might call “FEAR”? If he could just manage to ignore it, maybe he could actually get over it, forget it completely, realise its irrelevance and the fact that most of the time it wasn’t even true anyway.

It suddenly dawned on him that he wasn’t strong enough for this, very few people were strong enough for this, which was, of course, why most people didn’t do it. It was absolute stupidity! To stay for a considerable length of time out here surrounded by all these dangers was an act of pure recklessness, as if he didn’t even know what “reck” was.

What’s more, these people, the ones who thought and then communicated those thoughts for the purpose of being universally understood, almost always came to a sticky end. It was slightly more dangerous a business as it was perhaps given credit, only slightly less in fact than being a stunt man, at least in this case you started small, worked your way up to mastery, and even then there was safety equipment. What then was the psychological-self-analysis-and-spiritual-exploration-for-the-purpose-of-public-consumption equivalent of a crash helmet and fireproof clothing? There seemed to be no real way of working himself up to this, he either did it, or he didn’t.

And what was he hoping to achieve from all this anyway? Because he now realised that whatever it was, it really was not worth it. The average man, that’s what he should be striving for, wife, children, job. Average behaviour was the right course of action and this particular specimen appeared to be rather a large deviation, relatively speaking that is. Had it ever occurred to him that he might be ever so slightly neglecting his homeland? Was he that convinced that “Culture is not your friend”? Quite selfish was it not, to turn his back on the society that produced him and the camaraderie of collective life? But then again did he ever have that? And if not then why should it be such an issue now? It was wrong and he knew it, it had always been wrong and it was for that very reason he was here, doing this. He should have known more than anyone that it wasn’t easy doing this, but then again would it be any easier doing anything else? It would have been quite hard not to do it, in fact it was all pretty much impossible to avoid. What exactly do you do when you appear to deviate so far from the average man that at times your very being comes across as one great gross error?

Was close communion with nature really the answer? Was there any value whatsoever in these insights? Were they even insights at all or just different theories that can never be proved right or wrong? Did every self-organising system in nature have its own unique vibration and was it really so important that he should know? At the end of the day that was what happened to people like that, after a lifetime of doing exactly this they realised it was all a complete waste of time. So it seemed the only thing left for Whitetrash to do may well have been to go back and put his complete faith in everything. 

A Bomb In A Bull

With the inertia you might expect from a thousand pounds of flesh travelling at high velocity, the slender sword is driven effortlessly deep between the shoulder-blades up to its hilt. After years lying dormant in the beast’s chest the fist-sized device detonates on contact, obliterating its newly deceased host, yet again the God Machine had done its work. Whitetrash and Keith Laziq watch in silence. The explosion is devastating. Everything within a radius of ten metres is instantly destroyed by the blast and the man of the moment, with this his first centre stage performance, disintegrates into a semi-circular spray of blood, his main body parts falling back to the brown sand with a lifeless thud.
Federico Mama de la Torre, “El Rico” to his fans, had waited his whole life for this moment. Ever since he was a small boy on his grandfather’s ranch, chasing chickens and watching the men jumping on and off horses in their big cowboy hats, he had dreamt of the day when he too could don the “suit of lights” and enter the bullring as the star Torero just like his father before him. He was the latest in a long line of bullfighters dating back to the late 18th Century when his Great-Great-Great-Great Grandfather, Juan Pablo Domingo became the first ever bullfighter to spare his monstrous opponent which, after 28 strikes from his deadly sword, simply refused to die. That bull was the legendary “Vampiro” whose bloodline remains to this day and continues to beget prize bulls of the utmost bravery.
It was to this very bloodline that belonged the unfortunate creature whose vast bulk was now spread throughout the bullring, whose blood clung in droplets to the faces of panic stricken women in their fine summer hats. This historic feud between man and beast that spanned the generations had finally come to an end in the only way it possibly could, a tragedy from its very inception.

Being is a Beautiful Disease

A dazzling summer garden exploded in full bloom, a dense primordial climaxed jungle buzzing with abundance, a luminescent coral reef on the ocean bed are sickly fevered beautations of being, toxically out of control.
The Milky Way is nothing more than a giant culture of mould on the petri dish of the eternal void. Radiant, sublime, seductive destruction, a poisonous physical dream, hypnotic in its apearance, impure, irregular, unclean.
All we can do is the best we can to maximise and maintain the beauty of this disease.

Critiquing Critiques

Whitetrash found himself suddenly struck with the very clear realisation that everything he saw and heard meant absolutely nothing. All that really mattered were the ones he was with at each given moment.

So what about being with no one? Was that okay too? Was all that really necessary or was this okay too? He pondered over the possibility that he might well actually be okay, that there might just be a place in this world for a Jungian introvert, well of course there was, it was here, it had managed so far. He was just another side of the coin, keeping everything in balance, maintaining that supposed dualism known by so many names.

And was all that dualism business really true anyway? What evidence was there?

Men and women: so there was obviously quite a definite distinction just in all shapes, sizes, shades and textures in between.

Day and night: was more of a gradual, cyclical motion than a sudden off and a sudden on.

Matter and space: well there was either a thing or nothing, and nothing really in between although he had been told that nothing and something was actually the same thing. Well he’d just have to wait and see about that, if indeed he would ever be able to see and would that really change anything anyway? Would he actually do anything any differently? Would it be good to know? Would he even fully believe it anyway? How exactly would it alter anything of any significance?

They’d probably see a lot more happiness and less ugliness and generally enjoy the present a lot more, such discoveries may have the power to alter the course of history while at the same time the course of history may well have been already plotted and these discoveries were just another part of it. History, he realised could even have been the only possible way and there was no way of changing anything. Even collective efforts were only ever of limited success. The march of fate was relentless and unyielding. The only thing he’d ever had any control over was where he was and he could only ever be in one place at once.

Would he really be better off over there? Better off as in less likely to die which just maybe, at the end of the day, might have been the most important thing. Could that be true? Survival? Putting it off for as long as possible in the way you knew was best.

But did he really know what was best? There were no real dangers over there whereas all of this business could be a little bit harum at times, flying machines and poverty to name but two.

Were all of these rituals really necessary? Well, the new ones he’d recently adopted anyway, not the old ones he’d inherited from the ones that made him. Was that really the right way to go? Was it even possible?

He realised that this may not go down too well with his fellow eggers-on. He might well have quite successfully critiqued himself or at least the one who had been thinking all of those strange things recently. Were any of them actually valid or necessary for his own well-being?  How exactly would putting his own well-being at risk benefit him in any way whatsoever?

Maybe the older you are the more ready you are to face what’s coming next which would then make the key to all-round well-being concurrent with extreme survival tactics.

He wondered why older people didn’t just tell the truth before reasoning that they might not even realise it themselves, or that he’d just yet to meet someone who actually would, or maybe they were actually trying but didn’t want to come right out and say it as they weren’t even sure about it anyway but just had a vague gut feeling. And if he mentioned these fears to them they’d probably agree.

Where he was might well have been his number one priority and the place with the least amount of risks should have been where he was aiming for. In that case if it was possible to be over there, he very really should. Never mind the experience and the good deeds, all of that might be nothing more than temptations and distractions, traps laid by a hidden force designed to lure him this way or that and only he could tell himself, only he had any power, authority or even the ever so slightest influence over what became of him and what became of anyone else was only ever of secondary importance.

Anyway who was he to decide what other people would really like to do? They all seemed quite happy to him, quite content to let things continue and they might even have been right, or at the very least unconsciously following something else that was.

Was all of this just total rubbish? Was it all actually okay? Was there nothing to talk about or say, only do or enjoy?

Did the computer generated 3D image of a computer virus mean or change anything? Was it just yet another trap? Or could it be on the other hand a guide, a signpost, an attractor, the way he should definitely be going? The answer to that would have been very handy.

Well it seemed as if some people were creating basic digital life, flowery, wormy, colourful grubs, floating crustaceans, hypnotising away from the truth or a lie, leading him back to the right or wrong path. He could very easily imagine these images to be cybercosmic planets or galaxies or the next thing up. They could, at a much lower level be teaming with self-reflecting cyberlife spread evenly throughout their being like the glowing luminescence of a digital jellyfish. If that was true, then worlds had already been created, only no one realised it, or maybe some did but then surely everyone would know?

This then led him to the suggestion that all of this was also, at some level, a simulation which was gazed at in wonder by starry-eyed overcurious brains. Everything created on a computer was an act of creation. Viruses were created by programs so every cold he’d ever had was a program, every bit of a sore throat had evolved out of informational manipulation, every form of matter in fact, since everything was, at one time and in one way or another, organic.

If they were viruses, he thought, then so were flowers and so are we, everything in fact he suddenly decided was a virus in nothing, a beautiful virus, a non-thinking virus, an unconscious virus in both being and non-being where the property of self-reflection was merely accidental, not particularly necessary nor in fact desirable, in which case the flowers had it so much better!

Had he been a flower before? That might, maybe, somehow have made some sort of sense. So what was he going to be next and would it be any better or worse or were such distinctions even appropriate or relevant to the situation?

If he didn’t even remember ever having been Whitetrash wouldn’t that actually stop him from being anything like Whitetrash again? And if he was still Whitetrash what good would it do him, right now, that he should then remember? What part of Whitetrash would remain if he didn’t even remember who Whitetrash was?

Was it all really being used in the way they said it was or were most of them using it all rather mundanely? Would they ever make the leap into purely digital existence and was it actually possible or desirable?

When all was said and done all of this was nothing more than entertainment where the entertainment itself was in actually taking it all seriously. A hobby, just like any other only for some it had become quite lucrative and they might even have convinced themselves.

Phase Transition

Ice was dead water. Water was dying gas. Heating things may well send them into other dimensions which may account for the fact that water vapour was invisible.
The seas and oceans therefore were portals between the realms, the entities found there transdimensional souls and anyone who’d ever donned flippers and mask unwitting shamanic travellers.
A phase transition then was a collective shift into new realms of possibility, the collective unconscious changing its dream.

Photosynthesis

Leaves were like eyes operating a kind of hormonal sight whereby the information was stored in cells as it grew. So in that case, he thought, they really should pay more attention to the oldest of trees. Each cell buzzed with overflowing content, resonating through the roots and body to communicate its message, to interact and influence the overall vibrational field so that whole forests were like humming, pulsating speakers amplifying the voice of the sun, running down channels like veins and capillaries to spread the lifeblood in nourishing, enriching, directing waves, maybe even affecting the course of things.

Our Ultimate Goal May Well Be To Create New Worlds

It was at this moment that Whitetrash made the firm decision that in a virtual reality environment he would be bad just for fun. If you knew you could do anything and get away with it, who wouldn’t be tempted to direct their avatar into a certain situation for the simple fact that they were allowed? Finally allowed, after a lifetime of structure and things you couldn’t do, you were let loose into a place where anything was permissible without the obvious repercussions associated with the place you were used to. And if, for whatever reason, anything did backfire all he’d have to do was eject, duck out and return to the safe confines of where he was originally made.

If he was given that opportunity, to have under his own control an avatar that not only did things but actually felt and thought and he was given a situation in which to navigate them, would that not be nothing less than the ultimate game? Not to mention the ultimate pet! Care and control, the two main passions of humanity, simultaneously satisfied.

Could it possibly be that he also had a player, that he was in fact nothing more than an avatar in an interactive virtual realm of 3D pixels where it wasn’t only what he did that they controlled but also what he thought, felt and knew? It would certainly account for his behaviour at times as well as that of certain others, if he could actually put it all down to a reckless, mischievous imagination larking about in another dimension. It would seem though that some of them had a kind of method, there were themes and loops and poignancy which would suggest forethought and creativity as if they were making some sort of artwork. Now all artists create more than just one work in their lifetime which would then suggest that the player had done more than one life, if of course he was to assume that their time was slower than his, similar to how the time taken to play a football simulation was a lot less than 90 minutes. That would then explain those rare but nevertheless existent reported phenomena of memories from past lives, as if the player had dropped something in by mistake, or even on purpose, a little clue for the sake of interest.

What if, under total immersion, someone killed his player? Would he die also? Or just stand still forever? Stand still until someone else came along to direct him in a slightly different way. Was he to assume therefore that, as his life took a new and dramatically different direction, his player had either changed or died?

Now let’s just consider for a second that these players weren’t people at all, in fact they were nothing like he could possibly ever imagine. Neither aliens nor ghosts, they inhabited an entirely different dimension of pure, non-physical information. Could it not follow then that these players could also be being played? That they too were the avatars of their creators? In fact it could quite easily have regressed infinitely in the manner of a double mirror reflecting itself endlessly in both directions. Occasionally their avatars would achieve certain states of consciousness which made their connection stronger and taught them more about themselves because their players couldn’t communicate directly with them just as they couldn’t with theirs; all they could ever do was play.

In which case his players, much like himself, didn’t know exactly what they were doing either and would be the first to admit they’d made mistakes and could only work within the boundaries of inertia which was why they had to waste their time on war and politicians and middle-managers while the real work got done, trying desperately to steer the whole of humanity away from catastrophe until it achieved its objective. All they’d ever been trying to do was create more worlds and the only way to arrive at the sufficiently advanced level of technology was to create an impetus, an impetus their avatars would understand like sex and survival. Would he ever tell his avatar it wasn’t real? Of course not it would never get anything done. So whatever he created would be designed for the purpose of whatever he wanted them to create. It had always been the plan from the very beginning therefore to create a set of circumstances which forced action, without these imperatives they would never have worked towards the hidden objective of making worlds.

They may only be able to understand any of these things when the technology of their players was sufficiently advanced, just as their primitive avatars would one day, through their technology, be able to create their own worlds. It appeared that their players’ technology may well have nearly got there and thus so soon would theirs, so what then would happen when they did finally fulfil their objective? Would they continue to be played? Played playing theirs? Or would that be the final completion of the masterpiece, the phase transition reuniting player and avatar to rejoice in their new unfolding joint creation?

They were becoming gods and they would attempt to communicate this with their creation. While the original mythology came in dreams, theirs would be the various forms of mass media. The great “Google”, god of all things; “YouTube”, god of art and communication; “Wikipedia” god of knowledge; “Facebook” god of friendship and love. Some may try to keep the others ignorant of the truth so that they lived without these virtual alchemical aids and therefore failed to progress and allowed their deceivers to get there first. How much control, therefore, would they be granted?

Just a Theory

He saw the earth as one part of a double helix with its opposite, invisible to the human eye running simultaneously the other way, its coils swirling off into the past to replicate themselves. The sun ran through the centre reading the strands as it plunged down into the future lighting up the genetic code. The future was the fuel, the present was the flame, the past was the smoke. In this sense the universe was reproducing itself. The galaxy was one great colossal knot of double helixes, in other words the nucleus of a cell. So if the galaxy was a cell that replicated itself then that would make the universe some sort of being or at the very least a mass of billions of cells, a brain perhaps, probably a brain, a growing brain, a learning brain, a self-replicating brain. Life energy flowed through all living things and rose up into the ether to form the multicoloured smoke of the past. As smoke expanded in air so too did the past as it rose behind them,  separating from itself to multiply and be lived again. With the sun's relentless march the past grew until the galactic nucleus, fed by the invisible ectoplasmic mitochondria of the cosmic void, could do no more than separate into two identical cells. Who was to say that those cells did not then evolve independently to create ever more complexity within the organism? It was an electrochemical conscious thing and it all depended on the colour of your life. You’d become both a star in heaven and a particle in space, your own strand of the nucleus, replicating yourself until you were your very own.

If they weren't wrong........

They looked back on the past as separate, linked but in another world, a younger world, immature, slightly wrong. But maybe those who occupied this peculiar realm had in fact been exactly right after all, as right as they were then, their stories had actually happened, their myths weren't myths at all, their behaviour hadn't been the physical manifestation of deluded madness, but a perfectly rational response to perceived stimuli. Witchcraft had worked just as well back then as the internet did for the earth's most recent inhabitants.

Galaxies and Hurricanes

A hurricane is formed by the interaction between warm and cold air. Warm air is warm because it contains invisible water vapour, cold air is cold because it does not. These two different types of air react with each other to produce energy, the water vapour in the warm air is also condensed by the cold air into giant cumulo-nimbus clouds. At the centre of these clouds exists an eerie calm.

Our galaxy is formed by the interaction of positive and negative energy. Positive energy can be likened to water vapour and negative energy can be perceived as its absence. These two different types of energy react with each other to produce matter, the positive energy is also condensed by the negative energy into stars and planets. At the galactic centre there is a black hole.
It could therefore be said that, just like every star in our galaxy, we are the product of this process of condensation, the interaction between positive and negative energy, and at the very centre there is a black hole of infinite awareness around which all thoughts and feelings are condensed and revolve. But these thoughts and feelings are only the manifestation of the energy that creates them.