Outside the window is a cat who saw a butterfly and glitched and started following it. That’s something I don’t know whether I should admire or pity. Is it the case that the cat has a lower rebirth and less control over its baser instincts? So easily activated by that ultimate dukkha-inducer, the sympathetic nervous system.
If we didn’t have sympathetic nervous systems, we wouldn’t have evolved this far at all, but since we do have them, our further evolution is inhibited—
Do I think it is “more evolved” to have no sympathetic nervous system? Maybe. I think, at least, that the next evolutioinary step for humans would have no need for a sympathetic nervous system. I think it is toward this end that American society is grasping, but look how unevolved we really, really are.
Ultimately, we are totally unevolved,
Oh, I guess just that the people running society are not in it for the evolution of the speciesssss, insofar as the evolution of the species is defined by the appendixification of the sympathetic nervous system. They can’t be, given that their methods are bbbbased so heavily on forcing others to live in “survival mode,” in fight or flight, in sympathetic nervous hyperactivation their entire lives.
I just don’t know what to make of all of this besides the conclusion that it needs to be destroyed and built again from the ground up. It needs to be destroyed, unapologetically, by people with blank faces. The people who carry out the revolution will do it with the same blank stare as the person who gives the orders to drop another bomb on Palestine or to send another one trillion dollars to israel or to sit idly by and watch them as they lay claim to all that land that was never ever ever ever ever eveverr r rr r r, in any world, theirs.
These are not my words. This is just my regurgitation of the words of the people who came before me. Mostly Frantz Fanon. He is the most evolved human I can think of in terms of this framework. The one about how maybe we’re really supposed to evolve past the need for a sympathetic nervous system, that evolution can just, like, pinch it off, so that there are only remnants, artifacts of us once having had a sympathetic nervous system. We could shed it like we shed our tails when we no longer needed them for balance or
I don’t know what the most evolved species is. Like, who are we comparing ourselves to? Whales? Jellyfish, maybe.…. Crabs, lobsters…….. The aquatic ones come to mind, just because of how much better suited they’re going to be for the world after this one. The next version of human evolution will likely see us going back into the water as marine animals.
Marine animals are more evolved than us. I’m pretty sure they’re more evolved. I don’t know what kinds of societies they have, what methods they use to pass down their generational knowledge, but I do know that it doesn’t require nearly as much energy expenditure as human life, nearly as much discardation of so many different things….
This consumerist society, I don’t think it exists in whales. Their population thrives despite how fucking massive they are (or perhaps because of how massive they are…). But the bigger they are, the harder they fall, isn’t that true? Like, whale death is probably just fucking excruciating. There are so many different networks of cells at work in that thing. That’s why it has to move so slowly. They have so much energy devoted to their matter.
Speaking of matter, I would be terrified to meet the four-dimensional version of whales. If death allows me to cross over into the fourth dimension and see what they hell is casting such an immense shadow as whales… it’s insane. I can’t even imagine what version of those things exists in the fourth dimension, or whether I’m already part of that dimension, just like they are.
Maybe that’s it. Maybe the thing that casts the whale shadow is the same thing that casts the human shadow, the same one that casts the shadow for everything we see in the third dimension. Just like paper is a way of organizing objects in two dimensions, there’s got to be some kind of similar unifying, organizing principle for the fourth dimension.
The idea of paper is something that can’t be grasped from the first dimension, so I shouldn’t expect to grasp this fourth dimensional thing that’s casting all these shadows.
I’m sure there is some such 4D paper. Maybe it’s spacetime or something. We don’t know what the paper, is, just that there is a paper, and that I’m a drawing on it, as is the whale. Maybe there was an intelligent designer who drew both of us. Maybe god is that fourth dimensional drawer, and he’s the one who made us.
Then I guess the fifth dimension would be the further unifying force that has to exist to keep that 4D god intact. But if we can’t grasp what the unifying
On what kind of fourth dimensional screen am I being watched right now? I don’t know, but I do think that I’m being watched.
I don’t think I’m supposed to be watched in the same way by my fellow three-dimensional beings. I think I’m supposed to live in communities with them, for sure, and I don’t think life in this 3D world could ever be properly experienced except in the company of other three-dimensional beings.
It’s difficult to access someone’s three-dimensionsal self by engaging with their two-dimensional one. That’s why friendships in real life are always stronger than ones that start online. It was so strange to finally meet There’s a certain veneer, a certain polish that you can put over your two-dimensional self that you just can’t when you’re operating in the third dimension. Still, something about the projected reality of the second dimension—and the attempts made by the two-dimensional world to reach up into the third—makes you want to keep engaging. It makes you want to hang on to the friendships you make online. I think two-dimensional friendships would not survive if the three-dimensional beings did not engage with their three-dimensional selves, though. That is what language is. It’s the hope of people in the past that their two-dimensional etchings will somehow reach future three-dimensional beings, or, better yet, That is why it’s so funny and cute and silly to me that humans should find it necessary to send their little messages into space. Like, omg, girl, don’t you get it? Space is just, like, spaceeee. I think lowkey it’s literally, like, the space between atoms or some shit. Planets are atoms. Stars are electrons. They are three-dimensional objects and thus coordinated by that same four-dimensional unifying force—whatever it may be. Maybe the concept already exists. Maybe there’s already a word that describes the four-dimensional paper upon which 3D things can be etched. So, then, what are the messages of the fourth dimensional creatures that they try to send each other through 3D messaging? Are there messages being sent up to the second dimension from the first? What is binary code trying to tell us? What are action potentials trying to tell us? What are these ones and zeroes trying to tell us? Is that all there is to dimensions? Is it just adding? Like an axis of, To go from the first dimension to the second dimension, you add an axis. X becomes xy. If 1D is just x, then 2D is xy, and 3D is xyz. I think that, right there, is the most jaw-droppingly, beautifully human admission of our unevolvednesss. That decision to end the axes of dimensions at z, the last letter of our two-dimensional alphabet. It’s a very elegant way of saying “We have no idea what happens past here.” Just like there is no letter after z, there is no dimension after three….. This is where the wires start to get crossed. If the same person who said 3D = xyz were to have assigned names to the dimensions, then we would know our three familiar dimensions as Dimension X, Dimension Y, and Dimension Z. The dimensions would feel more conclusive. We would more readily accept that Dimension Z (formerly known as the third dimension) is as far as it goes. Thinking of dimensions as X, Y, and Z would beg you to think backwards…… It would make you want to ask, “Okay, then what is Dimension W? If there’s a Dimension X, does that not imply a Dimension W, and a Dimension V, and so on?” You could go all the way up to Dimension A. Though finite, this system would introduce way more refinement of dimensional granularity than we would ever assume if we were to continue thinking of dimensions in terms of 1, 2, and 3. Think about it: nobody goes around talking about the 23rd dimension. Nobody talks about it, but I’m sure it exists somewhere up there—or down there—or both—or neither. With the lettered naming system, the dimensions would stretch finitely before X up to A. With the numbered system, they would stretch infinitely after three. Z = 3. Y = 2. X = 1. W = …. 0? A = ….. -22? In reality, the dimensions likely stretch infinitely far in both directions, but if it’s equally hard to convey the concepts with both letters and numbers, at what point do you just…. There are certain things that the 4D beings seem to want to watch us do. I think they like seeing us in the flow state. I think that’s what is ultimately most entertaining to them: to see us fully present, fully engaged in something, or even multiple somethings at the same time. In my case, it would be listening to this song, and it would also be dancing, and writing, and seeing through my mind’s eye a moth with pollen on its antennae staring me directly in the face, and the two big black eyes…. I have no idea how to look it in the eyes. How am I to know if we’re making eye contact? That’s when I see the split between me and the four-dimensional beings. Maybe it’s just a trick of narrative. The four-dimensional creators seem to love tension just like we 3Ders like tension in our fiction ( Maybe that’s why we still have sympathetic nervous systems. If we were unable to be nervous, we might carry less interest to the 4Ders. I start to see the trees outside my window as something like the 4Ders’ hair or fingernails or something, but way more beautiful. Their ability to change with the seasons… I wonder what the seasons are shadows of. Whatever is going on up there is fucking crazy. I’m just happy to contribute in some way to the entertainment or whatever their equivalent of entertainment is. I’m just happy to be nominated by being born. Being alived. I’m happy to be able to engage with the world in whatever way I want. I’m grateful for my degrees of freedom. Any efforts made toward freaking out and doing weird anxious bullshit all the time are not what the doctor ordered—the doctor being me, or the 4Ders, or maybe the Buddha, and the real treatment being the dharma or something…. I just felt a weird little sort of throbbing, painlike sensation in my heart that makes me think I just touched a deep truth. Something tried to poke at me, as if to say Anyway, yeah, it’s fun to think about the dimensions. I just felt a surge ennui threatening to come in and interrupt my abilities. All of this to say I think I’m ready to have a boyfriend again. I think I’m ready to get back out there. I think I’m ready to do it again. I want someone to love and someone to love me back. I want someone to be with me in the middle of the night, in the daytime, walking down the street, being whatever wherever we are. Wherever we are. Us two limbs of the same 4D thing. It’s not incest if you both think it’s hot. But we shouldn’t be related. We all know that by not being related, we’re far enough apart on that 4D organism. Yes, that’s what it is. Just an organism doing incest with itself. But I’m not doing incest. I don’t want to fuck any of my family members. Did you really have to make me say that? Organism and orgasm…. They’re almost the same word. It’s almost the same. Can’t have one without the other. So where’s my other? Who’s going to be my other? I think if I keep going, I’m going to wear myself out. Burn myself out. Something. I think of dart goblins as I stand here at the conclusion of this essay. That’s all I can really say. See you on the other side.