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The Shining (1980)

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One on Top of the Other (1969), dir. Lucio Fulci

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):

If she's sad, give her a shoulder to put her legs on

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La la la la la

I want to suck dick under a desk while they're busy doing something else

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John Harris, used as the 1985 cover to Kim Stanley Robinson’s ‘Icehenge’

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✞ 666 ✞

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Neon Haze, Shinjuku 新宿

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Labyrinth

A place beyond time, where space and infinity chase each other in a continuous cycle of movement and change, free from gravity.

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2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

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I’ve recently begun to think of myself as a configuration of the universe. Nothing more than information. Made up of the same hydrogen that has existed since three minutes after the Big Bang, 83% of my body composed of carbon and oxygen forged in the hearts of stars billions of years ago. And what about this awareness? This perception of reality? Is that also a side effect of the physical universe, or is consciousness just my means to an experience?

We think of ourselves as these physical expressions on earth, housed in the box that is the cosmos and the universe in its entirety, but I think we’re just merely expressions of that universe. Not separate entities but a form of potential. The result of an evolution of the most primitive particles.

Am I wrong to think then that it must mean, just for a little while, this vast and indifferent universe is not just expanding but thinking and feeling…

The body, we know, is a temporary arrangement. But what if the awareness we have that we think makes us special is just a temporally sustained pattern of coherence. Not a souls in the traditional sense, but a ripple of information held just long enough.

Not just an agent in time but the very unfolding of time, where information turns inward and becomes aware of itself. Maybe that’s why we perceive time so linearly when time itself isn’t linear at all. To be conscious is to be suspended in a state of comparison, to feel the world as a difference unfolding and constantly comparing one moment to the last. Noticing change, holding onto that difference, a series of frames of reference.

I think there’s something primordial in this concept. Consciousness as complex information systems that has evolved to detect patterns, impose structure and survive.

If consciousness then is the byproduct of complex informational systems, what did it begin as. We often think of it born out of nothing, a divine power given to us special humans whom can use it to reason and to love… and to hate. Poetic and self-reflective. I don’t think it came from nothing. It must have began as just a mechanism. A flicker of responsiveness in a hostile world. A cell noticing light. A molecule reacting to heat.

It’s adaptive, a tool for survival. To process information and react — the very first “experience.”

To sense the environment. To distinguish pain from safety. Pattern from noise. Self from other. But over time and through billions of iterations it became memory. Imagination. Anticipation.

And eventually, us — aware not only of our environment, but of our awareness itself.

Is that where meaning then comes from?

Life feeds on this idea of negative entropy, pockets of increasing order siphoned off from a universe otherwise governed by disorder.

And consciousness, in turn, is maybe what happens when information, looped back on itself, becomes aware of its own contingency.

We are the outcome of that loop.

This is in and of itself absolutely absurd. In our endless search for meaning in every crevice of the physical and metaphysical world, are we just caught in this loop searching for something that never existed in the first place?

Then what? Where do you go from here.

Still, you want it all to matter. We want life to matter. We dig through the dirt looking for something solid. We invent gods, write books, drink. We fall in love and pretend there's some higher thread tying it all together, because the alternative — that it’s just noise — is too much some nights.

But even if it is just noise, we’re still here. Still breathing, still thinking, still choosing. And that I think counts for something. To know the void is real and to spit in it. I think it’s the whole point.

So I’ll wake up tomorrow. I’ll drink my coffee. I’ll write my name on a page and maybe tell someone I love them, or scream… because I can. And maybe just knowing this house is rigged, but playing the game anyway is enough. Not to win. But just to sit down and play. For however long the game lasts.

From stardust to stardust.

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Garry Winogrand: White Sand, New Mexico. USA, 1964

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Northern lights photographed from space

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