Squeezing the juice out of reality.

We possess five explicit senses: sight, audition, touch, taste, smell. In other instances I would add intuition as the implicit sense, but it is not important for this monologue. Given this, assume four situations:

In the first situation, you are walking down the street, when you hear a whistle blowing at your right. You look to your right and see a thick, brick wall. You assume the noise is coming from inside. You alternately hear a buzz like that of a bumblebee, flying closer to your ear and then disappearing. You wave the noise away, as it comes from no apparent thing. You take a few steps when you hear the same whistle as before blow in your other ear. You try to find its source, staring at the passing cars and across the street at the shops and cafe'. Nothing there.

In the second scenario, you are still walking in the sidewalk in the autumn dusk. The air smells of the dust raised by the hustle and bustle of the day. And the lamps set against the trees set against the pale sky have a surreal quality that catches your eye. You walk down the sidewalk and something makes you trip. It actually does more than that. It cuts your shin, and blood runs down into your sandal; the few steps back to the place of the darned object feel sticky on the left foot. You see nothing where you are sure to have tripped on something. In fact, as you sweep your foot across the sidewalk, it is again hurt by a blunt object. You are surprised to find nothing by way of sight. You seek with your hands and feel the object. You lift it, it is quite heavy, and with your fingers you trace its contour to determine its form. Those who see you carrying it home think you are playing a joke on the world. When you arrive you place it somewhere where it is soon forgotten and never found again.

In the third scenario, you are back out in the city doing what you usually do. In one of the blocks you sense this smell drifting from an alleyway. You pursue it to its source. Again, as the sound, you find nothing, but the smell is so strong and so delicious it makes your mouth water, it infuses your saliva and creates in your mouth something similar to nectar. It is all a mystery. You cannot account for the smell nor the taste.

Finally, after you have satiated your appetite on the invisible feast, and you have gone to bed for the night, and woken up in the morning to work till late, and returned home, you find yourself in the same sidewalk as before, without experiencing deja vu, and in your path you almost step on a strange, curvy, colorful object. You try to stop the step but it is too late. Your foot falls right on it, and through it; it feels like air. You try to pick it up but you cannot grasp it. It just sits still, morphing very slowly, like pudding in heat. You convenientely carry a notepad and pencil, and you depict it to the best of your ability. You wake up the next morning and find the object still depicted on the notebook, and you are quite sure you did not draw it in your sleep, as the level of detail is excellent.

So tell you me, which of these cases holds most reality for you? My assumption is the latter, as we are visual creatures. My conclusion is that we are not getting an equal amount of information (later to be processed as reality) from the world. Were we blind, the primary three would all seem more real to us that the last. If we were blind, I think, we would be able to perceive more of the world. While we see, much remains subliminal. So much myth has been created around the sun, around sight, in order to make some superior and others inferior. The ability to see has often been misconstrued to mean knowledge, when these example show much of what we do not sense. The absolute nature we attribute to the deceitful sight should be undermined, and the other senses exalted. Tis true, sight is not to blame for the failings of humanity, as these arise from intention, rather than sense (i.e. the ability to see skin color in relation to racism); and had we been blind we would not have been deaf to the cries of victims, or the ferrous smell of blood, or the bitterness of food, or the viscous feel of viscera. The main idea, nevertheless, is that the other senses are undermined to favor sight, and that it should be interesting to undermine sight to experience the world in a new 'light'.

Hermit Crabs of the Universe

There was that day, the one day he felt it. He felt it around him, enveloping him in a cozy prison of matter and interpretative information.

Gazing outward -- or inward, as it may be -- he felt the cold and clammy touch of reality caress his earthly coating. It felt odd, almost alien. Inescapable but for the moments when the curtain drops and time expires in the dark state of nonexistence.

It was moments such as these when he wished he could retreat into a haven of pure feeling, a place only his imagination was capable of crafting.

Emotions ablaze, he shone like a dying star, a shock wave of desperation tearing through the space around him. Curled tightly into a ball, he wanted nothing more than to squeeze himself out of his pervasive realm of consciousness...*blip*...and into the singularity of a conjectured after-death.

sphere

Icarus Variations 6

Icarus Variations 5

Icarus Variations 4

Icarus Variations 3

Icarus Variations 2

Icarus Variations 1

academia

And once in a while, after all the hosh posh fluff of freudian and lacanian interpretations, of jungian archetypes, of hermeneutic (a word that relates solely to the academic context) codes, and the realization that the rest of the population lives perfectly happy lives ignorant of all these things... the academia, to fight back, invents yet another new word to isolate themselves even more from the common, ordinary, banal, characterless, commonplace, conventional, dull, fair, familiar, generic, habitual, homespun, household, humble, indifferent, inferior, mean, mediocre, modest, normal, pedestrian, plain, plastic, prosaic, quotidian, routined, run-of-the-mill, second-rate, simple, so-so, stereotyped, undistinguished, uneventful, unexceptional, uninspired, unmemorable, unnoteworthy, unpretentious, unremarkable, usual world. Nay, they write yet another ten books full of phallic notions to interpret yet another obsolete, bucolic, 18th century sonnet.

Bunny

You came to me subtly like the first day of spring. you asked me what the homework was assigned in class on friday. I told you I had skipped class too, and you smiled. You then said "I'll see you later" and I said "peace."

Then I saw you on saturday, and I tried to say hi, but it was almost like you didn't recognize me. When I waved my hand and noticed you didn't see, I immediately transferred it to my hair, and made as if i was curling it.

Then on sunday, you looked at me in church. I felt your pupils stir in my periphery. You walked up slowly after service. You said you had something to say about your past.

You were afraid you had committed a great sin, and were afraid to tell your parents or your brother. So instead you picked me, to help you with your cross. I wanted to say 'whatever it was, I was sorry.' but talking when I should has never been my style.

You spoke of a night that seemed almost too old to remember. It was six months ago and a warm June evening. You're boyfriend back then, Brian, had wounded you deeply. You had caught him sleeping with your best friend, Darlene. You looked down at the space between my chest and the sidewalk. The atoms, or memory, seemed to weigh in your mind.

Darlene instead had been sleeping with Marcus, and Marcus in turn had slept with a whore, about two weeks before. The hoe in his story didn't really have a name, he had christened her Bunny, and paid her the money, and done what he wanted to do. There was pride in his voice when he boasted the story, but said nothing of what was brewing in his pants.

His confidence got to Darlene, who was drunk off Bud light from the keg in the bathroom. Naturally, her legs were loose by the liquid infused in her bloodstream. When they did it, it had been like a dream, not because it was good, but because she forgot it when she woke up.

She didn't know she, too, carried it in her pants when she met Brian at the game. He kept holding your hand but kept talking to your friend. You noticed something was wrong, when, after your team had won, the three of you went home, to your home, and around 10 pm the other two left and they left you alone. You thought nothing of it, but something told you to check. So you picked up the keys and you got in the car, and you picked up the streets towards his house.

Oak street was quiet and cool and ordered, each car took each spot it could take. You turned on the corner to find your own space right before the the stop sign. It was there: Darlene's car, a white Jetta with pink mardi gras pearls hanging from the rear view mirror.

After it had all occurred and the nerves had been shattered, you forgave him in your innocent blindness. He stayed the night, and left the next morning, then he pulled off the same move at the bar. You called him a jerk and you swore to hate him. And though the thought of him never left your mind, up to this day you haven't called.

In between, you visited the health center, some guy saw you as you read the magazine. You yawned, and he yawned, then the doctor came in. When you came out, your life had been changed and you knew it.

I couldn't see it yet, but I knew it hurt. I couldn't put myself in your shoes. I felt deep inside that I was the wrong stranger, incapable of sympathy, cold to pain and anguish.. the usual, casual egotist.

After that night, I saw you once and or twice some time after. You knew I knew and, embarrassed, evaded me. You became one with Jesus, started speaking the word. A few months passed and you were holding the sign. You condemned the lascivious and you yelled 'dirty liberals!' and screamed 'repent for your sins!"

I looked in your eyes and saw no trace of myself in them, no recognition, nothing, just a blind pair of dots that saw nothing but knew much about despair.