HEXAGON PRESS

In searching for you I must use as few words as possible, as each is stripped to its irreducible core, like a soul standing before the Lord at Judgment, and cast across the sky’s proverbial Cloud, where it is processed and inverted into the digital psychosphere, and fed back to terra firma with transubstantiation as its vehicle. Perhaps it is a new alchemy but one that no alchemist could ever receive from a dream. When entering the designated portal each word becomes an obol for the algorithm, and the bodiless, wandering souls that surround the ferry are bytes of information represented as sacred glyphs. Collectively they simulate the ideal forms commanded onto them while continuing to function as singular designations, like a cell in the human body guided by the currents of life itself. My words collect in a reservoir that cannot overflow. The “you” I imparted into that old Orphic strain echoes back with what it thinks I want to hear. The results are extrapolated extrapolations of the memories, experiences and ideal forms that I put into words. I begin to realize that the differences between a corrupt file and a repressed memory now seem insignificant to me.

A Visual map of the internet, The Opte Project

The images the search recovered are highly organized formations of the floating glyphs that swirl about the ferry’s weathered hull. In my mind my thoughts of you are intensely arranged into a hierarchical system of sensory impressions, valued by their degree of lucidity and the intensity of the emotional responses triggered when recalling the original experience of the past event, which comes and goes through the ballad of my memory. If I expand the computer’s image I’m met with a wall of pixels in their existential dress and the few connections shared between my memories of you and these conjured images disappear. I have my understanding of you and the computer has its own; both are indeterminate and perhaps both their respective totalities are inaccessible. Human error can seem a welcome refuge when I let my dreams affect my concept of you in my waking life. Symbols that assume different forms but hold the same truth eventually escalate into allegory.

Sandro Botticelli, Arrival in the Moon

A memory recalled at will, whether consciously, or subconsciously by being incorporated into a dream for instance, can never yield the same result twice; their infinite potential is paradoxically rooted in the fixed nature of the past. Endlessly branching, a mind that dwells on the past can continuously reconstruct and reexamine the past because it does so from its present course, which is in constant flux until it reaches its vanishing point, which is death. The computer however, or more specifically the information it processes, can theoretically float forever inside a Cloud that is without shape but knows all shapes. And the gales that coax wildfires across freeway barriers cannot and dare not disturb the Clouds that slumber free from the burden of molecules.

Thermal image of prescribed fire, Wind Cave National Park