I'm getting mixed messages from everyone I know. They tell me I'm crazy and they tell me I'm cool. They don't know if I'm just trying to be weird or if that's the way God made me and I'm just living the dream. They suspect the former process, but respect the end result just the same.
They tell me I'm not as different from everyone else as I think, but they tell me the way I enjoy things is fundamentally different from the way they do. They tell me the vast tracts of undiscovered land they catch me veering into in every moment of silence is really this common-and-well-worn world we all inhabit, but they wonder what compels me to reach into the undiscovered. They don't get my affinity for the timeless even in the most ephemeral of settings, and they don't get my relentlessly stupid ephemeral humor when I finally do buy in.
They say I'm mad, friends. They say I'm normal, in almost the same sentence. They say it's hard to tell the difference with me, to be fair, and that maybe that inscrutability is the difference itself. Inscrutably polite and inscrutably inattentive. Irrationally there and irrationally not-there at the same moment, I drift and do not. I cannot rationally attain the common knowledges and experiences of others but still, while I'm not attaining, I'm working: ever-better do I make my craft, practicing piano in my head when I should be listening to the song on the car radio and engaging it.
They don't know what to do with me. Everyone I know suspects some sort of odd neurological damage above which they gracefully float while I stumble yet again, but also some sort of odd neurological compensation that makes them the stumbling and me the graceful. You know, depending on the context. And a lot of contexts involve both, and we alternate facilities with competitive anything-you-can-do contests and with cooperative picking-up-one-another's-slack situations.
We get along but I also get the sense that maybe I'm straggling behind for too long and diving ahead for too long for anyone to really identify with my flow. My memory's long and I've got a wicked four-dimensional proprioception w.r.t. my body of work and my mind is sharp, but when it comes to obvious things about life and living, I'm as clumsy as anyone.
Believe it or not, there's an uncharted land between intelligence quotients and the "real world", an uncharted land between the written and the spoken, an uncharted land between the call and the response, and I live there, hyper-aware and pawing clumsily at my islands of knowledge - when I get to stay there at least - even as - when I'm truly living, which is to say when I'm performing a task of art or science or both - I'm between the two and totally alone and wandering, in space as if.
So I would wander into the machine, a machine of my own invention, a hundred thousand years ahead of time. What it was you really couldn't be sure until you went inside, but I had some testing processes so I had a pretty good idea. An unsprawling of the two world; a consummation. See, the undiscovered land in my mind did exist, surely, or it did not. Tautological. Whether or not the undiscovered land bore the fruit of this world or the next or whether it had some spatial analogue somewhere in the human-intersubjective or physical stars we would know soon.
For I would wander soon into the machine which would attenuate that the world of me with this the world of them, blending them topologically using the latest in neural projection technology, killing at every turn the unreal in my mind, and, for me, would show if the protozoan, fifty-foot-tall cells in my mind were imagination or projection or real. And then I would see only what was real in the world that was real, just as I had dreamed them. And I would dream, not of the real necessarily, but in the language of the real with the logic of dreams. Whatever the case, I had to know and with this machine I would know.
I'm not feeling so clever or narcissistic or special about this accomplishment. After all, anyone could do it in this era even if it is a bit ahead of schedule, a broad and insensibly simple-but-more-complex-than-ours sensory apparatus neurologically blended with my own current apparatus Homo Sapiens, and my own Central Nervous System (CNS). But no one had ever dared to make or use this machine on himself, for obvious reasons. I (me and my company) used an earlier iteration on a kitten and the kitten attacked me once the machine's operation had terminated. But at that point in the project, I had only gone halfway, so the machine had given the kitten the sensory power without the mental facility to handle it and therefore, the aura of light that I had become to the cat was nothing but ultimate threat. I'd be here a month in solitary once I stepped inside, just to adjust and adapt and learn the new vocabulary of the real, for that was the pact I'd signed with the company to prevent such incidents with the kitten. Subsequent tests had much improved results, and the latest kitten (and of course we try to preserve the lives and happiness of whatever we alter badly, if at all possible) actually seemed placid, even though we knew that it could sense and respond and know. We had a creature (harmless, albeit reckless) try to attack this latest kitten, and the kitten responded as if thirty seconds ahead, or perhaps just in a broader present, a present so broad that encapsulated the evidence of the prior and future thirty seconds. The cat seemed almost brilliant mentally, comparable to a human, if only because its senses had been expanded. The dolphin was able to swim to unfathomable depths along currents of pressure we had never even envisioned with our instruments, us the top species of this world, and like a conqueror that dolphin found the bottom of the ocean and had dived still further, warming continents with mantles of hell placated by the lowest of the sea. And had survived, and had come back to us not out of familial obligation but - here I speculate - out of the rational realization that we would be the ones to help that dolphin go still beyond, in the sensory quest it had become itself dependent on.
The mantis shrimp - that lives thereabouts where the dolphin'd tread - and that'd communicated with the dolphin for a brief, underrated segment of the dolphin's tour - is the bearer of essentially the most complex set of eyes in the animal kingdom, and only recently have we learned how the mantis processes such complex information in its CNS. Similar experiments were done on the CNS of bats and dogs and dolphins and snakes for hearing, and touch and proprioception, and all the rest. Humans have a complex enough CNS for not only processing what we sense quite well but also putting some proverbial lenses and filters over the input to produce a sophisticated image that we can then interface with with our motor skills. The bottom line is that the mechanisms of sensory and motor mechanisms are becoming quite well-understood by the human knowledge base, psychometrics and biometrics making their way into specialized fields.
There will come a time not too distant, after some beautiful extensions and iterations of this original, hopefully-successful experiment, in which athletic genius and academic genius will be not only seen as building towards the same thing, but also being simply two angled shadows of ultimate experiential-skillful excellence. The light will hit me from the mirror and I will not have to angle my posture to my best profile because I will be a perfect sphere, to at least what is at that time possible, and then new, previously-unknowably challenges will emerge to my senses, the better to consummate myself and shape myself to solve. What frontiers can a human explore if a dolphin can find the de facto center of the Earth? I know not but perhaps shall know. What about a community of humans? In time, my friend, with experiment and patience, we will know.
And then I will be whole. For once, I step, not wander, into the machine.
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