Anthology of the Self - Entry V
The Existential Horror of A Living Space (among other things)
The tangible world is constructed of objects, agents and spaces.
We are agents, naturally, wills of self-preservation, as is all we traditionally consider alive. We manipulate space through objects and exist to act upon what is to shape it to the carnal abstractions of desire and beauty and waste. Animals devour, plants puncture the soil and sap its fluids, fungi and bacteria rot the residual matter of agents (perhaps the most powerful agents for perpetuating the endless demand we agents have for more, the dam preserving us from drowning in mounds of our own shit and gluttony). We abuse other agents, bend them to enact our mentally observable needs with arachnid appendages and lithe mass. We’ve treaded on countless plants and insects for comfort and convenience footsteps, for the need to navigate space by means of a gravitationally-affected vessel. This is not inherently a choice, but we must imagine all the blades of grass that have screamed out and writhed without sensible grief under our boots. I wonder the names of those I’ve wronged, whether they knew it was me or if they only know pain and if my absent guilt is the only accounting of the act. I wonder how many of the little guys I traumatized, how many insect families I tore apart as their entrails oozed from out of their carapace. ‘Your mother has been reduced to a stain, my dear child, thus tonight we will starve from my own inept biology’ says the father mosquito whose wife I fended myself from. Agents are destructive to other agents from the burdensome quality of being of flesh and mass. Intelligent agents, that is to say, flesh in our own image that we hold superior to other agents for our capacity of interactability, we may seek to modify most of all. The very construct of language is a means of sticking our hands in the skulls of others. We stick our thumbs in the bloody clay of those we love the most. Love is formed from the malleability of our will, the residue of bleeding hearts congealing into the wax that seals our contracts of friendship. Our strongest friendships are forged in the greatest quantities of blood. Our words are mere summary, grafted into blades by the heat of trauma. The sharpness and quantity of our language, the ideas stemming from unresisted viral strains, have since become intangible, residually acknowledged only in the realm of dreams (for reality is a kingdom of swords). We perceive consciously only our own skin and orifices, never the rapid motions of the heart and the concrete which paves our tongue. We perforate the desires of others with our words and spread our will like mycelium in their subconscious. The rhetoricians and politicians, both in career and in our soul’s residency, are in the business of colonizing hearts, erasing the alleged intelligence and autonomy of other agents. We think ourselves intelligent only because we only see the flowers that arise from the corpusculent soil sowed prior with the germinated venomous seeds of the other.
Objects are interactable, intrinsically human and of express purpose from our anthropocentric perspective. They are had so they can do for or be sorted by an agent. Their creation and existence is under a contract of oscillation between eternal servitude and idle expectance. We often forget the dreadful fate that would entail being an object. The insufferable ennui of being a thing, infinitely layered like a baklava of despondence. Is to be used and attended to a point of pleasure or pain for them? Does their purgatory bear any sense of reprieve in serving or in waiting? It’s intangibly insufferable, stacked and heaped with other things restrained in their own physicality yet with no means of touching each other's hearts. To be an object is to be without feeling or giving love untransposed by an agent. Does our teddy bear know she is loved? If she can think, she may be, but can she feel and understand anything other than the tedium of unreceptive thoughts? We may be products of others, existing exclusively through sensory stimuli, but still one must feel fortunate to have ever known or held anything certain, to have some crutch of language to lean on and parse feeling. The moral guilt would be too great to know our books, our cups, our televisions had a pulse, if a breath arose from their idle beingness of plastics, ceramics and steels, encased in their own lack of expression and reception. To be as an object is to be imbued with a will, but if that will is ever enacted on, is your existence cursed only by the unfulfillment or desire for fulfillment of that will? It’s truly torturous. We also must consider how agents are transformed into objects upon allegedly dying. Their will paralyzed, their memories and dreams frozen and bound to rotting flesh, but it’s still there in those who knew them, felt their gall, isn’t it? To be encased underground in constant reminder of life unlived throughout our stint as dead matter, it seems we fear death only for its potentiality as a conscious state. With other agents, such as wood, one is playing with a corpse, aren’t they? However, there’s comfort in knowing death is a permanent state, that we have killed the tree that our house is built from. If death wasn’t permanent, there’s a dire degree of uncertainty within our corpses, one so crippling it has spawned a genre of horror. For plants, if the walls still had their nerves intact, if they were still being suffocated by paints, staked with more objects of vanity, our floors battered by continuous assault from our unrelenting mass, we would become villains, colonizers of all whose soul is not tangible. Nobody has asked if the cross that mounted Christ, too, wept in pain. Maybe we should kiss our walls, our phones, our pillows good night to thank them for their service, though perhaps the damage is already done.
Spaces are the most treacherous of all to imagine alive, for at least objects are tangible, non-abstract objects of matter. Spaces are the frameworks of objects, the navigable locales of existence, their consistency, the very fabric of what we deem reality. Every zoo of objects and interactables is capped and defined by nameable, navigable space. Space is always certain in the waking world, and most often uncertain in the dreaming world. This is the barricade on which the mantle of ‘reality’ rests and demarcates itself from chaos. Space can be chosen, toured, manufactured through the chemical and electrical. These spaces have intent contexts and are imbued with will and purposefulness. Space however, in reality, can be stripped of context, stripped of matter and observation and still be. There are countless unknowable spaces and near endless potentialities that could exist outside our framework of perception. Space is what is and has always been, the necessary prerequisite for matter, the underlying context to the potentiality of any meeting of souls or accumulation of objects. Space is the corpse of infinity, of god, within which all functions both occur and define themselves. Yet the context of space, the experience of space, is individualized. We walk past buildings and cannot contextualize the space within. We can chemically fill it with our cultural, memetic assumption of similar such experienced spaces, but we will be wrong in some aspects. Even in our most intimate spaces we are mistaken. Can you tell me where all the cracks are in the walls of your childhood bedroom, all the spots where the paint clumps? Will you be perfectly accurate? Where is there precisely space and matter within those locales so carved into our neurons they can become the sets for dreams in their perceived entirety? We are object-oriented in our thinking. In a sense we tend to erase the space in our imagination. From this arises the chaos of a dream’s geometry. We are uncertain of all space and haunted by it. Spaces could be rotting around us, perhaps just out of our perception or perhaps within its own tactile perception, bound to the same accepted binary of mortality. Our favourite spaces could be nibbling away at us like ravenous moths let loose on reality’s fabric. Spaces could be the very definers of mortality similar to how they form the skeleton of the tangible world. What even is space but a god of unsure motives? If a building, a room is space, are not the walls made of objects? Is not a forest defined by its dense presence of entities? The Earth is a confusing clump of stardust, a contextless nuisance to space, that gravity made to be like gum in the hair of void. Space sometimes feels definable as the absence of void and vacuum, right? But a room isn’t a mass of wood, it’s the fact that void exists betwixt that wood that makes it tangibly a space, one which a human can appropriate and contextualize within the limits of our observational capabilities. So space is itself void contextualized by objects. We can’t interpret void here in a singular sense. After all, there isn’t space, there are spaces by which we exist. There are the spaces we named bedroom and bathrooms, named ours within the framework of bedrooms and bathrooms. There is Chicago, then there is New York. We think of these as separate spaces. There is our city, our room, our office, our typical daily route, our experienced spaces. Exploration and discovery is a process of claiming spaces either via our experience or via the colonial notion of property. We are entitled to spaces because we have always existed in them or had worked hard enough to put our name in them, but these arbitrary distinctions mean nothing as the skeleton bears no neurons. We will die and the space will still be. Maps and city limits will be redrawn until “New York” and “Chicago” have no context, are not spaces experienceable outside of electricity and the miasma of dead memories. There is no spaces. There is in fact only space. One pulsing thing that creeps around our objects and waits until the inevitable point when it can reclaim itself from entitled matter with the guts to be and to take and to develop arrogance. It is not the state of death that ought to be feared, it is the permanence of life. The unshakeable dread that there is no death at all, that every second of our rot is felt, that space may constantly be feeling us up consciously at every second for eternity, hugging our flesh in giddy anticipation of the day where it can fade into you, flood your rotted vascular tunnels, make the objects and agents you have consumed and appropriated into contextless, scattered garbage that belligerently holds out against it’s demise at the most minute molecular level. There is no greater eldritch threat than the inevitability of space to enact itself on all matter, to defeat matter as the dominant fabric of existence. Time is our only threshold, our strongest warrior, our best friend at slowing the rot just enough for pleasure and love to meaningly be discovered and documented by the generational sprawl of all brands of agents. We must thank time for her duty and fear the space that already slithers between each of our cells, inflates our lungs and rests hungrily in the cracks of walls, floors and ceilings.