Hard showers of rain, sky clearing, warming temperatures, then
cold, snow, quickly followed by the budding greenery of spring...a
collision of seasons...
I was walking in the woods and came to a small cottage. The door was
open. There was just one room. The walls were lined with shelves, and
books filled the shelves. I picked one out and brought it to a small
table and a chair. I sat down. There was a lighter,
an open pack of small twisted cigars, and a glass bowl on the table.
The book was bound in soft leather, and my birth date was engraved in
silver on the cover. I opened the book.
It contained a shockingly detailed account of my life. There were no
chapter headings-but instead, pages with decades indicated. 1940-50,
1950-60, and so on. I searched the pages until I came to one that
announced a decade I had not yet lived. After a moment
of reflection, I picked up the lighter, flicked it, and set the book on
fire. It quickly burned down to ash. I scooped the ashes into my hand
and poured them into the glass bowl. A small translucent figure
appeared in the bowl.
"Right," it said. "You've made a bold decision. Your future is now
destroyed. You're no longer part of the Great Plan for all human
beings. You can strike out in any direction."
"What's the Great Plan?" I asked.
The figure smiled. "The ultimate collective destination and organization of beings. It's the structure."
"Then I'm satisfied," I said. "I don't want to be part of that."
The little figure nodded. "Good luck," it said, and faded out.
I walked out of the cottage and down a path in the forest. I came to a
house. It was conventionally built, with two identical wings. But the
wing to my left was broken by a series of blurred overlapping shapes.
Inside and around this Thing were several
people. I recognized their faces. They were not part of my past or
future, and I couldn't call up their names. They were changing the
shapes. They were making space and time. There was no intention of
coordination. But in some way, the evolving shapes
did interact with one another.
Drawn to this activity, I walked into a multi-sided shape and began to
invent my own forms. I erased some and added others. I felt a strange
delight. I was in a place I always wanted to occupy.
I had no sense of copying forms. I was inventing them from zero. Space
and time were null until I gave them shape. The other artists and I
were apart from one another and also together, but the togetherness was
not intrusive. There was no urge to collaborate
or mimic one another. Space and time---their changing nature---were
delicious. We were all free in the same way. Free meant FREE. Every
line, every stroke we made carried a sense of spontaneous revelation.
Look at THIS.
I knew my own past, but no details remained. It had all been absorbed and digested.
Then I began to see scenes---waves breaking and rolling on a distant
beach, a black sky full of blinking stars, a great high waterfall
pouring down in the middle of a jungle, ranges of mountains receding to
the horizon---they were inside a giant frame that
was labeled ETERNITY. I understood that I was supposed to see these
pictures as markers of endless life, but life inside the Plan. It was
pure deception.
If anything was eternal, it was my own act of creation.
I passed into a state of ecstasy...
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