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May. 23rd, 2017 01:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionAfter a while, and I know I'm not the only one, I started having conversations with the manual. I'd say something, flip to a random page of its vast middle, read a line, then respond aloud to that response, usually mentioning how inappropriate it was. And after another while, as you must also know, I stopped bothering to do that, instead tugging out of what I'd read the plausible response nearest to it. The one involving the smallest number of misinflections, words dropped, letters switched or added. It came to be automatic. Eventually I wasn't reading the manual at all, just glancing at it so that some one phrase or word or syllable of my semi-existent partner would be sourced in something other than my own, nearly wrung-dry imagination. If I didn't force myself to read through it cover to cover on the first day of each new year I'd have forgotten everything it really said. When it entered the terminal phase of its disintegration I poured the pages out of the binder onto the floors of the halls and walked on them and closed my eyes and let the feel of them beneath my feet suggest sounds. The crescent crunch of vowels, the sideways slip of consonants, the downward press of silent spaces. Soon enough my own thoughts were trampled to sibilance, then at last became the silence not between things but around them, then the kind too far from anything at all to anticipate being broken. No need for a manual then, you would think.
But with open eyes the place was still the place. And in the great chamber there they were still, the balls of nickel afloat in the air, in rows, columns, nets, or whatever figures you wished to grouo them into, receding upwards and outwards close enough to infinitely that you thought of them as neither ending nor not, as a substance rather than a number. I still climbed about on them for exercise. You could go up for miles once you'd learned all the ways to twist, kick, slap and bump to survive a fall. The three and a foot interval had clearly been exactly chosen to make them safely climbable. Not that they led anywhere: they just floated in the air like a solution. They stirred enough that you could push them into one another with great effort or great falling speed, but as soon as your impulse failed they'd push you right back to that point of contact, as though firmly but calmly refuting an out-of-line challenger. They weren't "for" anything, at least not any purpose realizable in the physical world. I came to think of them as markers of the dimensions, the limits, of what I was able to imagine. Some days I could lasso into my attention mighty forms, putting them into something like motion just by rippling the boundaries I'd conferred, adding something like color by turning my head or adjusting the depth of my focus. Other days they'd all just hang there, utterly separate from me, as though some inexplicable upheaval had thrown them all to their respective heights at varying speeds just a moment before, where, their own upward impulse having just then been spent, they'd all paused for the exact duration of the present, after which they would instantly return and obliterate me and bury the obliteration.
The manual said nothing about them, or about the magnetic field thst held them there or what sustained it (something underground? in the walls? in the balls themselves?). I don't remember well what it did say, but feel it was chiefly concerned with how to talk to people. How that talking affected them, say, or how doing so would affect you, or what it might build up between you or in the minds of observers. Information of no clear use, considering, and I always had the impression that much of it was wrong. When I argued the matter with it it tended to win, though, at least at first. Eventually one of us stopped listening - I don't remember who - and we both got to feel like we'd won. I have the impression now, though, that it had been saying all of the things that I've since come to think myself. I wonder if it, or rather its particles, wherever they are thereabouts, have assumed my own earlier positions? I picture them as a cloud too disparate for seeing, but in the shape of a person on a walk, and I give that shape a face I may have once had in my own walks there. I sometimes catch myself answering questions it might have asked. My answers are dry, I fear, and too on the nose. It will get nothing out of them unless, for some unknown reason, it keeps on listening the way it has been while comparing my words to what it sees. Sometimes the things it says affect my own sight in ways hard to say.
But with open eyes the place was still the place. And in the great chamber there they were still, the balls of nickel afloat in the air, in rows, columns, nets, or whatever figures you wished to grouo them into, receding upwards and outwards close enough to infinitely that you thought of them as neither ending nor not, as a substance rather than a number. I still climbed about on them for exercise. You could go up for miles once you'd learned all the ways to twist, kick, slap and bump to survive a fall. The three and a foot interval had clearly been exactly chosen to make them safely climbable. Not that they led anywhere: they just floated in the air like a solution. They stirred enough that you could push them into one another with great effort or great falling speed, but as soon as your impulse failed they'd push you right back to that point of contact, as though firmly but calmly refuting an out-of-line challenger. They weren't "for" anything, at least not any purpose realizable in the physical world. I came to think of them as markers of the dimensions, the limits, of what I was able to imagine. Some days I could lasso into my attention mighty forms, putting them into something like motion just by rippling the boundaries I'd conferred, adding something like color by turning my head or adjusting the depth of my focus. Other days they'd all just hang there, utterly separate from me, as though some inexplicable upheaval had thrown them all to their respective heights at varying speeds just a moment before, where, their own upward impulse having just then been spent, they'd all paused for the exact duration of the present, after which they would instantly return and obliterate me and bury the obliteration.
The manual said nothing about them, or about the magnetic field thst held them there or what sustained it (something underground? in the walls? in the balls themselves?). I don't remember well what it did say, but feel it was chiefly concerned with how to talk to people. How that talking affected them, say, or how doing so would affect you, or what it might build up between you or in the minds of observers. Information of no clear use, considering, and I always had the impression that much of it was wrong. When I argued the matter with it it tended to win, though, at least at first. Eventually one of us stopped listening - I don't remember who - and we both got to feel like we'd won. I have the impression now, though, that it had been saying all of the things that I've since come to think myself. I wonder if it, or rather its particles, wherever they are thereabouts, have assumed my own earlier positions? I picture them as a cloud too disparate for seeing, but in the shape of a person on a walk, and I give that shape a face I may have once had in my own walks there. I sometimes catch myself answering questions it might have asked. My answers are dry, I fear, and too on the nose. It will get nothing out of them unless, for some unknown reason, it keeps on listening the way it has been while comparing my words to what it sees. Sometimes the things it says affect my own sight in ways hard to say.
