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The faint tingle
was easy;
I pointed the telescope,
and the stars came quickly.
And you got very excited about it.
People usually think a percept
is a yoke of action, restraining
freedom, but really it is a much lighter upper,
a demonstration of metaphysics—shooting
stars, comets cutting across a giant elliptical galaxy’s
dust lanes, across the path of Neptune—
the True World of being, independence and freedom:
catering to areas of motor control, imagery
and perception to function correctly.
It’s a wonderful luminous oil, has a translucency
that takes on a watercolor effect; the shadows glow; exquisite
lacey effect from the foliage and from the background.
I have to say I am impressed that your mind
would pick that up and show it to you.
It’s almost like every time you con-
sider the stars, they fuse together
and the resulting admixture, or clinker, is ground
between the cross strands of the netting to form a unitary strand
across the median plane...
this can be seen most clearly in the night sky, with the distant stars
producing a domelike percept
that presents the stars, forming a rigid hood,
a little too much so for comfort.
Hard, sometimes, to tell the stars from the ones
when you bump my head.
Too scared to fight, I couldn’t see that I was the person
and the public: in this space,
all my percepts are in my head as
though they had wills of their own,
even the most distant star and yourself,
equidistant from the earth: a fact
that only I can know for sure. All things are infinite
organized assemblages: consciousness, freedom, and
the stuff you get when you push down on your eye balls.
You, though, scintillant, tended to persist longer
and could evoke muscle activity following, respectively,
the stimulation of visual and motor cortex—perhaps
only the token
of our freedom for intelligent manipulation, of
changes in time... I don’t know
if it was the scotoma, teichopsia, or what:
I was looking at pressure phosphenes
and the world just appeared—
and in fact
things have not changed very
dramatically since then—
only in detail.
[B]
BRIAN CHRISTIAN
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