Mirror in the Aether

IV

The great shutter hacks and crackles, lurching somewhat before it finally begins to retract. Mere seconds that feel like great elongated passages of time to an impatient man. Virtues are scarce when you have nothing but time in empty space. And who says what virtue is? Choice or an inherent trait or maybe even a pure state?

The first quarter block of lectures feel like they exist out of such ordering systems as time or space. To me, they are a pure state of experience or being. The recent focus of the lectures has been Empire and Egyptology, continuing with the running theme of warfare, combat, conflict, and violence, with various sojourns into related themes - mostly of a martial nature. Each quarter of lectures is followed by the requisite reflection period during which a guiding voice issues commands in a masked form. Gentle but firm suggestion. Commands are abstract or oblique and sometimes sound like they're being randomly generated without reason or purpose. 

I think it's a technique, a method of stimulating effective reflection through jarring non sequitur that serves to encourage and even require or demand disciplined focus and active thought. Whatever the means, the point of it is obviously to stimulate thought. Violence, morality, conflict resolution. Individual choice sparring with ordered behaviour. The absurdity of conquest and the great moral questions of snuffing out life and whether it makes a difference if the great moment is in hot or cold blood. Whether it has been commanded or it is choice. Whether the command came from another party or from ourselves through our own consciousness. Whether or not choice itself is a theory.

In the beginning, when there was just space and time, I would resist the lecture blocks. Despondency was a mask for my indignant anger, but the guiding voice is informed and a lack of engagement results in fruitless reflection. Idle thought, or maybe it's not thinking at all, must be some sort of trigger to the confinement vessel. Either it can read thought or hear my interior voice. Perhaps it assesses the quality of thought. However it's achieved, I discovered pretty quickly that I had to find a means of immersing myself. And so it soon turned out that the physical regimen wasn't just to assist in rousing me from rotten slumber, it is the key to a receptive state.

I wonder if the voice can sense the reluctant comfort I draw from the screen beneath the shutter. Whenever I contemplate the shutter in its closed and dormant state I think that it's because I'd rather be in a lecture, because while they're not visually engaging, they take me away to somewhere and that's something. It's odd to be hurtling through nothing and nowhere in a tiny space that never changes. In a tiny space within endless space. It's almost poetry. 

The outside is a churning maelstrom of light and fire and matter. A constantly shifting amorphous mass of activity and energy that's so vast and infinite and without order it's meaningless. With no-one to conquer it, it may as well not exist. It's just me out here in the pure nothing, but while I'm in it, I'm trapped outside of it. I may as well not exist either, and perhaps in a sense I don't. More poetry.

The first lecture of the first quarter covers colonies. From Congos and frozen wastes to The Great Series and systems of planets and stars and more to come. Claiming and renaming and reshaping physical and psychological space. The colonist is a great maker of order and my own reflections incubate as I absorb the ritual of factual display. Information relayed in the form of almost but not quite a vast and perhaps endless list. Statistics and comparisons and analytics - but without application. Conjecture and construction mined from ancient sources, consistent only in their unreliability. 

The lectures don't pose questions or set an agenda. They don't guide learning. They seem to be designed merely to inform, if they can be said to have been designed at all. The information conflicts, and there is little sense of rigour to the comprehensive lists of meaningless names and figures. Increasingly, I wonder if there is any awareness of the fallibility of information, and at times I wonder where I can place my trust. But I need to stay locked in to my senses. Process. Absorb. Obey.

Colonists are the great conquerors who conquer both time and space. By means of claim and name they give life by bestowing the very concepts of place and ownership. They give a name to number and a sequence to name. They bring existence from nothingness and they grant existence to nothingness.

The lecture shows a consistent pattern of outcome. When entire worlds are conquered and the colonist begins to turn back from the outward gaze they find that their creation atrophies and their subjects grow restless. Hungry to die for the chance to make themselves anew and then to make a first great mark upon some fresh slate.

I feel my concentration slipping. In the wash of words I feel increasingly connected to the burden I hold inside. I deny it, I resist it, I suppress it, but my secondary mind can feel the presence of despair. Biding your time and looking inward and mostly because the idea of looking outward is just too horrifying to imagine. I'm not worried about getting out or being free anymore. I worry about the point of it. If there is nothing can something be made in its place? 

On this vessel and in this box I am the sole colonist. It's now the first period of reflection and as the voice encourages me to reconcile my experiences with what I have absorbed I am concluding that I view existence itself as the colonisation of space and time. It is not merely the making of nothing into something but it is in fact a fluctuation of energies that never truly dissipates. The chain of being is never broken. The body-grown sperm cell is decapitated by the maw of the body-grown egg and thus so grows a wretched violent man who served his time more than twice while his gaze burned outward. Now as he looks and seeks inward he sees his many made subjects and they yearn for death. Isolated samples willing to be snatched from dream and cast out into perpetual waking. Light in the dark that won't be seen, so it may as well not exist. I can't look outward, but the more I look in, the more I hear the yearning.

I wonder if the voice is recording or processing or analysing my reflections. Whatever it's doing, it won't abide idle thought. If it does assess my reflections it keeps the score to itself. The punitive element of the confinement vessel seems to be that time can't be wasted. I've got nothing but time inside, nothing but space outside, and I need to make my claims by means of thought. I'm here to make time into something and then do the same for space. Or so I believe right now but as much as I absorb and reflect and pose great new unanswerable questions, I still find myself fighting despair and running from dreams.