The World filled With Ghosts

[italiceyeball]

 Echo chamber. I mentioned Narcissus earlier. They're still here, bouncing around in fragments. As long as some cultural continuity persists there'll be ancestor soup. We're swimming in it, naming ourselves after its ingredients, working for it, dying.

All the most righteous things like love, summer on grass and sunshine, all encompassing senses of contentment, religious experience, justice, whatever the ideal is... All the most righteous things, that we hold up as an answer to control? Are also instruments of control.

The World doesn't have an outside.

I feel a step away from everyone. Half muted to everything. We all seem to be moving in circles around each other, around our phantom treasures and banal shames. Fear and tinsel. A life on parade and the crowd just hums, blurs to flesh tone cloud. Less, the soft roar of wind over tall grass and a whiff of salt. The clay is cold between my toes. Still water, receding too slowly to notice. My reflection glittering blue and gray. We speak together, playing octaves:

What is all, any of this?

Remember that simply waking up in the morning can change everything.

Comments

[keplers_angels]

someone was just talking to me about polar coordinates. and I was only half-listening. something about how we learn the cartesian coordinates first and then become so confused and even when we think we understand polar coordinates, we're still just interpreting them into cartesian. and not really, really fluent. and how wrong that is....circles being circles....and trigonometry being so....organic....

Being, myself, not-on-good-terms with polar coordinates, I let this whole commentary slide by, feeling momentarily deficient in the magical simplicity of circularity.

When you say "The World doesn't have an outside" I feel frightened and bereft, so many of my most important moments seeming to exist there, and I picture Kepler's models and I need to know if it had an outer shell what shape would it have?

Do ghosts obey geometry then, in a world with no outside?
Euclidean or... some complex (mathematically speaking because the imaginary must be considered in discussions of ghosts) topological space?

Ancestor Petting Zoo

[italiceyeball]

If it had an outer shell it would be something else.

All we have are abstractions, models that work only in context. We can say "subatomic particles are like billiard balls" and model their behavior accordingly. In many situations, the models reflect what we see. But this is a metaphor! Outside of the context of classical physics the abstraction dissolves, particles aren't balls anymore and nothing bounces the way you thought it might.

I suspect this is true of everything. Everything that we possess is an abstraction, a model assembled from our years of fumbling through attenuated senses, fingers too large for the world's delicacies, eyes too skittish for revelation. Any certainty is an angle away from denial.

Ghosts are culture's substrate. The ground of being, for us, a topology of sweetest ignorance and frenzied desire. This is where you can dance, and not worry. What we can't have, what isn't an abstraction or a model, what can't be corrupted because it can't be caught or described. The purity of this|now|experience. But you can't keep it. You don't possess it, you can't abstract it. This. This, now. This.

Time, then. Time, ignorance, and desire. There is your topology.

superposition

[keplers_angels]

I would say that outside the context of classical physics---or rather, in the context of quantum physics--is the only place where abstraction becomes reality.

I've been plotting a genocide on ghosts. Psychic-flame-throwers... The ones in my mind didn't disturb me terribly until I was forced to consider that others may have ghosts in my image that they carry around, that they measure me against. That was when I decided they all should be exterminated. At least the ghosts of the living. I have no argument with ghosts of the dead.

Nevertheless,
I suspect there is truth in that topology. It looks easy enough to map, but impossible to meaningfully traverse while earthbound. What a splendid model for the geography of ghostspace.

Re: superposition

[italiceyeball]

If some Singularity God comes by and gives me a device which I could use to fully understand and manipulate my brain however I saw fit, I know that I couldn't resist. Removing the parts that hinder me, growing the parts that do. Becoming efficient but maintaining my need to dream. Understanding on tap, as needed, your day may be more colored by your omissions than your omniscience.

The gift is barbed though, times are so banal it couldn't be otherwise, the user is assured of their eventual destruction. A feedback loop somewhere down the line is inevitable, that's just how these things go.

I'd still take it.

Re: superposition

[keplers_angels]

But think of all the beautiful mistakes you would miss out on.

Re: superposition

[keplers_angels]

But I am getting images of Operation-like removing, with a cheap tweezer, the blurry little ghosts that haunt my day and night dreams.

I'm not sure if they should be released into the wild or destroyed like a malignancy....or maybe saved in formaldehyde for scientists.

Re: superposition

[italiceyeball]

I like the idea of having sepia fluid filled jars on display in the game room. A host of exorcisms, trophies from the war against self.

[therainingtree]

Somewhat o/t:

Why do we think of ghosts as dead? If they exist (which I don't believe), then they are a life form.

Because they are dead.

[italiceyeball]

They usually are dead. Living people who act upon us as ghosts are thankfully few. There are far more dead, though, and they've had time to, well, develop.

Most of the time this is a fracturing web of influences that becomes diluted very quickly. What sticks are general tendencies and moral responses. So, discrete identity doesn't make it and these aren't really ghosts at all. They're the soup broth.

Sometimes identity is preserved. In these cases it was the personality itself that became the product. The Man Himself, not his business or car or clothes. More than enough to go around, The Man Himself makes more. He propagates and evolves.

The Convincer is less concerned with identity than with winning the argument. She will impart her secrets to the ones brave enough to hear her out. As long as they listen, and laugh and cry at the correct moments, they'll be Convinced. They want to be.

The human dies. There is no direct continuation from that mind, it stops.

They systems they were involved in continue, influenced, shaped even, by its member. Red Barn at night, bonfires, music. A square dance bangs and claps out the corn plant's decoded DNA. The next morning we leave in a junkler, big one though lookin all v12. Can't get that rhythm outta my head, no words but that tap tap tappeddy tap!

The black vans pull up quietly and line the road in front of the cabin. I pull the junkler over and shrug. What the shit is this?

The Van Men, dressed in simple black and face coverings step out each carrying small metallic objects bradished towards us.

We step out of the car slowly, I'm tempted to begin screeching madness at this point just to push things along but luckily a Van Man walks up to me and says:

Dance.

Uh, ok. I start, relieving all the pressure that's been building since the barn. That corn DNA just explodes out in a flurry of tap steps and back flips, pirouettes setting pairs in order, the joyous explosoin of the helix and it's joining together, that sensual dance. If I could be a simple creature it would be half a DNA. Copulation with that many appendages, the responsibility of being a building block of life. Yeah, that's what I do. You make millions? I make life work, pal. I finish the dance while the Van Men surround me with cameras and other shiny devices blinking and making soft whirring noises, like birds, or some girls, you know the kind, the woodsy ones kinda small but tough. They're their own birds. We finish.

The Van Men nod at their machines and turn away, telling us to get out of here. One of them seems upset about something and yells at me:
Don't do that dance! You member it, some people just sticks to. Some places they snuff folks like you, no blink. Keep it to your damn self, or go jump off a cliff.

Cliff it is.

Re: Because they are dead.

[therainingtree]

Uh, okay.

I would posit that if something has desires, it is alive by (nonscientific, I guess) definition.

Re: Because they are dead.

[italiceyeball]

Sure.

But that something isn't the initial thing anymore. That thing died. It became more abstracted and mostly lives in the modern underworld of our collective unconscious.

We are Ghost Colonies, motherships of flesh and neuron. Like bacteria linking up and creating mega organisms.

Re: Because they are dead.

[therainingtree]

Well, sure, but isn't that a separate question?

For that matter, wouldn't it depend on the "medium"? If a ghost were the continuing action of the actual same neural impulses ported somehow onto a new "platform" when the original body died, then arguably that *is* the same entity.

Habitual Metaphors

[italiceyeball]

The difference is that the point of origin is no longer active. Waves are propagating, interacting, chaining causation, but the source is gone. This sentence has ended. But its effects, admittedly minor, continue.

A life, at least one worth living, is more like a symphony than a sentence. Minds are the medium.

Re: Habitual Metaphors

[therainingtree]

I'm not sure the point of origin's continuance should matter. (In fact, if it did continue, that'd be more of an argument for the new "copy" being a new and separate entity.) I used to be entirely maintained by my mother's amniotic fluid, and now I'm not, but am arguably still the same entity.