Tel Quel

It’s been unsettling, the past few nights. I wake up, mildly lamenting my painful inability to have bearable dreams, much less brilliant ones. Mendeleyev dreamt up the Periodic Table, Lederman conversed with Democritus in the dreamscape of Fermilab’s Collider Detector Facility… I, on the other hand, was more inclined to hover between life and death situations in my lucid dreams: reversing the Euclidean condition and the accidental discovery wormholes, conspiracies, the Venus Project, the cognitive asylum between the humanist and the futurist, the scanners, the All reet! All reet! of Bester’s mad android, and in particular the neanderthal child. As usual, Asimov had the most influence on my dreams (the last time it was the Blood Daubers by Kosmatka and Poore in Asimov’s Science Fiction however indirectly) and I’d wake up with a queer feeling of physical and mental displacement that lasted well throughout the day. On one occasion, I solemnly watched my lunch travel from one end of the table to the other. These dreams were wearing me out and I could feel it.

Nonetheless, I earnestly swear by Asimov (and Bradbury, and Sturgeon). They are immensely enticing and horrific but I suppose that’s the fundamental premise of science fiction – hypotheses as infinite possibilities, the existence of the multiverse; the spiritus mundi as a thought experiment. Every night I found myself walking into Schrödinger’s Cattery, surrounded by cats and un-cats alike.
I can barely tell them apart sometimes.

xx

Piece by piece the fragments are returned; the body, the work, the love, the life. (…) And which is true? That is, which is truer? Memory. My licensed inventions. Not all of the fragments return.

It was an irreparable vacuum of every other farewell. I turned towards the source of stillness so that none may see my face but you called out, like a wreath cast into the ocean. I let you take me in, coaxing me with an unspoken promise before releasing me once more. This wasn’t freedom, I did not want a choice and you didn’t give me one. On the contrary, we remained as lovers in a quantum entanglement; never one without the other, with the variability of motion and stasis in the same breath of logic.