18.12, Tuesday 9 Dec 2008

What I remember is walking unhurried down an unsurfaced road, all bright white pebbles and patches of dirt and grass in a strip running down the middle, and the trees - which I can smell too, that is vivid - curving over the road so that the sun comes through in tiny pieces between the overlapping leaves and branches, shingling the shingles, and the road curving around to the left and slightly downhill passing through woods filled with bluebells while there is a gate on the right that I do not use, and then the trees thin and I step into a patch where I can see the clear, clear azure sky, and the sun amazes me, and I take a deep slow breath, drinking the beauty, and what I remember then is the whole history of the photon hitting my retina and so my consciousness stretches out, back across time, back through space to the surface of the sun where once upon a time I fought in the goblin wars, our feet hooked in magnetic loops to avoid falling off and spinning into the heliosphere, wading through heaps of putrefying corpses tens and hundreds of kilometers deep, mulching and over millennia decomposing and recombining and autocatalytic loops of goblin proteins arising which we would harness, picking and restitching the cycles and matter flows of their autopoiesis with the tips of our swords such that over ten thousand years spaceships would evolve, the tips of our swords that were so sharp they were the resolution of superstrings and we would carve our names into the fabric of the cosmos itself whenever we made a kill, so the surface of the sun, our sun, is a trillion billion names, and it glows with these inscribed names, the interaction of the light and the power of the nuclear reactions of the sun combining with the semiotic density to make the currents on which our ships would ride, which would arc and tumble and dogfight like whales in heat, whales dancing in tangos, but multidimensional dances with a complexity never imagined on Earth; and from that vantage point, diving into the heart, I see the birth of my photon and its siblings, the ones that were nursed together in the heart of the star and I ride these brother and sister particles of light out to all their destinations simultaneously: and my consciousness becomes a ball of awareness expanding at the speed of light, now wider than the orbit of Jupiter, now passing the wavefront where the matter of the solar system collides with the matter of the galaxy and when I hit that I take the entire galactic disc in instantly, a giant deep breath that fills my lungs, a giant gulp that fills my stomach for I am a giant, and the Milky Way turns into a colossal eye, my eye, the black hole in the centre my new retina that absorbs light released at the beginning of the universe and so I am witness to the very first moments of time and also, therefore, the entire map of history which is laid out in-front of me... into which map I dive and follow paths and alleyways and circuit traces of consequences and rivulets of chance back to this moment, this path, these trees, this exact same blue sky, this intake of breath, this moment, this very moment, which I hold; and then I breath out because here I have all the universe inside of me and I hold the power to transcend and all it needs is for me to choose the right time and just for the moment I want to stand here, on this road, near the shelter of these green trees, in the brightness, in the brightness, in the brightness, in the brightness, in the brightness under our sun.