The Stairs Beyond Substance

There is no place in here, nor moment. No familiar semblances. The mind-forms here being concerned with nothing that's not ultimately mind itself. The shapes here have no correspondence in the formal world. They are the shape of Yevtushenko's poems, Chopin’s etudes, Gödel’s math. Here in these incoherent oceans of unmoldеd possibility, systems of thought provide the only landmass. Thеory and belief are all we have to walk upon, where language is a shell-swept beach, where algebra's an endless ghostly boulevard.

Suspended in this glimmering continuum, islands of supposition, continents of paradigm, tides of opinion lap in fabulous lagoons of proof, bringing a slow erosion, gradual change of contour. Here, the shifts in understanding are tectonic, diastrophic rumbles in the core, volcanoes of renaissance threatening to spit their heat and gold to cover all the world with their bright, dangerous precipitations. Smuts of change and novelty unwinnable borne on the jet streams of cold inspiration.

The depths are soundless, off the map, there is no sextant that will read the constellations here, yet are there hazards, undertows of falsehood, eddies of delusion in the bedlam reefs. Riding elated swirls of reason, bear in mind that nothing is unsinkable. The Palm Court orchestra plays on, beneath these fog-banked ambiguities rear intellectual icebergs.

No paranoid Magellan named these straits, autistic Heyerdahl or thorazined Cabot, the toothpicked scums of shattered coracle and surfs of splinter stitch the white caps to these slick gray shores, with here and there the footprint of some prior explorer, inmate or philosopher. Beyond a ribboned shingle of assumption, shifting dunes of creed, there is the scorched air whiff of a synaptic ozone, spindrift, gusted from cerebrospinal tropics. Underfoot, a tide line litter of rejected notions, worm-shot timbers from wrecked ideologies, discredited beliefs. In reason's rock pools seen, a ferning coral of dead faeries.

Above, strong light bursts out through solipsistic cumuli. The dazzle of near comprehension leaves a gibberish of phosphorescent scribble on the psychic retina. Over these beachheads of corpus callosum, strung between two hemispheres, there burns an equatorial sun of fact and data. Best not risk the information tan that brings disfiguring bikini lines of ignorance or, worse, the sunstroke of religion. Make for shade. The tree line looms ahead. Pull back the snarled anxiety of bramble and plunge ego first, into the undergrowth. Miasmal thicket darkness here, its chill immediate. Press on. Thorned snags of dogma tearing at the ankles, out into the sudden dappled bright, the eerie cross breeze of a clearing. The atmosphere here coruscates, thick with impending diamond. Through the spike lit blur an intimation of delirium's foliage clipped back, ordered into a Magritte topiary. Now a bordered path, redolence of park and arbour, wind chime scent of honeysuckle. With each step, a burgeoning of form, a greater density. Belatedly, the thought occurs: What life might this ethereal clime support? Ecologies of ectoplasm? And what Flora? And what Fauna? The air here crackles, viscous and intense, humid with meaning. The posited terrain grows steeper, rising up towards the domed pavilions of the spectre garden, flickering radiance of its exhibits brushed across the sky ahead. Struggle upslope the last few yards become a headlong rush into the raw mouth of this brilliant wind.