107
(Inapplicable)
Why do so many things–so many human things–hang together in ways we cannot fathom?
Imagine a 3-D tree with 225 branches and 225 roots passing through a 2-D universe. As the tree rises across the plane of that universe, it would be an inexplicable haze of points coalescing into a cloud of dots condensing into a clutch of dabs collapsing into a single blot before rooting off into another haze.
This is morality. This is purpose. This is meaning. This is intentionality. This is the transparency of experience.
Life comes the same way as cigarettes, the same way as time: shorn of history.
Life comes as this…
There are two directions in this dimensional tree metaphor, that of the tree rising up through the plane, and that of the dots moving across the plane. From the vantage of the plane, it is the ‘rising through’ which is impossible to see, simply because planes possess no up or down. The default will always be the across, because nothing could be more apparent than back and forth.
So from the perspective of a 2-D observer, the haze of points would arise from nowhere, coalesce for no apparent reason, then wink out of existence. The passage of the tree would only exist as the transformation of patterns across the plane. What are the forking of branches in 3-D would be nothing more than the collapse of wandering dots into larger and larger dots.
In other words, what are obvious through-relations become occulted across-relations, inexplicable explainers, the very ground of comprehension. Logic. Narrative. Reason.
Neural processes that cross the always wandering information horizon of the thalamocortical system and into consciousness do so like 3-D trees rising through a 2-D universe, as things whose structure and origin are utterly covered over.
We call this flat-land experience–the deepest thing we know, the very frame of profundity.
This is why you see streets and lawns and houses and so on, rather than the processing of information from your retinas to your visual cortex and onward. All you perceive are the relations across experience–first the street, then the lawn, then the house–and none of the through processing that makes experience possible. This is also why your thoughts seem to arise from your prior thoughts: given that the engines of thought, the through mechanisms of the brain, do not exist for us, we can only assign origins across.
And this is why errant thoughts so puzzle us, why we frown or laugh and ask, “Where did that come from?” They shatter the illusion of cross-relationality.
The illusion of this…
They reveal the closed two-dimensionality of consciousness. They give us an inkling of the great Kantian intuition (minus the ladder of transcendental deduction): the through…
Which, given our shameless conceit, we assign to God or Society, to the Devil or the Unconscious…
Things patterned after us.