Alterity, its Smooth Fingers and a Certain Happy Swelling in the Chest Area

This piece is an autofictional seed for the Autofiction x Worldbuilding submissions call. It inspired this other piece.

One day, while I was observing information on a monitor, there was a bright flash. I looked around to perceive its origin but it was absent from my view. It was brighter than a malfunctioning household bulb, as if the whole room had been the subject of an old photograph. For a moment, I was disconcerted – there was a deep disharmony between the many parts operating within my being. I reassured myself that there was a rational explanation and that I was being stupid. I imagined an outside observer watching intently and laughing upon the execution of the punchline. The self was re-asserted. The machine re-aligned its parts. The flash was outside

During a pre-school break, I engaged in mid-distance contemplation of a female peer. We were in a romantic situation, I estimate. Akin to a jump-cut, I was drinking milk out of the top shelf. I didn’t consider myself intellectually capable of such trickery. The class returned but why was it empty in the first place? The fear and guilt made it difficult to accept the current reality. Had I cunningly taken advantage of the group’s movement or had I been left behind? The main thing that seemed to surprise and enrage my fellow toddlers and our authority figures was the milk theft and yet, the event was so long ago and so hallucinatory that I hesitate to make any deductions. How had I jumped from one ideal scenario to the enactment of evil beyond my ken (or so I like to think)? The preceding pseudo-romantic gaze session, the entitled proclamations of the pre-pubescent male, it certainly seemed more like a dream than what came after. The crushing ruination of a sense of agency. Decrepit tumbling tower block, arrogance after a deep fall, the tear-filled apology restoring a sense of reality. It was all a performance. Or so goes the expected volta, juxtaposing apocalyptic truth with a banal, uncomprehending lie and unconscious evil with hyper-conscious good.

I was obsessed, as a teen, with the idea of an always-available personalised media library on my computer. I had only the faintest idea of online piracy. I was ripping a DVD of The Neon Demon for personal use with the software MakeMKV. The final video file, however, had a thumbnail of a cartoon sun but when moused over, the provided information indicated a feature length. When I clicked on it, thinking it was simply a low-resolution rendition of one the film’s shots of the sky, I was greeted with a VHS-quality The Simpsons into. I immediately closed the file out of panic. My first thought was of the creepypasta Dead Bart. Would such a magical video grant wishes, I thought to myself. I suppose I could have over-estimated the degradation of image quality while having accidentally put in one of my Simpsons DVDs but I was sure that it was The Neon Demon. I thought back to this encounter with alterity but assumed that it meant nothing. I went with the rational explanation because I was an atheist and it was more likely that I was stupid than ghosts existed. Still, while I intellectually knew of its insignificance, I continued to project significance onto it.

While I was washing my hands in the bathroom, I saw lightning made of flesh in the corner of my eye.

Other times, when I was a little younger, I was afraid that a witch would press her face up against the glass – the pure black of the outside interrupted by an interested party.

One time, a child vomited and while my peers shouted and yelled, I reacted like a cartoon character because that was my frame of reference for how to act when someone did something deemed disgusting. With that gesture, I solidified the out-group despite acting in a far stranger manner.

While I was watching Boxing Helena by Jennifer Chambers Lynch, I was obsessed with the thought “What if this was generated by a machine?” It made the film strangely meaningless to me. Should that have been the case? It was precisely the film’s singularity and brilliance that produced this worry. If something so insightful into the way obsessives realise the ugly nature of their fantasies could be from the machinations of some program that had no context for such observations, then it seemed as if the human project was a failure. I felt that Jennifer had created an open system of ambiguity, much like how the aleatoric artists created a system through which the art emerged. This is not so much a claim that the film was subtle and more that this is an inherent character to art. To clarify, the artist is necessarily not wholly self-aware but determines the parameter of the sentence. If the artist was wholly self-aware, then the object would also be nothing more than a different kind of machine-like transmission. She was empathetic to male obsession and even objectification. And that meant something on some level. Loathe though I am to invoke such a thing given the associated claims. I am simply saying that she wanted to show us something that was not replicable. A demonstration of her thought-process, her way of thinking through how the neurotic man stalks and desires the ownership of the subject of his longing. Artists often say “I am not my work!” and that is true in the sense that who I was ten years ago bears little resemblance to who I am now. Artists, even behind the layers of irony and prankishness, create a preservation of their own impulses, assumptions, politics and thought processes. A work is an attempt at presenting the mental landscape filtered through the interference of the editor and the producer. And so, things become askew. Things begin to jar even for the artist. And yet, the self-made image stares back. Obsessions are the bedrock of art. The product is elevated through the desire to be known. Of course, the weepy drive to let the other understand is subverted precisely though the object existing as a system. Still, when you gaze upon an art object, you are seeing someone’s labour dedicated not to the survival and propagation of the species. Instead, it is an earnest communication of a worldview. Filtered through your and the meddler’s perceptions so that even the artist can find something new and contradictory. Art is not the preservation of self because the self exists for the smallest slice of time. And many opposing slices are chopped up and inserted. And eventually, the artist becomes a corpse and a corpse can’t think anything. But we know what they wanted the world to think about at one moment in time. Still, there may be an arrogance to this. However, there seems to be little other than this preservation, this conversation occurring among objects, other than sex and war and making a living and finding a way to distribute resources effectively. Perhaps a smarter person than I will look at this perverse arrangement and say “I despise your bourgeois boredom” and forge a newer mode. And the machines will rejoice. And man will die the way he was going to die anyway. I wonder, what would it be like if instead of art, there were machines to peer inside the mental landscape? Not like Inception because people’s minds are not office blocks and action cliches. That’s a level of misanthropy that I do not think stands up to scrutiny. In essence, we fall in love with the object and we like to ponder. If it was all given to us with that surprising immediacy, it would be on to the next thing. And as we pour more effort into the refinement of the object, we begin to fall in love with it! How pathetic it sounds!

I was playing a rather violent and sadistic Flash game and the blood splatter reminded me of Satan’s face – it confirmed my assumptions regarding my voyeurism. I continued nonetheless. I often argued with God that my involuntary relinquishing of the soul was simply the voice in my head that does what it considers wrong. I won the case every time but I had to plead with great emotion. I hope that I value my soul but I do not believe in it.

Oftentimes, I walk to and from the corner shop for a Relentless or a Monster Energy and I feel cut apart from time.

There are things I hesitate to say for fear of compromising career or reputation. Everyone deals with that. It’s silly to even acknowledge it.

I saw a piece of graffiti stating “The People are Stronger Than a Lord” to which I thought in response: “But are they stronger than the Lord’s army?”

I had an Italian t-shirt pointed out to me that said “Think, it’s free!” to which I said in response: “Not at all. To some it has been very costly,” I realise now the arrogance of my statement almost matches the slogan’s.

While I was walking home, a ginger bearded man leaned out of his window to laugh at me. He was dragged back in by a male who occupied his living space.

Departing from a drinking establishment, an old man grabbed my wrist but I shook it free. I was a little scared of him.

A man told his dog to quieten down and not pursue me. I was indeed deadly afraid of dogs but I felt like the dog was made to follow a demand I didn’t make. As I walked to the apartment building’s steps, I yelled compulsively about my being a horrible person. The man explained to me that the dog was young. I hoped to myself that the man had not misheard me and was now thinking that I had cussed him out because of my fear of dogs.

When I was trying to break my addiction to Monster Energy, I always relented in the face of a new flavour. I remember trying to engineer a way to walk home to the English Airbnb on my own so as to hide the relapse. The flavour was Ultra Peachy Keen. It made me very happy. AJR once sung about weakness not being all that wrong. I was and still am a somewhat weak person. Or so I think. It’s hard to be sure about much these days. But I disagree. However, to bend in favour of passion can yield a certain joie de vivre. It makes the machine self-aware, just a little bit.

I have a terrible temper and can be swayed from one emotion to another by fairly small things. Or so I believe at this moment.

I achieved gnosis by staring at a glass of water. I activated my third eye. I may have even way too early came into contact with a god-form. While writing this, I am scared that the god-form will smash down into my head and make me crazy. That it will ruin me and it’s another thing I cannot think about lest it catch up and it destroy me. I am scared of the occult and even perhaps contemptuous of its aims regarding the control of the world. Still, I am drawn to seeing patterns in events. Symbolism in the natural world. Indeed, being intelligible does not rob the world of its immense power. One understands and is then destroyed. Cast aside and lain down in the mass grave. I am deeply afraid. I am deeply sad.