Douglas Mercer
June 23 2024
Once there was a writer who, overwhelmed by the flood of events, determined to write everything he experienced down, words, images, ideas, sights, sounds, memories, people and places and so he began to furiously record everything he saw or heard in order to keep an accurate written record in this way to freeze reality so that it could be understood at a later time. He soon realized however that by writing everything down he was becoming like a man on an infinite treadmill no sooner going back in time than going forward as the writing down of events was an event in itself and needed to be written down in turn, as writing was a laborious task and not the split-second activity which was required. Still resolved to record the flux of his life he decided to give up writing on paper and rather to write in his head, taking each event as it came to him and putting the record in an internal abode with many rooms which he had constructed in his imagination for just this purpose, But he quickly realized that the rooms themselves needed to be searched for and even this seemingly infinitesimal period of time slowed down the recording particularly given that since he began his efforts to record his impressions things in the outer world had sped up tremendously. Given this state of affairs he resolved to simply to open himself up to the world and trust that the impressions he was receiving would file themselves according to a plan of their own without the cooperation of his will. He quickly saw that this trust was repaid in kind as the capaciousness of his memory, that deep well inside him, soon grew to proportions of an enormous magnitude. Each event began to seamlessly and automatically fly to its correct spot within himself and he began to notice that the method used by this surreptitious means was to file everything according to its associations, that is like went to like; so if an event happened to him which was like some previous one all those events came up to him through the channel of memory and were stored together, and the memory constituted an event in itself which was recorded in turn there to lie in wait for some further and future use. He also noticed that in addition to being stamped by kind the impressions were being stamped by time; so that when a memory from his past came up to him the memories which had occurred near in time came up also, or if they did not come up totally, they were dragged closer to the surface there to be ready to cross into the threshold of awareness. He deemed this situation to be an ideal one for he could plunge headlong into the future without fear of not remembering, and everything would be recorded with no effort whatsoever on his part. And in this way he went on and on, experiencing new things in a never-ending way and knowing that the memories were growing in an ordered way and would come up to him exactly as needed whenever the time arose. But as he went ever forward in this manner a very surprising thing happened. He was suddenly overcome (out of nowhere it seemed) by a desire to write, not write about his internal processes as before as a mere recording device but rather lyrical profusions of words, or stories which seemed to betoken something enigmatic yet meaningful. For he had come to see that the memories he contained within himself were not just a storehouse of random events but that when put together and seen as a whole, when one proper part was juxtaposed next to another suitable one, a barely discernible logic and pattern began to emerge and this pattern required that it be written down for what purpose he could not yet tell. And as he wrote continuously in this way he realized that rather than only registering meanings from the world he was creating new words and new worlds and new meanings which would enter in the world to become memories which could be used to create ever more new worlds. Soon whatever walls or frontiers were within himself began to separate from each other, and the space inside seemed to become infinite, and the more he wrote and the more he remembered he realized slowly that it was not he who was doing the writing, not at all, but that he himself was being overwrote of was being written, that he was either being seized by the words themselves of some superior entity who was in control of them all. And once he realized that this was the case he began to write at an ever-greater speed as he withdrew all effort and he noticed that as he ceased to will even the slightest the process of writing began to move at a velocity that he even he could not record. In the past this out-of-control torrent of words would have frightened him but so overcome by the experience was he that it rather gave him a kind of infinite joy to be only the means by which things were expressed. How long this process of writing went on for he could not say; he only knew that at some point he awoke to realize that he had written some final word, and as he wrote it down he knew that the time of his writing and the time or his recording had come to an end. For a brief period of time he thought that he might miss it but this thought vanished as it came for no sooner had he stopped the writing than he was immersed and submerged in what he knew that he had created, and there the wondrous forms he had brought forth already existed and, what was more, he could create ever more new and ever more marvelous forms merely by wishing, or imagining them. Now he no longer need to write or to think or to remember but just to conjure up and the world that he now inhabited changed and conformed to some unspecified will he had discovered and which seemed to him to have a mind all its own. Right away he knew that this was the final abode, that this was end of his searching, that this was an immanent and searing experience that would not end and he could continue in this state without ever even being aware of it. That is the subject and the object had both collapsed or disappeared and he was no longer writing but riding, to where he could not tell, but he knew for sure that such a question, or any question at all, was beside the point.
