The Obsessive Self-Audit

I have a distinct memory of me, at three, standing in a doorway at my grandparent's house using the door strike to triangulate my height and telling myself in a rather gruff tone: "I am three." At this point in my existence I was concerned with my height. This point demarcates that place and that tendency, in me, to assume the role of the overseer and to administer myself through it. The very process of oversight became my consciousness. And through this process of oversight I became an obsessive over dates, numbers, landmarks in time denoting places in my lifetime used as reference.

Now, I am about to say something very controversial, but I do recall being ferried through the lobby and into the theater of a cinema in my hometown, Petite 4. There, I had a distinct memory of the marquee reading 'Superman,' which came out in theaters in 1978. The release month coincides with the December holiday season. That would have put me at about 19 months old. How I recall reading those words and that memory is a baffling thing to me because any more that memory has become a memory of it.

I have this distinct sensation of institutional memory, of passing through the long chute of education. At the point that I reached high school I had this very stark realization that I was 'growing up' and by the time those four years were up I was being pushed ever faster through another academic chute, college. In those years I spent evenings smoking weed, watching Star Trek, and staring at myself in the mirror witnessing the ageing process. I recall the peeling away of childhood as something resembling my father, nay my grandfather, emerging underneath. It is a strange metamorphosis to witness in the silent moments of a reflection but it did occur, and I documented it by sight as I did the Superman marquee and the height/age self-reflection by an obsessive self-audit.

I had come to a conclusion in my post graduate studies that rhyme, repetition, and memorials are the obsessive nee neurotic conditions of memory-as-existence. I still agree with this summation as I have lived it, experienced it, and see it still in action. To be in a process and to still be able to use that process to bracket out an existence in meta-process is something of a miracle yet it is simply a third-level reflex network sufficiently complex enough to articulate self-consciousness and still embed it within the process to see its horizons as miraculous.  According to Tor Norretranders, that's the 'User Illusion,' the stark fact that of the neuronal bandwidth occurring, conscious apprehension is but a sliver. Where do we go from there? That, as noted just above, is in the realm of outside of my fucking ken by a long shot, and to what we evolve mentally I can only imagine. It is the shuffling of time, the sorting and coordination of it, that constitute a consciousness that is perched so precariously upon a coral reef of genetic existence through time.

Let us reflect just briefly upon a metaphor that comes to mind, that of a bunching up of a rubber gasket stuck in a window frame. That little loop that occurs is something akin to self-consciousness. It's a homology to recursion. And that it occurred at all is a miracle happening within the material universe of possibilities. Material, energy, and persistence, through time, marshal the force of time to their vector. Time is something meta-matter, and yet it is so ever-present within all material. According to Einstein, time is on the material universe continuum, and so when we adjust the conditions of materiality we transform time as well. Clever man. He was one of many who had thought this during his time. And that's what makes it an important marker of our cultural existence, our cultural awareness as a society.

What comes next? My obsessive self audit had flung itself outward into the universe like the Milky Way of which I am a resident. This part-whole resemblance is something that does not escape me. Nor does the fact that much of what I am is much of what the unvierse is. It's as if we are the T-1000 from Terminator 2: Judgement Day, that is, something that was scattered that is now re-assmbling slowly into a conscious existence. And that's what leaves me with the universe-as-simulation scenario. Perhaps we are simply the will to self-knowledge of existence as such but an existence that is trapped within the universe and that uses the universe as its self-knowledge, which gets reflected into the peculiarities of matter's assembly thus making it a simulation of an active intellect.

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