the weaver

the totality symbol in alone

at the centre of alone is a vision

the narrator travels down through the apparent structure of reality until he reaches what he can only describe as a god particle: a small, ceaseless thing which “weaves reality together, this moment to the next”

it makes one moment from another

the narrator is shown its symbol.

but, as he says, it is more than a symbol – it appears to be the pattern itself: tight spirals or knots tracing matter as energy, moving through every atom, everywhere at once.

he recognises something of the celtic knot in it – a path without beginning or end, continually returning through itself

a totality symbol

the small containing the whole

this pattern runs quietly through alone long before the narrator encounters it directly

the ordinary repeatedly becomes enormous

dust gathered around a hospital dayroom becomes a civilisation – a tribe emerges, develops language, writes its histories and creates its gods

a mark in the skin becomes cuneiform, then writing, accounting, debt, money and the invention of a future

a pool table becomes landscape, history, mythology, grave and otherworld

colours become instructions

paper towels become messages

condensation on a window becomes communication from someone who existed there before

again and again, a small thing becomes capable of containing an entire system of meaning

this is also one of the characteristics of psychosis explored by the novella – meaning proliferates – connections multiply – an insignificant object becomes impossibly significant

the totality symbol occupies the uncertain territory between that experience and something older: the human desire to find a pattern capable of holding everything together

this moment to the next

the particle at the centre of the vision is not a creator in the conventional sense

creation has not already happened

it is happening

the thing is perpetually sewing the seams of the present, making this moment, then this moment, then this moment

that distinction matters

the vision does not reveal a completed universe – it reveals a universe continually becoming

its symbol therefore cannot quite be a picture of the whole – it is closer to a picture of the process by which the whole continues to exist

the circle, the mandala, the ouroboros and the celtic knot all approach this idea in different ways: forms which return into themselves, resisting an obvious beginning or end

the narrator finds his version at the smallest imaginable scale

whether he has discovered anything outside himself is another question

psychosis and revelation

alone does not ask the reader to believe its narrator’s cosmology

nor does it ask that everything he experiences be dismissed because he is psychotic

that uncertainty is important to the book

the narrator’s world is continually generating signs, correspondences and systems – some are beautiful – some are frightening – some are demonstrably delusional – others resemble the ordinary operations of poetry, mythology and religion: one thing standing for another, the visible opening onto the invisible

the difference between revelation and pattern recognition can become remarkably difficult to locate from inside an experience

the novella stays inside that difficulty

the totality symbol therefore offers no solution to alone

that is another question.

thirty years later

the image behind this part of the novella has existed in the author’s imagination for nearly thirty years

recently, it was drawn again for the first time in years

technology had something to do with its return

we are entering a period in which machines can generate language, images, music and other forms once associated intimately with individual imagination – that raises an old question in a new form: what remains uniquely ours when the technology becomes capable of making what we make?

perhaps experience remains

memory

the private image carried through decades

and the imperfect attempt to make art from it

the old symbol returned to the sketch pad

then it became a poem;

totality symbols

i treated it socially, my psychedelia.
i never asked it to show me something
weird. but it widened my consciousness,
i have a quantum imagination, infinite

for places to put you. i draw on language,
particularly the totality symbol i was shown.
i was shown the weaver, a god particle
who looms this moment to this moment,

the forefront of reality, made before my eyes.
i’ve drawn it my sketch pad again, first time
i’ve drawn it in years. but as i see technology
finally better me, all i have is my own art. a

vision from near thirty years ago, and i hear
trigger word of d.m.t., what it does to me.

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