Vision Rendering

How did you sleep?

Virginia asked Walt:

Did you dream?

At first Walt was speechless
as if he were lost in the zone
although what zone was still
to be determined

Yes

he paused for a few seconds
while Virginia held her breath

I was in a completely other posture

Walt tried to articulate
the body's acquiescence to its new-found
state of purposeless play:

And by that I mean that my orientation
was bodily distorted while tunneling
through an image space that was like
being inside a computer as it ripped
the contents of a DVD

I was drowning in the speed of these images

The phrase rocket-launched snorkeling comes to mind

It was a kind of underworld of images
so far removed from what we think of as
the human imagination imagining itself imagine
images

that what I saw was not really even
a matter of light nor memory

All I can really remember is the speed

And the body contortion

Or not even that since I no longer really had a body

Maybe you could say I was nothing but speed

But then that speed would alter and I would become

What is the word?

-- a floating point of reference?

I would just hang in the balance
a suspended entity refueling
for the next inevitable take off

Which is to say I was not straight up
nor was I on my back or side
or rolling or jumping or even
physically entangled with someone else
like you

Like me
said Virginia

Exactly

I had no back or sides
but had become sheer topological vector
shape-shifting through the alter time

Not even you were sharing
this angled looping through space
that was not quite slow motion
nor was it rapid chute motion
as if accelerating in any particular direction

It was like sliding sideways
in what from afar would be seen
as a confused state of motor deficiency
assuming there was a body
that could reveal its degenerative state
which there wasn't

This makes perfect sense to me
because if you look at the agility of
a lighter than life crab
skating hatch marks across the surface of
a sandy beach that never ends
you'll see how it too comes across confused
but is actually quite nimble
in its nonsequitur of motion

But there is no deficiency (Virginia pointed
this out as if to rule over Walt's illogic)

And it was not just my vector
(Walt kept on as if she had not said a word)
skating and shushing and chuting
through these parallel universes
while shape-shifting through the alter time

It was the angular trajectory of
an autohallucinatory sensorium
reaching epic escape velocity
caught in the blink of an I
one that corrupted all of my senses
to the point where one never knew
what season it was they were rushing through

Was it summer in Hawaii?

Snowy winter in Colorado?

Iceberg tentacles of invisible fall
picking up signals from a burning spring
Down Under?

Seasonal affective disorder
or systemic derangement of the senses?

It no longer mattered as I had
without even thinking about it
escaped the matter world altogether

No either/or or and/and
but the pure impulse of impact convergence
while spilling forth raw value points
along an improvised plotting of
wishful yet clearly emerging trend lines

And the things I saw while experiencing
the dramatic disambiguation of everything
that had heretofore grounded me in perpetual push-pull
were not ordinary

Yet even as they appeared totally other
and not part of this image world

I noticed something strange

(and here was when Walt started
doing something that had become
a recent habit namely he began
slowly massaging his thumbs
with his forefingers
as if suggesting the coming of money
or the residue of some dirty emulsion
that had suddenly seeped out of his skin)

They tasted like food

Food said Virginia

Yes said Walt

Food

These way beyond images tasted like food

But not food as sustenance rather food as aesthetic rapture

Something that fed my motion

The fuel of my imaginary trajectory
telemarking through proprioception fields
that were not downhill
nor were they uphill

They were simply paths

Trails that I intuitively floated through
while caught in the orgasm of aesthetic rapture

Floated said Virginia
as she turned the palm of her hand toward Walt
whereupon he saw the sign of her hand
maneuver its way in his vicinity
and flicker as in flutter

He saw her hand as a metacarpal butterfly
a skinflick of potential light motion
that would take hold of him like a stick shift
and churn his magnitude into a higher gear
so that he would once again teleport

He felt the shape-shifting vector he had become
begin to change its speed once again
as if she were now operating his propulsion
through the random flesh encounters
he was clearly still plowing through

The revelation suddenly hit him that
he had never really left the dream
and their conversation had
like the perpetual image machine
he was time-traveling through
always been a part of it

As he felt himself head into what
he imagined was the aesthetic equivalent of
Total Breakthrough Warp Drive

he knew that even this feeling would soon become elusive

He realized he never wanted to wake up again
nor did he want to disappear
in the unreliable space of the quantum vacuum

The in-and-out states of presence
he had thoroughly investigated
in his last major work of art
were meant to be left in the dust
and so there was no reason to offer
any concrete articulation for why
he was experiencing what he was experiencing

There was no question in his mind
that these oscillating states of
mixed reality presence
were part of that other
discourse network

the one he was untethering himself from
as a way to discover what came next

What he was entering now
was another dimension of becoming
even as Virginia playfully
put on the brakes and suspended his motion
so that he felt like he was once again
totally above it all
hanging in the balance

an entrapped-tease artist
floating in mid-air

photographed for the historical archive
his memory was slowly leaking

Was it pure madness?

If you want to create paths
Virginia said

you should not spurn madness
since it makes up such a great part of your nature

These were words that vibrated
deep inside his vision rendering

Vision Rendering...

It was like a computer dialogue box
in a cosmic sci-fi novel
about the second coming of Art

But this was no epiphany
he was having

Walt was simply dreaming

And in the dream
he and Virginia were chattering
as they always did
about the creative process
which then led to a meta-state
where they discussed the dream itself
in lucid detail

Details Forthcoming...

another dialogue box would purport
to know what was happening
while the processing units
kept pace with their awakening

Walt kept floating

---

Metadata: dreaming, awakening, processing, oscillating