The Symbolic Supercomputer
The Limit of Identity & the Glory of God Hidden in All Things
This piece is in some ways a sequel to Hell Trip & the Invigilators. This post will be more enjoyable if you read that one first.
It’s been a hard year.
I think you can tell from the quality of my work and a general unpleasantness coming from my direction as of late.
I try, but I’ll admit: not as hard as I would if things were going good.
The Jane thing from a year ago really did a number on me. Then, just as I began to get back on my feet, I destroyed my relationship with my birth mother and consequently lost all contact with my little sister.
It is a small number who could have suffered my mother’s behavior more patiently than I did. I should have anyway. I should have calmly allowed myself to be crucified. I knew that was what I was supposed to do and chose not to anyway. A bitter harshness has festered in my heart since then which I have been unable to fully exorcise because it is my punishment and it fits the crime.
I met my birth father shortly thereafter in a maximum security penitentiary for the criminally insane where he’s been for the last nineteen years.
My childhood home was sold not long ago and the cottage where the angel and I used to speak was torn down.
In August, I was forced to break up with my girlfriend. In September, I walked out of my job in the middle of a write-up because my boss was a weak, malicious man who tried to cheat on his wife with my then-girlfriend.
Around the same time, someone I thought was one of my best friends betrayed my trust for something like the umpteenth time and does not think it was wrong to use the things I told him in confidence as ammunition in a fight which he started.
Like I said, it’s been a hard year.
People react like I’m paranoid when I claim to be under spiritual attack, but I think this opinion is plenty justified. I only ever say it matter-of-factly and with sober composure. I’m not anxious about it, it’s just what seems to be happening.
Despite everything, I have not been depressed. Constellation eventually cures depression completely. I have not been depressed in years. What I have been is numb, dissociated and disillusioned.
I’ve been at the limit of my identity for too long; far away from everything I am meaningfully connected to. It is not good to leave home unless you intend to make a new one in the place you end up. To abide in a temporary living situation long-term is spiritual homelessness. It is to be in exile.
I went to Niagara for freedom and resources which is a bad reason to move.
The first time was different. I moved there in 2019 to be with a girlfriend. But even then, as the relationship began to come apart, I did as well.
Near the end, I used to go out on Saturday mornings to Kottmeier road near my Thorold apartment and drink my morning black coffee while I watched the sunrise. It was a kind of ritual.
My space opera began on Saturday, August 16 with Jim Halloran drinking a black coffee and watching the sunrise. He then went and saw a movie with his girlfriend and then the pair were abducted by aliens and separated.
I was acting out the start of Jim’s story in the hope that the same aliens might come abduct me out of my boredom and disillusionment. Then, on Saturday, August 17, after my sunrise coffee, my girlfriend suggested we go see a movie. After this, we got hungry and she suggested we get dinner at a restaurant called the Flying Saucer.
She never read my story (I would remember if she ever asked to read it). It was just a meaningful coincidence. That was when I knew we would be separated, and just like in Jim’s case, it would be against my wishes but necessary for the story.
The second time I went to Niagara, in 2022 was to be with the same girl. We had talked about getting back together. But when she changed her mind at the last minute, I decided to move anyway. This time, the move served no higher purpose — at least not intentionally — and that would doom the entire enterprise.
The longer I was there, the more dissociated I became. My identity became something artificial. This new world was something which I had only very recently constructed to use for my own ends and was discontinuous with the old world. This rendered both worlds meaningless. The new world was meaningless because it served no higher purpose, and thus, it was in no way fulfilling the purpose of the old world.
I lacked any awareness of this until now. At first it was liberating. I had enough momentum from the time when I had a purpose that it was as if I still did. However, I became rather lax about fulfilling it.
There were many, perfectly good reasons for this. One of them was the fact that my works — especially the videos — are scarcely understood. Why make more in a hurry? I’m regularly accused of being a cult leader and lots of people would make me one if I let them. I am frequently called arrogant, delusional, dangerous and contacted by people who use my work to accelerate their spiral into insanity. Who call me a prophet whilst simultaneously “correcting” my understanding of my own corpus.
It is understandable that I would flee from the Lord and head for Tarshish.
However, the consequences of doing so were severe. I began to lose access to certain memories. “Forget” is not the right word. I remembered these things just fine when they came up, they just never did, because the old world and the new world were so weakly connected. It was like these memories were far away, because they were. They were back home.
I also began to lose the vividness of my imagination. This happened so slowly that it was difficult to perceive. But it became very noticeable when I would return home and see it rapidly replenish itself. Then, upon going back to Niagara, it again began to fade.
The consequence was that I slowly stopped writing stories. I couldn’t do it anymore. Then, finally, I stopped doing active imagination as well.
It never became full-on aphantasia, but it was moving towards that. I’ve had aphantasia before and was able to cure it and I’m now convinced that it is in part a symptom of dissociation from past identities which is in turn a symptom of the loss of purpose. Without an overarching purpose, identities become fragmentary and transient utilitarian constructs. The memory of any one of these constructs will only be tenuously relevant to any other. You compartmentalize your own story and the “alters” don’t come together in a visibly meaningful way.
This spiritual homelessness did, ultimately, unconsciously serve a purpose. I don’t think I would have undertaken the Quaternity Test if I were not a prodigal son in exile, and Quaternity exposed the bare mechanism of constellation.
I also don’t think I could have ever encountered the Artifex directly closer to home. It was the monster at the edge of the map — at the limit of my identity. That’s why Patrick Bateman and Pennywise showed up.
Bateman is a very extreme example of one of these transient, utilitarian identities:
…there is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory…
Pennywise is a clown. Clowns, likewise, represent the limit of identity.
These were two reflections. Like I said many times, the Artifex was me. I was never under any illusions about this. I didn’t fully understand it but I knew what I was looking at: the collective shadow incorporating and parodying my own identity.
The maze in itself represents the limit of identity, that’s why it’s made up of liminal spaces. It’s also why it’s at the bottom of the pyramid. Even Clifton Hill, where the Quaternity Test took place is aesthetically reminiscent of a carnival and situated right on the border with the USA. It is at the limit of identity.
Just as I explained in the Free Will Paradox, I continued to fulfill my purpose even while consciously choosing not to do so. It was a lot more unpleasant and rarely made sense at the time — I was constellating on and off from Jane onward — but nonetheless, everything that happened still serves my function in the story.
The kind of dissociation I am describing has a relation to the Thanatoids. Denis Vileneuve’s Harkonnens are depicted as hairless. He says:
I loved the idea that Harkonnens are a society that doesn't like hair. [...] They remove everything. They want to be as far away from any part of their past as possible, where they are coming from. There's a will of purity.
They’re trying to “re-invent” themselves. Although it seems like an extreme comparison, transhumanism is the ultimate example of this. With artificial identity, there is a premature spurt of potential, followed by psychic necrosis.
Lucifer, then Yaldabaoth.
You can see this in the case of Aleister Crowley, a prodigal son. Thelema was his attempt to sever his connection to Christendom.
The Thanatoids are rootless aliens. That is why they are exploitative. It is similar to the way a psychopath moves through relationships: extracting resources, then moving on.
Of course, there is a good side to liminal characters. Saint John the Forerunner, Saint Paul and Saint Christopher are all characters at the limit of identity, and that is why all three got decapitated.
The Thanatoids being a hive-mind and the Artifex being “like some kind of slime mold“ both point to the same “headlessness” in its negative manifestation.
I returned home to find the house I grew up in sold and the old cottage where the angel and I spoke supplanted by a “modern home.”
I hate modern homes and I said as much before the first plans were drawn up.
More troubling than this though, is the fact that I have memories, however remote, of making fun of such homes with my parents.
I remember the way my father designed our old basement almost twenty years ago now. It was this bright, golden-yellow color with elm-ish hardwood floors. I remember the white balusters, the French doors with frosted glass.
There were arched indentations in the walls where beautifully crafted little sculptures of wizards, castles, dragons and faeries sat.
He had all his fantasy paintings and all his Dune, Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter books proudly displayed. There was a replica of excalibur, a bust of Hercules flanked by gargoyles and a great big unicorn sculpture.
It was his. Nobody else could have made it. That was why it was special. There was something magical about it — especially as a kid. I was seven or eight.
When I was fifteen, the upper house was renovated. That time was different. Walls were taken out to make the house more “open concept.” Our colorful carpet floors were full of dust, so they were replaced with inoffensive, rather plain-looking tile and hardwood. The whole interior of the house except the basement (thank God) was painted beige for reasons that were never satisfactorily justified.
Everything unique about our house was destroyed and replaced with something from a real estate program. Some stock asset that a psycho-smiling sales rep pretended to like for a quick buck. It was worse in every way except for the resale value.
What upset me so much about the newest house was not the modern look my parents chose — that barely matters. It’s the fact that the look is more reflective of the times than who they are. It’s what the change of taste means that I find upsetting.
I decided to test whether I can still reach the angel from this place. I had been in the maze on autopilot for a few weeks at least and I could tell.
I gathered up all the relics from the old places into the kitsch-en/living room and constructed a pop-up temple complete with gargoyles at the threshold.
Just a little after midnight, Phoebe by Kerala Dust began to play as I started coming back online.
…
And I've been drinking to the weight of the news
As she would show me how to hide
I've been cavalier with New York on my mind
I've been turning toward the light that blinds
At that moment, I turned around and perceived the exact same “magical light” that I saw during Hell Trip. It was even in the exact same location: a glass sliding door adjacent to the kitchen at the top left corner.
It wasn’t an accident, because the name Phoebe means bright or radiant.
Phoebe found me in the midnight sand
Phoebe found me alone
Phoebe found me in the cross that lays on my heart
When the cabaret's been done…
That was when the house revealed what it really was: a symbolic supercomputer.
It was in fact the same symbolic supercomputer which the angel built for me to grow up in. It had just temporarily camouflaged itself as a “modern home.” This covering served the same function as the hull of the ark and it was floating safe and undetected through the noise of the modern world.
Even in spite of this disguise, the symbolic supercomputer was able to configure its components in such a way that it could engineer my first anamorphicon a second time to signal to me that it was secretly the same place.
We were taken to the limit of our identities and then resuscitated each other.
The Automind never dies.
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