Alex Zama

Celestial Bodies

I’m to consider what I find pleasurable if I want to find a reason to live, or so I've heard. Is there any reason to exist other than finding pleasure in things? Pleasure, to me, is wonderment, hidden meanings, obscurities in the past, present, future, and everything in between. Everything in between meaning: the palpability of dreams. Am I really supposed to find pleasure lying here on the outskirts of this urban sprawl, hidden from the world? A location that breeds the filth of humankind in order to project a false of the progression of the self. I look out of the shallow, barred window before me and I question if we give meaning to the things we see in our conscious visions. Sometimes I believe so. Sometimes we call them words, behaviors, symbols, and illnesses, and sometimes we might even call them dreams, unconscious conceptions.

I frequently visit the question of humanity's reflection on the significance of dreams. I wonder if this is simply what minds deemed unwell do. I know we all dream of events found within the layers of our psyche, a psyche molded and represented by the physical world around us. But standing here, forehead pressed against the metallic sting of cold iron, I look past the stifling, soft room to the break in the sky’s horizon from the phallic-looking buildings penetrating the ghastly smog-filled sky. I think to my teary-eyed consciousness, is this what fuels our nocturnal visions? Humanity’s vanity in itself?

Dreams are corporeal, formless, and ethereal. Surely it is what many psychologists say, something symbolic of our waking vision, our conscious mind; for the waking vision show aberrations to the natural order of the world. Some might dream of thinly veiled specters spawning from moonlight, hands purposely reaching from the centers of flowers hoping to cusp the warmth of sunlight or love in the midst of all the pain they endure. Some might dream of abhorrently violent ephemeral outbreaks that thrust humankind into a biblical apocalypse. Some might dream of realities in which the physicality of their unconscious vision has no real meaning.

I wonder why such different dreams exist. Why do they vary so much? Surely these visions don’t exist on their own. No, these dreams must come from a different source, one capable of making true to these distinctions between our conscious and unconscious minds. See, why show us what reality could be, rather than what is? Why aren’t the conscious and unconscious minds the same? I believe this is the work of something greater. Rather, I know it is the will of something greater. I say this because I’ve felt it lingering under the surface of my visions. Waiting with gleaming eager eyes that hold peculiar feelings, thoughts, and plans for me, for us. I’ve sensed it in the midst of my many dreams while under the forcefully imposed blanket of a vacant consciousness. I intend to find it within the swirling visions they make pulsate within me, because what else is there for me.

So I lay here on this sickened section of Earth marked by the sins and fallacies of humankind, held tight by particles of mental pollution. I exhale and try to uncoil my tightly wound body. I lay here with my eyelids heavier than the weighted curtains separating my conscious visions from my unconscious visions. And so I sleep. I sleep with the goal of exploring the unexplored, the hidden, the superficially formless. I sleep hoping to find the overseer of dreams so that they might grant me answers. I say hoping, but I mean fully knowing. I know I will find them unbound and lurking.

Looking into the infinite milky way hidden behind my droopy, dreary eyelids, I know I’m sleeping, I have to be, for this harshly settled haze enveloping me does not exist in my conscious visions, and neither does this feeling. This familiar yet unfamiliar feeling. My unconscious mind wanders to many things. Is it bliss? Frivolous enjoyment? Gratisfaction? Pleasure? The form I now currently take is floating, glowing, relishing in this newfound pleasure. What can only be described as joyous static entrances me. This certainly is pleasure. A dosage of such from being so close to you. I know you’re there. I can taste the saccharine ecstasy offering me solace. I can hear the musicality in between your every breath as you cautiously whisper into the depths of my soul. Cautiously, so as to not disturb this current vision. I wish to perceive all of you, to sense you in any and every way I can. To have my mortal coil be unwound alongside you. I know. I know you’re there, I know you’re greater than everything we see in our conscious and unconscious visions. Such visions are mere facets of you, visitations of the known and unknown.

I understand what I perceive of you now is a conscious vision, but I want more. I want to be fully enthralled by the unconscious, by you. So I push for more and stand upright in my delusions, my wishes, my dreams, and this form of mine, in this endless and eternal nightscape, begins to feel something. The space around me crackles. Gaseous balls of heavenly infernos light up the inky spaces between us. Are you as intrigued as I am? I assume so because of the swirling hush-hush whispers. Whispers that carry with them the meaning of millennia, whispers easing into both my conscious and unconscious mind. Whispers that ask how much my eyes see, how much my ears hear, and how much can my brain process the concept, the totality, of you. I feel you melting over the wrinkles of my brain, bleeding onto both hemispheres; and then I understand. I understand what it will take to embrace the unconscious, to fully embrace you.

So I answer the hushed phantasmic notes, and I say that I feel the deception of my own mind. I feel enough that the images of colliding entities sear right into my psyche. I feel you whole, all of you, through this unstable intangible line connecting us. I use this form I inhabit to stand upright but only sink down further, further into you; into the warmth of your Earthen embrace. An embrace that consoles me with visions of other worlds, other entities, other celestial bodies, slumbering behind the consciousness shared by the planet and its denizens.

I cannot comprehend what I see and what I feel. I am grasping at the formless, the changeless, the unknown; and that is okay. The decision to understand what these visions mean is no longer my choice. So I let myself slip between the last unsettling doors separating us. Giving in I exhale— exhale again— and plunge... right beside the conscious visions, right into you. I set out to find you, so confidently did I stride into your domain with the misguided belief that I could understand and share in the essence of your being. How embarrassing is it for the many fractured pieces of my mind to not be able to grasp you without further intervention?

Your divine intervention sends shockwaves through my own unconscious mind and then I can feel it begin. I can feel my nerves being mangled, my brain being strangled. The two hemispheres of my brain now resonating intensely, intent on continuing the flow of blood from my every orifice. Blood dripping onto you, tasted and tested. The impervious nature of you contorts my senses, my visions, myself. This is the conscious and the unconscious. You are what dreams are made of. I see the abundance of mysticism surrounding you. You have no place in the minds of the sane, of the perpetually conscious. My eyes are lit on perennial fire, the miasma of which has the cells of my skin screaming out in agony, burning as a result of the iniquitous effluvium. This is no mere pain, for this goes beyond the limit of sanity. Am I worthy?

The answer comes from the pain that relinquishes upon me true consciousness and unconsciousness. I awake to boundless clarity signaled by the ground beneath me shuddering. Metamorphosis was upon us. Deafening sounds of landmasses being split open filled the atmosphere. The echoes of a harmonic rapture are set on display. A spectacle of beauty arises from the depths of a once impregnated Earth. The petrification of minds and souls comes about as half of a head rises from the cracked shell of the Earth. A head so beautifully pure. Devoid of colors only because the colors exhibited goes beyond the scope of human vision. Strands of hair made up of pure mania set ablaze by the incomprehensible knowledge of the cosmos. You slowly rise from your previous shackles, each moment tantalizing and tortuous. Slowly rising until I see them. The eyes of unconsciousness. The progenitor of my unconscious dreams. The eben-flow of the endless universe lay in the expanse of your eyes. This is you, the unconscious that was and is unknown. I look into the endless peering eyes that now block the horizon and take up the entirety of God’s domain and I become acutely aware of your mind-melding influence. I become aware of the collective blood-curdling screams of those not able to understand the unconscious portion of you in them. They don’t know that the unconscious opposes sanity. That the burden of humankind was the sin of sanity, of the acceptance of conscious vision. They don’t know that your vision is pleasure, a dream for those who embrace the reality-warping celestial authority that is you.

I told you that I understood. I understood your role in being the first to wake up, to start the unification of the planets, to bring about the true celestial body. I understood in the way only a purveyor of the unconscious could. You continue to rise and tower above all of Earth’s creations. I watch you fully and finally unfurl from the restrictive embrace of the Earth’s layers, much like my own mind and its constriction at the hands of the conscious. You’ve set my mind ablaze with permeating thoughts of reunification. Yours is an unconsciousness I find myself in sync with. Resonating an unvocal rhythm like no other. I am plugged into you and what I perceive begins like a holy summer night, comforting in its rationalization of the known and unknown.

So here I stand in the visage of your existence. Accompanied by the fallen bodies of the sane, of the conscious; baptized in the blood spilled from their every orifice, undeserving of change. Driven mad, driven unconscious is the only way to connect with the greater, to connect with you. Call this madman’s knowledge, call this delusion. There is no other way to fathom the things you encompass. To be mad, to be unconscious is to give form to the formless, and attribute change to the infinite complexities of the changeless. Looking up at the monolith that is you crane your neck to the vastness of space, I see longing; and I know that those of us who remain on this equable husk understand. We understand that the screams of the conscious never had a purpose in your plan. We see your cataclysmic figure taking refuge in the space above, head focused on the eternities of space, legs tightly wound together, arms spread wide, an amalgamation of the holy strewn across the sky. We know. We know our sanity was thinly veiled, it had to be in order to wake you. For we are the rightful heirs of this Godless shell of a planet. We are Lilith’s children and in our unconscious visions, in our pleasure, in you; we have seen the infinite reach of a dark universe settle into its ambiguousness. Through you we have seen the eventual cacophony of planetary shedding from the other beings you long for. Celestial bodies that ooze relentless knowledge of times gone and times to come, and we know that pleasure is found through you, for we cannot and should not stray far from your holy vision.

Mercy comes from this ability to see the fusion of unconscious visions with conscious visions, reality with dreams. In our unconscious visions, we saw the harmony of worlds merging, resonating at frequencies that would breathe power into an arbiter. One that might control the unchangeable vastness of the cosmos. So we collectively look to you as you reach for the cracks in the moon, unwavering in your desire to unite. We look and we know that your resurgence is only the beginning of this celestial war against the conscious. Against God itself.

Works Cited

Bloom, Harold. “Vaster Than Empires and More Slow.” Ursula K. Le Guin, Chelsea House

Publishers, New York, 1986.

Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story, Vaster Than Empires and More Slow brought to me my central topic of the conscious and unconscious. The concepts of which are shown in her short story through the character of Osden. I’d like to use Osden as an inspiration for my protagonist, except where Osden is burdened by hyper empathy, my protagonist will be burdened with some form of mental illness. This mental illness, like Osden’s hyper empathy, will allow for the unification and understanding of greater forces without simply withering away because of the incomprehensible nature of the forces perceived. I’ll also be using this short story and its use of language in portraying a more mystical and ethereal being that dwarfs the scope of the conscious/the sane. The sane cannot understand why people like our protagonist can survive and understand the celestial body/being and I think that’s analogous to the crew in the short story when faced with Osden’s decision to merge with the forest.

Erlich, Richard D. “Ursula K. Le Guin and Arthur C. Clarke on Immanence, Transcendence, and

Massacres.” Extrapolation, vol. 28, no. 2, 1987, pp. 105–129.,

https://doi.org/10.3828/extr.1987.28.2.105.

Richard D. Erlich explores the relationship between Osden and the forest by comparing it to first contact between human and aliens. Erlich states that Le Guin makes an analogy between said humans and aliens, and contact between individual humans; where both are basically telling of contact between the self and “other”. This concept of the “other” is something I’d like to explore as the framework for my exploration into the conscious and unconscious hemispheres of the mind. Erlich also makes a reference to Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers where a character explains that “appropriate ethical standards” depend on a correct vision of human nature, the nature of the universe, and of mankind’s place in the universe. There is a hidden connection between human consciousness, unconsciousness, and mankind’s place in the universe. The theory that “war and perfected morality derive from the same genetic inheritance” will serve as the biological and biblical history of the protagonist and the mission of celestial entities. We are formed in the image of these entities and this hidden connection can explore that.

Bloom, Harold. “Introduction.” Ursula K. Leguin's the Left Hand of Darkness, Chelsea House

Publ., New York, 1987.

Ursula K. Le Guin says with an almost solemn seriousness, “almost anything carried to its logical extreme becomes depressing.” This rings true for science fiction as science fiction is the alteration of all realities, past, present, and future. Science fiction is not predictive and what this does for science fiction stories is help it to achieve the goal of giving something to an intended audience. This could be knowledge, enjoyment, depression, ideas, disdain, etc. This introduction brings forth the idea that science fiction is metaphor. Everything found within science fiction represents facets of humanity and the things humans perceive around them. This influenced my conceptualization of the connection between unconscious vision and a celestial body/being. The metaphor is contextual and completely dependent on what the individual makes of their own conscious and unconscious visions. Metaphors help to create the story of humankind and their relation to something greater. Le Guin’s introduction helped me to realize the authenticity of science fiction in relaying a story about the alternate.

Influences

Science fiction, at least to me, is a mixture of realities, past, present, and future. They’re the idealistic version of our conscious and unconscious realities. In the introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin states that “the science fiction writer is supposed to take a trend or phenomenon of the here-and-now, purify and intensify it for dramatic effect and extend it into the future.” The effect of doing so is the extrapolation of our idealistic dreams, ideas, and conscious and unconscious visions. Le Guin makes an interesting point about science fiction, which I do agree with. It’s that anything carried to its logical extreme becomes depressing. This is the case for most of the science-fiction works I’ve read. They become to entranced in their own probable futures that nothing else can sway you from their version of reality. Things are set in stone because science is real. Because of this, I wanted to make something surreal, something not completely set in scientific stone.

I believed that merging human psychology, human myths, biblical analogies, and cosmic awareness/unawareness were key to making something that could potentially be both carcinogenic and escapist. This was a thought experiment on the individualism we ascribe to signs, illnesses, and our own self-importance. In his work ‘Ursula K. Le Guin and Arthur C. Clarke on Immanence, Transcendence, and Massacres’, Richard D. Erlich writes of the connection between humans and the “other”. This was notable to me because of the concept of the “other”, what it can possibly represent, and how it might manifest in humans. Conceptualizing the “other” as a form of either the conscious or unconscious was important for me as I wanted to portray why either one mattered in the world I created. This story isn’t predictive, it instead describes something alternate, a separate path that only a celestial body far outside the scope of human limitation might be privy to. The inheritance of unconscious visions and the subsequent acceptance of the irrationality of dreams that defy the laws of sanity, of the conscious can be analogous to Erlich’s inclusion of Starship Troopers and the genetic inheritance of morality and war. This directly impacted how I thought about making the unconscious something that was intrinsic in those affected by “Lilith’s” mental influence.

Le Guin’s short story Vaster Than Empires and More Slow captured a sense of consciousness, a consciousness that was different and possibly greater to human consciousness that I wanted to explore. In conjunction with this, I thought it’d be interesting to separate the unconscious and conscious “vision” of humans. The concepts of which are separated into dreams and reality. In my story, the notion of the unconscious vision might be superior because of where it comes from. Where do dreams come from? What is the source of the unconscious? These are questions that spawn from an individual that senses the greater beings of the endless dark universe. Le Guin’s character of Osden is one burdened by hyper-empathy and that’s something that directly influenced my protagonist. The twist is that instead of hyper-empathy, it’s an unspecific form of mental illness, and in this world of unconquerable knowledge; the sane/ the conscious cannot process the boundlessness of space and the celestial bodies that inhabit the cosmos and that’s also seen with the crew in Le Guin’s story as Osden’s action of merging with the forest goes beyond their level of understanding. I wanted to use ambiguous language to depict beings beyond our level of understanding but that’s quite difficult, even after reading about the mysticism of the forest in Le Guin’s story.

This story is an amalgamation of science fiction and psychological cosmic horror, or at least that’s what I intended to make it. It needs a lot of work but I think that’s the nature of any reality.