Pattern Recognition - I
It starts with love and it goes this way -- It's a circle twisted through four dimensions. It's a sphere warped in time. It's a story I wrote about 20 years ago. Sitting in front of my first macintosh, on a dialup BBS called "The Boardroom". My first internet journey, before the internet. It was bits over a modem and I couldn't sleep. I'm like you. We don't sleep.
We're made to be part of this world all the time. Dreams are for infants. Dreamers are wishes for horses. Daylight is for adults. Night is for lovers. Night is smooth on the skin. Night is cool on the eyes. Inside the overheads pour it in so fast so deep you have to squint to keep it out.
The story was an add-on. Each day, each person in the writer's group would write a section, parts contributing to the whole. Each day I'd dial in and see the chain grow by another six links. Five links, then mine. The idea was that all of us were in a diner in New Jersey, sitting on the harsh red seats, cracked vinyl, linoleum tabletops, googie patterns embedded in the hard aluminum-rimmed plastic. Melmac cup and saucer in front of me. Dark black brown liquid. The surface vibrating in circular ripples, disturbs a cluster of bubbles when one of us moves.
Look here. This way each story is a circle. I am sitting in the spare bedroom that will be our child's when she is born. I am illuminated by a nine-inch black and white phospor screen. Everything me is focused in that ovoid rectangle. Those characters that mean I have always lived. The words that say I have known you a thousand times. I have known you since meteors collided and lit the sun. I was Adam. I was the snake in the apple tree. I was a grain of sand on the first beach in the shadow of Olympus Mons.
You were the ocean that would not be still. You were the clouds that had to pass. You were Joan at the stake, you were Florence among the gut shot you were the cold river that took us down when the raft disintegrated against the stones.
This is my contribution. This is my coffee in my melmac cup. This is my waiteress with smeared lipstick and the crooked dress she has to smooth down when she comes out front. This is my pepper shaker. Here, this mound of salt could be anything. Make it.
With the tip of your finger you disturb the small white pyramid. Force a pattern through it. A Mayan snake. The Toltec eagle. Now the Aztec serpent.
I say, "What's that?" knowing you didn't mean anything.
You say, "Teoyaomqui, Aztec god of dead warriors. Thor's Valhalla to the Yaqui. Nothing dies, not even us. Especially not us."
I say, "What? You just made that up." But I don't believe it because love is a pattern. It's a circle. It's the mystery reborn over and over. Like the day. Like the clouds that will not be still yet always return. Like the smooth blue evening, lovers in the darkness create life again. And so there would be no day were we not in love.
"...you want?" I say.
"To be loved the way she was in that story."
"Which?"
You say, "You know," with your eyes. You say, "This," with your finger tips. You say, "Now," with your tongue tastes like salt on the table a pyramid toppled by the will to create the lines on the plain at Nazca, the Hopi Kachina, the Sun god of the Sioux nation.
And all of life exists to recognize the pattern.
Each day growing by six paragraphs that form a circle through war and rage and sex and death to this table again.
I love you.
I'm spending every day at work, working hard, absorbing myself so I can sleep at night. Filling my mind with equations and methods. Code and member variables. Object oriented, all, so I don't despair for wanting you. Ten thousand years I wanted you so much it hurts me to keep my eyes open. Four days so hard to keep from dreaming. Desire scares me. Fear of fire. Fear of the dark I will not yield.
Why has this happened to me? Thousands of times as if I have always been. You draw a snake in the white pyramid, the ouroboros.
"It eats it's tail," she says and then the modem cuts out and I'm alone in the dark with a disconnected macintosh. In 3 months our kid will be born.
How will I afford it? What will happen to me?
I add my paragraph.
What will happen to us? What will happen? Or maybe I already know.
And I add my paragraph.
The snake devours its tail. The lights go out. The sun comes up and my paragraph has been read and appended to.
While the earth makes a four dimensional circle in space time. It's a sphere. As far as you can go in any direction, you come back to this life, this here now.
I wrote twenty years ago, "It's a circle. It's patterned. Love is intelligently designed evolution. Recognize."
Love is listening to you breathe in the night so cool like clouds reflected in the water, the river that crushed the rafts and went on as if we were never there.
Yet I am.
You are.
Because I so want it.