Dear Metapsychonauts,
Since our last communiqué, something has quickened, it seems to me. The sleeper is stirring, the dream is destabilizing, the fog of time is fizzling, deliquescing, scintillating with the echoes of a forgotten eternity. Heaven and earth are flirting again at the edges of the known.
Amid the agony of the general chaos, in all its terrible beauty, we look to the future, we look to the past, we look within, we look wherever we suspect we might find what we think we’ve lost—a sense of hope, perhaps, a feeling of all-rightness.
As the global techno-fascist takeover powers on, as the genocide proceeds according to the war gods’ inexorable schedule, as the protests and sanctions and UN meetings extract some minor concessions, inflict some irritating inconveniences, it might occur to one that there is a message in the madness.
Here, come close, it says. Who can blame anyone for trying to make things right? Have you changed your life lately? Is today your best day ever? Your soul has many questions for you, many imperatives, and many topics on which it prefers to stay silent. What does your soul say you should do or not do? What is it calling, imploring perhaps, to your attention?
“WHERE REASONING ENDS, AWARENESS BEGINS,” writes Sandesh Shrestha in his paradoxically hyper-rational takedown of rationalism and explosion of the limits of the mental mode of consciousness, “Paradox of Paradox: A Philosophical Inquiry Into Free Will, Prediction, and Determinism.”
I remember back when very smart people would debate: Do we human beings have free will or not? I had thought the most vocal of these seemingly indefatigable interlocutors ended up taking a lot of mushrooms and deciding it just wasn’t worth discussing anymore. I didn’t realize that in our age of AI-accelerated surveillance capitalism the ability to forecast human behavior—whether in the domain of dissidence prevention or consumption optimization—is very much alive indeed.
Somehow Shrestha manages to re-ground the debate in personal anecdote and existential inquiry, through which he runs his own intellectual algorithms to come to his conclusion at the edge of the infinite. By exhausting every reasonable possibility, a completely unreasonable possibility opens up, which is neither A, B, C, D, Q, X, Y, or Z; neither this nor that, but a little bit of all of the above and then some.
Nolo Segundo, in “The Day I Remembered My Soul,” takes a different tack. When you start out your young adult life as a suicidal existential atheist, there’s pretty much only a couple of ways things can turn out for you—it’s ultimate, absolute nothingness or, well, something after all…
Segundo’s is a personal story, less an intellectual inquiry. More so, it’s a spiritual testimony—take it or leave it—but here is yet another recounting of a major glitch in the matrix in the shape of a human being who more than glimpsed the “other side.”
And then there’s the latest installment of our Acousmatic Crossings music series, ominously titled “Trance of the Invisible Storm,” which presents an EP-length, two-track composition by Wukir Suryadi, “Camouflage Trance.” Here’s how editor extraordinaire, Michael Eisenberg, described the piece on social media:
“I first thought of these pieces as a departure from the more electronically manipulated, classically defined ‘Acousmatic’ works that we have presented so far but, I’ve since walked that opinion back a bit. Formally, the music can be broken down into parts produced by somewhat identifiable sound sources. For instance, the listener can marvel, while at the same time become completely befuddled by the non standard and complex polyrhythmic base layer as being produced from a percussive instrument. Same with the highly charged, Hendrix meets Derek Bailey electric hellscape that inhabits the spaces above as a guitar-like stringed instrument. However, taking the pieces as a whole, a single entity—the alien-ness comes through and, at least for me, it’s one that is imbued with a dark enigma that builds in its menace, breaking out of a cocoon into a full blown sinister energy.”
I would just add, I think the “electric hellscape” and “sinister energy” Michael is talking about is not “evil,” but purely ecstatic, I would even say joyful, because it is liberated. I actually felt moved to dance to this music, which is not usually how I respond to the acousmatic. I would also highly recommend reading Michael’s full evocation of this composition, which is poetry itself.
All that said, it is time for the customary pitch to you, dear reader and listener, to become a patron of our journal. This is a labor of love, but it is not free to produce, so if you value the cultural nexus we’re conjuring here, please support it if you can.
It’s true, there are countless causes and media platforms and creative projects vying for your attention that you may wish to support. I know many of them are worthy—but I submit that what we’re brewing here is a rare combination of spiritual artistry that is especially worth supporting in a time when the line between waking and perishing is paradoxical at best.
A big thank you to our current patrons, especially including Jenny Gillespie Mason, who also happens to be a poet and musician and has just released a new album of ambient music called “Dream Journal”—check it out!
And lastly, if anything in our journal has moved you, or you wish to reply to this email, please take a moment to reach out and share your thoughts in our forum at Infinite Conversations. The writers and artists really appreciate your engagement with their work—and so do I!
Soulfully yours,
Marco V Morelli
Editor-in-Chief, Metapsychosis journal
Co-Creator, Cosmos Co-op
