Matthew Livezey Whitehurst
“Do you dream in color?”
“I don’t really notice it. So, I guess not?”
“I’m pretty sure I dream in color. I feel like color is important to me.”
“You sure you aren’t adding in the detail later?”
“I’m sure.”
“How do you know you’re not lying to yourself? Memory is a fickle thing.”
“I remember details from my dreams, and details include colors whether I want them or not. So I just assume that I dream in color.”
“Interesting. I would say that I don’t.”
“Did you watch black and white television as a kid?”
“Yes, sometimes, but I don’t see how that’s related.”
“I watched color television growing up. Especially before falling asleep.”
“Are you saying television affects how we perceive our dreams?”
“Maybe.”
“Is a novel in color?”
“No. But my imagination is.”
“Mine is too. But why do I dream without color?”
“I don’t know.”
“I didn’t have a television growing up.”
“Oh… well.”
I woke up in the middle of a dream where I was an architect reviewing some plans for a building I didn’t want to construct. As though there was a gun trained on me from a distance and I had nothing other than the fear of dying. But I realized as I moved through each room, checking the dimensions on the blueprint and making sure they matched the real thing, that the walls were expanding. Every time I moved on to another room and circled back to double-check the previous room, the dimensions would be all wrong. It was frustrating. I was worried that someone would be upset if I couldn’t get these dimensions straight, but there was nothing I could do about the place. I would run outside and check the lengths along the building, or see it bulging in places where it shouldn’t, but… it wasn’t. The place looked exactly how it should be from the outside.
It made me worry about what happens when we build more of these things. I worry about the constant filling up of space in place. And between space, there is more space. Metric spaces filled with semi-metric spaces filled with the very material of existence, everything inside itself. Things would seemingly keep getting bigger and bigger, and if we were not careful we could get lost.
What happens when our places become elaborate constructions? So full of themselves?
They become redundant.
A place of many places. A place within a place within a place.
“Aerospace itself is not inherently dangerous. But to an even greater degree than the ocean, it is terribly unforgiving of any stupidity, inebriation, or lack-ness… laxness? Is that the word?”
—Captain C. D. Snutts, a wasted American astronaut giving a speech to the students at the Basque Culinary Center, who was originally there to watch his daughter graduate
There are all of these places to sit but only two people live here. It’s two floors of a house with about six rooms on each floor. Every room is furnished as though people would occupy that space enough to use it. All the white walls are lined with generations of family photos. Coasters on every coffee table and decorative drapes atop cabinets and rolling tea carts. There are a few couches throughout the house, several club chairs, and a wingback chair. Outside is a private garden complete with a pool. Garden benches woven in wood and lawn chairs are placed generously around the poolside. In the source of the garden is a patio table with a matching chair set; off-white canvas.
It should be relaxing. But the emptiness becomes a place in and of itself.
The two people who live here, spend most of their days working away from home. In their eyes, it’s a place to retreat after work and throw expensive parties. In the eyes of the Universe, it is liminality on exhibit in a museum. Everything sits orderly and defined, objects sitting with their respective purposes. Often finding themselves inactive even by the very nature of their design. There’s something uncanny about a place built for people who are rarely seen. A place too big to call home. A place in danger of dilating.
“What separates the winners from the losers is how a person reacts to being a loser as opposed to being a winner. Losers lose, winners win—now I’m not saying he’s a bad guy, I’m just saying that he’s a sore loser and needs to learn some respect—believe me. I met him in Palm Beach, best mojitos in the Universe I swear—”
—Reginald Gump, 69th President of the United States of America rambling to his wardrobe instead of The Cabinet
At a certain point, you start to realize the place we designate as outside is inside. You are inside so many things. The totality of everything in existence is easily described as an ever-growing labyrinth. A maze that is vertical, diagonal, horizontal, and dispersed. The sky outside is inside of space. Space is inside itself or something else. The rooms are inside of a house. Cabinets inside of rooms. And tiny treasures, nesting egg objects, trinkets, and tchotchkes. Atoms inside of objects. Electrons and quarks inside of atoms. There doesn’t seem to be anything observable inside of electrons and quarks, but something somewhere seems to imagine their arrangement just fine. Or rather they’ve placed themselves where they are autonomously. Scattered across the universe becoming atoms, building objects, hiding inside of coffers sat in cabinets inside of the rooms of a house, one which sits inside a street, among a forest inside the sky and its winds, on a planet spiraling around a star, jumbled in scattered galaxies and dust, the miasma and particles of gas that form vibrant interstellar clouds, and the vast darkness seeping into more, an ever-encroaching ever-dispersing shadow of infinity.
“This is no longer about rational amusement. This—this is transcendence!”
—Ibis Feldm’n, Translocutor of the Kaleidoscopic Astrolabe mumbling to himself while tinkering with a particle collider beneath a Burger Queen in New New Texas
Out of coincidence and for no obvious reason, Ibis was startled by a glimpse of a shadow that shouldn’t be there——A particle collider misfires by somehow meeting and pushing gravitational forces into each other and bouncing back into the machine. The circuits and piping throughout the system fries and begins to melt. The center of the gravitational pull spirals open a ripping hole of space-time. It appears as negative space, lack of things, a blind spot. A gaping hole rapidly growing in size and warping everything around it. There doesn’t appear to be any destruction other than all nearby objects bending inwards, folding inside out as they stretch elongated toward the center of the hole, apparently evaporating completely.
“—a vowel in my name evaporated. I’m starting to feel a strange sensation coursing through my—wait, what am I saying—”
If you travel so deep into the quark or the electron and see nothing, you should keep going and look harder. Go deeper into the void of nothing, it opens up inside of them–the blackness is vast and spacious. If you travel deep enough, the entrance you came in from will be but a distant star, and closer to the center of this pocketed universe, is a globular cluster. Traveling deeper into the cluster you’ll notice something familiar — expanses of galaxies and dust bodies spiraling in their vivid patterns. Among these are planets born, much like the one we’re on now. In fact, it may even be the same exact place, just inside itself. And at some point or another, the heavenly bodies get too close to each other and need to breathe by expanding trajectories outwards, outstretched to their celestial limits. That they should withdraw their breath and breathe inwards, repeating their motions, in and out, allowing the quarks and electrons to dance and thrive. Building what we know, building what they know. Mimicry all the way through.
“The line between madness and genius is thin and… kinda sexy.”
—Richard Queen, writer for “That” on TOS Network in an interview
The Kaleidoscopic Astrolabe isn’t only a tool or artifact. Its application isn’t only to observe and map the stars and the adjacent dimensions. It’s a carefully constructed second moon in orbit of our planet. It adds to the tidal time tables and has been useful for irrigation. Its trajectory during the apogees inspires a light to glint through the apparatus and stimulate the internal mechanism. Its radiance spins the dials to align with a particular location, in this case, randomized and never repeated and mimicking its observed celestial positions. When the Astrolabe cools down, the information is transcribed by the Observers. And then the location is added to the archives.
The Kaleidoscopic Astrolabe is a globe structure with a tower, The Observatory, located on its horizontal axis. It houses the scholars and the Observers, and any visitors.
There are three shells to the lunar body of the Astrolabe itself, the tower only exists on the outer shell and on the quadrant facing Earth. Most of the mechanism spins on the inner two rungs. The kaleidoscopic observations parallel any anomalies in areas of accumulated Dark Matter, which reflect passages to other dimensions or disruptions in space that could potentially cause rapid physical decay or entropy material. The anomalies are impossible to see correctly, entirely, but to the naked eye, it appears as close to a broken mirror attempting to piece itself back together.
The Astrolabe has already mapped out the local galaxy and millions of nearby ones. Including ancient clusters in adjacent universes. Because of it, we can begin to observe the patterns of Dark Matter and find out where it comes from and where it is going.
“I think we should always mind the bears that bring entropy into our lives.”
—Nolan Tusk, CEO of Neurajail and PayMeBuddy
“I used to be terrified of being turned to stone by Medusa. Like what if when I’m out here in the Evergreen State forest, I stumble across a dilapidated structure and decide to explore it just to find a quick slithering creature with snakes for hair screeching at me and suddenly I am stone and there is nothing I can do about it. I figured it was a reasonable five percent chance, a rare possibility but a possibility nonetheless. Around this time, I also believed I should definitely never take a boat out into the North Atlantic Ocean. That big scary triangle is out there, man. That’s a whole other can of worms to open on another day.”
“… So was that a no to the rock climbing invitation?”
“No, sure I’ll go, when is it?”
“I can always invite you some other time?”
“Yeah, I’d rather go bowling. Although, now that I think about it. Didn’t you hear about how sometimes the eggs inside of the bowling balls hatch and there’s snakes that can bite you and when that happens you—”
There’s what one could call a “snaking path” that requires a set of bodily motions and rhythm in order to fully commit to traveling it. It’s an astral gateway that leads from Earth to what we only know as “The Platform.” The Kaleidoscopic Astrolabe seems to allow for this to occur. The discovery of this incident derived from mapping out every possible space in the Universe and its pocketed dimensions.
For the gateway to be accessed, the traveler must rearrange their intestines into a double helix, keep an elongated spinal posture, and be fully naked during transit. The path requires taking slow steps along the Astoria Riverwalk in Oregon, traveling Eastwards for as long as possible until you are affected by Dark Matter (or more accurately, until the Dark Matter finds you); the form of the material appears to be nothing but a blink of an eye. The location you should be carried to is walking Eastward along the coast of Golden Horn Island in Egypt. You must continue keeping the posture and pacing of forty-two more steps — on the forty-second one — you will blink and be walking along The Platform.
The Platform is sentient, but unresponsive to us. A strange new creature. To us, it appears to be the floor of a warehouse, but it is suspended in space and moving as though it were a space vessel. It has no propellers, no obvious sign of entrance, or even dimension. It is simply a flattened shape that is solid and moves with a kind of confident intention.
“You said my arrogance is disguised as confidence? Please. I’ve been told throughout my career that I have a cromulent vocabulary. It truly embiggens my ego.”
— I. M. Goddard, Author of “Hercules Sighed” and “The Water Fountain” during an open-mic poetry memorial for the great late author, Maine Winwins
I started writing a blog about the intentions of animals. I was trying to speculate on whether or not some animals decide things. So many things we humans do must confuse the hell out of animals. Like every time I do push-ups at home, my dog tries to interfere and I can’t tell if he’s trying to save me or thinks I’m playing by myself and wants to join in on the fun. It’s obvious to tell that my dog makes choices, when I see him walk into the room and pause for a moment and then meander over to the curtains shows me he deliberately walked over there but for what reason I will never know. I also wonder if maybe he made a choice but was unaware of making the choice, as though there’s still one more level of consciousness to achieve before self-recognition. But I see him see himself in the mirror and two things goes on in my mind; either “he sees another dog and doesn’t care,” or “he sees himself and doesn’t care.” I somehow feel like it’s a little bit of both. I wish he’d just learn how to speak English and say exactly what’s on his mind. Actually, nevermind, that might get really annoying quick. I should ask my readers this, is it bad…no…is it IMMORAL… to wish for… your… pet… to speak but then… take it back because… you think… it might… get… annoying?
“Ah… shit balls.”
—Spaniel Cocker, walking down the basement stairs of a Burger Queen in New New Texas just in time to witness his friend breaking a particle collider
A Pole and an American having kawa in Kraków:
“Kraby staną się ludźmi. Albo ludzie staną się krabami.”
“No.”
“Tak. Widzę to w przyszłości.”
“No, it’s not true. Crabs should just be crabs.”
“W końcu i tak staniesz się krabem.”
“Impossible…”
“Nie.”
“Well, I suppose logic is overrated. It could be…”
“…Zgadzam się.”
A poem from the perspective of a moth:
“BRIGHT WHITE LIIIIIGHT,
I FOUND GOD OH GOD I FOUND GOD OH GOD I FOUND GOOOOOOOOD
GO TO THE LIGHT GO TO THE LIGHT I FOUND IT AFTER ALL THIS TIME
I FOUND GOOOOOOOOOOD
BRIGHT WHITE LIIIIIIIIIIIIGHT!”
A haiku from the perspective of a mosquito:
“Nobody loves me.
I like blood. Blood is my God.
Do you have some blood?”
A word from the perspective of a god:
“Boredom.”
“I think. Therefore, I ain’t submitting to some metaphysical bullshit.”
—Tauntaun Despacito, a university student being fed up with a lecture on intuition, quantum mechanics, and the probability of death by vending machine.
CLAMOR 