Ball of shredded paper with spider legs marches down a street. Rendered with military-entertainment-complex CGI, the same entity reappears as an AI-operated policing unit. Consciousness, ever wary of being locked into someone else’s home (and thus someone else’s rules), launches upward into a cartoon sky. Let it pause here at an airy height, perusing materials and media. The “I” recognizes its oddity, the peculiarity of its rebellion, the hand it was dealt by history. On back of each eyelid, it says, imagine flashing multiples, stacked cubes containing sometimes smokestacks, sometimes candles. Hot air balloons vie for exits in the sky. Consciousness is made, the same way Soylent Green is people. Or else it’s this holy ghost, this transcendent other, this apparition, self-knowing and self-manifesting in language but not of it.
