I am the topographical map of my environment, aphorism 369, A Human Strategy by Matt Berry
369
I am the topographical map of my environment ... a slowly changing map. What repeats, cuts. What is intense, cuts. Moreover, I carry the maps of the past into the present. In fact, I am not looking at maps of two dimensions, but a blending of many maps and many more dimensions than I can number: the five senses, the blood, the heart, the stomach ... to name a few. My “consciousness,” therefore, is a fusion of past and present influences and impressions ... always a distortion of the current environment.
If I am ever to gain any sort of control over my own development, I must learn how to mold the topography on my own terms ... and the only way I can do this is to manipulate my surface world. This is no easy task, considering that I can never see this world perfectly.
Because my impressions are multi-layered and ever changing, my first step is to stabilize the surface world: eat well, reduce stimuli, simplify my environment, and get things to repeat to my advantage. Ultimately, it is through repetition that I begin to finger the topography: selecting what small and light objects come around again. Gradually, the surface world and I shape each other.
I cannot bring “mind” or “positive thinking” into this. “Mind” is the backward-thinking machine ... a jumbled memory. Mind, if reduced to anything at all, is merely that error-making organ, the brain. Put conceptually, that is to say, as one error describing another, mind is the product of human vanity and fear. It is the ghost in the machine and as such, it does not exist.
It can be believed, however ... in the same sense that the audience believes in a magician’s gimmick. One such useful trick is no longer to posit “mind” as in control ... but to see “mind” as inert clay, spinning on a wheel ... to see the surface world, that immediate, amoral, material world as that which molds the future mind ... from outside. Thus, mind, to repeat, is not only “inner,” not only “thought,” and certainly not in direct control. If one has any control at all, it lies in mastering what repeats ... but then one does not need “mind” for that! Hands are more to the point ... those beautiful instruments which alone can shape the clay. Here, for once, real progress! ... and so easy, soft ... life had never been so workable! But to command the clay to shape itself! To “think” oneself out of misery ... to discuss ... when a simple ingredient added or removed would be infinitely more beneficial! As infinite as the distance between something and nothing is infinite! A glass of water, for example.