Race to light
I run through fire
“I have tasted death, Ziller. When my twin and I merged, we were close enough to the ship being destroyed to maintain a real-time link to the substrate of the Mind within as it was torn apart by the tidal forces produced by a line gun. It was over in a micro-second, but we felt it die bit by bit, area by distorted area, memory by disappearing memory, all kept going until the absolute bitter end by the ingenuity of Mind design, falling back, stepping down, closing off and retreating and regrouping and compressing and abandoning and abstracting and finessing, always trying by whatever means possible to keep its personality, its soul intact until there was nothing remaining to sacrifice, nowhere else to go and no survival strategies left to apply. It leaked away to nothingness in the end, pulled to pieces until it just dissolved into a mist of sub-atomic particles and the energy of chaos. The last two coherent things it held onto were its name and the need to maintain the link that communicated all that was happening to it, from it, to us. We experienced everything it experienced; all its bewilderment and terror, each iota of anger and pride, every last nuance of grief and anguish. We died with it; it was us and we were it.”
- Iain M. Banks, Look to Windward
And i am not burnt
Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep seas swell
And the profit and loss.
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.
But soon i must halt
“He grows disenchanted with the intellect, disenchanted with ideas, disenchanted with consciousness at the intellect, disenchanted with contact at the intellect. And whatever there is that arises in dependence on contact at the intellect, experienced as pleasure, pain or neither-pleasure-nor-pain: He grows disenchanted with that too. Disenchanted, he becomes dispassionate. Through dispassion, he is fully released. With full release, there is the knowledge, ‘Fully released.’ He discerns that ‘Birth is ended, the holy life fulfilled, the task done. There is nothing further for this world.’”
September 27, 2012