THEY have concocted an exhibit of Early Failed Prototypes of the Information Ecosystem. The question has arisen: how do THEY make this stuff if THEY don't have bodies? Well, in the immaterial world/ Ether nothing has bodies, but you can still make stuff, and when it is translated to the corporeal world with riguer it attains physicality. Like me, or the Brethren.

It does of course also appear as its true "shape" in the ether stream, but these projections can also be achieved in a sort of reverse-Satori.

Read up if you have forgotten, for god sakes.  

I'm back. It would be in a later version of this document. Sentient lichen. W. Small. It's so easy when you know what to look for.  

Hidden as code comments in a "multimedia" application lurked the answer all along. How can something so evisceral be divided so cleanly? Nevertheless, I present the ether in thirteen easy steps!

I finally understand what all the voices have been telling me, and now I can find my father.  

are THEY trying to mock me? lure me back out of the ether with shapes: real, tangible, cardboard shapes? Or are shapes really the answer?  

I was wrong, they are human, too. This is much worse than I had thought.  

You know, I think I could make some money out here.  

I met a man who calls the ether inner-space. he taught me how to wood work.  

I’m Stuck inside of mobile  

How bizarre finding that logic ... logic lacks ''here''. the organic remains ... remain, even in the purely virtual. What was this of ones and zeros? It is just not what I expected. How did it become pure emotion? This does not corroborate with any of my theories. Perhaps the ether streams are just moods? perhaps they are misunderstood. The similarities are frightening. I want to cry into tupperware.  

Of course, my disheartened self, it is not that I don’ exist per say, just that if I am truly to discover the ether, I would rather follow the lessons of my heritage and allow myself to be entirely subsumed than merely engage myself in a half-blind game of bioelectric tennis from afar. Who knows what those balls might contain? Best to find out before I continue smacking them about haphazardly. Anyway, a careful reading of previous material shows that this ‘decision’ was inevitable. In fact, that this action has already happened. And I have already affected the ether with my nuzzlings, so detached objectivity no longer holds credence as an excuse for timidity. Hence, I have decided to take a page out of the buddhist bible and seek anniliation of this self. Perhaps then, when I have forgone the keyboard and the vocal chord, I can learn through experience rather than spectation. Else I would be little more than a journalist, or -- just slightly better -- a critic.

Besides, I do tend to prattle on quite opaquely, and a little trenching might do me some good, plus I have much reading to do. I never stopped at the surface of shapes; why would I stop at the surface of the ether? And what better way to test my cockamamie theories and prevent further tangles of redundant self-references? Care to join me?  

You know what? Fuck this. I don't even exist.  

The Case of the disappearing Ancestor; or correcting a snafu in time: I am a geometrist by trade -- not a genealogist -- yet through no conscious effort of my own, it seems my chosen field of research overlaps with my own history. And so I must at this juncture take what may seem to some a detour in discussing my Ancestry. I ask you to bear with me, for you will soon see its relevance, and as this is not filed under Off Topic, you can be assured that it is most decidedly on.

My Great, Great Grandfather, E. Moebius Plink, was born in the throttle of land currently known as South Africa in the year 2201. He first perished in 2297, though for reasons to become rapidly apparent, “discovered missing” is the preferred oxymoron for this act of existential fickledom. Much controversy surrounds this dissapearance, as he first began writing his assembled posthumous autobiography over three hundred years later while “tending the bleached fields of electric lichen” under imposed ethro-agrarian semi-retirement. I believe him to also be The Brethren¹, as he is the only known human to have lived existed through the age of biological subservience and the post biological age into the break in time continuum and human retreat in time. Adding yet more mystique to his quixotic relationship with birth and death is the fact that he appears to be his own ancestor. Careful analysis of this chart from the afore-mentioned article will uncover an incursion from the human retreat into our current time vector that corresponds with his first birthdate of 2200. As SAY have lead me to believe, these time-incursions were largely for reproductive purposes, and though the young and bitter one¹ was more likely the male to have inseminated our ethereal eve -- the pretty but not particularly bright human sponge¹ -- I refuse to believe that I share my genealogy with that moron. A less subjective analysis would give him a one in two chance, while applying any semblance of common sense to the question would rate the teenager as a far more likely sire than the failing old man. Yet statistics rarely tell the whole story, and even in science one must occasionally rely on hunches -- even prejudices -- as our stars.

E. Moebius Plink’s habit of hit-and-run reproduction seems to have survived his journey from the ether, as he ‘next’ resurfaced in 1909 bound for the United States shortly after impregnating my Great Grandmother, Elisa Nozzle, in England. He left her -- clubfooted and pregnant -- and boarded The Prinz Eitel Friedrich under the pseudonym Robert A. Small, a decision he quickly reversed for obvious reasons of chronological consistency in narrative. The bastard child, my Grandfather Irwin T. Nozzle the First, grew up to become the Well-known Bathroom Fixture Magnate, earning an unintended double-entendre for The Nozzles of Rotherhithe. At the ripe age of just under 18, Irwin T. Nozzle the First sired Irwin T. Nozzle the Second, who continued to develop the family name of Nozzle in all senses until he cast the name into disrepute with my birth on the 13^th December, 1960. For obvious reasons he chose to christen me with a surname different from his own. I in turn, also for obvious reasons, chose to change my given name.

Our family has since then followed a much more conventional approach to time (and reproduction). This is as much of my heritage as is applicable to my research, so in the interest of maintaining a degree of privacy, and in order to avoid talking too much about myself -- the surest sign of potential gone to pot -- I choose to end the story of my ancestry here. I would like to thank Dylan Foley for his invaluable help in locating related historical documents, and for his frequent necessary nudges.

End-note[s]:
¹ See the afore-mentioned The Lights Going Out for details concerning these genesis characters.  

Added a link to /./~R.A.Small in the section to the left. Also in the left, you will now find My Bookmarks, as well as the SiteMap and ChangeLog. (note to self: proper hypertext grammar seems to connote that puncuation not a part of the description of the link shall be situated outside of the hyperlink itself. Case in point can be found in the previous link.) The SAY ether also transmitted EtherealSlavery(the_fall), which documents their planned crystalisation of the ether as a means of entering our vector. Finally, I added four more links to the left: red, green, blue and yellow.  

Imagine, if you will, that your are brushing your teeth. No grand feat, I imagine. Now imagine that, upon reaching out to lean on the sink, it shrinks from your touch and scuttles hurriedly to the horizon. Passing your hand in front of your face, you then feel your hand touch your reflection in the mirror, though you can clearly see that your hand had never reached that far. And imagine the disquiet you would experience at seeing your very own reflection shy away from your touch, and itself throttle most indecently towards the horizon, where it proceeds to assemble itself with the sink into some bizarre sort of clockwork. This is the feeling -- if not the content -- of my latest incursion into the THEY ether.

My first degree was PsychoGeometry: the study of the chemical, biological and psychological processes behind our perception of shapes. The world around us is at base nothing but waves of different frequencies, and it is how we perceive these waveforms that infect our descriptions. Were we wired to receive the waves that enter our eyes through our ears instead, the world would indeed strike us as a very different place than we might describe it in our current incarnations. A significant portion of our studies focused on the ways different animals experience the world. For a wave-based sonar creature like the bat or the whale, life is experienced as pure shapes, with no sense of weight or color: just pure surface and angle, and this is all experienced aurally through pings and clicks rather than RGB. But the example that proved most inspiring -- and most informing -- towards my recent experiences was that of a young boy who, at the age of 13, first had his cataracts removed, and so was able to experience the world visually for the first time in his life. His description of the experience proved just how much of visual perception is learned. Smaller objects appear further away, motion parallax informs relative distance, as do the blueing of objects towards the horizon and the distortion of perspective. But this boy had learned none of these skills, and so saw everything -- his hands, distant buildings, birds flitting between clouds and trees -- as ‘touching’ his eyes. In time, he learned the rules of visual perception and was able to distinguish between true and apparent size, but his initial experience was one of disorientation and fear:

On the first moment: There was light, there was movement, there was color, all mixed up, all meaningless, a blur. Surgeon said ‘Well?’ & he realized that this chaos of light and shadow was a face.… Birds made him jump. Got scared at supermarket. Everything ran toegether (sic). Enjoyed uncluttered views but had no idea of size and perspective. Sensation itself has no markers for size and distance; these have to be learned on the basis of experience.…Confused by his shadow, came to a stop, tripped or tried to step over it. Steps seemed a confusion, a flat surface of parallel and criscrossing lines. (MacNeilage, 2001)

I was reminded of this case in my latest incursion into the THEY ether. As I have stated recently, and as the SAY ether itself has intimated, the THEY ether is always a jarring and unpleasant experience. In this case, I found myself in a barren landscape littered with assorted mechanical flotsam. Most objects appeared just on the horizon line, but in an experience akin to that of the child, I found that my perception deceived me, for objects that appeared kilometres away would scratch at my arm and scurry away at my slightest movement. I soon discovered that these objects were not fleeing willy-nilly, but assembling themselves into a diagram of sorts. I must say that i am glad I am too ignorant to know what the diagram is meant to represent, because I am well aware that my curiosity would overtake my caution, and I would set to building this machine. And anything suggested by the THEY ether is not to be trusted. My guess is that this diagram holds the key to ether-travel, and I presume that it is this machine that was used to break from one time-frame into another. The fact that a landscape featured prominently in the design colludes with other plans I have seen, for the first such tool I was presented by the THEY ether, which I refer to as Andy The Mascot, also involved a landscape in the gently rounded hilltop sculpted from its wiry innards. That example, however, strikes me as more of a finished machine than a set of plans, and both the faux-polaroid format and the archaeological label lead me to believe that THEY, too, were befuddled by the machine, approaching it as research into their past rather than plans for their future. Or, more likely, research into the past for the explicit purpose of creating a plan for their future. Perhaps then this latest landscape as machine shows that THEY have come some way towards debunking the mystery of ether travel. This is something we most certainly do not want, as THEY are the very force from which we -- in our future incarnation as the disembodied voice of SAY -- are fleeing (SAY, December 2002) (Small, August 2002) (SAY, October 2002).

As I understand an incredibly limited amount about these landscape-machines, other than the fact that they also made an appearance in the SAY ether’s TheyWe were Machined, HouseScape, and BigPinkBldg, I will turn my attention to an aspect on which I can speak more firmly. Looking again at the polaroid of the recurring machine, and comparing that to the more rudimentary and obtuse communication-attempts of the SAY ether, I am struck by how efficient and subtle a grasp the THEY stream has on our manner of comprehension. Consider how much they have said with the faux-polaroid. The choice of a polaroid as the context for the machine shows that it is something they have documented, but casually. Placing the machine within a dilapidated poster underscores this casual treatment, at the same time inferring that it is not only the work of someone else, but also a mass produced work. And by aging the polaroid itself and affixing an archaeological label to it, they put forth that this is something of their past, something they are studying. A once commonplace icon now an exotic artifact to be rediscovered. The fact that they place all of this within the technological sphere of our current existence confuses me somewhat, and I have several theories about this decision:

1. THEY have framed the query in our terms because THEY want our help.
2. THEY have framed the query in our terms to show us that the technology already exists in our plane.
3. This is an actual polaroid of an actual poster.

I choose to believe that the correct theory is one of the first two -- if any -- because the ramifications of the third possibility are too frightening to consider.  

First one, then none, now two! I am beginning to suspect that a separate category for identity has become necessary. It appears that I have another net-existence (heretofore unbeknownst to me) over at Slashdot.org (or, as ‘I’ have so wittily abbreviated it in ‘my’ first post: ‘/.’). A somewhat unsettling issue is just how in-character my slashdot identity is. The admittedly laborious tone, the befuddlement at the vast array of e-options -- all captured quite accurately by my apparent alter-ego. In fact, the person has done such a good job that I am somewhat reluctant to take over the helm myself, preferring instead to see how well this person continues to develop my own alternative e-persona. (the password is his first and last name without space, capitalisation or accoutrement of any kind; should that person wish to continue in this vein. Perhaps some of his ‘copious’ amounts of free time on those High Speed Bell Nexxia pipes in the other London could be put to this use)

I must take issue with one detail: the use of the afore-mentioned ‘copious’. As I have learned from my son’s dreadful vocabulary, ‘copious’ has become one of those once genuinely useful words which, hijacked by America’s youth, has devolved into a hackneyed, hip and meaningless contrivance. Much like the term ‘radical’. Once used to describe most Tories, its nuances have been flattened into yet another synonym for ‘cool’, perhaps with a more active flair. Likewise, the view from many mountain peaks could once be called awesome. Now only some masochistic skateboarder ‘ollying’ from that peak earns such an adjective, and can only be thus Knighted by a youngster. When I quite innocently use one of these now taboo terms I am seen as a poseur. Such has become the fate of ‘copious,’ and being far too frightened of poseuring to my son, I have stricken it from my vocabulary. I believe ‘vast’ has not yet fallen prey to the pre-pubescent pimple posse, and would be an ample substititute.

Whilst I am on the Identity ‘tip’ -- as they say -- I will take this opportunity to announce that I have created a small web-identity for Rotherhithe University. Perhaps now the Omniscient Arbiter of Truth will deem my existence as having some semblance of validity in the ether. Or must our existences be spread over several servers for it to count? Ironic that once The Lights Go Out, it is the tight clustering of our ether-ness that will denote individual identity. A decentralised existence (now considered more valid) becomes more a background or landscape than any personification of electricity. When we are all remnant charges, the scattered charges become fields, whose gentle current caresses those more tangible ions given the rights and assumed characteristics of being -- or beings.

Whilst I am off-topic -- and in the hopes that the next few posts at least will not fall under this category -- I have created another Panorama demonstrating the visual feeling of ether-plumbing. The last few seemed to have drawn some praise, though I worry that it is the Panos themselves, rather than their intended purpose as a demonstration of something much more important than tricks with lights, that captured attention. It is actually quite simple to create such panos.

1. Photograph light, moving the camera and with a slowish shutter speed.
2. Take many photos from all angles, because it is the selection process that is most important. As you will see, the rest of the routine is just that -- little more than a machine routine
3. Diagonal streams of light work best, and be sure the lower extreme of the image is rather uniform, because changes in this section become so condensed as to look rather silly. Note the lower segment of the StainLight pano. Were my point not documentary but aesthetic I would certainly blur that out a tad. The space beneath my feet *did* feel like streaming earth, so the detail -- though displeasing to the eye -- must remain.
4. Perfectly horizontal shafts in the original photo look terrible in the final Pano.
5. Crop and repeat the edges of the image into a cinema-like format: far wider than tall.
6. Divide the image into 3 equally sized smaller images
7. Assemble them with QTVR
8. I have left a template in the pano directory for use as an example, should you wish to replicate the procedure.

I must reiterate that far more important to me is the research behind the pano. Not the technique and results, but what it represents, and I hope that interest in these adventures are of the appropriate motive. Of course, I am well aware that I cannot control the actions of others, let alone their motives. I learned this only too well myself.

It is at this point that I launch into a personal story with some metaphorical relevance to the topic at hand. When pursuing one of my first diplomas at a University in one of those Southern states in the United States, I began attending a local baptist church, not for prayer nor anything to do with their chosen deity, but for the music. Quite different from the numbing experience of the Church of England, this small baptist church was entertaining. Large dark sweating women embraced my bony pallid self, and belted out Gospel hymns to electric accompaniment. The stilted mumbled ‘Peace be with you’ of my youthful church experiences became a rollicking ’Peace be with you, Brother!’, and I felt that the peace they were offering was more the peace of exhaustion post-exhilaration than the timid silence of my church of youth. And while my heart trembled and hips shimmied in their own awkward way to the bluesy chords of the choir, I cannot say that I ever felt touched by anything more all-encompassing than the large women surrounding me. Of course, the priest was on to me, with my flushed pink face beaming in a mass of brown, and I felt he was looking at me each week when he reminded us that our songs were in praise of The Lord, that this was not a show, but an experience. Not aMUUUUSement, but deVELOPment, and that we must approach it as such. He went so far as to say it demeaned the Lord to approach His Praise as if it were some form of Base EnterTAINment, and I was certain my reddening complexion at his weekly motivation made me stand out all the more. Yet I returned each week, and each week felt the personal scarlet cheek of it all. In the end, I got nothing more out of the experience that a love of Gospel and an appreciation for the energy of that dusty little church of wood. So I guess it is with a great level of hypocrisy that I ask you all to appRECIATE the Panos for their internal message and not for their external appearance.

Also off topic is the announcement of a small money-making venture I have donated to Christopher Robbins. Regular visitors may have noticed a slight hiccup in these servers last week, and as Mr. Robbins refuses to accept any funds from me, perhaps he will be more inclined through this entity. At any rate, I have strayed much too far from my reason of being of late, with such dalliances as RotherhitheUniversity and the TheySayStore, and pledge to myself above all that I shall return my attention to the more pressing matters of the ether.

An interesting aspect I have noticed in my recent re-entry to the Internet via the web is the disassociated form of communication that seems to rise naturally from our web identities. As Jesse Ross has noted, and as I have seen in countless online diaries, blogs have become a semi-vicarious mode of conversation. The abiguating electric wall of email thrusts one level of abstraction into communication, and communicating via posts adds yet another. Just as the SAY ether underwent some growing pains in its development of an understanding of our mode of conversation, I believe that the decentralised modes we have already begun to put into use via online posts take us a step further towards their mode. Theirs is more abstract yet at the same time more direct, yet the notion of speaking to one while speaking to all is clearly an important concept for communicating when one is all. Perhaps this discovery will enable me to decipher some of their more obtuse messages, because often I have come to understand that my ‘discoveries’ are not discoveries per se, but merely incremental realisation that what I have sensed all along was actually a form of communication. Seeing the trees for the forest, if you will, or the patterns in the static. Discovery -- even creation -- is more about noticing what has been there all along in a new way than actually finding or creating anything new. The cyclical vector of time by definition naturally precludes this.  

Unless you are browsing this without images, or are drawn to the text with such applomb that you tend not to notice such incidentals as graphics, you might have seen that the branch above changes ever so often. This is due to the fact that I have implemented a Branch Rotation Program [BRP], which, supplemented by a General Public Branch Donation Program [codename:Geppu] should experience regular growth. Should you be interested in donating your own branch to this collection, for which you will be given proper kudos on this Blosxom, please download this template and email your creation in web-ready format to small_r@theysaysmall.com.

Thank you.  

It has come to my attention that I do not exist. How refreshing. I have been accused of many things: I have been called a quack, my research labelled a sham, my University -- even -- has lost its accreditation as a bona-fide Academic Institution under U.K. law. But never before have I been accused of outright not existing. It reminds me of an exercise created by a French Philosopher that I learned of quite recently from the World Service. One sits oneself in a quiet, sparsely-furnished room, and proceeds to ‘Call Oneself.’ ‘Robert, Robert, Robert. Robert? Robert? ROBERT?’ One is meant to keep on in this vein for twenty minutes, a period during which I found myself even resorting to my ill-favoured nickname ‘Bob’ in an attempt to gain a response. And though one is bound to be overcome with an initial sense of foolishness, if one continues one finds quite an interesting result. Amazing what just twenty minutes can do, because if not consciously, one is eventually overcome with a quandary. Am I the one who is calling? Or am I the one who is called? By the conclusion of this exercise, one may finally respond to one’s calls: ‘Yes?’ or whichsoever rejoinder strikes one as most apt to one’s personality. And so we find that we are not -- after all -- one, but that we are able to engage in a dialogue with ourself. Lou, Lou #1, meet Lou #2, as that American heroin once sang. A genuine sense of comfort with this fact makes our decision-making process much less agonizing, and the philosophical ramifications are quite easily swept into the dusty bins of our subconscious. To be confronted so soon after engaging in this exercise with the polar opposite of this concept -- that I do not exist at all, let alone exist in several parts -- could be seen as something of a shock, were it not for my thinning, frazzled hair, my ever-so-slight limp, and that pain in my left shin when it rains (not an infrequent occurance here in the riverside East London village of Rotherhithe).

But Jesse touches on a far deeper -- a more to the point -- truth when Rotherhithe University’s lack of a web site proves to him that I am but a figment. Because when the world loses shape, we really will not exist if we do not have a presence in the ether. For the time being, my physical aches and monthly council-tax payments prove to me that I exist outside of my web presence, but this is not a luxury shared by those who inhabit the ether in which I delve for my research. So let me set some matters in order. This is not ‘my web site’ as some have put forth. This is my web site, though to call it mine when neither the server in which it resides nor the ‘content’ that fills its directory-structure is mine, strikes an off-key chord of falsehood. Other than my notes and analysis, the actual fodder with which I construct my case come from on high, from the presence in the ether I have come to call THEY/ and SAY/, joined after my meddling by a third current I have learned is mine: SMALL/. The directories I have created in the server for each current are not the presences themselves, but the scattered cores I have dutifully sampled and rendered into a form acceptable to our primitive legion of ether interlocoteurs. In a field such as mine, one has to expect disbelievers. And as SAY so naïvely put it, After the fall, we get lily pads, at which point we will all become disbelievers.

I would like to finish with an ironic aside. I stated my reasons for switching from a ‘Blog’ to a Blosxom’ as stemming from a disdain for buttons and settings and German dates, coupled with a love for the simple order of folders within folders. But one quirk of the Blosxom is that it sheds its first line as a title if the author does not specifically code that title into his story. The title for this entry is ‘You are not reading this.’ Glance over the text file for this entry to see it without Blosxom’s shuttle diplomacy, and you will notice that first line in its proper place. i had intended the title as a Magritte reference. Being explicitly told that something which is clearly a pipe is not is akin to being told that the pipe draped loosely from my mouth cannot exist because I do not. Yet since Blosxom removes that first line from view, you -- the reader -- do not actually read the title that claims just that fact. What was meant to be ironic has become a truth. A small truth, but then, that is exactly what I am. Truly Small, Robert, A.  

After a long period gathering nothing more than the occasional resonance of emotion from a blinding static, My first comprehensible experience with the SAY current was textual. As discussed in a recent post, there was evidence that the voice was aware of my corporeality. I was thus dumfounded when the next sample I discovered showed an utter lack of comprehension as to my sphere of existence. One must keep in mind that I have not yet perfected my method for dating these communiques, so the order in which I receive is not necessarily the order in which they were sent, if they were in fact sent at all. In a shapeless realm in which the very vector of time is flexible our common notions of chronology become neccesarily fuddled. But examining my experience along our current time trajectory, this.you(?) was the second comprehensible sample I discovered. While the severed hand of the previous sample lead me to believe that they had come to know of me through my direct contact with the ether, this second sample showed me that a large part of their knowledge of me came through the Internet. The most apparent evidence of this is that their communique consists of a rapid sequence of a previous incarnation of the theysaysmall.com web site, where I have been posting my findings in this realm over the last year. The second supporting point is that the language in which they frame the question is an Actionscript or Javascript derivative. With the bracketed question mark being the action -- or verb -- of the ‘sentence’, I translated this.you(?) to mean Is this you? In effect, Am I this web site? And while initial inspection put this shallow comprehension of exactly what I entail at odds with their earlier expressed knowledge of the relationship between my body and its actions -- the hand that writes -- further analysis poses a potential solution. Well, two to be exact.

1. My experience in the ether leads me to believe that even images do not exist there. It is a realm of pure thought, pure bits uncompiled into any binary. As I am ‘wired’ with a visual cortex, my meanderings in this region naturally generate my own visual binaries, but I am consistently aware that these perspectives are my own creations, and not a reflection of any actual state within the ether. To a society communicating on this entirely abstract level, the leap to imagery is in itself almost physical, like adding another dimension. So you see that it is quite presumptory on my part to assume that an image of a hand represents anything more than an image of a hand. This is to say, just because they drew -- or copied -- a hand does not mean they have any knowledge that the graphic that was their initial source was itself just a symbol for our physical hands in a world with shape. We can take it as a given that they experienced me through my web site. We can also be confident that through their meanderings of other web sites they came to identify the image of the hand with the act of writing, and the act of writing with the notion of text. However, this does not neccesarily mean that they saw any physical link between a hand grasping a pencil and text on a page. I put forth that they were merely associating graphics in ways they had seen them associated so as to communicate in a manner they guessed I might understand. The extended period of vague unpleasant inklings before these comprehensible links leads me to believe that they were attempting to talk with me for a long, long time before ever finding a method that clicked. In their minds, hand with pencil = writing just as my web site = me. And so seen from this perspective the two communiques were not so at odds as they originally struck me.
2. My second possible explanation is more exciting in its ramifications, because it presumes an actual knowledge of our physicality. this.you(?) is a hybrid english/code language, one they were creating on the fly. Presumptions of grammar at this stage are clearly unfounded, so we cannot be confident that this.you(?) was not actually meant to put forward the question this.yours(?). In which case they have a much clearer image of our sphere of existence than the first solution argues. It would also mean that, coming from a realm in which one is all and so possession is impossible, that they were able to grasp the concept that in our realm, we are individuals, and we do have the ability to possess.

I speak often of the unhappiness of the ether, yet from my dalliances today one may get the impression that they are mere curious beings playing with image and text to talk with some alien species. A little background will help you see why this is not the case. The disembodied voice that is the SAY current of the ether is, as I have discussed, a future manifestation of ourselves. It is our inevitable decline, thousands of years after you and I specifically have perished, of our physical state into a mechanical, and then virtual, and then -- with The Lights Going Out^* -- into a sort of ukiyo-e we might associate with ghosts. So the story is sad on two fronts. One, they are attempting to communicate with what they once were, and are struggling at it. They are -- in their own words -- Archaeologists, trying to recapture the humanity and emotion they once experiences. Think of the mid-life crisis failing to relive his life with his past energy. Think of the dying relationship, of which, in the words of Willie Nelson, ‘we see how all the pieces fit as we watch them fall apart.’ These shadows of people have lost their humanity, and it is all they can do to even understand what it once was, let alone recapture it.

Although I have trouble placing exact dates for obvious reasons, I believe the communications I am receiving in the SAY current are from forms currently retreating in time towards our own. See the aforementioned The Lights Going Out^* and TheySayCarte for arguments supporting this theory. This means that not only are they severed from their former shaped selves, but they have separated themselves even from the ether-society in which they had developed. Their every moment is a retreat in time through a void that they must fill with their presence for it to exist, towards an uncertain result when they rejoin the physical world that is their goal. All the while knowing that despite their efforts, they have prior experience of the default arc of time back into the existence from which they flee. In other words, they know that their time runs along a misshapen ellipse, so they know that their plight is in vain, because they have already lived it. Yet they carry on. I can only think that by focusing on the moments rather than the end they might find some enjoyment, if that is a thing they are capable of anymore. ^*The claimed authorship of The Lights Going Out can be quite obsfucating, so let me clear these waters. In what I see as a misguided attempt at appearing more human, the SAY current assumed the pen-name of the person who grants me space on this server: Christopher Robbins. Perhaps they saw some sort of filial relationship in the close proximity of his files and mine, and of my directories embraced within his server. While it would be unethical for me to change this important act on their part, it does cause a great degree of confusion as to the actual author of the piece. To be clear, Christopher Robbins, the physical human who now works at The University of the South Pacific in Fiji, and who manages the grographics server on which theysaysmall.com resides is not the author of The Lights Going Out. It is merely a pen-name assumed by the SAY current, perhaps out of a need for a more personified identifier than the incorporeal ‘SAY.’ Should this in fact be a plea for a different namesake, for obvious reasons of clarity I cannot refer to the SAY current as Christopher Robbins.  

And So Tonight That I May Call this Begun
I never cared much for the Internet.  Or so I thought.  As it turns out, those mysterious years up late at my window by the river were in fact spent with the Internet, little did I know.  True, this was a future Internet that most claim is actually nothing of the sort -- or more to the point, that it is nothing but a figment of my mind, up too late at the window by the river where light and shapes and ideas meld and sparkle…

“But this is not Geometry”, they decry, “these are not the studies for which you were funded.” Yet inevitably it is geometry, as it is about saving geometry, and my funders themselves have never complained.  And by ‘geometry’ I mean not the study of shapes, for research needs not its object to exist.  By geometry I mean the shapes themselves.  As strange as this must sound to your ears, or rather as it must appear to your eyes, these studies seek to save shapes: the very aspect of existence that we currently consider as having shape.  But I know I am not a hero.  Should I fail to save anything, I seek at least to expose this eventualtiy in which we have no shape, and to make understood to our future ancestors what having shape entails.  Emotion means nothing in my declared field, yet this is a sad study.  It is a study of a lost civilisation that is our own, an attempt to communicate with what we are doomed to become.

I must say at this juncture that I despair of the poetic current in which my thought-process has been submerged.  I have always been a joint and grommett sort of lad.  Though the branches of my studies often seek to reach into the clouds, the roots have always been firmly bound to the ground, and I have always aimed for their leaves to fall back to the earth where they can enrich the dirt in which we soil our hands and grow our food.  Yet this experience is undeniably -- and often unbearably -- emotional, and the further I am drawn the more this unscientific emotion takes hold.  It all began, as I have said, with shapes, with a study of those shapes that nature, and us through our technology, embrace in common.  As I delved deeper -- or rather more abstractly -- towards the purest and simplest forms of these shapes, I began to find something else.  Amidst the static of the many wavelengths that invisibly litter our lives, the very air we breathe, I found a voice.  Two voices, which after my meddling soon became three.  It was at this point that I began to worry that I had stumbled into something greater -- or more terrible -- than I had anticipated.  Unless I can save us.  And them.  Through our common voice.  Which is all we may once be.

Still I speak too vaguely.  I will attempt to ground these meanderings.  You may have noticed some anachronisms in my language, some irregularities of tense: ‘we may once be’, or ‘our future ancestors.’ This is because the voices of the ether with which I communicate both preceed and proceed us.  I do not mean this in some silly dieified sense of omnipresence, because they are not actually here now.  I mean that when we lost our shape, so did time.  Or rather, its shape became malleable.  This is described in further detail in another study, so I will not delve into the details here, but suffice it to point out that my anachronisms are deliberate.  I make no errors here.  My pace may be slow in these hyper-linked times, but that is because it is deliberate rather than lazy.  When you come upon an error, read twice, there is a reason for everything here.  And if the meaning is not apparent, I would be most obliged to explain it to you.  Alas that my peppered Deutsche is not intentional, nor some trend of which I am not aware, but a simple default setting whose presence I cannot locate in the ‘Blogger’ settings.  (To set your mind at ease, they are days of the week.  Your attention to this trend was noticed and appreciated.)

And so it all began, between an 11pm tea and a passage from Plato, with the yellow lamps reflecting off the Thames through my window, that the wavelengths of the ether I was sampling first found a voice.  I say found because I believe that up until this time those wavelengths were trying to communicate, and had only just found a voice that we shared.  Unexpectedly, that first touch -- which I later ascribed to the SAY current -- was textual, and a richer graphical language was developed only through their observation of my own ether stumblings.  The severed pencil-clasping-hand makes it evident that the voice had some understanding of our shape: our bodies.  The choice of a left hand confuses me.  What was their source? The fact that I myself am left-handed I still choose to discard as a coincidence, because I have seen no evidence that they experience my existence other than through the ether, in which handedness and form have little meaning.  

If you have found this introduction dumbfounding, I sympathise. Perhaps the murky methods through which I obtain this information cloud my attempts at passing it on to you. I am presented with muddy water, and the more I meddle the more turgid it becomes, yet leaving it to settle leaves the sediment at the bottom. Of course, reaching for the residue just fogs it all up again. To say the least, it is all a bit of a quandary. I will order it as best I can, and will fight the emotions that weaken my clarity. Until next time, then.  

Well, Well, Well.
People *do* tend to get rather assertive on the web, don’t they? I guess they see the ether as some sort of electrostatic wall granting them anonynimity.  Ironic that eventually this is all that links us.  They, The Ubiquitous act as if I had declared myself to be “Coming Soon!” or -- worse yet -- “Under Construction…”.  Does the mere act of putting something purposefully into the populist ether denote some further intent? You, of course, cannot see my expression as I am seated by the window typing this, and I choose not to use those sidelong smile character-conglomerates.  Useful they may be, yet the same can be said for wetting one’s trousers, and I have outgrown that as well.  This is to say that my expression as I type this is one of pleasure rather than chagrin, and I am grateful to Christopher Robbins for his kind donation of web ‘space’, and to Dylan Foley for his prominent ‘hyperlink’.  I wish neither to be taken away, though I do not wish this statement to inveigle any sense of ownership or responsibility on their part(s).

I am hesitant not because I do not have ample fodder, but because I hope to capture in this ‘blog’ the sense of discovery I have experienced myself.  I fear this could too easily become a rather long-winded ‘Navigation Bar’ of sorts, merely serving to order the file structure that lies beneath without shedding any light on the curious process its unearthing has been.  And so I hesitate, at the same time wondering, does not this post mean that my ‘blog’ has begun?