Five

 Is it possible to have a dream so vast that somehow you can begin to sense the curvature of the universe itself? I don’t know the best way to describe it—perhaps we’re going to have to talk about black holes—but last night’s dream was like the dream the universe's curvature had of itself. Or it just felt as though I was grasping at the ends of a black hole from inside, and an infinite edge slowly moved in to the center.

I also dreamt of a concept that seemed suspended in the vastness of this curving universe. I thought, how we liked to think of people as kinds of machines (“meat machines”), how there had been talk of “reductionism” and such (people are nothing but biological machines). But the machine took over and its place inverted, and came into its own. Now it was the machine that produced a ‘person’ in series, a factory of people for each one. It’s now just that there are lots of machines producing lots of things, and when they come together, occasionally, in the vast stretch of the universe, as it finds its infinitesimal curvature, there are people, stars, planets, molecules, molecular clouds, and desire. When the machine takes over, there is no more reduction; the relation of production takes the lead. And we have a cosmos—a vast distribution of producing-machines that formed for no final reason and which will dissipate again for no reason.

I woke and thought about my freedom today. Still a mystery. Still a pleasure to seek, to think about. And though both the curvature of vastness and the absolutely contingent molecular arrangements of the universe are cold, simply there, still I found myself stirred, amazed at the possibility of love in this infinite freedom I think I dreamt of—for in all this, the finite moments, the times when time slows (and this amounts just to a relative difference), or curves, or attenuates, here is like the essence of love. It is love-in-freedom; maybe this is the right formula. Maybe.

The formula in numerical terms is trivial but inexpressible, for in this case 1+1=infinity, or twice infinity returns 1. The two are infinite, or in their falling for each other, begin to attain infinite speed from different relative initial speeds; therefore there is inevitably a phasing that occurs, like when you drop two pebbles into a pool of standing water and the waves they make successively cancel and reinforce. This is the logic of two hearts; a pulsation outward may meet a canceling or reinforcing wave, and the exact form this takes is determined by the time each pebble hits its place in the water. Add a third and just a more complex form of this basic pattern emerges—though it quickly becomes unsolvable by ordinary analytic. But each heart generates an infinite (that is, continuous) series of pulsations, and the nearer they come to each other the more distant the characteristic interference pattern becomes, so that soon it seems that the two sources act as one. But this is only an illusion of proximity, for the nearness is limited asymptotically. The interference pattern becomes visible to the lovers themselves only as they look behind and side-to-side; as they stare into each other’s heart only that characteristic motion of the other manifests itself, the intoxicating “thisness” or hæcceity. It is the affect-effect of this discovery upon the heart that subtly alters the frequency of interference—the reinforcements and cancellations. In joy the love liberates and so the lovers dance and play in a multiplicity of roles, and the interference is more reinforcing than canceling (joy, teaches Sp—, is always given by an increase in being); in sadness (which is inevitable), the love hides and wavers and looks for its own masks, selfishly deceiving, pulling when it should push or pushing when it should pull and so the degree of cancellation increases and the lovers move only to keep everything at zero speed (the sum of the waves equals 0).

This alternation between happy and sad love brings us, however, to the heart of the problem of the relation between freedom and love. Sad love begins to unwind itself from the fibers of the other’s hæcceity, and in the distance looms the prospect of the break, the loss, and another. But in happy love, we have an inverse situation: that field of freedom which in sad love is encountered as an outer horizon beyond the (sad) lover, becomes a wildly immanent horizon right within the hæcceity of the other (we are of course considering for the moment the case when both achieve the condition of happy love—the most erotic state possible to human beings). And in this moment the infinite speed of absolute freedom presents itself, like a spark or lightning bolt that suddenly illuminates the whole sky at once. Therefore is not the spark we experience in true love not the spark created in happy love that finally ignites the infinite freedom that only a human being (I only speak of humanity) captures by virtue of their characteristic speed, their intoxicating hæcceity?