The Constants of Experience

1. The Precognitive Engrams.

It is impossible to orient in the world without a belief system (axiomatic presuppositions). Our aim is to present a belief system that is the most adaptive and ‘true’ (as an instrument or a tool is ‘true’) when it comes to providing us with a pre-cognitive schema that rewards and brings forth what is best in human nature, and when it comes to functioning in a world where all the meaning that we are evolutionary programmed to experience in order to stay intact with and care about reality is born in relation to the constants of experience.

Like a cat who has never seen a dog is his life is afraid when he encounters its smell for the first time, we are programmed to loath or admire certain environmental stimuli. We are designed to adore life and detest death, adore odour of ripe fruit and detest scent of decomposing corpse, adore sight of young flesh and detest look of old tissue, adore an act of courage and detest an evil deed. And since the crucial characteristic of being human is being social (Aristotle’s κοινωνικό ζώο), an essential part of our pre-cognitive engrams are designed for navigating amidst the environment of social categories, that is, acquaintance-stranger, friend-enemy, mother-father, saint-sinner, sage-simpleton, rich-poor, warrior-wimp, hero-adversary, and so on. What is more, the meaning of a human life is generated along the curves of this topological landscape, within its intersections. We profess that these archetypes that are evolutionary selected to refer and represent most relevant and meaningful categories of phenomenological experience are more real than empirical phenomena found in the world, due to the precept “those things are the most real which have been present for a longest time”. The engrams that allow for experience in the first place are more real than particular embodiments of stimuli corresponding to these engrams. Jonathan Pageau exemplifies this topological realm by describing the category of the dragon — “what if dragons or else monsters in general are simply not the same type of “thing” as dogs or cats or apples? What if the way a dragon exists has less to do with the difference between a tiger and a rabbit and more to do with the difference between a friend and a stranger? The difference between a friend and a stranger is not a measurable, reproducible phenomenon, yet it is one of the most real experiences a human being has. A friend is a real category of existence, but there is no ‘zoological’ friend, that is I cannot point to someone that would quantify ‘friend’ for all the world in the way a cat is a cat for everyone. Friend is a category of human engagement. And in a similar vein, encountering a stranger is encountering an undefined person, we could say the undecided in human form. I would like to suggest that a dragon and more generally a monster, is the category of the unknown itself in animal form. Ultimately a dragon is an image of chaos, the place where knowledge and categories reach their limits.” In other words, life consists of encounters with the unknown — stuff that have to be approached cautiously, since we do not yet have the established culture as for how to deal with it. The novelty we encounter is always refracted through the symbolic lenses of the mind, and only if these symbolic lenses are true, if these lenses correlate with how reality lays itself out, those to whom these lenses belong are adapted to the environment and thus have more chances of staying alive. In other words, these symbolic lenses are either true in false in a Darwinian sense — if they are true then they serve as tools to actualise the potential around us into the shape and form we want. And if they are false, if the symbolic lenses are out of sync with reality, then we are as well out of sync with it.

Modernism does not leave room for this perspective. We can see how its offspring capitalist system rewards some of the worst traits of humanity like greed, self-concern, and competitiveness, while alienating a huge number of people, the proletariat in the past and, in our times, the precariat (creative and sensitive people, set asunder in the miasma of meaninglessness and lost in sardonic pursuit of power, fame, and pleasure — thus being put in the precarious condition of lacking money, power, meaning, and friendship).

Modernism gave us welfare, yet the most prosperous Nordic countries are those that suffer the most from the suicide epidemics that has roots in alienation, loneliness, and absence of grounded belonging. No wonder that What Is Emerging now from these countries has the most pronounced and deep understanding of the problems that modernism and postmodernism leave unaddressed. At the core of this new sensitivity lies the idea that human beings need more than enough good food, money to buy the latest technology, and time to have lush pleasure. And that in order to get more than these material pursuits can grant us, we have to embrace a developmental framework, one that sees human beings as capable of reaching new heights of personal growth throughout the life-span.

From my perspective, the problem with what might be called ‘the modern worldview’ is that it has a very naive understanding of metaphysics, or even lack thereof. It has a similar relation to what religious framework provides as the metaphysics of young Wittgenstein has to that of the late Wittgenstein.

In this vain, it emphasises (1) meaningfulness of human life, (2) human life per ce, and (3) the metaphysics that sustains this emphasis. Which with a very broad brush can be structured by Thomas Aquinas’ distinction between essence (Being) and existence (beings) and Martin Heidegger’s fourfold mediation of consciousness amidst ‘earth’, ‘sky’ (earth refers to matter without meaning and heaven refers to spiritual meaning without corporeal existence), ‘death’, and the ‘sacred’ (death refers to absent non-existence, and life refers to its opposite). I do not think there is a better introduction to these themes than a great and concise book The Language of Creation: Cosmic Symbolism in Genesis by Matthieu Pageau.

In Christian language everything that is created wakes up to the freedom of its own, to its benevolent conscious beginning, and to the possibility of being in communion with God by participating in the process of Logos through which all is created. Only on such premises being can be seen as a ‘gift’, for gift implies cognizant ‘giver’. Only on such premises it becomes possible to respect and feel gratitude for it, since one cannot be grateful to the sheer randomness. It is this eucharistic (which means grateful) attitude of metamodernism, that we contrast to the “come what may” carelessness of postmodernism and “what we know is all there is to know” arrogance of modernism.

2. States of Consciousness as Encounters with the Archetypal Others.

There are two insights from the cognitive scientist John Vervaeke that might come of use here. The first one is that we do not project meaning onto the world around, neither do we merely discover it in there. Rather, we form a real relationship with it, within which we can afford meaning and significance. The second one is that there is no sense in talking about evolutionary adaptedness in general. Rather, an organism might be adapted to a particular set of circumstances. An organism is ‘adapted’ if it might afford a certain set of relationships with its environment that sustain organism’s long-term survival. In case of human beings what really matters is the social sphere — our survival primarily depends on the relationships we have with the others — parents, kids, tribe members, government officials, soldiers, strangers. Instances of such relations may vary, but at its core there lays an invariant structure.

A nurturing mother, a disciplining father, a self, a stranger, a wise old teacher, a fragile kid, an adversary, a joker — these are the chablons for the archetypal (most common) encounters within which consciousness perpetually finds itself. To know how to behave in such situations, at least intuitively, is to be ‘wise’. As sentient embodied creators we inevitably get clues and perceive abstract situations as ‘encounters’ with the others — so that even such abstractions as nature and culture get their anthropomorphised representations.

From the Jungian perspective, our well being depends on how balanced our relationship with the archetypes is. Too much of a tilt in one direction simultaneously endangers mistreatment of others (for example, there has to be a balance between work and family). More importantly, our well being depends on which encounter we will hold as absolute. Christians, as an example, render the relationship with Christ, an archetype of self embodied as a self-sacrifice for the sake of love, as their most significant relationship (which opens the door for the radical selflessness in relations with others and affords a mechanism of internal scapegoating instead of more natural mechanism of external scapegoating).

How come the fundamental constants of human life are distilled in the form of symbolic persons? It happens because as social beings we cannot help but use anthropomorphised figures as reference points to address focal constituent categories of experience. We are wired to seek contact with sentient creatures. We are wired to communicate with powers that are fundamentally able to react to us and care about us–and these figures have to be anthropomorphised in order to meet such demands. In order for such communication to enact more power it has to be refracted through the most powerful symbolic figures. Imagine playing chess. Instead of (theoretically possible) remembrance of the actual configuration on the chess-board, instead of keeping in mind what moved where, and instead of merely pronouncing the move of yours (‘E2-E4’), the player uses embodied statues of the figures and the checkered desk, player grasps the figures with her hand and slides them in the aimed place on the board. People even entail these figures with certain personalities who have stories — all-powerful queen, overprotected king, dispensable pawns, and horse that moves like an ‘L’. We imply that the inevitability of using the proper representative symbols for the game of chess is akin to using a proper symbolic lenses for the game of life. One just cannot remember and keep in mind the whole setting of actual figures, even the cognitively gifted grandmaster. The anthropomorphic imagery speaks to us as human beings with the language we are most suited to understand — with the language of (extrapolated) human behaviour. The effects of this relatable intra-human communication are the most vivid and enduring. Despite of the fact that we have changed as a species and now are able to think in more abstract terms, the fundamental nature of human experience had not changed and needs to stay as it is, for, otherwise, we are no longer fully what we are capable of being. To make sure that it stays this way (contrariwise to certain transhumanist aspirations) the ultimate essence of the cosmos has to be accounted for in anthropomorphic terms. As argued elsewhere, metamodern stipulation demands a moral responsibility to use the most profound and useful tools we have at hand in order to alleviate the suffering of the people without collaterally undermining the nature of being human. In order to use it the faith is required, one which has nothing to do with “lying to oneself”, but has everything to do with setting eyes uphill instead of downhill, with depositing an ideal to strive for. Here our aim is to map out the holistic landscape of phenomenological experience and show how in the Christianity its positive spectrum is literally incarnated (nature as virgin and mother, culture as benevolent father, Logos as son who self-sacrifices in service of love and truth). When we became aware of the evolution we were able to cease being its unconscious playthings. Now, with the eyes consciously set on these archetypes, we may be ready to overturn natural state of affairs on our own terms.

The claim that life can be conceptualised as a sequence of encounters with archetypal ‘others’ has to be elaborated. Obviously, when a person does her routine there is no necessary intuitive leap from the habitual actions to, say, father culture, or, when a person faces unprecedented novelty there is no necessary link with mother nature. However, there is a logical connection between these situations and how, especially a posteriori, a person would be able to address and deal with them. There is a gradient that connects two rather extreme ways of approaching reality or, rather, two different levels of abstractions on which reality lays itself out for us. One extreme is just the regular day-to-day experience without much ado about what this experience means symbolically. On the other extreme there is an explicit encounter with an anthropomorphised image of a certain slice of reality, say, a goddess of artificial beauty Palace Athene. Between the two extremes there is every possible way in which consciousness tries to make sense out of its experience, be this way a proper or a deeply misguided one. What is being hypothesised is that the most thorough, mature, and beneficial way of addressing these realities is an actual dialogue with them, a prayer. It is not beneficial because the domains of reality somehow become magically altered, it is beneficial because it alters psychological arrangement of a human being. It alters the way in which a psyche is accustomed to deal with the parts of reality. It is thorough because it strikes to the core of what it means to be a human being, which is to have meaningful relationships. While anthropomorphising of certain domains of reality may seem archaic and naive, there is no stronger way for a human being to meaningfully connect to these realities. If one is to alter her ways of relating to something, one is might as well conceptualise it as a meaningful other to whom to relate in the first place.

These may sound pantheistic or animistic. But, not without a few caveats, this is just orthodox understanding. Our world is indeed full of principalities — angels and demons — intelligible ethereal beings that lack material bodies but possess plenty of existence. It is said that people do not have ideas, rather, ideas have people. In the same way these creatures often take possessions of human beings. This is why the Catholic Church has a rite of exorcism, of expelling evil possessors. The matter of which entities are to be addressed is a matter of hierarchy and good taste. In this hierarchy, God, Mary, saints and angels operate in a way that brings the world, community, and mind closer to unity, while the devil and fallen (hence lower in hierarchy) angels operate in a way that fragments the world, community, and mind.

Thus the sequence of encounters with the archetypal others is just an abstract way of saying that the modes of how we operate in the world may be conceptualised in anthropomorphic terms. We do it anyway, subconsciously (“father left me, therefore fatherly authority of culture is to be disregarded,” or “mom left father, therefore totalitarian ideology has to bring in order every chaotic patch of soulless material reality”), so why not start doing it with full awareness?

3. The Inevitability of Collective Metanarratives.

Throughout the long process of natural selection groups of people needed to share a common narrative in order to bond members together. If the central story did not hold, their survival was endangered. After the thousands of generations, only those stories that represented the principal constants of experience were able to endow their groups with the map of phenomenological reality that allowed them to navigate in the web of psychological and sociological complexities. Those group whose stories were not corresponding to the constants of experience died out for they were not able to orient themselves properly in the symbolic landscape of communication and individuation. Their intergroup relations were unconfigured and outergroup contacts were naive. They could not come to a stable equilibrium among themselves and they were used and outsmarted during the contacts with strangers and foreigners because they did not possess suitable accounts for dealing with these types of archetypal situations — accounts of the ‘other’ as friend or stranger. There are patterns of the most common situations where groups of people and particular human beings are finding themselves in, they repeat themselves in history over and over. Great oral and literate traditions possess the full spectrum of accounts for how to behave in these situations. For example there are times when group finds itself in utter chaos, place where whatever group was doing before does not work out anymore. This situation of stress and discomfort is overcome, in every great tradition, by becoming more conscious — paying more attention and uttering truth in the face of novel circumstances — that is, by meeting reality on its own terms. Also, there is a pattern of stultifying order, place where culture stopped being updated to the changed environment, place where attempts of conscious individuals who work for the improvement of culture become punished instead of rewarded, as in Stalinist Russia. The stories and symbolic representations of these most significant patterns of human condition help those who see them as sacred to recognise, be aware of, and address these complex situations head-on. Most of the time we do not explicitly understand these correspondence between particular events and sacred tradition, and, when the connection is pointed out we might be sincerely surprised, since we were acting out these programmed reactions implicitly — as something that is obvious in and of itself and does not require justification.

4. The Historicity of Consciousness.

1. In the beginning there were no consciousness, there was only Chaos and no one yet to conceive it. Our predecessors who just devolved from their common ancestor with chimpanzees and bonobos, had no awareness of their thoughts and could not provide an account for the rituals and customs they were acting out. It was a circle of infinite repetition, pure and round image of the unconscious nature;
2. Then something happened, namely, somehow, we became aware of death and its inevitability. The circle takes form of a tail-devouring serpent, called Uroboros. At this stage, rudimentary consciousness is able to discern one pattern — all that is born is going to die, before, now, and after. Enter consciousness;
3. And the crux of the matter is — I am also going to die. So, enter self-consciousness. This is what happened in the Garden of Eden, in a brief period between consciousness (Adam named animals, after all) and discovering good and evil (self-consciousness);
4. At this stage, Adam and Eve eat the apple and realize that they are naked in the eyes of death and, thence, in each other’s eyes. They become self-aware and insecure. They are no longer part of nature and have to wear “garments of skin” and use technology in order to protect themselves from their dangerous environment, that is, from Nature;
5. As people were getting more comfortable by alienating themselves further and further by setting the Culture they were developing at odds with Nature. At this point in the stories our ancestors were telling each other some interesting patterns started to emerge, in which the main characters implicitly represented phenomenological categories of Chaos and Order — at this point Order was positive (it was their city) and Chaos was negative (it was the unexplored territory around their city). With time, they started to conceptualize the difference between the two types of news that novelty brings — good news and bad news;
6. So, enter two guises of Nature — life-giving Mother and life-taking Death, womb and tomb. At this stage people encounter the Red Queen who says “here we must run as fast as we can, just to stay in place. And if you wish to go anywhere you must run twice as fast as that”. This is how nature works — it does not stay the same, it constantly changes and says to those who fail to pay enough attention “off with their heads”. At this stage the hero emerges, best represented in the image of St. George who kills the serpent of Chaos (the negative part of Nature) and frees the princess (the positive part of nature) thus re-establishing the normal life of the city by discerning positive and negative news that novelty brings — creating Order out of Chaos, shattered in pieces. This eternal process was also represented in the first cosmogonic story in the world — Enuma Elish of Ancient Mesopotamia, where Murdoch (by using attention and truthful speech — Logos) breaks Chaos (Tiamat) into pieces and creates the world out of these pieces;
7. Of course, Order is also ambivalent. Ancient Egyptians were the first to realize it (of course only implicitly, i.e. in their mythology). They realized that culture has both positive (protection, meritocratic hierarchy) and negative aspects (stultifying tyranny). In addition, Ancient Egyptians were able to account for the consciousness that mediates between Order and Chaos — to account for the individual who updates the culture by incorporating novelty and shattering obsolete parts of his culture, while keeping and rescusciating its positive parts;
8. At this stage an account for the Consciousness is provided. If people are attentive and speak the truth, the probability that they will stay adapted to their environment and, hence, stay alive is higher. If the culture is not updated in a sufficient pace (if conservatism prevails too much), then the unaddressed novelty grows and ultimately shatters the obsolete walls of the culture. When we rush to update our culture too fast (liberalism) or “non-truthfully” (corruption, populism, etc.), than the basis of the culture may be broken and stop being genuine and organic, in a sense, it ceases to be the culture what is was.
9. At the next stage we have an account for good acts and evil deeds of the individual human beings. Caïn kills his brother Abel and we know that the Son can be either good or bad, tertium non datur;
10. So what we have got is Mother (Nature), Father (Culture) and Son (Consciousness), all with its positive and negative aspects.

In mythology, chaos is always associated with birth-giving mother nature and unconsciousness, while order is associated with masculine culture which provides stability. The process that mediates between the two is associated with the individual consciousness that permanently mediates between the two modes, rendering chaotic novelty either irrelevant or relevant, and rendering relevant novelty either helpful or adversarial. If this engagement is carried out in the service of Truth and Love, the adapted culture becomes more sustainable in the long run. One of the representations that embodies this process is the figure of St. George, who kills the dragon-serpent of Chaos (negative feminine) that was threatening Order, and gets the princess (positive feminine) as a reward. St. George creates Order out of Chaos by discerning positive and negative sides of novelty, thus participating in the process which in the western tradition goes by the name Logos. When a baby is born, adults like to argue about what will affect her development more — genes (nature) or upbringing (culture). Then in the conversation, something else is often mentioned, something like “chance” or “individuality”. And that is that, there exists nature that surrounds culture and there exists culture that surrounds individual, but there is also an individual and we surely act like her agency in the world is real, because, after all, we render her responsible for her actions. So there is also consciousness, termed Dasein by M. Heidegger, which finds itself embodied in the world of space and time where it is faced with a need to act. It is this world as forum for action, that is addressed by mythology, religion, literature, et cetera. They put an individual inside a story, without which his acts in the world have no meaning whatsoever. Moreover, a person feels that something is filled with meaning only when this something is to be found on the line between the point “what is” and the point “what should be,” when this something brings one closer to the goal which she has rendered as “worth pursuing”. In fact, the degree of positive emotions we experience correlates with how closer a certain event has brought us to our desired future, which we keep in mind. Outside of this value-temporal setting, beyond the narrative that leads from the bad point A to the good point B, a person is not able to the point of continuing her life. Meaning is always to be found on the intersection of the narrative and the human life placed within it. And, as it will be argued further, a society that is not united by a common meta-narrative is also fated to be beyond the hope of sustainability in the long run.

5. Personal Experience of the Anima Archetype.

We concentrate on the figure of Anima solely because relationship with this figure was and remains an integral part of the author’s personal development. It is used here to show how central and impactful the conscious interpretation of one’s dreamworld through the Jungian framework might be.

Now and then we fall in love from the first sight. How come so reasonable and calculating beings are prone to such mesmerizing experience? It is as if the object of our love is a jar which we fill with whatever the substance was present in us and strived to find in the world a suitable vessel to dwell in, a vessel where desire joins with flesh. Long before such a joining, a dream and fantasy of it was sown deep in us. What was sown is best conceptualized as a living image, or a figure with certain idiosyncratic personality traits, which need to be more or less salient, since in the future it is bond to serve as a screening and sorting tool for the numberless living beings amidst whom we are to choose a spouse. As we grow up this ideal image also grows and acquires idiosyncratic features that are to make up and complement our insufficient “bad sides”, it is often because of these traits opposite to ours we fall in love with a person. We will fall in love exactly with a person who will reflect the most our strive for the “second half”, who will add up to us as a missing puzzle that fills the ideal form.

This figure is an utterly relevant part of our psyche that needs care and protection. We often feel guilty because of our handling of it, for example when we say something like “my soul is rotten”. Fragility of our souls requires trepidation for we know how they are prone to contortion and perversion. In principle, the soul of a man is expressed in the female image, hence the concept of Anima, while the soul of a woman is expressed in the male image, hence the concept of Animus. Therefore, in general, a man falls in love with a woman, and a woman falls in love with a man. Everything that sexually attracts a man is laid in the image of Anima and, in the pursuit of joining with it, he often loses his sanity.

The problem comes when this pure image of the soul is distorted and deformed throughout our life — by our thoughts, actions, experiences. In fairy tales, the ambivalence of Anima is expressed through the images of a pure princess (positive feminine) and an old crone (negative feminine). Mother nature both gives birth and kills, hence the word death is often feminine. If our experience with the women has distorted our image of Anima, then it will be extremely difficult to find love, because instead of projections of purity and beauty we will endow all encountered, seemingly suitable epitomes of the opposite sex, with such epithets such as “bitch”, “whore”, etc. To avoid it, the soul must remain pure and preserve chastity. In the ingenious “third dream of Svidrigailov”, F. Dostoevsky demonstrates this theme with an unparalleled depth. It is important that each of Svidrigailov’s hallucinations ends with a sketch of nature, thus connecting the inner subconscious world, where the soul lives with the outer world of matter, where all things novel are born — syncing two worlds that are expressed in the image of femininity.

Svidrigailov is Raskolnikov’s alter-ego, “freed” of all kinds of “prejudices”. They follow the same path, but more consistent and logical Svidrigailov is the first to reach the end of it. If Raskolnikov denies the old way of life in Christ and forges a Nietzschean set of self-designed values, but still clings to the ideals of beauty and good, Svidrigailov is more coherent — for him good and bad are relative, everything is permitted, and everything is irrelevant… Turning to the third and last dream, Svidrigailov finds a five-year-old girl in the room’s corner. He feels a sense of fear: “… her lips are moving apart into a smile but the tips of her lips tremble, as if still holding the smile back. But then she just ceases to restrain herself; she already laughs; sheer laughter; something sassy and ​​defiant shines in this non-childish face; this is debauchery, this is the face of a camellia, the impudent face of a French whore. Without hiding or modesty, her both eyes open: they look at him with a fiery and shameless look, they call him, laughing. ” There is no evil intent in his thoughts, but suddenly this little creature turns into himself — such a ruddy baby-face acquires the lecherous expression of a lewd, depraved girl. Vulgarity, hypocrisy, cynicism are expressed on it. Svidrigailov and this baby swap places. He is aware of his turpitude and ignomity. True terror possesses him as he begins to agonize. Conscience tells him that the only way out is suicide. He broke the main Christian commandments: do not kill, do not steal, do not commit adultery. Living for the sheer pleasure, Svidrigailov did not appreciate friendship and did not believe in true love. Svidrigailov kills the divine image embedded in him. Being a double of Raskolnikov, he did not someone with whom he could pray for his sins. He did not have his Sonya. If in the second dream the struggle of conscience is shown, the last dream is a glance into the horrid mirror of his soul. I once had a dream that was a variation on this theme:

Me and my friend were entering the village in the countryside — small houses in the dusty setting, sand is everywhere, all is dry and yellow. Behind us creeps a little girl, a rather secluded one, to whom I’m trying to say something in order to attract her attention, though without avail. I feel a strange necessity to get in contact with her, to help her.
Meanwhile, the sky is getting darker. The girl attempts to break through us, but since the path is narrow I succeed to grab her by a hand, saying “let’s walk together”. Yet she, a girl of eight, managed to break out and resumed her way forward, now running.
As we tread on, I’m looking at the houses on my left side: they have their front walls eaten as if solely for the purpose of the passers by to look into their confines — there I see decrepit and abandoned classrooms. Atmosphere gradually transforms into that of a horror show. The running of time accelerates along with the beating of dream’s (and my) heart. Meanwhile, the girl tries to get inside the house which as I understand used to be her home. We pass her as she stand on the right side of the trod, in the place where it turns left. She rings the bell, noxiously.
I and my friend continued our way forward, but there was something in the air, something was rotten. I glanced back to ask, I don’t know whom exactly, “what is happening? Why is this village abandoned?”
I notice that the girl, altogether incapable of getting inside her house, stands there with a slashing terror in her eyes. She is broken. I take her in my arms and run as fast as I can to leave the village. When I looked at her house it was no longer there, except two dolls who were sitting opposite of each other and staring at each other, as if alive. I turned the girl’s head from the scene so that she can’t see it. They were sitting on the earth, where the floor used to be. My heart was breaking.
As we’re running out of the village, the multitudes of mutilated bodies were attempting to close the passage, preventing our escape. These zombies were crawling on the ground so that I had to jump over them — as high as I can. I’ve put my entire effort into the last jump and… it was over.
I was in the darkness for some time, somewhere between the dream realms. Narration voiceover tells about the terrors which were happening to the females of the village: “men were playing with the fingers”, “ rats were used”, “women were hurt”, etc. The bas-relief images and frescos appear — showing certain mutilation of the female genitalia, showing tortured women.
Then I found myself on the sun-lit bridge crossing a river. But without the girl. I understand that I it is my fault that the girl was living in that place, where all those horrors were taking place. “Rat mutations” tape runs in my head. I look at others and cry “where is the girl?” She’s nowhere to be seen. But then I feel the sleeping mind conjuring and conjecturing another, last puzzle of the Gestalt — she returns. With her head wrapped in some white bandages; with her head uncannily prolonged. As I’m unwrapping the bandages, a grey-blue skin of hers can be seen. I uncover a head of a rat. I’m struggling to fix my facial expression to make sure she’s not horrified of how horrified I am. As I hold her on the bridge, I say to her — “I would not leave you again”.