Let's say a "tesseractal" is the three-dimensional being's generic for a fourth-dimensional being.
A tesseractal would see the three-dimensional world clearly but not be perceived entirely by its inhabitants. As with Edwin Abbott Abbott's A Square in "Flatland," whose two-dimensional mind is blown by a close encounter of the spherical kind.
I'm explaining this to a friend who asked me over lunch if I believed in extraterrestrials. He was making indignant noises over "billions of dollars" being spent on SETI, the club for radio astronomy nerds who decipher space noise. And why would "they" do this when there are already extraterrestrials right here, he said conspiratorially.
I'm guessing "they" is the government. The government of the United States. The one made up of some lawyers, the occasional car salesman, a doctor or two, a few businessfolk and a lot of spoiled rich dudes who pretty much repeat what their 24-year-old aides tell them to say. These are the people covering up the existence of alien life forms walking among us here on Earth.
He is giving "they" way too much credit.
Even cursory observation suggests that bungled coincidences outnumber actual conspiracies by a ratio of about 1,000:1. Most actual conspiracies are really a string of small, coincidental farces. Conspiracies reside primarily within people's hindsight, but we love them.
My lunch date is a guy who will say anything in a confrontational way just to see what he gets back. He just finished telling me how he intentionally incensed the wife of a mutual friend by ripping women of a "certain age" just within earshot of her. She takes herself too seriously. Instead of shooting him down with a single Viagra crack, she came unglued.
He said she was scary.
I said don't sleep. Ever.
As for extraterrestrials, I told him that few things, for me, were matters of "belief," but rather of deduction. And because we keep receiving and decoding new information throughout our lifetimes, deduction is a continuing versus a conclusive process. For me—a single unit of a known species of 7 billion living on a tiny wet clod in the solar system, itself a miniscule dust spec in the galaxy, itself a infinitesimally small dust bunny in the universe, itself one of an infinite number—to presume I can achieve conclusive knowledge of anything other than my own experience and maybe not even that seems not merely the height of hubris but also insanity.
But he really wanted to go there. I searched his features. He was kidding but he was not. He certainly didn't want to be dismissed as a wackjob, and I knew if he was, he'd persist until I said anything just to get him to shut up.
Him: "You don't seem to feel very strongly about aliens walking around right here."
Me, looking directly at him: "Not at all. All people seem oddly alien to me."
It never occurred to him that he might be A Square, so I told him about it. Between dimensional and string theories, it seems more logical than alarming that other sentient things we cannot perceive of are walking around us. Why not? People talk about experiences with angels and ghosts all the time. Ever have that experience where it seems like you should have just had a car wreck but the vehicles seemed to kind of pass through one another? Me, too. Perfectly sober. Who's to say?
Our propensity to vilify everything we don't understand is more curious to me than those mysteries themselves. It's one thing when there's evidence of malfeasance; another when there's none. There seems to be more malfeasance in human nature than in nature itself. Nature is one indifferent mistress. Humanity it scared of its shadows.
It's always a good idea to question one's way of seeing the world as much as questioning what one does or does not see in it.
Here's an alien kitty:
I take a break from my impressive wine habit before the year turns. I look tired enough without being mildly hung-over.
I feel better physically. But it took me away from the inside of myself, which may be the reason for the habit in the first place, like a psychomotor Droste effect. When you break the cycle, you're left with what's behind it, typically grief or something like it.
Grief or something like it does not take "no" for an answer. You can't just say, "No, I'm not having this grief. I'll distract myself. I'll focus on work. I'll rave in Ibiza. I'll eat this chicken pot pie and watch 'Spongebob.'"
Fine.
Grief will wait, like a cougar, watching its prey get fatter and fatter. The longer you wait to let it take you down—and it will—the longer it will chew through you.
Grief comes in waves. It physically hits the body like a wall of water. It leaves you like a cartoon coyote flattened by a giant steam roller. You sort of unstick your flat self from the ground and try slowly to get 3D again. It's hard to breathe when you're 2D because your lungs are flat. That's how you know it just happened.
I can see why people don't give up wine habits alone, but the handful of people who understand me are farflung and occupied. And I don't do confessionals except for ones like this, where I can say whatever I want without someone interrupting to tell me what I'm trying to say or what's wrong with me.
So I sit alone in a cloister with this stuff that's stuck keeps fucking me up and say, "Fine. Here I am. What the hell do you want?" And then wait, because of course it can't be like a round of antibiotics and a two-day nap. It's more like Cato Fong dropping from the ceiling when everything's almost perfect inside of you.
There are other things to do in the cloister. Push-ups. Art. Any kind of art. Anything the body considers art. The mind has to stay out of it and let art take place. Which is why I am not too concerned about sentence structure here. A small rebellion of the consciously dying.
Art is in my lineage. My mother and her friends spray painted six-pack rings Kleenex pink and blue and twisted them into hyacinth blooms for table centerpieces. I don't know what your mom and her friends did. Mine did that. I find it to be not merely perfectly legitimate "art," but Renaissance-like Americana that will one day adorn a plaster half-pillar in the National Art Gallery. I say this in all seriousness because I saw a perfectly pressed men's dress shirt pinned to a wall in the National Art Gallery as part of an "installation."
I have ironed, and I have dealt with plastic six-pack rings. Ducks get caught in them. I know, because I freed one once from a six-pack ring. With another guy I had a crush on that makes me wonder if I hit my head. That's not to be as un-nice as it sounds, because he was a perfectly nice drug dealer who was shorter than me but drove a nice car. And I think he had a pet snake.
See, I told you.
I find a blog site I've registered on who-knows-when and it just sits here with my name on it not doing anything. So I start typing these words, and almost type "styping" instead of "start typing" because it's a logical portmanteau and who says we can't just make up our own? So I styping (maybe that's why) and I wonder really just how much of a waste so much of what's posted online really is, like this, meandering off into no place in particular but seems at least to be amusing me.
I mean, I'm shooting electrons all over the surface of the planet doing this, which presumably one does with ones own thoughts as well, but thoughts don't travel the energy grid and flash-fry coal, hydrogen or a petrolforms and spew more carbon into the atmosphere and melt the ice caps and drown strangers along the coast. That I know of.
So that's what I think about now as I activate a blog on a site I registered for who-knows how many years ago, for whatever unknown reason.
Sometimes I want to say things that makes no sense to anyone but me in the moment and that's enough.
So it works for me, unless I'm killing the planet. What then? Should I take to a notebook with a pen? Same problem. Killing trees for paper or polluting the wee amount of drinking water we have left for our exploding numbers by recycling paper we've already used for, oh, say, the California Tax Code? No, that doesn't work.
Recycling is like this collective self-delusion that makes it OK to spend $100 at Trader Joe's and come home with $70 worth of packaging that we then dutifully put in "the recycling" that ends up being processed with what little potable water we have left to drink. There will be blood, but it won't be about oil. It will be about water.
But who wants to read that? We burn up fuel cruising the Internet for cute animal pictures. So here is a kitty:
