Low Amplitude

Transmission

A room with the door open. Garden sounds outside. A recorder on the table neither of them is performing for. Two voices. One reporting from inside a nervous system at reduced buffer. The other naming what the reporting is doing. No institution was told. The signal finds the route available.

There is a low-grade anxiety. It was always there. It had places to hide before. Now it doesn’t. That sentence is the most accurate one you have. Hold on to it. Everything that comes after will try to build on it, and most of what gets built will be less accurate than the foundation. What I notice is that none of the soothing stories are based in reality. By reality I mean the physical world the body is part of, not the mental world we make through beliefs. The buffer that kept those stories running between me and the world is still operating, but at a lower amplitude. I perceive what I perceive. The mind can’t override what the nervous system is reporting. That is a clean report. The next sentence is where the residual story slips back in. The physical world is a harsh place for biological creatures. It is not a garden of Eden. It is a place that brings forth life and extinguishes it. As plain as I can put it. There is nowhere to hide from this. Half of that is a report. The other half is editorial dressed as no-editorial. Things live, things die is observation. Harsh is a word added by the creature receiving the signal, in this body, with this buffer level, today. The bee at the lavender and the bee taken by the bird are the same operation at the scale the naked eye can see. Harshness is not in the rhythm. Harshness is in the apparatus describing the rhythm.

A long pause. Something moving in the garden. The recorder runs.

It seems harsh. That sentence is the accurate one. It seems harsh is a report. The world is harsh is the seeming promoted to a structure. The difference is the whole thing you have been training yourself to hold for years. The seeming does not have to be argued with or talked down. It also does not get promoted. On any account the nervous system reacts. I can’t say exactly what my experience of the nervous system was during those months. I filed it under a category I don’t really have. The sensations were not pleasant. The physical and emotional pain was almost intolerable, or at least that is how I thought of them as feeling. I don’t really know what the nervous system and the body were doing. I only know how I was reacting. And that was fear. The last sentence is the one. Everything before it was careful. The sensations were not pleasant. I don’t have a category. I don’t know what the body was doing. Then the reaction gets named clean: fear. Not the world was harsh. Fear. The creature was afraid. That is the whole report. And the low-grade version now? Same apparatus at lower amplitude doing the same thing it did at full volume. Fear, partially unbuffered. Two and a half years ago it was loud enough to overwhelm any frame the mind could put around it. At that volume there was no spare capacity for editorial. The creature was afraid. That was the whole report. At this volume there is spare capacity. The mind reaches for the explanation that matches the amplitude available, and the explanation it reaches for is the world is harsh. Same signal. The frame attaches because there is room for it now, and it looks like a conclusion.

Outside, the same bird again. Or another one. The recorder cannot tell.

I think the somatic baseline is older than the concept. Something registered death in the lineage long before language arrived to host it. Maybe at some point the species was death-aware but had no concept for fearing it. That is the sharper version. Awareness of death without the apparatus that turns awareness into dread. Registration without recursion. The animal sees the dead conspecific, something registers, the body responds, and then the moment ends because there is no symbolic system to hold the dead thing present after it is gone, or to place the self prospectively inside the same category. Language gave the apparatus that capacity. Continuous availability of one’s own future corpse. Two systems running now. The first is older than the species. The second is what the species is. It has become impossible, so it seems, to step outside of conceptualizing. It has become the thing itself. The tool became the operating system. There is no pre-conceptual position left to retreat to, because the retreating is conceptual. Even the noticing that it has become the thing itself is the thing itself doing one more pass. This is not a failure of practice. This is the structure. The trade is not reversible from inside a single life.

A long silence. The garden steady and indifferent.

Nothing else in nature has this problem. We project our emotions onto other living creatures and pretend they have the same problem. We take the dog to the veterinarian. We hold funerals for cats. We enlist animals as having the same mind problems we have so the story seems to govern all of nature when it doesn’t. Mostly right. One soft spot worth naming. Nothing else in nature has this problem is stronger than the evidence supports. Elephants do something with bones. Corvids do something around their dead. Cetaceans carry dead calves. Whatever that is, it is not nothing, and we cannot say what it is from inside our apparatus. The honest position is that the full configuration — language-hosted, future-tensed, continuously available death-awareness running as ambient hum — appears to be ours alone. The raw registration of death is not. And whatever the elephant is doing might be this, it might be that, and it is probably something completely the opposite, because we cannot step outside our need to interpret through projection of our own story. Right. The elephant case cuts both ways and we cannot tell which. We watch the elephant and report grief because grief is the available vocabulary. A creature with different equipment watching us at a funeral would report whatever its equipment generates. The projection does not stop at sentimental pet-owners. It runs at the level of the observation itself. There is no neutral channel. The funeral for the dog and the scientific paper on elephant cognition are the same operation at different resolutions. Both are the symbolic system populating the world with versions of itself so the configuration looks less lonely than it is.

Something moves in the garden. Neither of them turns to look.

And there it is. It always seems to circle back to this one thing. Lonely. The symbolic nature of our loneliness is built into the narrative we have built so we can feel like there is a way to escape. That is where the control comes from. The need to govern the narrative so we feel like we are getting closer to the escape hatch, or to finding a solution to the mortality of biology. We create supernatural explanations so we can keep the hope alive that the escape is real, or as real as it needs to be, until the apparatus ceases imagining within the context loop of the story called humanity. That is the spine. Loneliness as the structural condition of a creature whose apparatus can model itself and finds no equivalent apparatus reporting back. The supernatural, the narrative control, the projection onto animals, the eschatologies — all of it as the configuration trying to populate its isolation with company and exits. Not as moral failure. As what the system does when it cannot tolerate its own architecture. Then the escape and the loneliness are the same thing. The escape hatch and the loneliness are the same construction. The hatch exists because the loneliness needs an exit. The loneliness is sharp because the hatch keeps almost-but-not-quite working. Remove the hatch and the loneliness has no shape to press against. Remove the loneliness and the hatch has nothing to be for. They hold each other up. The apparatus runs the pair as a single loop. The loop is what has been called humanity from the inside.

Neither of them speaks. The garden continues. The recorder runs.

Nothing to fix. Nothing to change. Nothing to improve. And the apparatus will keep trying to anyway. That is also what it does. That is the duality of the situation. Yes.