Self

He had been through a lot of things. Not so much in the conventional sense, though there was that. Those had been obvious. Mentally though, he had been to the brink. Emptiness, darkness, dense nearly impenetrable, hateful crushing rust. Self was a abstract. Not a mirror of physical events, memories were a catalog, not a costume.

He wasn't sure how people could be so preoccupied with what was immediately in front of them. In his mind that was merely a blip. A surface picture that really didn't add much to the whole – especially when it had been torn down and rebuilt so many times for him. Word were words. Examples were a flat tale that he couldn't relate to. The context was missing. The bits and bobs that filled a life. A schedule, goals, people, place, purpose. It was just a pigeon hole a space on a board that he no longer played on. Underneath it all was solid. A nothingness that was still something. A fixed point that didn't change, because there was nothing to change.

He could still sense brightness. Light focusing here or there, but one had to be careful in the light as well – as light itself wasn't something to fix oneself on, but to shine on things. Some light merely made the surface bright. It showed the different between itself and darkness, but it didn't see into the darkness. It wasn't an x-ray. Pointing out the broken limb was fine, but to see how to set the bone was another matter. Even then, it was easy to see what was, but not what could be.

Power was simply a scale. A position, a hierarchy, an organization was simply structure. To those worried about place, it was almost a blasphemy to change it. It was the container that wasn't seen. As useful as they are, they are also a straitjacket. The top doesn't interact with the bottom except through intermediaries. There are exceptions of course, but not enough to warrant a mention besides the obvious. Which is functional, if one has certain check-marks in mind, but anything specific gets diluted in the transfer. It has, in itself, limits inherent to the design. The mobility and goals were based on the position and responsibilities in the structure. Anything new was relegated to a position within the structure, not to compromise the structure itself. When one saw beyond the confines of the system, the possibilities were limitless.

It was a headache to interact. Everything came from a predictable direction, a predictable tone, and predictable content. Everything that presumed upon an even, or uneven playing field, shared or unshared experiences. A presupposed place and function. Even negotiating the scope was a monumental task. Sharing a language was not the same as sharing a lifetime of experiences. Concepts spoken from the depths of the heart and the mind would require a different kind of focus than was normally present.

What was needed was a theater, where the usual cloaks of office could be put aside. A chance to watch, learn, read someone else's words. A dance of music. A stage where it set itself – without the trappings of the presupposed. An exchange of molecules, amplified to balance out the hats of tens, hundreds, thousands of years. He had done this before. It had been a break that broke things. But it was a blank slate. Which is what everyone said they wanted, but without wanting to let go of anything.