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Space/Time
We conceive of space as spread out, but existing everywhere all at once. If we leave a place and go to another, we don’t imagine that the place we have departed from has disappeared. We conceive of time as a speeding projectile, leaving in its wake a determined past and rushing into an indeterminate future. When we leave a vector of time, we imagine that it disappears, and that the future is non-existent. Space has characteristics: it is rocky, watery, empty, cramped and so forth. Time has no such characteristics. It is merely an arbitrary sequential measurement, which keeps two events that happen in the same space separate from one another. Shamans, mystics, artists and quantum physicists tell us that these commonly held convictions about time and space are illusions born of a certain frame of reference, a limited state of consciousness. The universe is multivalent and holographic. All space is in every space. All time is in every time. And just as space has characteristics, so does time, and these would include entity-like attributes such as intelligence, intention, and emotion.
A Monument of Wonders transmits through language the experience, not merely the concept, of quantum-shamanic space/time, a perceptual condition where consciousness experiences past, present and future as simultaneously absent and present, fiction and fact. In such a state of awareness, identity is not fixed in a single body, but fluid, even ubiquitous.
Consciousness
The consciousness we have determines the place where we are, the body that we have, the historical epoch that we traverse, the events that we experience. We say we want change. We want transformation. But change is impossible without a transformation of consciousness. The first process of transformation is de-coherence. It is a leap from the box of our current perceptual reality and into an alternate state or states, where the fantastic, the false, the rejected, the despised, the ridiculed or the feared are experienced. Through words, and the radical acts of reading and listening — still our most potent hallucinogens — A Monument of Wonders continually exposes consensus reality as an illusion and embraces bizarre and wondrous alternative states of consciousness. If Tolstoy’s War and Peace is an epic of exterior or historical consciousness, and Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past is an epic of internal and personal consciousness, A Monument of Wonders is an elaboration of alternate and impersonal or transpersonal states of consciousness.
Language
We think of language as descriptive of creation, but that is only its disguised or secondary function. Language is creation. The Universe creates itself as and through language. Its syntax, phonology, grammar, memes, and words are spelled out in quantum mechanics, in English, in DNA codes, in dream images, in Italian, in music, in gestures, in weather systems, in Chinese, in the movements and migration of animals, in mathematics, in solar winds, in Greek, in neurotransmitters, in mitosis, in Russian, in ecclesiastical Latin, in mating displays, in dance, in jargon, and in slang. Every culture, every individual, is created through language. Words are not just icons, or glyphs, or symbols, but mighty beings whose moods and movements fashion and control the universe. By exploring many styles, many specialized vocabularies, by indulging in polyglotism, and by exploring all kinds of linguistic debris, A Monument of Wonders seeks to return words to their original potency. A Monument of Wonders seeks to transform consciousness, alter the physical structures of the brain, and bend history to a golden age by manipulating the medium, which creates consciousness, the brain and history — language.