An hour I mostly wasn't there for — and can't stop returning to.
Not a manual. Not a field note. An attempt to hold a feeling still — in words and in colour — before it faded, because the parts that fade are usually the parts worth keeping.
I don't remember the moment it took. One second the room was the room. Then, with no transition and no sound of a door closing, the room stopped assembling itself the way rooms do. Nobody warns you that consciousness has a resolution — and that it can be turned down.
Everything was zoomed in. Not magnified — zoomed, the way a photo goes when you push past its last real detail and fall into the grain. The world stopped being made of things and started being made of pixels, and I was somewhere down inside them.
The sound came with it: slowed, then simplified, then garbled — not because anything was broken, but because I was too close to it to hear the whole of it. Vision did the same. It flattened. It gave up its depth. Everything arrived one layer thick.
Jumping from one colour to the next. One square of nothing to another. That was the entire content of the hour: colour, then a different colour. I had no body I could find. No edges. One dimension, if that.
And here is the part I keep turning over — my thoughts were completely intact. I was still me, still thinking clearly, still narrating. I just couldn't zoom out. I had the mind and none of the map. I was microscopic, genuinely and not as a figure of speech: like an ant on a four-lane highway, aware of every grain of the asphalt beneath it, with no way to understand that it was standing on a road.
I had the mind and none of the map.
Later I understood what had happened. Normally, experience is of something — it points at a world. Every colour belongs to an object, every sound to a source, composed so fast and so automatically that you mistake the finished picture for reality itself. Under, the assembly line stopped. I was left holding the raw material: colour and sound and dimension with nothing they belonged to. Sensation without a referent. The pixels before they resolve into an image.
It was abstract in the truest sense — not a painting of anything, just form and quality and movement, closer to a colour field than a photograph. I spend my life making abstractions: models, maps, systems, this whole library. But I didn't make this one. The world got abstract on its own, and I was only there for it. The abstracter became the abstraction.
It was liberating. For someone who carries the whole system in his head every waking hour — always holding the overview, always responsible for seeing how the parts fit — being reduced to a single pixel with nothing to integrate was the closest thing to rest I have felt in a long time.
No whole to maintain. No structure to keep aloft. Just the one colour at a time, and no obligation to make it mean anything. There is a freedom, it turns out, in being too small to be responsible for the whole.
A freedom in being too small to be responsible for the whole.
Surreal, and simple, and clean. Not a high — nothing I'd chase. Just pressure, released. The anesthesia didn't give me a new feeling so much as it briefly removed an old one, and only then did I notice how much I'd been carrying the entire time. You don't feel the weight until it's set down.