The Imaginary Map

I don't find much of worth on the internet. The problem with the internet is that while you can say anything you want even if it sounds so silly that no publisher would let it be said in an actual book, by the same token any idiot could post to the interenet and many of them do. I'm sure there are some real insights there, insights that could never be found anywhere else, but looking for them is like searching for diamods in an enormous heap of garbage. There are a few interesting fragments of ideas, but mostly it's all a lump of simplistic New Age nonsense, simplistic literalist nonsense, and Time Cube-esque ravings, along with the usual completely irrelevant search results you get even at the best of times, such as a page intepreting King Crimson lyrics.

After a while, I leave the computer behind, feeling empty and unsatisfied. It always seems as if whatever it is I'm looking for is just beyond my reach no matter how far I stretch. If only I had someone to talk to who would understand me, I might have a better idea of what it is that I'm searching for. But I don't, and I probably never will.

Let me tell you a bit about myself. My name is Holly Jordan, and I hate it. It makes me sound like a sweet, normal girl-next-door type. I live in the United States. You don't need to know where. It could be anywhere. It doesn't matter to my story. My father was a bible- thumping Protestant and my mother was an athiest, so I'm pretty cynical about religious loyalty. I am in the senior year of a high school that is the same as any other high school at its heart. Most of its classes just regurgitate things that "everyone knows" which are completely false. Almost everything worthwhile I've ever learned has been outside of school. The exception is my current math classs. I've managed to do well enough academically to get into a decent college someday, but only really excel in math. I'm not really sure what I'll do with my life once I leave. I don't think I'm going to be a mathematician, as I'm not as interested in the mathematics itself as where it's leading me.

I reluctantly leave the library behind and walk into the dull linoleum corridors of the high school. Today is an awful, terribly mundane day. There are some days, mainly in the spring and fall when the air is clear and the seasons are changing, that I feel a connection to something greater than myself. But on winter days like this, I feel dead, although sometimes in the heart of winter break I enjoy standing on the threshhold of my house and watching the pure white snow. Of course, it doesn't matter what the day is like outside, because our high school is like a cave. It has no windows except in a very few rooms. Perhaps it's having spent so much time in a building like this that's contributed to my sense that the real world isn't real--not in the sense that skeptics think but in the sense that there are much greater realities that we're not in touch with. Perhaps we are all trapped in a building with no light desperately seeking a window.

As I am thinking this, however, I notice that I am holding a paper in my hand. When I was reading one of the books, one on Euler's theorem I think, I noticed a piece of paper stuck in it. I'd picked it up without thinking.

As I stand still in the hallway, deserted in the heart of lunch hour, and look at the paper, I am overcome by awe. It feels vaguely like I always imagined old parchment would, but much sturdier, almost as if it is new. On it is what seems to be a mathematical diagram, a graph with two axes, one for real and one for imaginary. Except that there are small circles on the diagram that show pictures in them. Even though they are very small, when I look at any of them, they seem to almost fill my perception. They are black and white but in a very detailed, almost photorealistic, style. There are so many of them, showing vast cities and beautiful forests or strange machines or things that I can barely comprehend. I realize that this is some kind of map. It is fascinating and enchanting, but the other worlds are not what I am looking for. It is difficult to look at the map because it is so facsinating and detailed, but I draw my eyes down toward i. I see a picture that appears to be merely blackness but something about it makes it seem not like an absence of light or being but a kind of being that is too great for us to understand. This is the heart of imagination, the door to eternity, the Black Void. I hold onto it and try to meditate on it.

1. I find myself in another world, but not the Black Void itself.
2. I enter the Black Void, but then am pulled away from it before I can understand it better, into a new life.
3. To my dismay, nothing happens

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