Geist-Driven

He shakes off the white sticky webbing that cloys to his spirit in the same way that overplayed, teeth-grinding bubblegum pop music occupies neural capacity. His trajectory was not recorded in the flight plan, and never would be. He is in a hapless rocket without a guidance system, leading the ascent of the wax-winged monkeys within. The pitiless founders half-heartedly gesture concern toward the sun that has blinded him with vainglory and that will soon melt the arrogance of his demise, while their other half-hearts lurch gleefully at his impending fall.

Back on Earth, picking up the pieces of his spectacular descent, he scratches and scrapes the dirt in pursuit of some answer, some closure. He has everything he needs here, every comfort, every provision. But in this dimension, apparently, everything was never enough. He is sick with the cush and comfort. Contentment and happiness are the kid gloves of complacency and boredom. He thirsts for pain, just a drizzle, to keep himself occupied through next month. He was not meant to sit idly by while others solved the codex and took the glory. He was not meant to come in second. And with this as his charge, he will endure the suffering. He will prepare his wings anew. And he will die, once again.

The geist inside him would propel his body right out to the infinite edge of space-time, right over it, into the void,  into nothing, with afterburners ablaze and the throttle fully open. He sees that he is a tool, a machine, a minion of consciousness. Onward! Faster! He leans into the hot breath of karmic hell fire. He laughs into the terrifying chaos of his battle with archetypes who arm themselves with mythic weapons and time travel. He knows it is futile, like attempting to defeat the ocean tides. But he knows also that a warrior has no choice. He is but a molecule of burning hot ammonia in their most vile, most stinking, sticky, yellow piss. He thinks he hears them laugh, maddeningly just out of earshot, as they drunkenly spray him across the cosmos before rejoining their brutal, orgiastic party, now in its sixteenth millennium.

The geist tries to recall what he certainly must have learned after so many times around, but finds no adequate brain in his local body. Instead each star appears to him as a piece of the exomemory of the collective, a clue to the codex. He cannot possibly reassemble the big picture. In fact the verb "to reassemble" does not seem apply. Its levers of action find no purchase outside of time scales. The disoriented geist must now piece it all together from myth and the Hubble space telescope, with two left hands and a foot in its mouth. Each gain, each hard won nugget of knowledge slips back into obscurity at the end of each lifetime. Who is he this time? He reawakens screaming, having just come through the birth canal, realizing he has forgotten it all, yet again.

And so only this much is clear. He must live the geist now, in this lifetime. He must shake off the dullifying comforts and blinding distractions. He must dive fervently into the material and commit to memory the language of the stars. He must listen to the small voice within, the voice that is always just emerging, the voice of the geist that is horrified by trivialities. He must do as the voice says. It does not ask much, tweaking his trajectory ever so slightly at choice points, but with deadly accurate aim. And in doing so he will free this prisoner from his encrusted, bleeding eyes to claim its place among the gods.