Key to Ash Fork
“Eternity is in love with the productions of time.” (William Blake)
(links to four of the Ash Fork chapters below this article)
“Classical philosophical thought is completely outmoded, as Korzybski, the man who developed general semantics, has pointed out, the Aristotelian ‘either-or‘ — something is either this or that — is one of the great errors of Western thinking, because it’s no longer true at all. That sort of thinking does not even correspond to what we now know about the physical universe.” (William S. Burroughs: “The Job,” pg. 48–49.)
If you have read at least one of my Ash Fork series, starring Captain Bergamo, aka, Count Bergamo, you might notice that it is not set in outer space as we are taught to imagine it. It is set in a probability field which is between squared possibility and materialization. This is how I imagine the Western Lands William Burroughs wrote about. It is real, he said, but it is not solid:
“To endure in time, any structure must present predictable recurrences. The visions, the glimpses of the Western Lands, exist in space, not time, a different medium and a different light, with no temporal coordinates or recurrences. The medium bears some relation to holograms …”
Bergamo is a Captain by rank, but not in a space force or even an air force. He was in the army. He was tricked into calling in a strike on a house in Bagdad where there was a family. In the ruins he found a child’s arm. He was damned by his own hand, as was Burroughs after he shot Jane Vollmer in the head. When a man does something for which he cannot forgive himself, he lives among the damned. Captain Bergamo is told by a psychiatrist about the many worlds theory in an attempt to console him, suggesting that each decision he makes chooses a path, while in another instantaneously created universe, other possible decisions take different paths.
Instead of being a linear line, life is an ever expanding matrix.
Bergamo began to think about how he could get to a different dimension, one where his life took a different path. His strategy was to use conscious intent to speed evolution of the only other body he had, which was the body mapped onto the cortex. He began to change state and move about in this new body, which became self aware, like an astronaut coming out of hibernation. He had no idea if it could survive without the organic body, or if it could, for how long (maybe just seconds) but it was his only path of inquiry.
Instead of riding in a rocket to Mars or the moon, he wakes up in Ash Fork. It is a replica of a small town from the American west, with the main features being a train station and a replica of an old Southwestern Mission. Bergamo has no sense of traveling anywhere, it is just there, and when he is there he has no sense that he’s dreaming.
It is a real place in a dimension of un-squared probabilities. It has no material location, it has a bandwidth location.
Instead of conceiving that technology is the point of the process of externalization of interior processes, Bergamo conceived of awakening these interior processes by mirroring them back from the technology, to be the brain of the body formed by the cortex, to make it fully self aware. The body as mapped on the cortex is not proportional to the organic body (it’s mostly hands and mouth) Bergamo develops an injectable DNA field computer which establishes nodes in each muscle trigger point. Bergamo becomes the first natural born man to solve the problem of surviving the shift from organic based life to information based life.
Now he’s not just awake in Ash Fork, he’s learned that because of his powers, he is a god in this dimension. He is self aware, not a component in a factory disguised as a themed western vacation town. He has awakened in himself all the capabilities that were extended into technology, and he has made himself into a computer more powerful than could be imagined. His intention, to consciously evolve into different dimensions of Space, succeeded, but nobody else can do it. He left the instructions, but when other humans try to shift they feel such intense fear their muscles break their bones, and they die a painful death.
What humans can do, though, is make clones with DNA computers embedded into them. But they do not behave freely, even though they think they do. They are property, and have what is called a Priority Chip, a program which overrides any other program when activated. These clones are corporations. All the information of the corporation is stored in the clone’s computer field, but the personality program is on the other side of the firewall, based purely on adjusting to responses.
The Personality keeps to its side of the firewall
So the personality does not really know what’s taking place on the other side of the firewall. Like the town itself, the life on the surface moves along unaware that its purpose is to power the Dark Drives being produced beneath the surface. In Ash Fork there are spooks, a term used for people who lay in the energy belt generated by the drives coming out of the factories, along which they initially accelerate, and then, they vanish. The underside of the Dark Drive is black hole technology. It absorbs all light, including the light in the bodies of the spooks. All that can be seen of them until they pull themselves together again are ghosts dancing in the poppies.
Ash Fork is a series but not in series. It exists in Space, not time.
The consistent character is Count Bergamo. When he first goes to Ash Fork it is empty and desolate, but each time he goes back it has begun to change, and he is driving the changes by remembering that he is like the personality programs of the corporations, which do not have access to the other side of the firewall. He is a social interface, and he is also a computer of immense power, in the form of a man. I have been writing these as an exercise for many years. My rules of engagement were that I could edit for clarity and grammar but the narrative remained as it came out onto the screen, so that this was a practice for learning to write without forethought, aka, active imagination.
My experience of active imagination is that it is like dreaming. It takes awhile after writing it to grasp the deeper meaning.
The images are dream images. My friend Adelia Ritchie was just writing about this, the right and left, and how they get along, or do not get along. Active imagination puts these two separated lovers back together again. I will link it below.
And below are some Ash Fork links