I made my move exactly and precisely when and as I had intended to, but the move made me. I had been planning it forever, only it had been planning me.
That awful awareness – tell me that you have never known it! Tell me – if you can – that there are some people who have never suffered from this terrible appalling insight. Good luck to them in that case, that’s all I can say.
I made my move with great guile and cunning but it did me no good because it was still the move making me. The move outsmarted me every time – it got there ahead of me and it turned the tables on me. I wasn’t anywhere to be found. I was a clumsy sad accidental invention, it occurred to me, in a world that didn’t care.
I had made my move, my defining move, my conclusive move, we might even say, and yet it all gave way to nothing. It was all roaring so emptily in my head – it was roaring like the hallucination it was.
Tell me that you have known this horror – this waking horror, as I call it – where you are being controlled by your own frighteningly out-of-control controlling. Tell me – if you dare – that this doesn’t ring a bell. You perform your customary actions in order to arrive at some aim, in order to achieve some purpose, but it is your customary actions that are performing you. You’ve been outsmarted again.
‘My customary reactions, my customary behaviour’, I crowed out loud, feeling very pleased with myself, and hoping to receive the Great Benefit, but in all of this I was nowhere to be found. I was the original sham. I was the original ‘Sham-I-Am’, the Sham-Master of whom people might sometimes speak. I was the original Chairman of the Board of Shamsters…
I was busily plotting my escape just as I am always plotting my escape. I spend ninety per cent of my time plotting my escape and the remaining ten per cent I spend thinking about enacting it. There’s nothing else to do in this narrow dimension, apart from forever plotting and rehearsing escapes that won’t ever work. It’s a pastime, it’s a hobby, it’s a preoccupation. It’s the ‘Planning to Escape World’ that you are always planning to escape from – you’re so damn busy planning that you can’t ever leave.
The move had made me and I was afraid. The move had made me and so it could equally well unmake me. What did it matter – it’s all shadow-play, after all. The move had made me but maybe the move wasn’t real in the first place. Maybe the move never happened.
The machine made me, I decided, but the machine had made me by some kind of accident. I was an error of the system, an echo of an original process that had long since receded from the earth. I was a mistake that had somehow gone wrong. Tell me you haven’t known that terrible, terrible sadness! Tell me you don’t know anything about these things of which I speak…
‘The machine has made me,’ I tell everyone I meet. ‘The machine has made me and it is the machine that is making me speak these words…’ People walk away in horror when they hear this – they turn on their heels and walk away rapidly in the opposite direction. They know the truth of which I speak well enough, but they don’t like to be reminded…
