One possible solution to my career problems is imagestreaming.
It's imagestreaming that maximises the amount of (illusory) free will that I have:
so far, it's the best strategy that I have encountered which can help me do that.
When imagestreaming, I can make the Universe as rich and interesting as my
imagination will let me. I can be whatever I want, morph into anything,
experience lives that are not possible to experience in this Universe.
Enrolling into fine arts school is a step towards acquiring good skills at
representing my imagestreams visually.
Here is an imagestream relating to that, again edited for readability.
I am Archimedes in his bathtub, shouting eureka. Thus it begins with a eureka
metaphor. The bathtub is full of different objects, and phenomena.
There is a whirlpool and cloud system in one corner. A hurricane is developing.
It's raining, it's foggy, it's hailing; there is loud thunder. There are submarines,
and various objects floating on the water, in particular the yellow plastic duck.
The water is turbulent mostly, but next to me the viscosity is zero: it's a superfluid,
so I am not wet despite being in the water. In another corner, the viscosity is
enormous, and there are streams of various solid colours that don't mix. There is
a deep purple stream, a bright canary yellow stream (Serinus canaria), another that's
a very opaque blue. The strands of these currents merge to form a braid which travels
like an optic fibre. The streams are carrying messages, and water.
Instead of the previous image of the young girl in the bath with the duck,
I'm Archimedes and I am much older. The duck is quacking, not silent.
It is paddling happily, going around in circles around the whirlpool,
moved by the centrifugal force.
There is a blue tarp at an amusement centre, covering the floor of a temporary tent.
I am a child sitting on the tarp,
but various things are poking the tarp upwards, under me and around to me.
I imagine that they are music notes trying to poke through the tarp.
Actually lots of musical notes are heading towards me. They have the shape of
small ebony black balls, perfectly spherical and very hard. Each one that I can
reach, I put in my pockets until they are bursting to the seam.
This is a cliffhanger scene. Sylvester Stallone is hanging by one hand keeping him
from falling to his death. The stone of the promontory he is hanging from has an
unusual shape. It is a slate of granite in the shape of a square root, and he has his
hand stuck in the steep bend of the square root sign. As he looks there, he notices
that it's become a cube root, as there is a small 3. Which becomes a 5, then a 7.
The next prime number is quickly replacing the previous one, making the granite
stone bigger and bigger to give it room. The numbers are now written in Chinese,
they are elaborately constructed of slates of hard stones. As the numbers get larger,
the Chinese characters are so complex that they look like buildings, eventually
they represent blueprints for entire futuristic cities.
I see a juggler, it is lord Shiva. He is juggling the three oranges of Prokofiev. The
oranges are planets, covered with water and atmospheric phenomena. Only a god
would juggle planets. One becomes a bowling ball with three holes for the fingers,
and I send it away rolling, and its inhabitants become all dizzy from the rotation,
and it's messing up the weather too, with more hurricanes than would
statistically be predicted.
I am in an orchard eating a deliciously ripe red cherry.
I'm sitting on a chair and little bees are buzzing around me. I get up and walk and
walk, I don't know where I will be going. I am climbing stairs and I look around me
to find a table, set up with a Thanksgiving dinner and a turkey. I clap my hands to
applaud. I don't know why, there does not appear to be a performance concluding.
I am carrying a sleeping bag, and I unroll it to sleep. I am in a forest, it is dark,
and I hear the music of bird songs, and I think of Siegfried who could understand
birds. This is a pretty image, and I fall asleep. A little canny fox comes to visit me,
his eyes shine in the moonlight. He has a friendly bushy tail. It could be used as
a paint brush. It could also be used as a wiper for eyeglasses. I am in discussion
with the fox about how to make a top-quality brush with his tail. With an electric
shaver, I trim the tail into a brush shape, and I explain to him how useful such a
tail can be. But the perspicacious fox objects that his hair is going to grow, and
this will lead to unevenness. Is there a solution? I tell him to strive to make
his hair grow at an even pace. Very different story from the tailless fox of the fable who
tried to convince other foxes to cut their own tails.
I am a little koala in a tree, and I am hugging the tree firmly. I'm quiet here and I'm
sleeping. I've got big round eyes. I'm smiling and it's a comfortable position,
on a gorgeous eucalyptus tree with smooth bark of a light olive colour. The smell
of eucalyptus leaves (especially the Molton Brown edition!) keeps me soothed.
It's very pleasant, peaceful, relaxing. Now I've got to get up and do something.
It's a dark sky with stars and the Milky Way. I'm a little teddy bear, a koala, on my
two feet, walking on the ground with slow tentative movements, with a gait that
is not the most elegant, like a stuffed animal not showing much articulation of
movement, with my two front paws up in the air, on each side of my body, just
hanging and useless. Not a very natural position for a koala. I walk and I walk and
I try to get somewhere. What do I first see? Is it the stream with the salmon?
I'm in British Columbia. I'm meeting with Kodiak bears, much larger bears than
koala bears. I wonder if there's a connection with Philip Pullman's trilogy. I'm
going around the world, going east to west, the opposite direction that I had
intended. There are whales in the ocean.
I'm now in Kamchatka, going down the Rim of Fire. Now is the Hokkaido
island in Japan. There is a flight of Siberian cranes, they are on their way to India.
I follow them, gliding the air currents with them. I land in Bharatpur, the bird
sanctuary. It's been raining a lot, so there are lots and lots of birds like a hundred
years ago, not like when I actually went there and it was totally dry and there were no
flocks of birds, only an ecological disaster, but a very skilled guide could still help
us identify a hundred different species of lonely birds (I have the list if anyone is curious!)
But today water is plentiful, the cranes have landed in a big pond full of
fish, frogs, toads, salamanders. I want to continue my trip around the earth but
there is something more pressing: I want to explore the tree of life, follow
Dawkins' Ancestor Tale, but I want to follow every branch, so I need a plan.
I don't want to follow one branch and get lost there. I need an algorithm,
a bit like a computer chess program, where I'll explore a bit one branch, then
jump to another, then another, until I've reached every dendrite. Now I can
continue my round-the-world trip east to west. I'm in Tibet which has been
ravaged by the Chinese, it's all destroyed. It's very cold for koalas, ten kilometres
above sea level. We fly away and I hear the sound of the high winds, which at
first has no structure, just a bland high pitch noise, but upon hearing with more
focus, have a rich beautiful structure, it becomes the music of the high winds.
The trip goes on: Dubai, Egypt, Turkey, Bulgaria, landing in Switzerland, at the zoo
or on Lake Geneva. There is Chateau Chillon on the way from Lausanne to
Montreux. The waves are splashing against the castle walls.
I am hungry and I need eucalyptus leaves. I shake my head in despair, getting
more hungry. Wondering if I'm just a stuffed animal. A pantomime. I see
white strings hanging on each of my four paws, and there is someone above
who is animating me. I'm really fully stuffed now, but hungry. And that's not much
fun.
I am at the piano, and I can play any work of Bach or Beethoven in reverse i.e.
from end to beginning from memory. I'm an octopus, playing 8 different compositions on
8 different keyboards forming an octagon around me.
.
