It happened. It was happening. It is happening. It happens.
The effects were instantaneous – an accumulation of all sensory information. He was aware of every item of information about everything in all directions. At the same time he was unable to take in any of it.
His visual cortex took in all the information from his eyes, even the peripheral vision was alive, streaming information into his head. He could feel the light enter his cornea to transfer through the tiny lens and vitreous liquid before slamming into the retina and lighting up the rods and cones like tiny excitable fuses. The acuity of focus became a bundled mass of extra detection – the pictures on the wall were broken into deep pools of coloured, textural detail, each transferred within myriad pinpricks of light. But more than that, he was now also aware of the processing in the cortex, the pathways of stimulus as the eyes and optic nerves jangled. On its own that would have been extraordinary enough, but there was also so much more going on.
His ears picked up every detail within earshot – the boiler permanently exhaling in the kitchen, the wind rattling the windows, even his breathing and heartbeat and the auditory signatures of every little element within his vicinity. The quivering hairs within his cochlea received the magnified information given from outside. He had thought it quiet, but now even the silence was a wall of pressured sound. Unaccostomed to such overload, he instinctually put his hands to his ears, but this only served to emphasise the reverberations, squelching them further with the effects of his cupped hands.
In his hands he could feel the natural pressure of his circulatory system coursing through the capillaries and veins like so much fluid held by a flesh bags. He was aware of the synaptic functions within the muscles, the feedback of each neuron, the tensions within each of his muscles that kept his arms upright: these took on gargantuan proportions of which hitherto he'd been completely oblivious. The signal was naturally sent and his chest arose. With it his lungs expanded, only so far until numerous oxygen exchange and muscle tensions indicated a breath was fit to be expelled. Beneath it all his heart took regular beats – contract, rest, contract, rest. In his entire life he'd probably noticed this phenomena for no more than a minute, and yet the vitality of his being relied on this organ's muscular fitness and perfection.
And with each breath came air rushing over his olfactory organ – the tasting of chemical signals picked up and detected. He could smell his body, the base sexual and the bacterial odours: these rushed to the nerve centres and were split and diverted to the areas of his brain where the effects of molecules, mere molecules, were being summarily decoded.
He felt the pressure of his tongue on his palate and teeth, of the watery taste of his mouth. More still, he was picking up indications from his alimentary system of digestion, each squeeze of peristalsis and the minute transfer of food nutrients through the lining of his ileum, whilst separate enzyme indicators co-ordinated levels of sugars through his gut and water retention in his colon. The whole effect was of a tenuous organic machine absorbing the means necessary for function.
Further still, he was also aware of the effects of gravity on every part of his body, his bulbous feet on the level floor, and of the pressure of the seat upon which he rested. His skin gave off pressure data about he clothes he wore, the temperature and air pressure, even the air displacement within which he sat.
How had his mind ordinarily coped with all this information? From everywhere perceptional stimuli rushed into his mind without filtration, without the natural sifting of the brain. Instead, he was aware of it all and of the automatic processing of each point within the grey matter between his ears. How could he survive another six hours of this, let alone one hour – or one minute or second longer. This was the very definition of overload.
But then he noticed he was able to control his arms. He lowered them. They obeyed. He had wanted to control parts of this complexity and had been able to do so. He raised and lowered his arms again, like some slow exercise for those in clinical recovery. The same thing happened. If he could control his arms, he reasoned, he could control other things. Indeed, he was able to siphon off the sounds from all sources to just one thing – his breathing. He chose to ignore everything other than the focused points of his eyes, cutting out the perception processes and resolving structure and from that meaning. He found he was staring at the corner of the table. His mind was alive to the fact that this corner, an ordinary part of this mundane piece of furniture, had edges and that light was bouncing off it and entering his eyes, but he now understood: this was a corner.
He was overjoyed! For those seconds of mass perception all had been a tumbling force of chaos. Now he was able to control at least one thing and make from it a thought, just one single thought, that this was the corner of the table, something he understood and was able to use. The function of a table did not have to exist in his eyes, but was the principle of form – it had tableness to it.
Within seconds this realisation extended to all other aspects of his perception and as more came under his control, more things took on meaning and relevance. Instincts returned to mere instincts again and were ignored. He had another thought – to talk. He simultaneously thought and opened his mouth: "Let it be!"
That wasn't what he thought at all, but those were the words that crept from his larynx and lips. This was a surprise, and he immediately thought of the Beatles and their soulful ballad, as if that had been lurking in the back of his mind somewhere, but it had not come from there. In fact, he did not know where it had come from; as if it had not come from him at all. The words had originated elsewhere and made manifest somewhere between his thoughts and his actions.
And for the remainder of the day the question of where these words had come from occupied his idle thoughts. In fact, the question never left him – not that week, or that year or for all the years to come.
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