Many fall

With a strident yell, I fell off the edge of a cliff and felt my heart thumping out of control as the air pushed me, with increasing anger, miles downward into a thick darkness.

My eyes were closed and limbs were outstretched on what felt like curved surfaces. My head, turned to a side, was flattened against a sphere. My eyelids shivered and opened a little and shut again. Consciousness was around me, not inside and was about to leave but it felt like I woke up too soon, caught it by its trailing strings and was swallowing it back into myself. I became aware of my body in parts. My arms and legs appeared slowly. I could see that I could see again. It was white all around, everything was still.

Sight and movement felt novel, exciting. For a long time I just moved and observed my fingers and toes and all the joints of my body. I looked around and found gigantic white spheres all around and found myself in the gap between six spheres - two above, two below, one ahead and another behind. There was space between the spheres for me to walk - as though a path had been created. My mind was completely blank. I had no thoughts, no memories, no knowledge. Feelings - strange and new - were emerging.

I began moving in the world of spheres. Each touch felt the same curvature, the same glassiness of the surface and the same bright white rays from every sphere. I was walking on spheres and the path went on endlessly, jumping from sphere to sphere always finding more on every side.

After a while I saw a blurred image in the white light. I strained my eyes to see clearly. Bit by bit, the image grew to completion - large and alive. The creamy white light carved out the image of single female breast. Above the breast was a big, uneven forehead of a woman. A man was making love to the breast and the forehead. I went closer and saw the man from behind. The breast was as big as the man and the man was lying over the breast and kissing the forehead. I went closer and bumped into the surface of a sphere. I realized that the man, the forehead and the breast were inside the sphere.

I moved away and saw that inside each sphere there was an image occupying the entire sphere. The whiteness of the spheres all around were getting replaced by the colors inside. A bright red sphere drew me closer to itself. I saw a small black oval bud that had not yet blossomed. A swarm of bees was hovering around the bud trying to open the flower. The swarm formed a cylindrical shape and started attacking the bud like one single log of wood. Fresh red blood, dripping from every bee, had filled the sphere.

These sights were pure images and I could not identify what I saw with any system of concepts or language. I didn't know what I was seeing - I just knew that I could see. My mind was slowly buzzing into a state of convoluted activity. Images dug up memories and sounds. I started uttering sounds, meaningless sounds. I was still staring at the trickling redness when I uttered "beeeeeee..." and the sound of 'e' revolved around the spheres and kept hitting me as the bees were rhythmically trying to force into the bud. A vague, rusty associative memory between the image and the sound I just uttered was forming.

Every image was different and yet every image was inherently spherical. The world filled with so many different colors and objects seemed to have just one shape when touched: what I felt with my hands was just a spherical glassiness everywhere.

I walked ahead and saw more and more large images within spheres - a tuft of black hair dropping to one side with a few white strands, the legs of a farmer ploughing a barren desert, waves of the sea lapping the striped back of a woman, a glowing yellow sun setting itself behind a razor's edge, nimble fingers caressing a pair of hands, a small dark umbra of darkness and a penumbra filled with skin stretch marks, lips locked into each other kissing and starving and putrefying into a pink gangrene, a window of a bus intermittently flashing lights on an enchanted face, a slimy snail shaped like a human ear in orgasms of joy, foam filled hands scrubbing and laughing, a spine tickled into jerky movements, a mouth being fed pages of a novel, large eyes surrounded by blackness and filled with tears, two shadows walking in circles around the moon, blind eyes absorbing endless expanses of throbbing skin......

Words were rushing into my head and I was yelling them out in a nonsensical stream of babble. I ran between the images and yelled "haaaaaaaaair", "leeeeeegs", "feeeeengers", "peeeeeenk",... stretching out the vowels and reveling in the formation of my mental associations as they emerged from my clouded mind.

Suddenly I saw someone looking at me - was she inside a sphere or outside? The word 'mirage' flashed in my head, I yelled out "meeeerage" and pursued the figure. Catching glimpses of her now and then, I kept running between those images inside the spheres trying to find the image outside the spheres.

Then, with a roaring sound, the spheres started melting. The images inside started acquiring life. The sounds from every sphere filled the air with a deafening noise. At the same time all the spheres also started coalescing. The entire world was melting and fusing around me. I was at the center of a tremendous vortex. The woman I was seeking began to form from the melting and coagulation of everything I had just seen. She had been inside each one of the spheres. And now she was congealing inside me. I was also melting and fusing with every image.

I was not outside anymore. There was no outside anymore. There was no inside either.