patteren: los text

[los1] : virgil woke me up from a long dream : it wasn’t a good dream : he mentioned something about thyme right off, but I wasn’t paying attention, was too sleepy or just wasn’t able to understand him at first : I wanted the dream to end, and I was willing to go, thyme didn't figure into my decision really, but he did mention something about her right off : later I realized she was calling me: thyme, the woman who virgil didn't know until she had visited him in the depths of norfein and asked him to find me and bring me down to where the instruments were manufactured

[los2] : about my expertise in the market for instruments: virgil didn't mention it being a reason for coming to norfein. I didn't know what an instrument was, I didn't know I had any expertise in the markets … and later it turned out it wasn't my expertise at all, it was thyme's doing : virgil woke me up that day from what was a whole confinement : he did mention thyme, not her name but that she had come to him and told him to bring me to norfein, to the fourth circle : virgil put it differently when he woke me up : he told me to come, basically not worry and that I would make it in, though I wasn't one of them, : and that I had to — that if I didn't come I wouldn't make it : he made it sound inevitable : I don't know how long it had been since virgil had been out of the seventeenth level when he came to get me, but I know he definitely had no way of knowing that I would make it into norfein, much less the seventeenth level : except that he believed her : that I could make it, even not being one of them, and that it was essential that I make it : and virgil implied not only that it was essential for norfein, the traders and everyone right down to the seventeenth level but also that it was imperative for me, for my purposes, to go straight to the seventeenth level : I didn't know what my purposes were but : she wanted me to emerge from the slumber, and perhaps the only way for that to happen was on the seventeenth level

[los3] : the instruments originate on the seventeenth level : it took a long time to get there : people saw that it was virgil and let us go right through, it was obvious that I would never be able to get out of there, and I wouldn't have, if it wasn't for her : actually there was a calmness for me, because whatever I was leaving behind was such nothingness that I could feel myself forgetting it as we descended : I didn't know, actually, if we were ascending or descending : at that point I didn't know about the seventeenth level, I didn't know it was our destination : he told me, 'the seventeenth level is where the instruments are made, it is an undiluted effort of creativity, and it is secretly sensitive'; : to what, it wasn't something that I would have been able to have any notion of at that time : virgil gave me some brief introduction to the mechanics : He explained to me about the assarion curve : that day, for some unknown reason the assarion curve, which was called the quadrons, was inverted. normally upward sloping, assarion was trading downward sloping that day : this was the sort of thing that, in the seventeenth level worried about and had to correct so that the traders, could properly evaluate the spread between assarion and the multitude of instruments built with assarion as a basis : he told me these basic facts but it was clear that he was really counting on me to jump in and intuitively begin : 'it is not a process for the mind to attempt to reason through, except after an intuitive relationship to the seventeenth level has been initially forged'

[los4] : the seventeenth level was a place with no visible technology : just being in the room felt heavy : but also calm and acute concerning these matters of the instruments : an awareness that did make virgil's cursory introduction seem trivial : virgil introduced me to moirai : 'moirai is a unique environment manifest through the joint creative efforts of you and the seventeenth level,' he told me. 'What does that mean?' I said : it means that the seventeenth level, so cold and impervious, envelopes me and together we imagine a new place, a place where we can discuss the instruments in language that we both understand : The multitude of instruments, derived from one another and linked together through complex entanglement that was unfathomable in its entirety even to the most experienced traders : I had no understanding of the system at its fundamental level : it was a market in which agreement upon agreement were made and packaged and stacked together such that only the most complex relationships could discern the actual flow of assarion : apparently my complete void of knowledge on the mechanism of the market and norfein would have mattered greatly had I been somewhere other than the seventeenth level, but being there my lack of knowledge constituted innocence that provided a creative advantage for moirai. The seventeenth level didn't require that I spoke the language of the market, moirai and I spoke together in our own language, : the seventeenth level required my creative reserves, which apparently I had in abundance their having been so neglected, and which were apparently amplified by my unfamiliarity with the market

[los5] : I asked virgil: 'what am I supposed to do with the inverted quadrons?' : he said that I should first become acquainted and then somehow get around to the problem of assarion's inversion. I closed my eyes. Although the seventeenth level somehow made my mind abnormally acute, even hypermnesic, the vision of moirai was at first blurry. It was blurry, but colorful : with clarity of mind, though not vision, and extreme color saturation, I recalled the extended period of dark dreams from which virgil had just rescued me. This sensation was completely opposed to the dreary trudging I had experienced these many years in which night after night was filled with burdensome visions that were clear enough but perfectly bleak and entirely void of color. This was the reverse, no clarity, but full color. The value of time was immediately something new, there was a sense of fluid control over it, and this was central but at first only quite a distant feeling : And on this visit with moirai I learned to use my eyes in quite a different way, I let go of the normal faculty of seeing and embraced some alternative approach which is difficult to describe, perhaps I could say it was a lack of focus in the normal sense which gradually, through the influence of the seventeenth level, became a plane of focus in itself. Initially I couldn't discern anything but vague shapes bathed in an encompassing saturated varying green hue, but gradually—as things normally do come into clarity say when one's eyes get used to the darkness—I could discern definite objects. The objects were from nature, what I hadn't seen for nearly as far back as I could remember, since being in Dis where such things are no more, indeed they were plants and rocks and trees. It was presumably ancient landscape at first, there were no flowers, no genatalia in that way, there were ferns and pine and truly and older set of elements, there was plenty of stone, and I began to walk about if it can be called walking. It was more as if the landcape itself were scrolling, the navigation being primitive, I was but a set of eyes floating through this garden space ...

[los6] : virgil had me come in and out of moirai several times in a sequence of short visits. It took several entries at first to keep from having nausea, and then several more to discern the rudimentary objects of nature I have described. Then eventually there was a voice. A sweet voice whose frequency was just out of reach, I attempted to correct my own frequency, something that seemed possible in moirai, to tune to the frequency of the voice. It was a woman's voice and with but a few syllables I found myself reaching to achieve the appropriate tuning in order to understand. I could sense it being a single phrase repeated, as if she were aware that I was slowly coming within range : It was then that my hypermnesia brought me to the conversation I had had earlier that morning with virgil in my room. That conversation had been lost to my awareness as soon as it occurred, much of it I wasn't present for at all. He had awakened me from a trance, after all ... but something about this sweet voice coming from the seventeenth level, that I likened to moirai, speaking in waves of beautiful sound, not yet articulating, wanted me to stay there. That is, I wanted to remain in the nether space below the frequency of the voice so that I could continue to bask in the melodious beauty without comprehending the literal meaning of the words. I had a sense, even in my inexperience, that it would not be possible to remain there, that I would inevitably learn enough about navigation to discern the meaning of the words : But as I basked in the nether space below the meaning, I recalled with clarity the conversation with virgil earlier. Specifically, I remembered him mentioning a woman. At that point he didn't tell me her name, I believe he himself did not yet know who it was. But he had described her, and certainly he offered the description in order to assist in the difficult prospect of releasing me from my endless march. I may have been more entrenched in the bleak and dreary and ever deepening trance than he anticipated, or perhaps he himself was so taken with her that even in his static monotone her description did succeed in awakening me. I had forgotten his description of her immediately, but it had done the job and there I was following him down through norfein into the seventeenth level. And now, in the glory of my initial courtship with moirai I could remember every word of his description of her. And I could perceive the depth of emotion underneath his stoic delivery.

[los7] : virgil was a stoic man, but he was somehow above norfein. He, like me, didn't really belong there and wasn't the same as all the others, but he had been there for an eternity and there was a hardened shell of resignation about him that enshrined his experience into wisdom and gave him a hardened demeanor. But in the hypernesia of that brief transition to the frequency of moirai I was able to see through the shell and sense the hopeful and perhaps excited glint that this woman had given him.  And further, she had forced him out of the seventeenth level, out of norfein, through to the very fringes of Dis to where I was marching through the deathly slumber : So in that moment of clearness, when I could not yet make out the meaning of moirai's repeating syllables but was fully entranced in the music that they created, I recalled every nuance of intent behind virgil's action. There was a woman, she was even more powerful and important somehow than virgil himself, and she had instructed him to come to me, to awaken me, to bring me not only into norfein in the center of Dis, but to bring me all the way to the seventeenth level, the center of norfein, only accessible to the initiated, and from where there is no turning back : To be brought straight into the pit of norfein from the relative safety of my slumber on the fringes of Dis was somehow indubitably the rescue that I sensed it was, for the emptiness of my trancelike circumstance on the fringes of Dis was indeed worse than the fires of manipulation and mocking birth chamber of instruments in the seventeenth level in the center of norfein in the center of Dis. I knew that fact then, and with ever brightening clarity as I passed through the transitional region of awareness that eventually gave way to the complete and stunning features of moirai speaking gently, indeed repeating the mantra of greeting until I could focus and tune myself correctly to her frequency : 'Welcome to moirai, may I help you?' : I hesitated but she knew that I had heard her this time, she had stopped repeating the welcome message. She simply looked at me, gently. I became lost for a moment, possibly longing to go back to the music that was her welcome message before it became clear, but finally I spoke. 'Hello,' I said, 'I ... need to know about CENTOR' :: 'Yes?' :: I paused … 'What is the current price of CENTOR?' :: 'Five.' :: 'Five?' : But suddenly I was again disoriented, I was swimming in the soft greens that had been all of moirai to me until a moment ago. I had lost the frequency of my moirai, or perhaps I had unfocused somehow for I had no control over the faculty of focus yet. What had I even been asking her? But as I swam in the soft green of the obscured moirai, in which I was now quite comfortable, time began to slow quite a bit, that is, I knew somehow that I could reason through several formulations much more quickly than was possible outside of moirai for an equivalent unit of time

[los8] : virgil had told me, I now remembered, that traders could not properly evaluate the spread between assarion and the instruments built with assarion as a basis in a downward sloping quadrons environment and therefore the seventeenth level has created an instrument, known as CENTOR, which bundles all assarion rates together, assigns an overall value to the bundle, and derives a new value for each point along the quadrons such that assarion is in equilibrium in the inverted quadrons and traders can properly evaluate the spread between assarion and the instruments built with assarion as a basis using these new assarion values. This bundling corrects the quadrons anomaly and stops the assarion loss. But today that was not happening, for some reason traders were still losing assarion in the inverted curve and so there must be a problem with CENTOR.  I was here in moirai to find out about CENTOR : I could remember, while swimming, ever more relaxed, in the soft , fluid green :: VIRGIL: the delta, the sensitivity of the value of CENTOR to a small change in the value of the underlying, which is :: URIEL: assarion. :: VIRGIL: yes. the sigmalos, the standard deviation of the continuously compounded rate of CENTOR return per unit of time, meaning :: URIEL: the volatility. :: VIRGIL: yes. and the gammalos, the sensitivity of CENTOR delta to small changes in the underlying :: URIEL: assarion. :: I came back to within focus of moirai, it seemed this time that she was finding me, in contrast to our previous meeting when I distinctly felt myself focusing gradually on her, using the music of her voice as a beacon. She came now to me, through the soft green ooze :: 'Welcome to moirai, may I help you?'

[los9] : URIEL: Hi. Can you give me the equilibrium price of CENTOR right now? :: MOIRAI: You must define 'equilibrium'. :: URIEL: ... the equilibrium being where the price of CENTOR is equal to the sum of individual prices of assarion. :: MOIRAI: The equilibrium price is five. :: URIEL: so, CENTOR's trading at equilibrium right now. :: MOIRAI: Yes. :: URIEL: Does it always trade at equilibrium? :: MOIRAI: It trades at equilibrium when the quadrons is upward sloping. In an inverted curve environment it normally trades at above equilibrium. :: URIEL: So that's the problem today, that CENTOR's not at equilibrium even though the curve's inverted. :: MOIRAI: 'Yes.' : Out of moirai and into the seventeenth level, my limbs ached, it wasn't possible to judge how much actual time, seventeenth level time, had passed. I had been with moirai for a long while but I also knew by a parallel awareness that very little seventeenth level time had passed : virgil was not there, I was alone in the seventeenth level and consequently I was afraid. There was no doubt whatsoever that I was not actually alone, that is, that someone was aware of my every move, not necessarily a person : perhaps a team of onlookers, or, more precisely, some consciousness that was beyond a loosely configured group of separate minds. Away from the very pleasant feeling of moirai, the seventeenth level felt to me like a group of subsumed minds acting as one, mental constructs that perhaps used to be complete minds : as though always watching : there was the seventeenth level's eye, though likely more than an eye, an epicenter of awareness as well as input, it was indeed the umbilical hole and I was drawn to the eye with an aching that was coupled with repulsion

[los10] I decided to go back in. To go back in and be immersed in the comfortable soft green that had served my memory so well and relieved my physical ache and my sudden fear of the seventeenth level. But this time she immediately appeared, as clearly and soothingly as can be imagined, before me :: MOIRAI: Welcome to moirai. :: URIEL: Can you tell me what is different today from past instances when the quadrons curve was inverted and CENTOR traded at a premium? :: MOIRAI: That's too vague. :: URIEL: What about volatility, are there large differences between assarion volatility today and during past inversions? :: MOIRAI: No, no difference. :: URIEL: How about the delta? I asked. :: MOIRAI: No difference. : I nearly drifted away again, but it was more a wishful drift that didn't materialize as I mentally grasped that those peaceful floating moments were no longer … that the green hue that was my naiveté had expired and now my moirai was this face, this beautiful face with striking features full of extremes and contradictions, at once hard, even fierce, and more soothing and reassuring than I had ever known. I pushed forward with the inquiry, vaguely regretful that the green was no longer but equally aware that my future was this face, full of the mystery that was the void that seemed to constitute my future in the seventeenth level : URIEL: The spectre shares for CENTOR, is there any difference? :: MOIRAI: The hedging ratio, the number of spectre shares, remains constant. :: URIEL: And the yield to maturity? :: MOIRAI: The yield remains constant as well. Be more specific ::  URIEL: The maturity ... the maturity is the problem? :: MOIRAI: You must be more specific. : It must be something to do with the maturity, she was guiding me that way : I attempted to open my mind beyond her face to comprehend what else here could help me. But all I could know was her face and I began to become lost in the intricacies of her visage : suddenly, from within one of those intricacies I knew the question, 'what about thetalos? Is there a significant variation in thetalos?' :: 'Yes,' she didn't smile at me but I could feel the warmth of moirai for the first time, 'thetalos values today are higher than normal.’ —  URIEL: Thetalos. Can you define thetalos for me? — MOIRAI: Thetalos is the sensitivity of the value of an instrument to a small reduction in the time to the instrument's expiration. — URIEL: What about the expiration? :: URIEL: Does the problem with the quadrons have to do with the expiration of CENTOR? :: MOIRAI: The maturity of CENTOR has become imminent. :: URIEL: Imminent? Is that the cause? ... CENTOR is about to mature? :: MOIRAI: Yes. ::  URIEL: Is that the cause? (pause) If the expiration of CENTOR is increased sufficiently, will the trading prices of assarion revert to normal levels? :: MOIRAI: Yes.

[los11] : I emerged from moirai and virgil was back in the seventeenth level, standing in front of me. 'So, you found the problem,' he said. 'CENTOR is about to expire,' I told him, not actually knowing, being away from moirai, what that really meant. 'That's very quick for you to have been able to discover that problem. I knew it would be quick for you, but that's extraordinary.' virgil was ever stoic, and his conviction that it was right and critical for me to be here was unwavering, but I detected that he might be a bit shaken to see me taken so quickly into the nomenclature of moirai.  As for me, the feeling had been nothing less than exhilarating. Along with the knowledge that I was able to inexplicably collect and parse the knowledge, was the liberation, an emotional condition that I hadn't encountered as far back as I could remember. The exact quality of the emotional condition was difficult to recall, and even harder to describe to virgil. I could only hint that it was an extension of the green hue of lightness in which I was initially submerged : 'Remember,' virgil said,'that moirai is a collaboration between you and the seventeenth level. It is partly from you and partly from the seventeenth level.' :: 'And how do I know what's mine and what is from the seventeenth level,' I asked. 'The environment, ...' virgil tried to explain, 'well, it can be difficult. But the more real to you it becomes the more possibilities there are ... for learning ... as well as for falling ...' :: 'Falling?' I asked. 'The thing to do now,' he continued, 'is to go back in and change the maturity of CENTOR.' :: 'How do I do that?' 'Ask moirai to change the maturity of CENTOR and if you are able to do it at this time it will happen.' :: MOIRAI: Welcome to moirai. :: URIEL: Hello. Please increase the maturity of CENTOR to a span sufficient to cause CENTOR los to revert to normal in an inverted quadrons. :: MOIRAI: It's done.

[los12] : Time, or 'thetalos' in the parlance of norfein, was not possible to discern in the usual manner when visiting moirai. There certainly was a progression of events with moirai, but the corresponding progression of events in the seventeenth level, or outside of norfein, was difficult to reconcile with any regularity to those events that took place in moirai. I had impacted the system of interwoven instruments and immediately there was a change. The exact nature of the change wasn't perfectly clear to me, but it was evident that there was a change for norfein, a change in moirai, and a change with me.  The change for norfein was technical, the maturity for CENTOR had increased to a span sufficient to allow a normal trading range for CENTOR los in an inverted quadrons environment and so assarion spreads were navigable for the traders. Although I still didn't consciously understand the nuances of the change, this general knowledge was sufficient for me to interact with moirai : The change in moirai was something like a growth, or an increasing of robustness. This was my moirai, not the overall norfein seventeenth level moirai which was incomprehensible to me. My moirai had become increasingly filled in, what started as a sea of green hue, had constellated into a striking visage, and now was a complete woman. She was standing, sitting or strolling in a formless garden, or at least what seemed to me emotionally to be a garden. And I was there too, completely corporeal, talking to her and sitting or strolling beside her. She was beautiful and delicate, but also commanding, and I felt ever deferential to her lead. I was drawn to her on many levels, my physical motions necessarily followed hers, emotionally I felt an utter pouring forth of warmth for her, and intellectually I possessed a calm but insatiable hunger for knowing something of what she knew. Her presence itself was knowledge and knowing her knowledge was but a matter of being able to tune to her frequency with increasing accuracy.

[los13] : My presence in the seventeenth level, with virgil, was as cold and stark as when I arrived, no matter how much time I spent with moirai. Indeed, the more time I spent with moirai, the more static and bleak the seventeenth level became. The contrast was complete, as lush emotionally as was the garden of moirai, so comparably cold and empty was the seventeenth level. virgil was appropriately emotionless, sitting in the seventeenth level, bearded and smoking, he seemed to be in a thinking trance each time I emerged. He focused on me suddenly when he saw that I was released from moirai and queried me as to what had occurred. 'So you are building a garden ...' he commented. 'Isn't that what moirai is?' I wondered, 'That's your moirai,' he said,'It's different for everyone, as I told you it's partly your own creation ...' : The freedom of moirai was intoxicating, the act of building this garden was so foreign and incongruous to any endeavor I had experienced, but it came so naturally ... It was a mental assembly, I wasn't digging the earth with my hands, but the sublimity was an emotional equivalent to excavating, planting and dirtying the landscape of my mind. The stasis in which I had resided when virgil found me was echoed by the barren seventeenth level, but it was obliterated in moirai with a rush of creative and hopeful feeling : In contrast to the intoxicating freedom of moirai was the oppressiveness of the seventeenth level, a place which was the doorway to moirai but utterly antithetical in spirit, at least seemingly so when I emerged from moirai and was once again present in the seventeenth level.  moirai, tinted with the absence of time, engaged me completely physically and mentally, whereas the seventeenth level provided a vacuum for my presence that was all the more a void in comparison with moirai. moirai, whose memory to which I was so close while sitting distractedly and hyper aware in the concreteness and silence of the seventeenth level, was so distant in these moments of waiting

[los14] : In the seventeenth level, as in moirai, the instruments were constellated and arranged in a metaphorical language. In moirai this language was of my own design, at least in part, as virgil had explained that the environment of moirai was a collaboration between the seventeenth level and me. Certainly the vocabulary of moirai, comprised of a beautiful woman and a wild garden, was of my design.  But in the seventeenth level the language of the instruments was distinctly not my own. The intricate connections between instruments, the underlying, the derived, the derived from the derived, and so on, were written on fragments of parchment in abstract symbols with incomprehensible relationships. virgil could apparently read these manuscripts and gather comparable information from the glyphs to that which I obtained from moirai: the woman and the language of the garden : moirai was intoxicating while I was there, but upon reentry into the seventeenth level it resulted in complete exhaustion. And the seventeenth level was no place to rest, it was hard and cold and totally uncomfortable, and there was always work to be done.  Work to be done that, within the garden of moirai was a sublime experience, but in the starkness of the seventeenth level was torturous : there were long incomprehensible hours in the seventeenth level during which virgil was pacing and asking repetitive questions about what I had seen or done in moirai. These interrogations were what I wanted and felt I needed the least after having been in that place, which was becoming fuller and more sublime with each visit.

[los15] : moirai was becoming more of a forest than a mere garden, or actually it was a garden at the edge of a forest: moirai walked or sat in this garden, which grew more vivid with each visit, and as the fringes of the garden became more defined it was clear that the garden of moirai was perched on the edge of an old forest. With each visit the forest became deeper and grander and I found myself wanting with increasing intensity to proceed from the garden into the forest : as I emerged from moirai, and was physically drained as well as mentally obtuse, virgil laid right in with questions. His questions were incomprehensible to me, or perhaps, more accurately, his questions made sense in some distant way as though part of a dream that I couldn't quite recall. Assarion, the quadrons curve and associated instruments had a clarity in moirai that was untranslatable to the seventeenth level, and although I preferred moirai I was still beholden to the bleakness of the seventeenth level’s reality: virgil’s circular discussions, the parchments with nauseating glyphs, the concrete walls and unmoving air. This seventeenth level is where I was, this seventeenth level was an extension of where I had been, of that place from which virgil had brought me. This seventeenth level was the very core or epitome of that environment in which I had resided for as long as I could remember ... but, there was something before that, I knew there was something that had come before this place of which the seventeenth level was the center and which constituted all of my consciousness and memory.

[los16] : virgil had brought me to the seventeenth level and thus had introduced me to moirai and for that I was grateful : moirai was in contrast to all that I could remember, but then knowing moirai uncovered something that had come before all that which I could remember. I couldn't discern what my experience in moirai was indicating to me had come before all this, but the realization that there had been something prior inspired hope. moirai was at once lucid and ambiguous, this irony seemed to best characterize the essence of her environment, and so the hope that had been inspired by remembering a former life was also at once lucid and ambiguous. It was also thus intriguing and infuriating at once, when I was back in the seventeenth level with virgil's questions and my longing for moirai.

[los17] : As I continued to visit moirai there began to come not fully decipherable images: they were fleeting, as though incomplete memories coming from distant childhood: there were boxes: boxes upon boxes, a sea of boxes. And there was sadness, sadness that was the wilderness of loss that described my condition immediately prior to being brought to the seventeenth level by virgil. He had rescued me from the exile of sadness from loss and brought me to this place, bleak to be sure within the seventeenth level, but with the doorway to moirai from which I knew now that there was more than I could comprehend so soon. I had some prior connection to moirai, she was not a new garden, she was an old garden sitting on the edge of an old forest, the wilderness that had some prior meaning to me. I began to wonder who moirai was, if to me she was something other than norfein's machine of creation, the truth of which I was increasingly aware. Who was moirai?

[los18] One evening thyme began to walk. She didn't know why she began to walk or where she was going, but she was used to not knowing why she did things or where she would end up once she completed those things she set out to do. She did have a certitude about the correctness of those endeavors whose results were ambiguous, a certitude that struck some who knew her as arrogant and uninformed. But to call thyme arrogant and uninformed was not to know her, for she was anything but either superior or naive in the assessment of the rather labyrinthine wanderings of her own (quite superior) mind.

[los19] : thyme walked for a long time and wasn't sure that she wasn't walking in circles. As she walked she thought, as was often her policy when she walked. She actually walked in order to think, as she found that walking inspired a different sort of thinking than did any other activity. She didn't mind walking in circles when she felt she needed to think. In fact, sometimes she preferred walking in circles to walking in a straight line because it allowed her to revisit her thoughts over and over in slightly varied manners. This evolution of thought was how she typically arrived at the conclusion as to why she was walking, but today was different. Today she couldn't put her finger on where it was she was headed.

[los20] : So thyme kept walking. Eventually she realized that she was not walking in circles but in a rather determined straight line.  Her path took her straight out of the city, through more sparsely populated neighborhoods and eventually she found herself in the countryside.  At the outset of her journey she had had an inkling that this walk would be long and momentous and she had tied up loose ends and prepared to depart the city for any length of time necessary. Now that she had arrived in the countryside, while having fully intended to rather travel in a circle, she couldn't recall what thoughts had caused her to forget her circle and proceed beyond the perimeter of her previous experience to this unknown region.

[los21] : thyme was now lost. But this did not bother her. She had already had a prescience regarding this journey and so wasn’t surprised to see her prospects darkening as did the sky. She was undeterred and rather than panic she merely re-immersed herself in thought and proceeded forward along her straight-line path that inevitably brought her out of the countryside and into the wilderness. Presently thyme found herself in pitch darkness, having walked in a more or less straight line from the city on a road that appeared to have become a path through a dense and relatively old growth forest. This predicament would have overwhelmed someone less stout of heart than thyme, but she was undaunted. She simply kept walking.  She continued, still protectively wrapped in her circular—but evolving—thoughts, until morning, impervious to the chill of the night and the dampness of the forest. When there was light enough from the dawn she began to discern the individual trees of the forest, which had hitherto been merely vague lines, blacker than the obtuse space between in the black of the night. The first object she saw with the light of dawn, other than individual trees, appeared to be a small cabin.

[los22] : By the time thyme saw the cabin in the woods, she was hungry and tired and felt that providence had determined she would end up there. So the inevitability of her approach to the place was sufficient in her mind to prevail over any trepidation that the thought of visiting a strange house, embedded so deeply in the woods, would ordinarily hold for a young woman such as thyme. She proceeded directly toward the front of the small building, which had two wide, adjacent, sets of double glass doors with separate sets of stairs ascending to each of them.' She remarked that although the structure had a ramshackle and remote character, there was a certain brightness to its symmetry that wasn't altogether of this world. Before she reached the stairs however she was halted by the sound of a voice that came from a man standing nearby whom she hadn't noticed. 'Who are you?' the man asked.' 'I am thyme.' she answered. He paused and looked her over carefully, evidently not knowing what to make of her. She immediately understood this man to be ornery, but not unfriendly, and certainly not threatening, and she clarified, 'With a T-H-Y' and then quickly added, 'I am hungry.' He again looked her over, somewhat too piercingly, she thought, and he said, 'that I knew already.'

[los23] : The man's expression was unintelligible and he looked at her intently, seeming to be immersed in his own thought process. thyme, in accordance with her unusual ability to acquire a robust intuitive understanding of someone’s character upon acquaintance, commented to herself that this man was several things at once that don't ordinarily occur in ensemble: pensive, playful, self-absorbed, unconcerned with trappings, and overly serious. She immediately assessed that she didn't care for him too much, but that he was at least interesting, and if providence had determined that she should associate with him then she was willing to let events unfold. She was, however, very hungry and felt that she needed to press the issue of her hunger before any additional distraction could be allowed to occur. As if responding to her thoughts, the man invited thyme to eat, stressing however that his fare was likely to be absolutely unsatisfactory to her. 'Quite the contrary,' she pointed out, 'Anything is fine.' The man was gruff in his invitation but thyme understood him to be absorbed in trying to make sense for himself of her sudden appearance, and she forgave him his reticence. They entered his cabin and he began evidently gathering together items for her to eat.  He struck her as being, with some portion of his attention, singularly focused on what he was doing and, with some larger portion of his attention, focused on something else much more distant.  At length he ended up mumbling in her direction, without much attentiveness, something to do with the strangeness of her showing up. She hadn't fully heard him, but for the sake of decorum she responded, 'That I should end up here was providence. I have been walking since early last night, and this morning your,... cabin ...' she wasn't quite sure how to characterize his abode '... was the first place I saw after the sun rose.' The man suddenly looked at her again: 'You don't look as though you've been walking through the night.'

[los24] : Now inside she plainly saw that this man was a painter and most of his possessions related to his artwork in some way. There were few materials, and even fewer works. She was able to perceive some evidence of blockage in his creative endeavors, and his space did not impress her as a reflection of either prosperity or happiness. But in spite of these lacunae there was a determined and energetic quality to the organization of his activities that, she immediately sensed, offered a counterbalance to the unattractiveness of his frustration. Thus she found herself somewhat attracted to the state of affairs his process evidenced and she noted that the attraction was quite remarkable given her normal inability to be attracted to things of that nature. Indeed she usually found herself having difficulty suppressing the repulsion that overtook her whenever she was forced to, too intimately, witness the exposed process of another person's work.

[los25] : As thyme further surveyed the room she detected evidence of an obsessive nature of the works, all in progress, surrounding her in the small room she now came to realize was this man's studio. There were images of, what appeared to be, boxes, simply depicted, repeated with slightly differentiated forms. The quality of the lines were much as she imagined a child might draw, and repetitive in a way that a child might repeat something, in an uninhibited manner. thyme possessed an unusual intuitive grasp of both the history and destination of those objects and persons toward which she chose to fully open her faculties of assessment. In this case, the paintings and drawings were in a perpetual state of evolution, both finished at the moment they were begun and never to be finished at all.

[los26] : thyme further appraised the artwork of this man, who she was increasingly coming to understand as being unlike anyone she had known. The further she appraised, the more she found that her normally keen and comprehensive instincts were unusually impaired. This impairment seemed to increase the more she exposed her intuitive abilities toward the work. Furthermore, her deceptively simple immediate impressions became increasingly obscured in complexities that she had not initially perceived. The effect of the emerging confusion was significant, she had been weakened by her journey and lack of sustenance. The unexpected circumstance of the misleadingly simple artwork had allowed her to forget her normal attention to the vulnerability she experienced when opening her faculties to these this type of impression.

[los27] : thyme struggled to maintain composure as she wrestled with the inflowing impressions of this man and his work. Weakened by travel and hunger, she had unwittingly been taken in by the misleadingly simple works and the succeeding complex stimulus took her by surprise. It would have been difficult for her to explain the phenomenon to a person lacking her ability of perception, so mixed with the overwhelming impressions was the question of how she would explain herself to this man if she suddenly became incapacitated by the impressions of his work. As a rule she was careful, given her awareness of the vulnerability that accompanied her gifts, not to open herself too suddenly in this type of circumstance. It seemed to her that again providence had conspired for her to forget herself in this instance, owing to the necessarily weakening effect of her journey.

[los28] : thyme saw the boxes flowing, they were flowing outward from her to create an endless sea of boxes. Simple boxes, with unknown contents, were floating and multiplying in a steady and deliberate way. She couldn't discern the origin of the endless flow, and she couldn't discern the destination. The origin seemed to be too close to perceive and the destination too remote. She felt that she was not alone, there was kinship in the flow of these boxes. She was comfortable in the boxes, but there was a looming uncertainty, a possible disruption. She attempted to focus her attention on the individual boxes but was unable to discern the adornments. She could only delineate the outlines. These boxes were begun and they were beautiful. But they were only outlines, incomplete and unfinished.

[los29] : Among the boxes was a voice, that of a man coaxing her away from the sea of images. '... Uriel ...' he said, '... your food.' The name brought her away from the submersion, the voice was somehow familiar and the boxes subsided, individually and as an array they faded into the distance. She was sitting comfortably now, in the studio, amid the artwork, she was tired and hungry again. : 'I don't know what happened,' he said 'you were not responding.' : 'All I can remember is boxes.'

[los30] : thyme stayed in a small cottage directly next to Uriel's studio. For a while she didn't see Uriel at all. She soon discovered that spring was beautiful in the woods and she began to make a garden among the tall trees at the edge of the woods next to the cottage. Directly next to the cottage was a small clearing surrounded by large rocks, seemingly arbitrarily arranged.  Apart from Uriel's studio adjacent and the small clearing, the cottage was completely surrounded by large trees. thyme occasionally sat on a rock and stared at the road she had taken from the city, which ended here, having become little more than a small foot path. The cottage was deep in the woods.

[los31] : Although she had no experience with plants, thyme's garden flourished as though she had a magic touch. Her garden was a blend of the natural landscape and small patches of tended plants from seedlings and volunteers she found while walking in the woods. Uriel was working constantly and didn't seem to notice or care what she was up to. He brought her food occasionally. It was paltry sustenance, but she found it to be perfectly adequate by some seemingly preternatural effect. Gardening, eating in this meager way, and being alone, she noticed her intuitive skills sharpening and rising beyond their already prodigious degree. This sharpening intrigued her. She had taken the effort to observe, it was her gift to do so, whether others she encountered possessed the same degree of intuitive clarity she did. She considered herself earnest, but had never encountered another in her realm, she had never once felt her own abilities mirrored. The new expanded awareness made her feel more isolated from normality than ever before. And she noticed, in spite of her increased perception, she was never able to intuit the motivations or pinpoint the emotional disposition of Uriel. This was strange to her because it was also a circumstance she had never encountered.

[los32] : thyme was happy in her garden. The nature of Uriel's character proving to be so enigmatic to thyme's normally acute sense, and his continuing to be reticent toward her in spite of the beauty of her garden, were the only troubling preoccupations that plagued her otherwise peaceful and contemplative days. thyme's dogged adherence to the inkling that providence had brought her to this point, and the fascination and fulfillment of her new vocation in the garden, kept her from turning restless in the woods. Eventually thyme began to lose her sense of time. She was aware of her loss of sense: she only knew that it must be mid summer, that the days were as long as she imagined they could be, the nights were correspondingly short, and the forest, despite the cover of the canopy, was warm from the ground up even early in the morning.

[los33] : Occasionally during the long summer days that thyme spent gardening and walking in the woods she would lapse into the boxes.  The lapses, she thought, were complimentary to having lost her sense of time. The boxes were timeless, or before time, she felt, and her lapses were not as jarring as the first lapse in Uriel's studio had been. At that moment she had been tired, hungry and caught unawares by the impressions of his work. When walking alone in the woods she was at ease and the boxes floated along with her and mingled with the trees. She was very attracted to the boxes although she didn't know anything about them, even their exact physical nature was obscure, they were depicted like drawings, like the unfinished drawings she had seen in Uriel's studio. The boxes scrolled about her as she walked, sometimes she had the vague feeling that they were being pushed out and sent on their way to be delivered or disseminated, as though they all came from a central location but each box were destined for some unique and remote place.

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