Randonauting, Alethiometers, Figure and Ground

Always, there’s an invitation to an influx of chance — how else will you learn what you don’t already know? (Or, don’t know that you know?) We let the hand of mystery rearrange the patterns we enlarge. Always, it takes us beyond our capacities to describe, to leave an exact trail of breadcrumbs — that’s because of the incredible interwoven simultaneity of everything, and also because certain symbols, certain metaphors, are strengthened and empowered as the two objects of comparison migrate further from each other in terms of what they literally are, away from any chance meeting of each other in the same quotidian plane.

And then, of course, they do meet; and language is destroyed, and must fly to the outer sea of meaning, to be repaired and sent out hunting again with a bigger net. Of course the finer meanings slip through, leaving only phosphor traces of their passing, like fireflies.

There’s a haunting epigram on the final, posthumous album by poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen. It must have been written shortly before he died. It goes like this:

I can’t leave my house
Or answer the phone
I’m going down again
But I’m not alone

Settling at last
Accounts of the soul
This for the trash
That paid in full

As for the fall, it began long ago
Can’t stop the rain
Can’t stop the snow

I sit in my chair
I look at the street
The neighbor returns
My smile of defeat

I move with the leaves
I shine with the chrome
I’m almost alive
I’m almost at home

No one to follow
And nothing to teach
Except that the goal
Falls short of the reach

The whole poem is a distant and eerie echo of one of his earliest songs, “The Stories of the Street,” produced in 1967. That song ends with this verse:

We are so small between the stars
So large against the sky
And lost among the subway crowds
I try to catch your eye

By 2016, Cohen no longer had his hand on the suicide as well as the rose. He had learned to hang peacefully like Odin above the paradox and absorb it. The parting twist of his epigram anticipated a digital phenomenon that has come just a few years after his death, and has its own cult following.

Randonautica is an app you can download from Google Playstore or Apple’s App Store for free. It’s emblem is an owl twisting its head to look at you (owls have sclerotic rings that permanently freeze their gaze in straightforward parallax vision — the ultimate commitment to a predatory existence).

Randonautica overlays a coordinate system comprised of randomized points upon the map of your local geography. The points are generated by a quantum mechanical calculation, yielding an uneven distribution of those points. User preferences select for an anomalous paucity of coordinate points, or conversely an unusual concentration of points. A third choice allows for selecting the epicenter of greatest anomaly.

Now, here’s the thing: users are invited to frame an intention, to meditate and visualize and declare the intention while the app is selecting one of the preferred coordinate points as the destination at the end of a short journey for the user. Consciously projected intent and focused awareness are actually known from double-blind studies to affect the outcome of random number generators. The destination point becomes linked in some way to the intent of the user.

It’s a sort of digital dowsing device, you see. Instead of the symbolism being captured in words, it is written in four dimensions across the landscape. The goal indeed falls short of the reach, for the reach is vast — and this is the point. Ordinary journeys to nearby (and perhaps familiar) places become sigils illuminating and activating secret currents of meaning and understanding.

Randonauts (as they call themselves) fairly often have quite unusual, even eerie and macabre, experiences. Several cadavers have been found. Strange sounds and voices have been heard at destination sites; menacing figures, odd trinkets and relics have been discovered tucked away in forested verges, abandoned buildings, vacant lots, and other places that Peterson’s Field Guides would generally describe as “waste spaces.” Most notoriously, a group of teenage randonauts discovered a small suitcase stuffed with two dismembered human bodies at the exact location of the coordinate point provided them by the app: a desolate bank of a river in an industrial zone of Seattle.

On the flip-side, some lives have been saved by randonauts who arrived just at the needed moment, guided by their programmed journey. Plenty of people have seen or found objects at the end point of their Randonautica journeys that proved especially meaningful, reflecting on a current life situation, serving as a pivot point for large life-changes.

Several questions arise. Is this a case of confirmation bias and self-cold reading? In other words, are people going out into the world and seeing what they want to see and finding what they are primed to find? After all, the landscape is full of dusty corners, hidden woods, darkened buildings that exist all around us; we just don’t notice them because they are not destinations in our habitual movement patterns, because they don’t seem relevant. Mostly, we edit them out of our awareness. Randonautica makes the field wide open, and sends us to these liminal places.

In fact, the Randonautica app has a mode where it simply selects one randomized coordinate for your exploration, regardless of anomalous features; this mode is called blind spot, riffing on the notion that there are a vast number of places in the world which we “tune out,” individually and collectively. (For instance, on a mown verge in back of our local midwestern Walmart, there is a large wooden stockade placed for the Amish to tie up their horses and buggies while they go shopping — a wild cultural disjoint almost invisible from the normal lanes of life.)

However, there’s a difference between seeing something to which we’re unaccustomed, and experiencing a serendipity, a Jungian synchronicity. Randonautica seems to frequently yield results that are uncanny. To investigate why, let’s examine Leonard Cohen’s poem further.

He begins by describing a confinement (nearly paralysis or total renunciation), yet suffused — even saturated — with presence. Elsewhere, he sings of it being “crowded and cold” in his “secret life.” There is a blending of the mundane and the poignant with meaning, as soul reckoning becomes a task as quiet and clerical as bookkeeping. In the next verse, the mundane takes on the quality of of the perennial and ancient ordinary, as the “fall,” with its Genesis allusions, is identified with the rain and the snow, natural and unavoidable and eternal.

And then, something interesting happens. The singer and his neighbor lock eyes over the business of the street, which might as well be “Boogie Street,” an allusion in Cohen’s writing to the ephemeral activity of a world that is built on the mysterious, luminous “emptiness” at the heart of Buddhist perception of reality. “I’m wanted at the traffic jam, they’re saving me a seat. I’m what I am, and what I am…is back on Boogie Street.” That luminous emptiness, you see, is also at the heart of the randonauting experience.

“Lost among the subway crowd,” as it were, the singer and his neighbor exchange a “smile of defeat.” This is yet another key piece of Cohen’s metaphorical code — it appears elsewhere, in his song A Thousand Kisses Deep, where he speaks of being “summoned now to your invincible defeat,” where “you lose your grip, and then you slip into the masterpiece.” Another clue: in his song Going Home, he writes that the singer, “…wants to write a love-song, an anthem of forgiving, a manual for living with defeat,” even though a more austere, transcendent, and demanding voice explains that the singer“… doesn’t need a vision, he only has permission to do my instant bidding, which is to say what I have told him to repeat.” We begin to see that the Randonaut is not the Creator of the experience, but more so the Cursor — the ribosome, the Moment (in the physics sense) of translation and congruence, rectifying the hidden and interactive code around us.

Cohen’s next verse rather confirms this: “I move with the leaves, I shine with the chrome.” The singer is the street and its subtlest signals (soon to be gone). The Randonaut is the anomalous collection of points — sometimes a concentration, sometimes a void.

In one of his final songs on the same posthumous album, Cohen lays it out even more clearly and prophetically. “I’m not allowed a trace of regret,” he sings, “for, Someone will use the thing I could not be…

My heart will be hers
Impersonally
She’ll step on the path
She’ll see what I mean
My will cut in half
And freedom between

For less than a second
Our lives will collide
The endless suspended
The door opened wide

And she will be born
To someone like you
What I left undone
She will certainly do

I know she is coming
And I know she will look
And that is the longing
And this is the hook

The meanings that the singer noticed and strung together, the points of synchronicity that he cherished and loved will be transmitted another in a mysterious moment of intersection, stripped of intent, luminous in its endless implications, distilled to a fraction of time and awareness, and set free to keep working.

This compares with an essay by Jorge Luis Borges, The Wall and The Books, wherein he ponders the motivation of “the First” Chinese Emperor, who ordered both the building of the Great Wall to contain and protect his empire and the burning of all historical records and books pre-dating him, inaugurating a mythological age by violent decree. To Borges, this presents a striking conundrum: why should one destroy within and secure without on such a vast scale? Borges, for his part, quickly dispenses with the historical explanations, and veers toward an idiosyncratic and magically-inflected profile of Shih Huang Ti, the Emperor.

Shih Huang Ti, according to the historians, forbade that death be mentioned and sought the elixir of immortality and secluded himself in a figurative palace containing as many rooms as there are days in the year; these facts suggest that the wall in space and the fire in time were magic barriers designed to halt death.

(What a palace in which to go randonauting!) So, he goes on:

Perhaps the Emperor and his sorcerers believed that immortality is intrinsic and that decay cannot enter a closed orb. Perhaps the Emperor tried to recreate the beginning of time and called himself The First, so as to be really first, and called himself Huang Ti, so as to be in some way Huang Ti, the legendary emperor who invented writing and the compass. …Shih Huang Ti boasted, in inscriptions which endure, that all things in his reign would have the name which was proper to them. He dreamt of founding an immortal dynasty; he ordered that his heirs be called Second Emperor, Third Emperor, Fourth Emperor, and so on to infinity. . .

Ultimately, Borges suggests a much more extraordinary consideration on the part of the Emperor — one in alignment with Leonard Cohen and his imagining of a future trans-personal relay of significance.

The tenacious wall…is the shadow of a Caesar who ordered the most reverent of nations to burn its past; it is plausible that this idea moves us in itself…. We could infer that all forms have their virtue in themselves and not in any conjectural “content.”

In other words, the juxtaposition of elements in creates a meaning which intrinsically resonates across time with other certain harmonics, and is not dependent upon situational rationalization or justification — an important point we’ll return to in a moment. Everything is scrying everything else. In typical Borgesian fashion, he nearly imagines the Emperor carrying out a blazing act of enigmatic paradox in order to telegraph ambivalence to the future, and generate the following epiphany, which Borges lays out:

Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces belabored by time, certain twilights and certain places try to tell us something, or have said something we should not have missed, or are about to say something; this imminence of a revelation which does not occur is, perhaps, the aesthetic phenomenon.

In Phillip Pullman’s beloved fantasy book series, His Dark Materials, the main character spends a great deal of time staring at a magical device inexplicably placed in her possession by the head of the college where she resides at the behest of her adventurer father. Lyra is a clever girl, full of storytelling and imagination; but at first, she can’t make any progress in deciphering the strange instrument.

In her world (existing simultaneous and parallel to ours), the alethiometer is a “truth-compass,” a machine that responds to a mysterious particulate matter which conjoins all things — including the soul of every person — to each other. The device has a needle moved by the force of this “dust,” and has a bezel with myriad wordless symbols.

As she studies the alethiometer, Lyra begins to understand that each symbol can have multiple meanings…that there is, actually, an infinite regression of meanings for every point on the dial, shaded by the question asked or intention stated, and illuminated by something else — the meditative, clairvoyant awareness of the one doing the scrying.

As her adventure progresses, and as her role in the Moment unfolding in her world (and all our worlds) sublimates past her personal concerns, Lyra becomes masterfully adept at reading the alethiometer, guiding her friends where they need to go, answering crucial questions; and, ultimately, setting the multiverse Cosmos in balance.

Is such intuitive magic possible with Randonautica? Well, consider this: we habitually make the assumption that we move through a steady, stable world, and what happens “out there” is objectively real and intrinsic to itself. Prior to Einstein, the scientists imagined that space and time were dimensional absolutes, fixed in the background of all events, imperterbable. It’s a very basic assumption. You think that someone else who stands where you stand at the same time that you stand there will see the same tableaux upon the street, the same sunlight, the same geography and circumstances.

Yet, the modern observers like Joyce and Woolf surely revealed to us that we never do encounter the same scene twice, nor can we ever exactly share our situations. There is no absolute background. Ourselves and every element, every particle and iota of the moment co-arises with us in a complex dance of creation, being called forth by powerful dynamics of symbol, meaning, metaphor. Everything that you see, hear, and feel on your Randonautica odyssey is conspiring with your own emergence to create a juxtaposed field of significance entirely unique to that moment. (The paradox arises because we are all doing this simultaneously and in parallel, interweaving our unique situations. And, well…not only us, but every sentient iota of reality is doing this.)

Your Randonautica experience is orchestrated just for you…because every experience you have is custom tailored. So, what makes a Randonautica “scrying” different than other experiences? What makes an Australian aboriginal “gone walkabout” in the Dreamtime different than a man walking across the landscape in another instance?

Perhaps, it all depends on the kind of awareness you bring to it. As Dean Radin of the Institute of Noetic Sciences has written, there is a particular quality to the consciousness that influences random number generators, allows for clairvoyant remote viewing, and empowers really meaningful consultations of the tarot or the runes. This consciousness can be summarized as intensity without attachment. Single-minded focus upon an object of awareness, a desire, an intention — prising open a wide window of possibility (likelihood!) for that outcome to exist, for that object of awareness to actually exist as recipient of that attention — without the slightest grain of emotional turbulence from any requiring that outcome to exist (and the constriction that would entail)… that is the way it happens.

That is when we fully participate. That is when everything else participates. That is when accidents don’t happen. That is when the goal falls far short of the reach, and we slip into the masterpiece. That is when we touch the hot wire of the neon sign that lights the whole Universe.