Self-Similar Gateless Gate
a literary inquiry into the connection between initiation, math, fractals, and labyrinthine loops of consciousness
***
Ea leaned her forehead against the cold glass of the bus window that went through the night at heart-squeezing speed. The girl smiled at the thought that she was making a quantum jump into a different universe: two hours ago she had packed her whole life into a small backpack, bought a one-way ticket to the biggest megapolis in the country, and prepared to conquer the world with her creative spirit. She felt a mix of thrill, hope, and sadness. She tried to clear her head: quantum jumps require focus and clarity of intent, and she wanted this other universe to be more vivid and strange than the one she used to inhabit. The gentle vibration of the moving vehicle was so lulling that she closed her eyes.
**
She was alone at a bus stop.
The falling night was dark and stormy. Rain mercilessly poured onto her shabby sneakers. The girl was shivering, but the extra sweater lay mired in the depths of her backpack. She couldn't muster the energy to get it out.
The stranger in a trench coat and a hat sat beside her. The hat brim hid his eyes in the shade. He handed Ea a woolen shawl without saying a word.
"Thank you," she said, accepting that odd gesture of kindness.
"You will need it where you are going," said the stranger.
"I don't even know where I am going," laughed Ea. "I had never been to that city."
The stranger nodded.
"Of course. Your Saturn is returning," he said.
"What do you mean?"
"You are entering a personality crisis forcing you to reconsider your place in the world." The stranger looked at Ea. She gasped at his piercing white eyes that almost glowed in the dark.
"That sounds a bit dramatic..."
A sudden eeriness arose in Ea, but curiosity about this Virgilian character was mightier than her caution.
The mysterious man looked away from Ea. "For many centuries, different indigenous cultures engineered these crises into ceremonies. They are also called rites of passage or initiatory rituals.1 It is a shame this practice was lost.”
"How so?"
"The desperate search for immortality has driven the developed West to turn its gaze away from mortality.2 Death, as a formative principle of life, became a ruin. In the rite of passage, an individual faces mortality by getting to the edge of their sensual experience. It could be considered a small death – the initiate comes out changed, often feeling more responsibility for the relations they are forming.3 The individual becomes a dividual: a connection between other connections, a being in a continuous state of modulation.”4
"A grownup version of 'you only live once' philosophy?" ironically said Ea. "Is this ritual like an ayahuasca drinking ceremony? My friends did it. They described something similar, although they used less fancy words." She laughed.
"Yes, some cultures use medicinal plants to help the psyche let go of the usual ways of perceiving reality, but it doesn't have to be substances: hunger and sleep deprivation can also produce necessary disturbances in perception.5 Do you know what happens to an insect during ecdysis?"
The stranger paused for a second to take a small round ornate box out of his pocket.
"I am not sure what ecdysis is," sighed Ea.
"The process of shedding an exoskeleton in insects."
The man opened the box that revealed a small holographic projection of a dragonfly and continued. Ea desperately fought the desire to touch the all too realistic insect.
"Ecdysis, or molting, consists of three stages: preparation, shedding, and adaptation.6 A rite of passage often follows that structure. First, the individual leaves their old life behind and undertakes a prescribed form of purification. After that, the initiate goes through a transformative ceremony. The experience is unique for every individual and is bound to the specifics of the rite. The ritual holds space for a prolonged sensation of bewilderment and opens a gate into the hidden labyrinth of the psyche. It leads the the individual to a symbolic death and rebirth on an expanded psychic level.7 The third stage is the integration of insights and visions."
The holographic dragonfly was resting on top of its successfully shed exoskeleton.
"I am bewildered just by listening to you! My understanding of reality has more to do with TikToks, numbers, and Excel sheets than such epic experiences," said Ea. She was not sure if she should take this pompous talk seriously.
"Matter often comes first in the Western knowledge framework, where material circumstances should be measured and mapped, and what cannot be measured is considered false, illusory, or unimportant."
"Ok, so let's say you are right; initiation is important. How could it become a part of this number-driven culture?" asked Ea.
"Another definition of 'bewilder' is 'to confuse in mental perception, to perplex, confound, to cause mental aberration'.8 Bewilderment invites the initiate into chaos. And here lies a beautiful bridge between the realm of the symbolic and the realm of the measurable.”
The hologram coming out of the ornate box blinked and displayed a triangle.
"Chaos theory, in mechanics and mathematics, is the study of apparently random or unpredictable behavior in systems governed by deterministic laws," 9 continued the stranger.
A new triangle appeared in the middle of each side of the central triangle, one-third of the central one's size. And then, again and again, creating smaller and smaller triangles. Ea felt hypnotized.
"What you see is called the Koch snowflake, displaying infinite length in a finite space," the man explained. "Some patterns formed in nature are orderly in space but disorderly in time, others the opposite. Some patterns are fractal, exhibiting structures self-similar in scale. Others give rise to steady states or oscillating ones. Pattern formation has become a branch of physics and of materials science, allowing scientists to model seemingly random and complex phenomena.10 A good question to ask shamans, artists, and scientists – can the transformation of the soul also be modeled? Before, and in some cultures still, communities turned to myths and folktales for guidance into individuation patterns. Yet that has changed as the myths about gods and heroes mutated into myths about technology.11 These new myths require different symbols and imagery to transmit knowledge. Complexity is at the core of chaos theory; inner worlds are strange reflections of the outer world; what could become of the world if we studied spirit through mathematics?"
"Math is great and all, but I still don't see how it can guide a feeble caterpillar to become a badass butterfly..." Ea turned to sarcasm to shield herself from the intensity of existential matters, but the stranger didn't pay any attention to it.
"Simple processes in nature can produce magnificent edifices of complexity without randomness. In non-linearity and feedback lay all the necessary tools for encoding and then unfolding structures as rich as the human brain.12 Perception and cognition are studied, understood, and recreated with technology through math. Math is one of the ordering languages of this time and one of the key features of our grand narrative. Yet the knowledge created by this language is much less accessible than symbols from the folktales. Scientific abstractions lack a visceral aspect and require a lot of training to engage with. Artists, however, can potentially embody and process these challenging ideas, giving them intellectually stimulating yet more comprehensible forms. Art can surpass the utilitarianism of scientific discoveries and instead poeticize them. It can invite new forms of thinking and worldmaking." 13
"I am an artist," rejoiced Ea. "Although I am not certain about my intellectual capacity to... how did you say? Embody mathematical abstraction?"
"It is often enough to create a perceptual paradox: pictures that play with reality and unreality, as M. C. Escher does with his looped multidimensional images.14 Or, like poets, refuse transactional definitions and allow other views to circulate within the networks of meaning, making the body of text porous and enterable through image, sensation, relation, resonance. It’s the opposite of pure information defined by a strict schema or metadata.” 15
The hologram changed once again and displayed a bunch of crude hieroglyphs arranged in a three-dimensional space.
"Here is another poetic artwork challenging the perception. It is a theatre of signs."
Ea silently pondered the image hovering above the box for a while.
"I just finished a funny book," suddenly smiled Ea. " ‘The three stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.’ One of the central ideas is that a drug could translate your cognition into a maquette and make you perceive it as real life. Would be so cool to be translated into your hologram."
"I don't see why not," said the man. "You wanted to touch it, did you not? Go ahead."
"Seriously?" Full of mistrust, Ea slowly poked the image. "Wait, but how would... Aaahhh...."
Her heart sunk into her heels, and the atmosphere thickened, surrounding her like thousands of inflating balloons. She felt a rush of panic, and just as she accepted her imminent demise, everything was over.
*
She found herself standing on a mottled floor. Above her head rose a vast grey dome. Human-sized hieroglyphs surrounded her. She realized she was inside that thing she drove her finger into – the theatre of signs. Her head was spinning. "I must be dreaming," she said out loud. "Or I took strong psychedelics..."
A few rounds of deep breaths melted her anxiety into curiosity. She took a couple of uncertain steps toward the closest hieroglyph and reached her hand to touch it. The contact with the structure produced such an extraordinary sensation that Ea cried out in amazement: she suddenly comprehended the entirety of the phrase “to be without.” She repeated this action with the other hieroglyphs, which produced a somatic journey through concepts like “to love,” “light,” “the underworld,” “to separate,” and “all that grows.” She noticed that interaction with the symbols also changed the surrounding sounds.16 A loud voice coming from above interrupted her amusing exploration.
"Are you ready to go back?" asked the voice of a pseudo-Virgil.
*
After a familiar unpleasant sensation of being squeezed through a tube, Ea stood firmly on her two feet next to the stranger with white eyes. She felt a little nauseous. The bus stop and the highway were gone. They stood surrounded by the soft darkness of the void.
"I am not sure what to make of that... er... experience, but it was awesome! Tell me, where did the bus stop go? Am I tripping? Am I sleeping?"
"It doesn’t matter. What matters is what you learned through our conversation," the man astutely looked at Ea.
"That initiated people will bring heaven on earth?" she asked sardonically.
"Not necessarily," the stranger was serious. "Rite of passage is one of many ways of temporarily stepping out of consensus reality; in other words, abandoning all the learned symbols and knowledge frames and engaging in an unmediated sensory relationship with existence. It can call forth new ways of being and becoming.17
"Like performing inner alchemy and reaching unity with Dao, connecting to The Source and its infinite wisdom and devising a parametric curve out of that revelation," 18 pshawed Ea.
"If that is what you want," the white-eyed man imperturbably nodded. "The change in how you make sense and make world thanks to that experience is crucial. It matters what you create and what you inspire in others. It matters what you hold sacred. It matters who follows you into that different way of being."
"Who knows, maybe I will learn to jump across the multiverse and code a travel journal about it," dreamily said Ea, ignoring her interlocutor's solemnity. "I never asked, who are you? What is your name?"
The stranger smiled and slowly evaporated into the void, his eyes glowing in the dark till he completely vanished.
**
Ea opened her eyes. The train was slowly arriving at the central station. "What a strange dream," she sleepily thought. "I should make a project about it..."
She took her backpack and descended onto the busy platform. She took two steps and stopped dead in her tracks. "Hold on... wasn't I taking a bus?"
***
End Notes
Here and after, see Martin Shaw’s work of weaving myth and folktales into wilderness rite-of-passage.
For further reference on the cultural relationship with death in the West and post-Soviet Russia see Mokhov. Here, in particular, is referenced the relationship to immortality, 116-117.
On rites of passage and their cultural and personal significance refer to Shaw.
The Deleuzan concept of a “dividual” is explored by Burrows and O’Sullivan in ‘Against Control: Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted’, 29-49.
Shaw, Introduction.
See molt in Encyclopedia Brittanica.
Cited by Moore in Anarchy and Ecstasy, Chapter 4: Bewilderness: Monica Sjöö and Barbara Mor, The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987), 74–5.
Refer to Moore for a more extensive conceptualization of bewilderment.
See chaos theory in Encyclopedia Brittanica.
Gleick, 308.
Here, I am referencing Campagna’s understanding of the concept of Technic, which was only hinted at in the interview with Lemos. It is developed more broadly in his work Technic and Magic, which is not cited in this paper.
See Gleick, 306.
More on mythopoesis in O’Sullivan and Burrows, 1-15.
Hofstadter explores the art of M.C. Esher throughout his work to illustrate his development of “strange loops” and patterns of cognition, but here specifically 255-256.
Allado-McDowell and Metahaven discuss in depth the power of discontinuity and recursion in constructing a narrative.
See Points Of View I for further reference.
See O’Sullivan and Burrows, 63-85.
For further reference see Kohn, Livia. “The Subtle Body Ecstasy of Daoist Inner Alchemy.” Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, vol. Vol. 59, no. No. 3, 2006, pp. 325-340.
Bibliography
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Allado-McDowell, K. “Issue Article - We Are Reflections: Metahaven and the Charms of Recursion.” SO-FAR, 30 September 2021, https://so-far.xyz/issue/we-are-reflections-metahaven-and-the-charms-of-recursion. Accessed 12 December 2023.
Campagna, Federico, and Sofia Lemos. “World-ing, or: How to Embrace the End of an Era. Federico Campagna, RIBOCA2—2nd Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art 2020 — Mousse Magazine and Publishing.” Mousse Magazine, 17 September 2020, https://www.moussemagazine.it/magazine/world-ing-federico-campagna-riboca2-2nd-riga-international-biennial-of-contemporary-art-2020/. Accessed 13 December 2023.
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Mokhov, Sergeĭ. История смерти: как мы боремся и принимаем (The history of death: fighting and accepting). Individuum, 2020.
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O’Sullivan, Simon, and David Burrows. Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy. Edinburgh University Press, 2019.
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