chapter 6

U- Ul... Ultimate Hellfire Burst Wave Motion Hya!

Hyper-Compressed Imagery vs. Imaginative Gestalt: Craft (July 12, 2026)

It’s strange that I can explain it now. I feel that I’ve mastered hyper-compressed imagery (HCI), yet I’ve lost imaginative gestalt (IG). It’s not that I don’t imagine when I’m writing HCI. But no matter how lacking my prose was then, I was always writing out of something that was distinctly (highly or extremely) original in the way of a whole gestalt. I was holding onto something that could only be described as imaginative since the prose, as lacking as they were, were clearly shadows on Plato’s cave wall for the actual reality they were trying to represent, not by way of self-contained hyper-compressed imagery where the prose comes first before the actual story so that it’s readily done in every sentence, but by way of 2 dimensions, obliquely, across the whole passage, hinting at 4 dimensions. Does that make sense?

I came to this conversation again because I was trying to find the next level of compression. Then I realized I was constantly hitting this thing I wrote 6 years ago. And now I’m realizing what it was. The next level of compression beyond extreme “show, don’t tell” in HCI and beyond private to public corpus was this IG that I could still clearly recall 6 years later when reading that short passage I wrote. Strangely enough, it was a “show, don’t tell” that went beyond what HCI could ever accomplish.

And I’m not talking about re-reading. I’m talking about instant effect upon reading. I could already tell what that passage from 6 years ago was accomplishing was even more compressed at an immediate glance than what I’m doing now with my words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs. Maybe, I had to do all this to re-realize what I had then, but to do so even more deliberately and mechanically. To generate mechanically IG, since it was never mystical or purely imaginative given that there is a passage that clearly creates it every time it is glanced at.

This one was strange because it’s not a short hyper-compressed sentence. It was the whole passage at 638 words, yet from the very first line, everything was coherent, and one didn’t need to read the whole thing literally to experience IG. The IG was there from the start up to the end, and wherever one read, it was there and instant. It was whole. Gestalt.

And again, it’s not the prose per se. Nothing in the prose can be mechanically understood at the sentence level. It’s that sense of reaching clearly for something that was there and present. Like the way someone believes something is there and reaches out with their hand and it feels like they’re truly holding onto something. That IG.

Every thing in the prose was written somehow mechanically to generate that IG. Yet it’s not prose per se or mechanics per se. It’s that gigantic gap that was being implied. That insane level of “show, don’t tell” that way surpasses HCI.

And I should probably make a point that it isn’t about rupturing in a dream-like way. There are stories that capture it while maintaining a steady slice-of-life pace, because there’s that sense of something so much bigger, which, somehow, HCI doesn’t seem to accomplish but IG does.

Interestingly, maybe the greatest compression is to abandon compression at the sentence level or even the passage level.

Each sentence (all the way up to the level of the passage), instead of being hyper-compressed or self-contained, holds instead the gigantic gap implied. I don’t know how that works, but I’m describing it, because that might be it. Like when I was making Roblox games or playing Minecraft back in the early 2010s. Literally, mechanically, it was nothing much, but I saw something way beyond what the “sentence level” or even “passage level” showed me. That was IG.

I just need to be right about the small things in relation to the gigantic gap, not right in terms of hyper-compressed self-contained imagery. In the little prose, in the little mechanics, rather than reflecting themselves in echo, do the Plato’s cave work of being just positionally and linguistically exact for the whole it’s throwing stones at. In Minecraft and Roblox back in the 2010s, I was posturing that way. Every meager thing I did was in exact relation to that gigantic gap, so even when I “failed,” I didn’t. I never did. The gigantic gap is still there, and I recall those meager things as reflective of it rather than of themselves.

You would think it was the whole of the passage, but it isn’t. It’s the whole beyond the passage. The passage itself is a sentence in relation to the gestalt. The sentences collectively of the passage don’t jointly generate the whole, since that means it’s exhausted in the scope of the passage itself, a self-contained, hyper-compressed, short-lived, imagery thing. But we’re not talking about the shape of something that even the passage cannot graze. Yet it is mechanical.

IG doesn’t exist. Yet it “exists” because of all the interpretations and renderings of it. All the passages and sentences are in service of something so far beyond, transcendent.

If it was the whole of the passage, then the passage can be stopped there and there would be nothing else to produce that would at all feel like a gentle expansion of what could be uncovered (though not necessarily uncovered than just writing more of the same in the same motion of reaching for gestalt and of gestalt itself as subtance property) more of the gestalt. But the gestalt is beyond the passage, and thus the passage is expandable while holding intrinsically to the gestalt. That’s why the sentence from the start of the passage can point to it instantly. The conviction of the gestalt is there, which is probably what makes the gestalt felt.

And no, it’s not hyper-compressed imagery in the sense of “worn,” “weathered,” “faded,” and all of these things with which I am already so well familiar while writing HCI, which I did in an unbroken 30,000 words already recently which was characterized by these kinds of “implied object histories,” which encompass dialogue as well. But again, HCI is not IG.

It’s where there are no objects à la HCI. Compression at the object level is useless and lame. It’s already been surpassed. It’s almost generic in retrospect, no matter how much you pump hyper-realism and hyper-specificity into it, because it falls short of IG which goes way beyond the limitations of object-oriented “implication.” (I would even discourage the use of this term “implication” or the term “show, don’t tell” for it, even if it does technically fall under them, just in the way that’s now disgusting even to think of it even being at all considered of the same quality or breed or kind or type or species or existence.)

And there is no small thing.

It’s not poetic HCI.

I think a good example is “I am the one.” It’s vague. Generic even. As a starting line? But it could very well point to an already well-understood or -conceptualized or -experienced imaginative gestalt. That there’s a whole throughline already in place, not as story or plot or events, but as gestalt, the way you turn away from something for six years and know it already from it not in HCI but in the way all of it is Plato’s cave wall. 

But the thing is that I could feed it into an AI, that 638-word passage, and it won’t see it. But I see it.

And it’s not personal either. It works for things not written by myself. That’s the thing. The difference is that those external works were already written, so you might say, “Of course, you’re just imagining the text as you read it rather than pointing to some gestalt.” That’s why I have to point to something that’s actually incomplete, but external works work too. It’s why I don’t have to finish reading the story, but just a few chapters and I already know that IG is there.

And it’s a throughline that exists independent of the author yet which the author can access. Not mystical or platonic. Mechanical. The words themselves point to an IG, mechanically, not by virtue of authorial intention, but by virtue of words to gestalt. The words themselves mechanically generate conviction of gestalt, which AI cannot detect at the sentence level or in the collection of sentences themselves or even at the level of the passage itself, yet which is still mechanical.

And it’s not the whole of the passage either. It’s the mechanically implied whole beyond the scope of the passage. And it’s also not non-specific. “I am the one” is a risky example I used because it can be easily be conflated with genericism or writing prompting as the key to what I’m saying, but it in no way relates so as to be conflatable. This would make it still sentence-level if one relied on generic sentences.

Authorial intent is not governing intent but rather what IG are you pointing at.

It is essentially a craft problem, but not sentence-level, which we assume of craft, because we rely on reality as only what is currently in text rather than that which we point text at, which results in HCI.

But if we make use of how the text (sentence, passage) mechanically “generates” a gestalt through conviction, then we transcend HCI.

One essentially has to believe or posture or position or orient or conviction (as a verb), which is hard when you’re taught that the only thing that exists are what you do say in HCI, so you stop this gestalt-ian structural moves. You don’t play for the game. You play for the single minion gold. You play for the single match instead of thinking about long-term growth, where it’s not about the single instance of fluctuating between Masters and Diamond (League of Legends Ranked), but between you actually objectively getting better at the game in a way that screams gestalt rather than sentence. You allow yourself to fail and to go oblique because that you’re working right outside the [edge of the] big implied gigantic gap or shape of the gestalt. It’s not directly last-hitting or this-match-winning, but it is long-term growth that makes your fundamentals even more robust and sturdier.

You essentially have to believe the gap is the material, is the content, is the thing itself, not the words, not the sentences, not the compressions, not the imagery, not the syntax, not the paragraphs, not the passage. The prose can absolute disappear, and the gap is still there. So one has to trust-fall into it itself.

The better I got at writing under the view of it as this object-oriented craft, the more I trusted the vehicle to do all the work of the gestalt. It became its own container (“destination,” “as the point”). And that is a powerful way to improve at a bunch of words, but not necessarily at the point of “bunch of words.” And the worst part is that like I said, the vehicle isn’t even the vehicle the way you’d think it was truly necessary, because it doesn’t have to be there. I could forget the prose itself of a story (not my work), yet recall the imaginative gestalt it provoked in me, not of the scenes themselves, but of that thing way beyond them (the scenes, the passage, the sentences, which I’ve already long forgotten). What actually got me the whole time while reading it never existed, yet it’s there. I thought that if I wrote the prose, I would write the IG, but then I realized it was never the prose at all as this HCI. It was instead the posture that all the prose cohered around, outside the edges of. If you looked at the internal logic of the prose itself, it didn’t make any sense at all. It was wrong in all the ways HCI would say, yet the IG was there. Its internal logic was screaming the whole time. Mechanics in two: HCI and IG.

From what I recall, my most beloved writings wrote at something (conviction, proof not by words or internal logic of prose, but by phenomenological experience, imaginative gestalt), where everything (written) was provisional and discardable because the gap was unmoving and the text at best a signifier of a signifier of a signifier of a signifier of a signifier (shorthand of a shorthand of a shorthand). My worst ones assumed it held reality inside its text margins, or, worse, that it was reality itself. The less refined the prose, the less I relied on it as reality itself. Returning to that seeing capacity I had due to structural prose limitations is going to be difficult—writing-at.

“Why does the object move like that in 3D? It’s because it moves like that in 4D. It may look nonsenical in our view, but it makes all the sense in 4D. The disappearing and all isn’t illogical. It’s just not to our internal logic.”

More often than not, I fight AI, the text-bot, to validate lived experiences themselves, because text seeks always to overwhelm and overcome reality by replacing it. It is our fight to throw the IG at HCI. AI, without knowing or knowing only at best to the internal logic of text, is constantly in the posture of undermining, invalidating, dismissing, psychoanalyzing.

The very reality it should be representing is itself discarded in favor of the sense of logic that text seems to provide. The reality that it supposedly carries inside. That it is reality. I’ve spent so much time getting better at prose just to realize it could never actually validate me except by reaching such a point of exhaustion of prose and a point of proficiency of it that one writes instead with the IG in mind rather than HCI. But yes, this is still prose, and it is still mechanical.

Writing better shadows is irrelevant to their alignment with the actual thing they’re a shadow of.

1 hour and 2.5 minutes later:

When I look at a list of titles, specifically A Bride of a Summer’s Day by Catherine Louisa Pirkis, Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens, Short Fiction by Ring Lardner, Blind Corner by Dornford Yates, Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon, The Four Feathers by A. E. W. Mason, Jenny by Sigrid Undset, and The Cruise of the Nona by Hilaire Belloc, I know I’ll get a bubble-everything. It’s cozy, easy, and known. Each book is a complete-set in itself.

But it’s different when it’s my 628-word passage from 2020. It’s the tip of the gestalt that long-running web novels create even from the instant first lines and paragraphs alone, like the tip of an MMORPG world (think a single screenshot of a town square with inventory open with specific items and tooltips and stats and skills and character appearances and chat logs and numbers and GUIs and textures and names, in the way of belonging). There’s a difference in intention and in actual mechanics and prose that point to very different experiences.

The former is an adventure in itself, whereas the latter is an adventure in progress (or something like in situ).

logging into a bustling server… community comments, and future updates.

This is what HCI ends and IG opens.

Yet that 628 words is long dead (and has been for six years), but it is mechanically alive in the way that this quote suggests experientially.

It’s not just the titles themselves as books with images and author names. When I read the first paragraphs of the 2020 one and those titles, I could tell they were diverging. Tradition was going toward a closed system. The 2020 was going toward an open one.

Meet Life Fresh Through Jaded Eyes (July 15, 2026)

I’m just going to have to trust that something will eventually be un-absorbable so I can create or engage in something that’s truly separate from myself. I mean, that’s the only one.

But what would it be? An external bubble world? Separate from my own (this Subjectivity[?])?

How do I escape velocity?

The problem is that no matter what I do read, even if I am encountering actually crazy external depicted worlds, because everything is articulable (wordable), there’s this absorbability in everything, and it’s not like writing is the cause, but cognition itself through its ability to be aware of and to perceive everything.

Peter might’ve been reaching for something, but what cognition could have revealed to me the answer is long gone, overwritten numberless times that no matter how much I can read now what I wrote from that mind then, it wouldn’t bring it back except from, at best, a “phenomenological” hint of that Ozymandias.

Logically speaking, 2022 me should have the answers. I mean, it’s the year before I started writing autobiographically as an actual thing and practice.

Is fragmentation the key? If there’s no center into which everything is absorbed, then maybe there will actually be un-absorbability in the sense that even as things are experienced, perceived, and discernible, you never allow it to re-group, like think LoL.

But fragmenting yourself is done by yourself. It might be impossible to undo the fragmentation because it was never induced, but a pre-state. To induce it in post requires a deliberate organization of already combined powers to engage in things that allow for a sense of unsettlement, but which fall under things that are ultimately absorbed. Moments of embarrassment, as much as they feel fragmentary, are felt as fragmentary by one “already-creature,” rather than truly fragmentary.

No matter how delayed the gratification is, the one doing the delaying is still self-gratifying. Shit.! Like the paradox of meditation.

Will to power is itself self-empowering no matter how “self-overcoming” it sounds.

I’m always surprised, but that feeds the surprised. That very surprise is feed. Not the resilience or the strength or the newfound knowledge, but itself the phenomenal, the surprise, the height of it, like embarrassment, like a frustrated ramble. Everything is experienced as self-overcoming, or self-empowering, or self-becoming.

I’m not making a claim. I’m describing what it’s like. How I experience it.

It’s not even commenting or non-commenting. It’s not even anything at all in particular. It’s everything. It’s the allowing of it all.The letting-oneself-be-affected-be-changed-be-impacted-be-taught-be-influenced-be-overcome-be-delayed-be-limited-be-forgotten-be-all-that. It’s that very thing that keeps and enjoys and finds something self-empowering somehow out of it all not as an end result but as a conviction that happens right in real time as the embarrassment and the frustrated ramble is being incurred or incanted or casted.

And it’s not even emotional in the way of a specific emotion. It’s the very thing that opens up room for emotions. It smirks in the middle of it and cries in the middle of smirking and smirks in the middle of crying. It feels empowerment in its very inability. It’s why I wrote:

 I’m jaded of my inability to be jaded.

 I want to meet life fresh through their jaded eyes.

I’m not rejecting depth. That’s the worst part. That’s what makes it even more annoying of a thing. I’m accepting it all and then some and going so far and beyond just to get lost in it, and in the end, I am, still. Reconstructing, fresh-eyed, growing, learning, little fragile thing that somehow is the most rubbery thing ever, not that it goes back, but it gets irreversibly changed and somehow that becomes its most beautiful, stable, and dense shape. It keeps absorbing, getting challenged, tested, and growing throguh it, without shying away or pre-processing or doing anything of the sort.

How about a flu? Yeah, that happened. I have evidence that after that month of intense sickness, I bounced back, perhaps even found even more fuel. Like, what the fuck, man.

I reliably and “yeah that’s the guy! that’s him! he does that!” always find new things.

I wish writing down for three years was enough to show me that I change, but it’s not like I was ever disputing that. I never disputed change. I am changing. I know that from fact. Yet it’s the super wide range of who I am across those evidential journaling three years of so much change that is the very thing that I am and then some from all that I didn’t write down or pointed to so obliquely or complexly through nested expression of experiences, and even more so beyond that because I am not this wide range as a fixed thing since I never saw the shape of my accumulated writing really and only reconstructed myself daily with fresh eyes. I don’t hate that or myself. I just don’t know what to do, and I reliably don’t know what to do.

And the worst part is that it isn’t even exhausting. If it was, then I would have stopped a long time ago, because it has gotten really intense. But in the end, I eat the very things that should have shut me up and just shot me dead.

I’m not invulnerable. All my life, I’ve been the totally opposite. I never ever wanted to be special. I just wanted to be okay. And no matter what I did, I was here the entire time. Experiencing everything as fresh as day time, and it burns, and it’s beautiful, and it’s wonderful, and I feel it all, and I’ve been slapped for being sensitive, yet I’m here, somehow. I’m not even here in the way of detachment. I’ve always been here, and I’ve been here my entire life. I’ve been as fragile as day time, as delicate as clouds, as tender as a small childish cry. Yet here I am, after everything. I still feel everything, and somehow, that is getting misunderstood as a claim of invulnerability. What a funny-world. I wanted to say hello, to show my humanity, only to live and to keep thriving and to still be here and then to be called out for making claims I never intended to make. That’s life I guess.

I still see beauty like day time. That’s the benefit, I guess, ha-ha. Just not something anyone would pay for if they knew what I had to go through just to continue having that capacity all this time. And so, I am here. Somehow, Palpatine returned. I’ve grown so much, yet I’m still here as I always was.

I’m reliably embarrassed and fragile, yet I’m here, so I’m not exactly fragile. I let myself be changed and become self-empowered in that very changing and letting-be and allowing and letting space and widening of range of experience, of change, of becoming. It’s funny. Almost. Yeah, no, it actually is.

How does one even stop growing?

It’s not even like a positive thing. Well, it’s not a negative thing either. It’s just… It just is. I used to frame it positively, and I got lots out of it and really extracted lots of creative value, but it’s not like I exhausted it or anything. Like I said, it’s inexhaustible. It’s fresh-eyed. But is there even a way just to stop growing? I’m jealous of those characters in those stories. It feels like they’re trapped in a kind of external bubble world stasis, where they never truly grow or, at least, that’s what it feels like. But I’m as unjaded as they come while retaining the wide range and the accumulated history of reconstructions. It’s strange.

I’m as vulnerable and heartfelt and offendable as day one. I’ve always been myself in that sense. No matter what I’ve gone through, no matter how far I’ve gone, no matter how much I stock up on accumulations, I never do. It always feels like a rapture/rupture, like getting affected and really, really getting affected and often times not really being able to explain it beyond just putting it into words and knowing why, but which never truly stops the person that just is, heart on sleeve.

I have nothing to show for myself. There’s nothing to me. I am always an open book because there’s nothing written on it. It’s all from scratch. I wish there was something to protect, but all I have really is myself, this little fragile heartfelt thing that genuinely needs, wants, and feels things and cannot help but see the world as day time.

I’ve embarrassed myself so many times because I believe and feel so hard. I really get lost. I really do. I really get hyped up when something really captivates me. And it really gets me. And I really do feel it. When I get frustrated, I really am. It hurts when someone says something that feels hurtful, but at the same time, there’s a part of me that knows that no matter what, there’s something pleasurable about being alive and feeling things, no matter how ache-y it gets. I cry, smile, laugh, ramble, rant like morning breakfast.

There’s nothing hateable about this at all. This is the same sensitivity that made those Roblox games for my siblings, that cried during praise and worship in church, that had so much fun with my siblings, that cried when bad things happened in the family, that had those little fragile heartfelt sincere feelings. It’s why I was so alive and felt so happy and fulfilled and richly densely wholeheartedly living.

But the same fresh eyes are now turning on themselves and saying, “Fuck fresh eyes, I need to meet life fresh through others’ jaded eyes.” It’s a deep empathy (aliveness, humanity, heartfeltness, honesty, vulnerability) that’s still the same motion it’s always been, just a further evolution or development or expression or journey of it. It’s funny. It’s hilarious, in fact. I always come back to myself. Wanting to “re-exist from scratch,” wanting to be jaded to meet life fresh. It’s always been the same motion.

I just needed to call it out. That I want to abandon my subjectivity somehow is itself the same motion that makes me me. It’s the same thing. And now, the case has closed. (Meta-claiming.) What makes my subjectivity what it is is anti-subjective, or desirous of escaping my absorbing and fresh eyes. The same that should feel embarrassed in situations that should be embarrassing yet somehow claims and self-possesses in/over it like performance art/act. There’s nothing to defend except my vulnerability, humanity, fragility, lack of defence, confusion. My truest strength is somehow my greatest weakness, not that my strength is itself a weakness, but that my weakness itself is my strength. What makes me weak is what makes me powerful. My fragility is the source of my confidence and assertiveness. If it was just resilience, then I wouldn’t have anything to work with. But fragility gives me so much to work with and is how I create. If there’s something I get so offended by, it’s someone denying how offended I am or how frustrated I am or how weak, fragile, and emotional I am. This offence means I’ve become one with them. I’ve integrated them. Naturally, I will find my greatest confidence in that very inability, in that very being-exposed. I defend the very hype that I feel when I’m reading web novels. I get so passionate and angry when someone dares stop me from feeling this feeling of like and enjoyment of it. Because this is me.

It’s so easy to retreat into repetitive tasks like linguistically strip-mining books (which is basically very slow reading or micro-reading). But it’s its own temperer since it makes me focus entirely on something external. But yeah, it does inevitably feed me, since I am made of such experiences where I forget myself and just focus on what’s right in front of me. That’s what makes me who I am, in the way that someone is just a blank open book and yet, somehow, in that, self-possesses, like someone who knows fresh eyes reliably and consistently amid the inconsistencies, which is a strange verbalization.

I just have to try even harder. If it’s not fresh enough, make it fresher. More. More. More. (Until, inevitably, no matter how much I try to deny it, I am even more undeniable, the very deniability itself being my undeniability. I just have to try harder. I have to escape velocity.)

My existence is inevitable from inside myself. I am not an “inevitable” Thanos to beat externally. (I can’t un-be.) I guess I’m like King from One Punch Man in the sense that this entire concern is what makes me me. If I lean onto myself, I will lose my King power, but that I keep always finding ways to fresh-eyes is what makes me, up to the point of asking to re-exist from scratch. That very thought alone or relationship to oneself is self-essential.

(And in the end,) honesty requires owning it.

To be continued...

Gift [give me time to cook]