Existenceproof

"What would your feelings be, seriously, if your cat or your dog began to talk to you, and to dispute with you in human accents? You would be overwhelmed with horror. I am sure of it. And if the roses in your garden sang a weird song, you would go mad. And suppose the stones in the road began to swell and grow before your eyes, and if the pebble that you noticed at night had shot out stony blossoms in the morning?"
-Arthur Machen, The White People

There are moldy spots in the rank cracks of academia - para-maths, juxta-chromatics, alt-history, and those other fetid fields which are sometimes erroneously put under the umbrella of impossibilogy, whose students are quacks and cranks and snake-oil guzzlers - disciples one and all of the unreal. Theirs is dangerous work, more dangerous than could be imagined by the epidemologist or nuclear physicist, for the latter remain within the bounds of the bounded, the concrete and finite. For those in the univers(e/ity)'s light, death is the end, the only end, sometimes feared, sometimes welcomed, but always definite. You can, of course, imagine other ends than death. That's the appeal of these studies of the unreal: to let the imagination slip from the blessed limits of humanity and this cosmos, and return with the illicit fruits of infinity.

If this sounds too simple, too easy, consider going to the grocery store to pick up fruit. There might be dozens of varieties of fruit to choose from, but you know what you like, and where to look to find it. Now consider a grocery store that's got every fruit on Earth in it, piled up in neat rows and stacks of bins and baskets. You might be looking for quite some time to find what you want. You might even be allergic to some of the fruits and not even know it. Consider even further: a grocery store that's got every fruit the Earth's ever had or will have, every enormous prehistoric deviance and genetically-engineered vegan-friendly meat-thing. You might get lost in the aisles, and never find your way out. Even if you did, you might've brushed up against the wrong bin, and brought home a seed that invades and overgrows a continent. But of course we're not just talking about every fruit here, but everything and anything. As much as you need to open the spaces of possibility, you need to close them off.

This act of closing off, of denying unwanted possibilities, is called existenceproofing. The exact process varies tremendously, as you might expect - you might invoke the null-number huil, paint grim lines of bronte, and so on and so on, depending on the field you're working in and the result you're working toward. The ideal is the same: surgically precise excision.

Existenceproofing carries its own risks. Lookbackonwhatyou'vereadandseehowthegapsshapethecontent. Solidity alone has no structure, and in this is indistinguishable from total emptiness - form requires void, and in the intermingling both solidity and void attain their own structure. Existenceproofing is the art of voiding - and if it is too graceless, or too artful, it can give birth to monsters.

The trailblazer of existenceproofing cut away too much, leaving an abyss that swallowed them up like a sudden vacuum into howling chaos - no record or legacy of them now survives besides this abyss. Buildings and parts of buildings that shouldn't be spring up in the wake of the inexpert existenceproofer, for buildings are defined as much or more by the cavities within them as by their bricks and planks.

Life of a sort too is not an uncommon by-product - for life doesn't require any particular substance, or even non-substance, just an ordering system - as the proliferation of trypophobic plagues in recent years attests to. Living silhouettes are among the worst of these voided life-forms (at least, among the worst that don't swiftly lead to the end of a world-line), empty vessels in the shapes of people. More paranoid members of occulture believe that crowd is already fully infiltrated by them. And some say all these bizarre studies are only able to achieve tangible results because the world itself has been existenceproofed - a nonentity slowly dissolving into gibberish as it wakes up to that fact.