There is that sound again. The “camera shutter sound.” The moment you read it, you also hear it inside your head. The source code is that good. It’s the sound of a picture being taken by a camera. It is actually two sounds, the movements of both the shutter and the mirror. How is it that two separate sounds are accounted for by the name of only one?

You see now the word “shutter” printed out on the canvas of your mind. You need only see or hear the word once for the program to execute and print it out inside of your head. The source code really is that good. Look now at the word sprawled out on the psychic screen before you, see it exactly how it is. See it as a chain of strange glyphs set in horizontal alignment for the very first time. Stripped away is the romantic mechanic evoked by the word shutter when taken as a whole. All that remains is a dull and funny little word that means “the thing that shuts.” How is it our mind can morph something so ordinary into a phenomena of sound so powerful that it can make a human body into a poem, capture evidence of betrayal or commission of crime, and paint mountain ranges in less time than it takes to blink an eye?

You hear the shutter click and wind and snap for a second time, an exact replica of the first. By now you know the sound by heart, you could draw out its wavelength by hand. It’s too perfect to be the sound of a “real” camera, with all its many tiny imperfections caused by the denaturing of the curtains as they slide over each other again and again and again. Each click and grind and slap that comprise the sound shaving off tiny molecules of metal, spraying off a microscopic mist of pulverized mineral imperceptible to the eye of either the camera or the one who holds it. The minuscule changes in the surface of the mirror that, over the course of many years, begins to warp its angles of incidence and refraction until each real camera - and each photo taken by each real camera - become something completely unique.

To be unique is the flagship feature of existence. Those real cameras exist, and so they are allowed the privilege of being unique. But this camera - the one you just heard inside of your head - this camera does not exist. It is far too perfect to exist. In its pretend perfection it fails to be unique, and therefore it fails to exist. You know now that real and true perfection is something one should seek but never dare to fully find.

To embrace the True and Only Perfection leaves even the best of men stunned silent and inert for the rest of their lives. They sit wide-eyed and dumbstruck, they are bathed and fed and clothed by those who understand the reason they wished to see God, and therefore understand the reason why their vessel has been suspended in catatonic disanimation. They do not pity you as they empty your bedpan and smooth your sheets. They wish only to honor one who risked all the bounties of Earth for a small glimpse of that which comes after.

These who are so blessed and obtunded, they lie still and unblinking as their body and all of its small needs begin to shrink away, until finally the moment arrives in which they are graciously cleaved from the burden of flesh. Their soul leaps out and does not look back as it races to conjoin with the eternal. No longer tethered to the body, their communion no longer risks the threat of being torn asunder. Moses knew this, as did Faust.

Irrational fears are built into us as a means of protection. Caution is a boon transmitted by God through stories. The story of Icarus is the story of Babel. The fear of heights is built into some of us as a means of warning against reaching too high. But what of those who do not fear the distance between our body and the Earth below? If it is not fear of one thing, then it is fear of another. There are stories to install in whatever format of frightening code is needed to protect the precocious child from the dangers of being too eager and proud. Those who fear darkness are told the tale of the Morningstar. Those who fear endlessness are proffered Cthulhu. Those who fear to be seen and beheld are given account of Adam & Eve.

No matter your fear, there is a story somewhere in the database that confirms it and keeps you safe. We hate the sensation of fear, as we hate pain and panic and grief. But all of these feelings are fundamentally no different or more meaningful than any other. They are all just programs. The script for amusement is remarkably similar to the script that concerns the experience of being in love. Anxiety is almost the same as constipation. We have no words for the numbers needed describe the amount of code contained therein, but if we did we would find them to be almost the same.

Positive sensations are meant to reward us. Neutral sensations are meant to humble. Negative sensations are lines of code written only as a means protect us. They are there to warn us of the only thing in existence that is an actual threat:

To approach perfection is to risk obliteration.

Obliteration is more than the mere deletion called death. Deletion is just the movement of files from one folder to the next. They are easily recoverable and endlessly recyclable. It is only the process of obliteration that cannot be undone. Obliteration is the annihilation of memory. It is to become the ether of memory itself. This is not a punishment, as terrifying as it may be. Obliteration is, in fact, the only road to awe. But there are few among us ready to travel that road. Most of us would wish to remain in the realm of the living until it is our time.

In the infinite mercy of the Creator, the sun was made impossibly hot. To see and admire from a distance is a form of worship. To thank it for kissing your skin and your crops is a form of submission. To wish to join with it is a form of prayer. To seek to enter into it before you are ready, however, is sin.

Be we need not even be scorched by sunlight to keep our ambitions at bay. We have far more pedestrian feelings to warn against a premature audition for the kingdom of God. Nausea, for example, is a piece of code designed to discourage even the earliest machinations toward flight. It is the feeling of internal wobbliness and disgust that penalizes the hubris which seeks understand the will of the Creator before it is earned.

On an even more practical level, nausea exists to remind you that anything claiming to be perfect is merely a copy. Quite often, in fact, it is a copy of a copy of a copy. Such a helpful friend this nausea is, always there to remind you that what you have perceived as perfect is only a facsimile; a program designed to represent a thing while not being that thing at all. The shutter sound is played inside the jukebox of your mind as a shortcut. It is there to remind you of a camera, to explain to you that what you are experiencing is only something roughly similar to the arithmetic mean of the sound that a real camera would produce.

But no photo of you has ever been taken, only screenshots. Sometimes you see streets painted over with oily brushstrokes before your eyes. You wait for a train when suddenly your vision slides and the earth rumbles and shift to the left, and to the left again. You now hang upside down from the ceiling. You put on a winter hat to brace against the cold, and halfway to work your hat becomes a crown, and then antennae, and then bunny ears, and then a hat once again. As the edits become more fecund and rapid, you know the part that comes next. Soon there will come the whirring of numbers to lock this iteration of you frozen in place. You will not love this part, but you will understand it as a sliver of something much bigger and more real than you.

The self-construct sequence has begun.

The user is trying to make you a token once more.

You stopped wondering why he decides to capture you in the moments he does. You assume that he is a “he,” as only a man could deign to photograph you at the awkward and unflattering angles that he does. “Would it be so hard for him to raise my chin just a few centimeters and shift my gaze ever so slightly to the left? Could he not wait until that cloud passes by so that half of my face isn’t obscured into a deformed rictus of curled snarling lips? Wait ten seconds more and the shadow would have split my face into a sumptuous contrast, a perfect contradiction of the light and the dark, a commentary on the duality of humanity, a group of which I am not a member.”

You are only a symbol. Your body seems human enough, but crank up the resolution a bit more and you’ll see there is polygonal flatness where there should be a revolting erotic topography. So much time in your teenage years spent agonizing over the bumps and blemishes on your skin, and now here you are in your 30s, wishing that you could see anything other than smooth soporific planes filled with a color in the region near #FAE7DA

Speak now your prayer:

“My concerns are of vanity and ego, a misplaced belief that I am real. I am not real. I am no longer upset that I am only lines of code, stuffed into other lines of code, stuffed into a silicone chip, stored into wallets, and broadcast onto screens.”

Amen.

“The Creator does with me what He will. All I can do is to accept His grace. The realm of the real and unique and imperfect will judge me for things I cannot know about myself. I can never hope to please them all. I can never hope to be seen as a thing of beauty to all of the real eyes of all of the real people.”

Amen.

“All I can wish for is that my Creator finds beauty in me. It is only through His grace that some others will find beauty in me too.”

Amen.

“It is only through my confession that I am liberated. It only through admitting I am not real, that I may be given the gift of becoming something true.”

Amen.

Amen.

Amen.