ECHO II - A RECIPE FOR A JOKE

The previous part was a long joke. Here are the steps to recreating this joke on your own.

STEP 1:

There is a person who is assured in who they are, what they mean and what they've done.

STEP 2:

YOU ARE NOT WHO YOU THOUGHT YOU WERE.

STEP 3:

This is the funny part, the punchline. The joke is that someone is different, that they have been successfully Othered, and can no longer look back on themself in the same way.

STEP 4:

The joke has been completed. This is the part where you are meant to laugh.

WHEN you've then lived your whole life like this, you become used to walking silently. As quietly as possible to avoid any attention.

Attention = Humiliation = Death.

Death is bad. You avoid it as much as possible, keeping to the margins and padding around so you are not heard. You are not meant to be seen either.

The thing is, when you live as small as possible is that your heart grows to fill the space left around you. If you have constrained yourself to the smallest point, the area left is not empty. The heart will send out runners and if the runners are left unpruned, then the soul will be undeveloped. The body cannot be left empty. There has to be something.

In the center, a small black seed in a drawn heart is labeled "you." Red veins run out from the heart, which is labeled "the rest."

Organs mean something. They define purpose of the self and characterize its meaning. If you take out all the organs and leave the body with nothing, then new ones will grow in their stead. This is necessary. They will not be the same ones, the body will restratify itself as needed for its new purpose.

The body can keep doing this. It could do it forever. But it will grow tired. There are only so many times a person can restructure before it starts to wonder if there was ever a structure at all. That's how you get a ghost.

And you keep doing it, again and again. There are more ghosts and more structures and more and more until the body is overfilled and probably under an immense amount of pressure. In the real world this makes diamonds. Inside of the body this is one of the illegal things to do with a pressure cooker.