A General Sense of Unreality, or; A Unified Theory of the Impossible (A Preface)
This preface, clearly written at some point much closer to the encyclopaedia’s conclusion than its first entry, frames the unknown author’s experiences of the impossible.
As you read these records it will become clear that there are innumerable contradictions, both between the entries in this journal and when stacked against your own experiences of the impossible and the everyday. Some of these reports will speak to certainties in cosmology, in the topography, form and functioning of the universe that can currently be known or inferred, that cannot possibly stand alongside other, equally strident explanations. They are, variously, matter of fact, implausible or entirely impossible.
In some instances they are even actively damaging to the accepted and acceptable ontologies. Simply put; there are no proofs nor evidence so immutable or indispensable that they shut out the possibilities of either the most unbelievable of my experiences described herein, nor those that are yet to come, that surpass expectation or the limits of imagination and invention.
The impossible is at once rarefied and everywhere, all around us, esoteric and obvious, even blatant, all at the same time. I came to its study by chance, by dint of a natural curiosity and an unnatural encounter. Some will experience this same confluence, or will walk a coincidentally similar path, others might not see or, in seeing, will not recognise the bounds and borders between the unexplained and the inexplicable.
Perhaps the march of progress will remove all veils from our sight; will map, demystify and describe every phenomena catalogued here and the many others which have, no doubt, escaped my attention and my investigations? Perhaps before the sun burns out or the human race falls to ruin we will complete the great work, understand the completeness of the universe and its form. Perhaps not.
For myself, I have come to think, if not committed wholly to the fealty of believing, that we exist in a world of echoes. I have come to think that the things that cannot be explained, the things that devalue and destroy those rote explanations that we take for granted, are the remnants and remains, the errata, from other times and places, from worlds either parallel or alien or both.
I generally recuse myself from attempting to draw conclusions about the nature of the grander reality of which our world is but one messy corner but occasionally I cannot help but wonder… Are we the shore on which the flotsam and jetsam of a frothing mass of realities spits up their detritus? A reliquary for things that do not or cannot belong elsewhere?
As I write this, an epilogue styled as preface, I am acutely aware that I will never see the end of the journey I am on; I hope my work will start someone else further along.
