We'd hiked for some hours, steadily upwards, in the dark green lush tropical Island foliage. Sometimes, I'd look up to see the deep blue sky just to remind myself that it was actually bright and sunny up there; that's how thick and rich the vegetation was.
Periodically, we could catch glimpses of the extinct volcano that was on our right and around which the trail appeared to be slowly spiralling. Howler monkeys could occasionally be heard, but their "howls" sounded nothing so much as some teenagers playing some kind of belching game. And you'd see the monkeys up there in the trees sometimes, sprawled out and doing nothing.
Eventually our tail turned inward, towards where I imagined the volcano must be. The trail meandered quite a bit there, skirting along the top edge of a deep pool into which a waterfall plunged. And then we began to see the odd angular porous chunks of volcanic rock scattered about and through which the trail passed.
And then the trail hit the wall of the volcano and turned left, hugging it tightly and curving around. It was a sheer drop to the left, perhaps 20 feet. Not certain death but certain steep enough to break something if you fell. The trail was wide enough, however, that you didn't really worry about falling off, though two people could not walk safely side by side.
And then the trail took a right turn and we entered a dark space, a cave. As my eyes adjusted I couldn't see any clear way to go forward, but there in the back, at what appeared to be 50 or 60 feet in, we could see a glow, so we went forward.
As we approached the glow, however, it became quickly apparent that this was not an exit. In fact, as our eyes adjusted, we could see that it was a machine with many whirring gears. The gears were moving quickly, in a blur, but seem so well meshed that they made only the slightest warm hum.
We stood and stared gap-jawed at it. It was, to say the least, pretty odd to see a machine here in a volcanic cave deep in an island jungle. I thought for a moment that the machine was a pump, to pump water out of the cave for hikers, but somehow that idea didn't lock onto my brain. It was first of all far too quiet and second of all, it didn't look anything like a pump whatsoever. The gears, too, seemed arranged not in right angled planes but in any possible spacial orientation imaginable. I could not in fact imagine how such gears could mesh; it looked almost more organic than mechanical.
After several minutes of mute silence, someone poked one of the gears with a hiking stick, and what happened was really hard to describe. The gear seemed to respond somewhat to the poke, pulling more deeply into the machine for a moment, in between other gears and not directly visible. It then sprung back into place but now there seemed to be another gear connected to it just above it. I wondered for a moment if that higher gear had been there before and we didn't notice it, so I took the hiking pool and poked a few more gears. As I poked and then poked again, the gears were definitely sprouting more gears and, did I imagine this? Whirring and move ever so slightly faster.
We shook our heads in disbelief, and that's when I noticed that no external power source was visible. In fact, the machine was not visibly connected to anything at all, though I guess there must be some kind of connection to the outside world down below it. Was the thing gas powered, perhaps? Well, we didn't smell anything and there was no sign whatsoever of combustion. It was damned weird.
I think someone tried bracing the pole against a non-moving piece of the machine, and we got behind him and helped him push. I don't know if any of us were trying to push over the machine, or see underneath it or just to try to detect how heavy it was, but it didn't matter. Either it was extremely heavy or else extremely well-connected to the cave floor, but in either even we didn't feel it move at all.
We all then encircled the machine and searched for a sign or a switch or anything else that would identify its operation or purpose, and after a few minutes we were ready to give up. But one of us noticed a small hole along one of the few non-gear surfaces that were visible. The hole was just large enough to accept the end of a hiking pole so we stuffed an end in the hole. Someone made an off-color joke, but I think they were trying to disperse the tension.
And then, a click. The pole seemed to engage something, so we tried pull it out. It wouldn't go. After a minute, however, someone pushed downward on the pole like throwing a big lever, and I swear that emitted a loud kachunk and then the gears started doing something I couldn't quite understand. They seemed to all be drifting in and out and amongs each other, some whirring even more quickly, others slowing down conisderably. If you squinted and defocused your eyes, it looked almost like a giantbroiling mass.
But then, after a minute or two, the gears all seemed to find a new place and then they stopped moving around, though they kept whirring and gearing of course. In fact, they seemed to have found an entirely different but equally acceptable configuration.
We tried throwing the pole-lever again, but it didn't work a second time.
Eventually, we just turned around and left and made our way down the jungle trail in silence.
When we got back to town, something seemed different. Everything looked the same, but on the other hand the content of everything, it's very meaning, somehow felt different. Yes, our hotel was still a hotel, but now it was something else too, perhaps many things. It was an empty space surrounded by the materials consisting of the hotel's walls which blocked out inclement weather. Cars were still cars but instead of being merely machines that you drove somewhere, all of a sudden they were physical devices that gave a human rider kinetic energy while protecting the rider the consenquences of increased kinetic energy.
In other words, everything was the same, but different.
And then I directed this new inner vision (or was it truly inner? Somehow, it felt like everything else had changed) to the other people I saw. What did it mean to be "human" in this new light?
The answer can not be answered easily. To put it simply, I saw a human in terms of everything else in the entire universe. A human, unlike anything else, seemed to somehow distantly reflect all possibilities, all potentialities, all possible meanings everywhere, and at all times. It was in some ways grand and glorious but it was also disorienting and frightening because I sensed that there were too many possibilities for any one (or even a good subset) to lock onto. In other words, anything goes and this was not just good but evil and mostly everything in between as well, most things having no relationship to good or evil at all. In other words, we people seemed to be "about" the limitless possibilities that being "about" something can point to.
It was a self-referential feedback loop that disoriented and confused me.
Like the others, my dreams that night were all distorted and incomprehensible. I woke up shaking and trembling and with dark rings under my eyes.
After taking a shower, I got dressed for a hike and knew what I would do. I kocked on the others' doors and we hit the trail, not forgetting to take several hiking poles. The plan was obvious: To switch the machine back to the way it was before.