Tunnels in The System of the Self

There's a manic confluence of cultural forces bearing down on me at present which precludes the stating of any coherent viewpoint beyond... wow. I've gone from the Neil Stephenson's Baroque Cycle to Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos to Rise of Nations to the new Animal Collective album to New York City and back again, struggling to find a thread, trying to find a thread...

But, as Will Oldham once sang,

If I could fuck a mountain
Lord, I would fuck a mountain

Indeed, the interconnected immensity of life is something sexual, which Oldham has recognized, a sentiment echoed in NIN's "I Do Not Want This":

I want to know everything
I want to be everywhere
I want to fuck everyone in the world
I want to do something that matters

It's only to take a slightly further step to recognize that the very world as-it-is is our Lover, we are its Lover, we are here to serve and bring it pleasure, to take ours when able... and so much of it comes to us today through media, as though our engagement with the disembodied Sign is the means by which we may touch the growing social body we're evolving up and through. Though we honor our physical bodies, communion with higher truths takes place further within the reaches of the mind, in the capacity to recreate the interior visions of the authors we love within our own domes....

In Hyperion there is an ancient mystery known as the Labyrinths, a network of massive and perfect tunnels existing like a mysterious ancient webwork in nine planets throughout the Hegemony of Man's 100+ inhabited worlds, a system which may or may not have been established by the mysterious TechnoCore, the God-like Artificial Intelligence machines -- spawned by humans -- which are busy throughout the series constructing the Ultimate Intelligence, a meta-being which dines on quasars and treats the billions of human minds throughout the Hegemony as so many neurons, unwitting tools to allow Him/It think His/Its thoughts, process energy, etc.


I'm wondering, now, if these "labyrinths" exist on our human scale as well, manifesting as mysterious "tunnels" within our own bodies, which beguile and flabberghast our constituent cells like so many mice struggling to apprehend the presence of pyramids. Though "tunnels" connotes something negative (literally) in its use of emptiness, this need not be so, in that perhaps it is our network of tunnels which binds us to other humans, in the form of potential causeways for use at some future date to the benefit of our highest potentials. I have empty, useless, huge pathways inside of me, mere ghosts of actual infrastructure, put here by God-knows-who, and in exploring the mystery Me, and seeing equivalent structures in my peers, it as though I wish to turn my body to "align" my tunnels with those of another, and in our coordination of swiss-cheese tunnel currents, a stronger wind may blow through us both/all, gaining in momentum and direction as we seek to stand stock still, cross-conduits of terrible lightspeed gales that we are.

Perhaps it is the aforementioned media which is intuitively produced and sent rushing in to fill these gaps, whistling through us into each other like Pacifico winds through crude cliff-\side eyelets and red rock arches, which leads me to ask two questions: 1) do our bodies contain mysterious structures for the facilitation of future media forms (artworks of another planet), and 2) what would happen if we refused to channel our cultural products? If we stopped writing, reading, consuming, listening, playing... would the gaps in our internal labyrinths be filled by something else? Or is the feeling of cold air rushing through dead spaces, pointless holes and meaningless tributaries, the actual intended condition?

I don't know.

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