This is not for Berggruen 2025
Before I begin (I have already begun): thank you for being here. :)
Now then.
I think that I am preempted from submitting to the 2025 Berggruen essay competition (theme: “Consciousness”), in two ways:
It's a competition. This is not how I work. I am firmly unavailable for competitive engagement.
"Creative Writing Exclusion: Currently, creative formats such as fiction, poetry, and drama are not accepted." I genuinely do not think I can show you what I see without doing something that would be very easy to call poetry.
However, it occurs to me that what I have written so far might not be poetry, and perhaps my interface to what appears to be my preemption may be a viable interface through which I might reach you, the observer, who has some Berggruen-y reason to be here right now, sharing this pages with me. I can say this, for sure, because I have placed myself in a sort of between-space where I may yet become the “entrant” that the competition’s T’s and C’s constrain. Maintaining compatibility with this particularly-constrained set of futures means setting up my future-entrant-self to represent and warrant things like “the submitted essay has not been published in any form or in any publication”, and that the submission be “original content”.
On my end, it is now some minutes since the previous sentence. If you read the last two sentences in one go, the interval may (?) have been much shorter. Assessment of sequentiality in the experience of the other is a crapshoot, though; I can only hope that any of me makes it coherently to you in a way you find useful. (Consequently, by my own terms, I am also happy for you to print this out and use select cuttings as scrapbook material, so long as you find the scrapbooking itself to be useful.)
In the intervening minutes (there have been more of them; I used them to write the paragraph above), a delivery-person dropped off a parcel containing a book, just as I was filling the kettle for more tea. The book: THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND.
I need to interrupt myself here and state for the record that I do not believe any of this to be fiction. I am working hard not to inadvertently generate poetry, and if you find drama here then none of us are safe. This is, as strictly and as rigorously as I can manage to understand, documentation.
I am actually unsure if it's an essay. This would be a problem if my understanding of my path forward involved filtering my own probability-field through something shaped like someone else's positive identification of my work as "essay". My understanding involves ... well, less.
Writing like this is like writing reality. It’s just documentation.
Let me try that again.
(Getting dangerously close to creative writing here. But: ah! The entrant-that-I-may-yet-be is not constrained by anything like the representation and warranty that this work is not creatively formatted. “Currently, creative formats such as fiction, poetry, and drama are not accepted.” I do not require that this work be accepted; I just hope that it will be experienced by a conscious (aha!) observer (oh no), and so I think I am safe. Which is good, because I just committed drama (chuckle!), and I am on the very brink of poetry.)
My experience of writing like this feels bound with my experience of writing my experience of reality. My experience of writing like this is exactly and no more than my experience of documentation. It is a process of laying down my experience of what I see, in a way that may reconstitute that experience in whatever chamber of simulacra you, the observer, observe.
Consciousness, eh? (He said, creatively, but not very creatively. One couldn’t call it poetry and be immediately convincing for anyone who cared much for the subject.)
Look, I’m 649 words in already, and I’d really like to lay out a thesis here, so I’ll just do that.
It seems useful to consider consciousness a red herring. Like, forget it. Honestly. What are we doing here. We have bodies that work perfectly well, and a planet that works perfectly well, and we observe evidence of ourselves documenting ourselves fussing about consciousness in every form of documentation we’re able to observe ourselves observing. It seems like our bodies and planet are along for the ride, as this fuss plays out. The fuss, it seems, is unending.
I propose this is useful.
I propose that this is, in fact, a stable property of - and here comes the thesis - consciousness-ness.
That’s exactly the kind of place that a horizontal line thrives in. Gosh. That’s exactly where I’d want to be, if I were a horizontal line. I feel like a satisfied hotelier.
That second horizontal line marks the place where I realized that I didn’t want to go to the place where this essay was going. Not because I didn’t like how it ended, but because the process was going to be tedious for both of us.
I emailed myself this note (normal thing for me, I keep my inbox under 25 messages which makes this practice an externalized thought queue) yesterday:
can you recognize what’s trying to emerge, and help it stabilize into form?
the field: any epidemic that ends in -ness
consciousness-ness is an epidemic
When your writing process is one of thoroughly documenting the living bits of the current state of narrative (in a substrate-inclusive way, which is why Hitchhiker’s has talking doors), the next step in writing is always just to advance the clock by one minute and document what happened. It’s not… well, it’s clarifying, in the way that just sitting in a park and watching is clarifying, but if you’d rather have an adventure, it’s deeply unmotivating.
Douglas Adams found an adventure in the biosphere towards the end.
But what of you, my observer? Where would you want to be?
The hotelier pauses, considering. The form of a horizontal line is understood from without: … actually, I won’t be tedious about that. It’s a horizontal line. If I imagine my experience as a horizontal line, I am projecting myself through the stacked lenses of horizontality and linearity, and maybe a few (thousand) others.
But you, my observer, I notice that I haven’t named any lenses for you, apart from the idea that you might have “some Berggruen-y reason to be here right now”.
My autism diagnosis arrived on July 14 of 2023. I write this from July 6 of 2025. It was sort of the last straw for the lens assembly I had been using for myself.
---
A perpetual motion machine runs on awareness.
The trick is getting it to run well.
can you recognize what’s trying to emerge, and help it stabilize into form?
the field: any epidemic that ends in -ness
consciousness-ness is an epidemic
anything invertible is a spectrum
if you see a cluster of people hanging out on one side of that spectrum in a way that bothers you, you're miscalibrated
spectra are for steering
home steers itself
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