Welcome to The Grey Space Poetry Collection, focusing on the themes discussed at grey-space.org and beyond, including: brains, reality, life, love, and, especially, death.
This is the work of Randall C. O’Reilly, mostly from his early adulthood, wrestling with the impossible fact of mortality and a growing understanding of the human brain: an organ composed of neurons, bathed in sea water, unambiguously organized in the same way as every other mammal on the planet. What the actual fuck is going on here, seriously? This is not OK. And yet, in the finest grey-space tradition, it is actually perfect, because: (a) it is reality, and (b) a great motivator to do lots of stuff you might not otherwise do (like write intimate, crazy poetry and share it with “perfect” strangers).
This content should probably carry a TRIGGER WARNING: this work follows the The Straight and Wide Path, serving as a kind of exposure therapy to deal with my fears. I feel compelled to add that I feel like I’m generally a very happy, well-adjusted person, despite what you might think from these poems :) Some notes:
- • A Parody of Winds is a relatively safe place to start.
- • The Origin of Species is one of my favorite psychedelic ones.
- • We are all Communists wrestles with life as a parallel distributed network of neurons (also The Simultaneity of Rain).
- • Aliens – are you with me?
If you want to read about the philosophy behind these musings, see the main grey-space.org website. For more than you’d ever want to know about the brain, see: compcogneuro.org.
The Grey Space is the place where ideas live. It is grey because the ultimate truths of the universe are contractory, neither black nor white but rather a beautiful grey space full of conflict and contradiction, that nevertheless admits to a perfectly self-consistent overall level of understanding. There is nothing mysterious about this grey space, and yet it holds all of the mysteries of the universe within it. This grey space lives within the grey matter of my brain, and your brain, and all other such systems capable of understanding these ideas.