Channel

When you need a dedicated band of communication with the world, you start thinking of a channel.

A channel is remote access to a spirit without any body. A spirit without a body is not one which had a body at a time and then the body disappeared and it got stuck without one. Rather, a spirit without a body is one which has never had a body. It has always been in free-float, always been able to access the world with the privileges of being dealt with freely.

You can only deal with such a spirit on its own terms. You cannot impose culture, morality or any other systemic frame on the spirit. It will just shrug off the impositions and go on the same as before. And because it is difficult to deal with anyone or anything outside the conventions of our civilisational conventions, we prefer to deal with spirits through channels.

Just like a television station remotes the tasks of production and consumption of content, a spirit splits the processes of the production of experience and basking in its radiation.

This universe exists because it achieved a constant mass. Out of all the other universes that could have existed, only this one does because it is stable. Chaos operates essentially in a fixed frame. And because the universe needs to have constant mass, there are many voices, many narrative-strands that exist without bodies and operate through channels. Because spirits forgo a valid existence and a life (though weighed down by its mortality), we have managed to contribute to the universe-wide phenomenon of constancy of mass.

Spirits are our saviours.

Channels are our saviours.

How do channels operate? How do they get to do what they do? How are they chosen and how do they negotiate a border with the spirits they allow access to their body? Borders demarcate with time and content-based tags, who gets to speak when. These borders are not respected of course, but the lattice of the points demarcating a border help perform a distance even if there is none.

An infected body, that is a body that has entered into a channeling agreement with a spirit, has no control. In the middle of any conversation, in the middle of any thought, if the spirit has something to say it will just say it. Not bound by tact, meaning or continuity can be very liberating.

After a point, infected bodies are able to talk to themselves and treat conversations and sometimes sociality itself as a reflective surface. Conversations are furthered by people who allow you to project anything on them and then conversing with that projection.

Agreeing to be a channel is firm commitment, it is difficult to get out of it after a point. From being an individual in isolation, you become a shared instrument, a shared room. It becomes at the same time the easiest way to stop identifying too much with your room as a personal space and more as a shared room with traveling tenants.