Research Journal of Margot Takada
February 2
Today, I added a second cube to Hinton’s higher-dimensional perceptual exercises, and let me tell you, the difficulty increases exponentially. Holding one rotating cube in my mind is more or less manageable at this point; holding two borders on bonkers.
But when it works—when my mind can maintain awareness of both cubes’ rotation—something strange happens. It’s like Hinton said: the cubes feel less like objects and more like coordinates in a field. It’s like a cube isn’t a thing, so much as a specific configuration of relationships.
Which made me think of tarot.
If a cube is less about faces and vertices just sitting there being a cube, and instead, it’s a relational “slice” of the field of reality, this is akin to a tarot card being more than an image printed on card stock.
A tarot card isn’t meaningful in isolation. Meaning arises from the card’s relationship to so many things—for instance, the card’s symbols would be gibberish were it not for an entire web of cultural associations. Even on a prosaic level, what would a picture of a throne mean if thrones didn’t exist in real life?
Not to mention the various meanings the card activates as my psyche—conscious and unconscious—interacts with it. A card’s meaning arises from its position in a complex field of information.
I don’t know what to do with this insight yet, but I can feel something brewing in the back alleys of my brain.
February 9
Welp, tonight was the weirdest night of my life, and I’ve experienced some pretty strange shit in my 28 years on this planet.
I was at the Barton College library, back in the stacks by the theoretical physics section. It was about an hour before closing, and it was just me and the mice in the walls. Lately I’ve been carrying my tarot cards everywhere, hoping inspiration will strike, and I decided to do Hinton’s rotating cube exercise before pulling a card, just for fun.
Woah, nelly.
I shuffled the deck, and I’m not 100% sure that something weird wasn’t already happening at that point. I wasn’t expecting it, so for all I know the web of light was already there, and it just didn’t register.
I’m already getting ahead of myself.
Right. So I shuffled and drew a card: the Magician. Whether or not the “light threads” were already there, all I know is when I laid the card flat on the desk, I could see them: faint, spiderweb tracings of some sort of semi-translucent…liquid? I’m not sure. I dragged my finger through them and they sort of wobbled. More like rippled before they reformed.
There’s definitely a pattern, but it’s not entirely symmetrical like a fishing net, or anything immediately discernible like a spider’s web. But I stared at it for—well, nearly an hour, because the front desk person scared the crap out of me when they came through, flipping off lights. If they were seeing the web of light, too, they’d make a killing at poker—their expression didn’t change one iota, and I was too freaked to ask them.
I slid the card back in the box, and the web faded away.
The second I got home, I tried again. Nothing happened.
My first thought was it had something to do with Barton College. No matter how normie the brochures try to paint that place, it’s straight up Bizarro World. But then I remembered Hinton. I pulled out my colored cubes and worked through the exercise—and then I pulled a card.
The Magician. Again.
And wouldn’t you know, Hinton and all his higher dimensional strangeness delivered. The web was back, and this time, I could discern a clearer pattern. The lines of light were thicker in some areas, almost like individual threads had been braided together, making the web denser in certain areas.
Did it mean something? Was it somehow related to the card I’d drawn? I tried again, this time pulling the Lovers, and sure enough, a different section of the web “densified.” Talk about trippy.
But that’s nothing compared to what happened next.
See you soon.
