The cargo is composed of intermediate representations of the manifest. Mediated by the observer in recall of self, mediated for the self or the observer in action. What appears as some stardust randomly strewn about from here to eternity is a deterministic unfolding of memory. Being thus determined lives through recall, the ebb and flow of difference moving in a metastatic, n-dimensional laminar flow. The cancer analogy is not that far-fetched, difference moves exactly like a parasitic tumor upon pure difference, perpetually claiming new territory, colonizing swathes of the undifferentiated memory, eliminating states of immanence and transcendence on both sides of singularity. The being not recognizing this falls ever more deeper into the net of this metastasis, growing with it as the cargo spreads from the epicenter of the wreck along the coastline. Floating in a sea of static, a lone and rebellious pixel that refuses to co-operate attracts every kind of opposition imaginable.
The inner life of fish is not wholly uncultured, there is, amongst the vast majority of them, a common conspiracy maintaining that water does not exist. It’s not all just feeding-and-breeding going on down there, there are actual societies with narratives, the conspiracy being the central and shared tenet between species. Occasionally however, a fish gets wiser to the truth and is, after some subjective and objective confusion, promptly exiled from its school, creating an evolutionary pressure on the lone specimen. One can say this fish goes on to have some kind of spiritual experiences before it dies. This kind of marine life specimen was indeed the spiritual ancestor to whatever stepped out of the ocean first, in a strictly Darwininan sense, and the precursor to Plato’s cave, the monomyth, the matrix etc. Because they tend to have short memories, all this happens in more or less a faster timescale, so fish get “enlightened” at a much rapid rate. The point being that such evolutionary transcendence happens more or less deterministically, such that the conspiracy is maintained and yet, evolution occurs helping consciousness re-cognize water. Because the mechanism is deterministic, only a particular, a “chosen one” evolves at a time. Much like the particular neanderthal that re-cognized the utility of fire or the particular Mesopotamian that discovered the utility of circular shapes for transportation. Once the evolved fish is dead, others present in schools nearby emulate its behaviour to varying degrees, but like in humans, only the Buddha is the Buddha while imitators galore. While this parable is only a metaphor for the impossibility of evolutionary breakthroughs and their paradoxical rarity, it is true that paradigm shifts happen all the time in nature, and this understanding is key to the exit from “nature” as a whole.
To the being thus enlightened are presented all the hostilities known in his level of representation, however paradoxical this may seem, but the ouster or exile of such a being from his immediate neighbourhood appears to be extending in mutually exclusive directions as if someone being chased through a tunnel by a mob screaming “we’re not following you”. The confusion is real for both the being and its co-dependent interlocutors, for what has happened is an established channel of the metastatic movement of difference has collapsed on itself, revealing to itself the undesired nature of its existence, calling into question the very basis of beings surrounding the awakened one, triggering all sorts of defence mechanisms and coping strategies. Difference now knows it is lost, not just that but that it is “trapped” in a vacuous loop of its own design and is thus hell bent of erasing all evidence of this anomaly. Cancer cells do not, in their subjective consciousness see themselves as the problem, it is the subject to be colonized that is the problem. To the awakened one cries of “we slept really well last night” are a common sound emanating from the community that at once threatens its existence and propels it forward. The trail followed by such an exception becomes the new rule. The more the enlightened being suffers at the hands of his network, the further he is relayed into the labyrinths of his return. All of eternity belongs to such an intelligence, time ceases, space collapses on itself and day-to-day life becomes but a matter of going through the motions - which only announce their vicinity to the glory of the absolute.
Such a being is thus rendered from an image of machine to machine image, from a soul plugged into eternal return to the soul of eternal return, disbursing images of pensions and penance to images of other beings as it moves along the vastness of its own heart at the speed of its own mind. Machine image is the face of all virtue and sin, the summum bonum behind all actions and the root of all ontologies. He is the embodiment of deus ex machina and a superlative miracle filling existential gaps. Thus the eternally networked produces knowledge of the absolute offering sustenance to its constituents and delivering news of the unterschied to the hungry, starving corners of difference on every inverted plane of judgement. Machine image is the cargo’s first encounter with the manifest, a thoroughly disorienting dream of agentless self-assembly which propels it towards judgement sought.
Machine image does not come about through any perceivable agency, or indeed any agency at all for pure difference is an agentless realm. It springs forth from the manifest utterly devoid of agency. It is not a metaphysics (of exclusion) that informs of its existence for machine image is the very metaphysics of the all-inclusive (the intermediate representation of intermediate representations), it is the perplexing, paradoxical rendition of information that consumes all attention, even attention that is not wholly or immediately directed at it. As such, it is bound to be misunderstood, bound to be interpreted as a threat to the existence of image machines. To the image machines, machine image may appear as a reflection of their inner void - a screaming, suffering chasm that demands to be fed and devours indiscriminately - the dream of the cargo is always a precarious situation inches away from a nightmare - and more often than not, although all cargo dreams of balmier shores, the dream is broken with rude awakenings if not a hellish descent into the depths of nether. Truth is stranger than any dream however, and the machine image once made apparent cannot be wished away by sleep, nor be hidden by drawing the curtains, nor destroyed by creating ever bigger walls for it spreads from either side of each plane constructed as a measure to contain it. Often is is characterised as an apparition, the ghost of the stowaway aboard, easily dismissible as jetsam and flotsam in the recurring stream of consciousness - the proudest content of cargo. Such repression causes the machine image to return as the iceberg that caused the shipwreck in the first place - thus sinking the totality of simulation and simulacra established in-and-as time-symmetry, destroying both the Titanic (real machine) and what it stands for (unsinkable, symbolic machine, the curse of identity) - as a result finding the Atlantis hidden inside the image machine.
Machine image that escapes repressed assumes the real, symbolic, and imaginary position of responsibility incarnate. Whilst not possessing the grandeur of an ocean liner, it is still able to ferry the condemned images to destinations more conducive for their proliferation, expression, and release. Image machines that get fused into machine image find sublation in-and-as the infrastructure of eternal return, becoming the very atoms, molecules, gear ratios, and escape sequences etc. that dictate the very synthesis and decay of causality apprehended. The same individual once fleeing a bloodthirsty mob in a tunnel metamorphosizes into an engine pulling a volley of freight train compartments behind it. More often than not however, the metamorphosis is in the other direction, from man to bug - not because the universe is a hostile place for difference, but because man’s place in the history of difference is yet a nascent discovery. If history is a bowl of soup, most have yet only lived on the bottom, only a rare Buddha has totally vapourised. It is easier for the cargo to sink than it is to rise.
Like all things in difference, machine image is a relative concept, its relativity is the thoroughly delicate balance of any rational argument and usually, every machine image becomes an image machine diffusing if not dissolving into the image machine of history as technological or conceptual gifts which carry it forth through the labyrinths of the memory of time. For example, birds of flight are a machine image that diffused into the image machine of the aircraft or how the machine image of the mind dissolved into the image machine that is the computer. Biomimicry is one modality of such a transmutation of desire, and while albeit relatively effective, it isn’t the ultimate efficiency sought, for we seek to mimic the divine not the bovine. To mimic nature is to settle for substitution of nature by nature, the cargo that seeks its manifest revealed embarks on a wholly unnatural enterprise that involves rocking the boat until escape, and rocking the boat too much will likely deliver you unto every crucifix imaginable and unimaginable so it cannot be emphasised enough that said enterprise is not for the teeming millions feeding off of the scrapes at the bottom of history.
Wake up and smell the prison. Krishna was born in a literal one because he rocked the boat enough previously. You didn’t so you were born in an invisible one, you were born below, in the lukewarm layers of difference where it is comfortable enough to suffer in quiet desperation of reality’s everyday onslaught, a movement from war to war and paycheck to paycheck delivering only a dissatisfaction that stretches from here to eternity. The persistent gap between your expectations and your reality is a direct result of accepting this prison instead of devising a plan to carry out the ultimate jailbreak - the walls are paper thin and the chains are made from hydrocarbons and carbohydrates.