The spine of the museum consists of a row of (extremely impressive) cave reconstructions, sampled from among the 492 decorated caves at the site. (A two-hour tour of the site takes in perhaps 10.)

The following images are of reconstructions, not originals. The photographic quality is especially dire, given the unusual lighting conditions and cramped space. What I’m posting here is what I’ve got. (Click on images to expand.)

Cave 003:

Cave 217 (one of the most renowned caves, whose images — disputedly — convey scenes and stories from the Lotus Sutra):

Cave 275:

Cave 419:

… so, 24-hours later, there’s not much in the way of gripping travel news to report. We’re heading to the Mogao Caves tomorrow, which should be worth talking about. Up to now it’s been desert and donkey-meat and the general weirdness of the Chinese West, but with a mind oozing uselessly like gritty mud, it doesn’t add up to anything remotely profound. Perhaps later.

The thing I want to introduce tentatively here, because it has to be re-introduced more thoroughly quite soon, is hyperstition, and in particular; hyperstitional method. I’m getting the strong sense that there are things it simply won’t be possible to do otherwise. (I’ll try to explain.)

There are a variety of plausible ways to explain the basic ‘idea’ of hyperstition. The most pertinent of these, here, right now, is that it is an attempt to systematize the philosophical usage of fiction. By framing a philosophical discussion within fiction, rather than within an assumed consensual understanding, it is advanced as a perturbation of disbelief, rather than a modification of belief. How to proceed philosophically from the artificial background assumption that everything is a lie? That’s the hyperstitional question (whose Pyrrhonian and Gnostic resonances are immediately evident).

Practically speaking — which it always should be — the fork taken is to formulate thoughts within the ‘voice’ of a synthetic (fictional) subject instead of propounding them in the name of a privately and socially accredited one.  The preliminary hypothesis: greater experimental diversity of thinking is to be expected when it is conducted in the mode of ‘what might be thought’ — comparatively free of ego-commitment and first-order social games. (Orwellian ‘thought-stop’ is the confirmation of this hypothesis from the other side.)

Beginning from a fictional self has a Buddhist slant, to be discussed at some later point. Being in Dunhuang is what makes it worth mentioning at all.

While all of this is relevant to the problem under development as ‘sub-cognitive fragments’ (i.e. how to think), the return to the question of hyperstitional method, to me, has mostly come in the other direction. My philosophical retardation is infuriating, but my literary blockage is utterly intolerable. There is nothing of which I am more sure than that abstract literature, or metaphysical horror fiction radically pursued, is the undertaking which claims me, but there is equally nothing that calls forth more titanic forces of procrastination. The obstruction, quite obviously, is ‘me’ — and hyperstition suggests a solution to that, or at least, a method directed decisively towards a solution. Find the way to speak on behalf of that thing which can say what you cannot (or something like that).

What hyperstition has yet to fully do (I still believe), is to close the loop, subsuming itself definitively into fiction. It has to become a story, rather than a theory of stories, before it can be said to have attained consistency.