Third Factor

## Artistic Description of the Third Factor

i have once again incidentally stumbled across one of those no-clip zones that happen to catch me by surprise every now and then, they take me while i am strolling around and throw me into the psychological abyss known as blackspace.

once again i can see that same old door in my mind beckoning me forward, blurry and distorted, impossible to describe in words yet it is still unarguably there, and tinged with some imperceptible alien hue that screams subliminal messages into my mind of dread and futility, as if a glaring ultraviolet light had been turning around and just so happened to shine directly at your eyes for a split second before leaving you in the darkness again.

it is the frantic passage of time that anchors us to the waking world. exiting this passage of time forces us to stare into the bare, screaming truth beyond the screen, lathered with that subliminal hue which appears black in eyesight but screams brighter than any color in mindsight.

many find the screaming beckoning call of the third factor to be unbearable, and immediately retreat into the greasy, sedative, sickeningly sweet trance of that is the real world and its passage of real time. the third factor screams loud to penetrate the grease because it has always been there, behind your back, but no one listens, and those who do listen always eventually give up and turn back.

the color black is unique in that it does not result from the combined presence of multiple colors, but from the absence of light altogether, as does the third factor’s imperceptible hue, which appears in the absence of meaning.

the futility of these transient visits with the third factor leads me to think that the illusion that is “meaning” is nothing but some arbitrary set of conditions that motivates these little beings to pursue some arbitrary path through this “real world” which is really just an arbitrary mass of objects and concepts that happen to be here in this specific time and be doing these specific things. there is no meaning. things move just because they happen to be moving, people follow a life goal just because they happened to get an arbitrary surge of neurotransmitters when doing a certain activity. what you’re doing while immersed in this greasy time-induced dream may seem like finding “meaning”, but once you step outside the flow of time into the imperceptible void of the third factor and look from the outside in, it becomes clear that all your efforts to pursue meaning were really just a little being moving around inside this mass of grease, and if you wiped the grease off the table and stomped on the little being, nothing would’ve changed anyway.

is there really no such imperceptible hue, and it really is just black? maybe this is just an artful representation of the basic concept of being a sore loser, an abnormal reaction to being reminded that the little drawings that you made as a child don’t have any practical use in the real world. who knows. not even time can tell. and so all that is left for me to do is to retreat from this gash in the grease, stop staring into the black void and give my eyes a break, and return to the submerged humdrum of everyday life. we will meet again, third factor.