One night during my exhibition at Unruly Collective, we decided to trip. Daniel was with me—a guy living in the space at the time. The trip began. We sat among the paintings, talking, looking at the work. I stopped in front of one of my pieces and began to study it in that state.

The painting stopped being just a painting. Its surface shifted into something else—a complex panel, like an interface attempting contact. It shimmered with neon, metal, phosphorescence. The abstract forms inside it moved, assembled into structures, dissolved, and formed again. It felt like a screen meant for communication. The painting was trying to speak. The intensity was overwhelming.

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After a while, we went down to the basement. About ten works from my Ancient Cave Art series were there—a body of work that grew out of studying prehistoric petroglyphs and cave paintings from different parts of the world. The moment we entered, something changed. The space was quiet. The symbols on the canvases no longer felt like images. They resembled real cave walls—dimensional, protruding, almost physical.

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Daniel stood there for a long time, staring. Then he turned to me and said,
“Listen… you keep painting these cave drawings. Guess who I am.”

I looked at him.

He smiled.
“I am the cave man.”

I laughed, but he remained serious.

“You were the one painting them on the cave walls. You just don’t remember.”

I asked why he thought that. He said he had about three percent Neanderthal DNA—he had taken one of those genealogy tests.

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We went outside into the backyard, stood near the house, smoking. At some point I used the word alien. Daniel shook his head.

“I don’t like that word. No one is foreign. Everyone belongs.”

I thought for a moment and replied,
“I don’t like the word hallucination. It cancels human experience. I prefer vision.”

Sometimes a single word closes an entire world. By calling something a hallucination, a person marks it as unreal. But sometimes what is called a hallucination is simply an experience for which language has not yet found a precise name.

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After a while, he said he wanted to climb a tree and sit there. He was a cave man—no further explanation was needed. He disappeared into the night.

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I went back inside and began walking through the rooms, looking at my work. Everything appeared different, deeper, as if it were being revealed for the first time and had always been known at once.

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I walked up the stairs and sat on a  clothing chest I had never sat on before. It stood in the corridor between the room and the staircase.

That was where it happened.

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Everything that needed to be remembered returned. Not as a thought, not as a conclusion—recognition. As if the knowledge had always been present, hidden for a time, and now revealed again.

The body was still there, clearly felt. At the same time, it was no longer the only form of presence. It became impossible to hold onto.

I was no longer there in the usual sense.

The gaze expanded. Nothing felt separate. Everything belonged to one continuous whole.

Then it unfolded.

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I was the one painting on cave walls, and the stone those images were made upon. I was the charcoal in the hand and the movement of that hand. I was the animal and the hunter, the blade and the body. I gave birth to children and died in their arms. I cultivated the land and destroyed the harvest. I built ancient cities and conquered them. I raised walls and burned them down. I created inventions and destroyed them. I discovered new continents and was already there. I went into battle, drove the blade into the body and was the blade, stood on both sides of the trench. I burned inside the tank and looked through the scope. I caused suffering and experienced it, continuing while believing in separation. I created and destroyed, began and ended. I made works of art and loved people and life with a love that had no boundary.

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From the beginning of civilization to its end, all of it unfolded through this.

Not through a personality. Not through a name. Through that which moves across all forms, taking shape again and again.

One infinite “I” that forgets.

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I am everything. I have always been everything and will be everything—not through this body, but through everything that exists. Even here, on this chest, the movement continues.

I remember again and again through countless lives, forms, identities. One of them awakens, as if emerging from a dream of separation. The music playing in that moment was written by me, for me.

 

The chest I was sitting on was made by me, for me, out of the same substance. And this book was written by me, for me—not as a personality, but as that which moves through everything and can take any form.