At the Museum Jorn in Silkeborg, 2026, April 10-12, Patrick presented the inaugural address at a Symposium on triolectics and absurdity. If behaviour in an existential crisis could be framed as a surreal game of imagination could it evolve as a piece of theatre in the genre of LitRPG? If so, we have an absurd trilogue between three fictional characters guided by the echoes of a Greek Chorus. Philosophically, Patrick’s play argued that existential crises generate a third space where imagination, topology, and consciousness interact. The mind becomes a geometric field; conscience becomes a proper subset that can ‘hack the brain from within’. The triolectic interplay is thus a model of how individuals navigate uncertainty: not by optimisation, but by recursive self-reflection.
Working with the proposition that homo sapiens is not equipped for an existential crisis for the simple reason that we cannot know if we will be able to reach the end, we ask: what about homo ludens? Whether it was the recent pandemic or a local catastrophe, arguably, an existential crisis spontaneously becomes a no-exit endgame. Amid all the uncertainty at best everyone is equally at risk of death. One simply has to wait. But in the process of waiting indefinitely, a personal immersion in a parallel universe may offer an individual a safe space, an umbrella shading the reality of a ‘hard’s rain a-gonna fall’. This is Godot’s Cave. It’s surreal. But there could be an alternative reality offering an escape route and a pathway towards an endgame. So, is it possible that homo ludens may be equipped, if they ‘feel the strange’ by converting the crisis into a game of imagination?
What if this were to actually happen in the mind of an individual? Wouldn’t it be impossibly absurd to simultaneously know both the real behaviour and the imagined behaviour of such an individual at that moment in time, T? This lapsing into non-being sΓ↑@>αη1φ∑ is more than ‘just a game, just pretending’, it is an unexpressed code of survivalist behaviour grounded in Nature, unscripted at the frontier of reality and imagination. A fictional character dubbed My|self©, retreats into an imaginary Godot’s Cave waiting for an endgame. It is a game that plays and replays itself in non-Archimedean time, in a succession of moments in time requiring My|self to play in a parallel universe with a player unknown. In the mental cinema that runs through My|self’s mind in this surreal game, conscience acting as the fictional-to-real character F2R© player only ‘magnifies the disturbing thoughts best kept at the mind’s edge’ – that in the brain’s payoff factory if there are payoffs p > p* in game, sΓ↑@>αη1φ∑ and only p* obtains. Absurd.
In this mental space, two imaginary figures emerge: Macalla (the echo) and F2R: together they form a triolectic structure: not a dialectic of two forces, but a shifting triangle of self, reflection, and counter self. This is explicitly linked to Asger Jorn’s triolectics and his situlogical, palimpsest like method of reworking images. The precarity of indefinitely waiting, infinitely for an endgame could in all probability anesthetise the neurons in My|self’s brain, facilitating quantum effects to operate in the brain such that a number p* appears momentarily inside a superset of neurons, a number that ‘thieved the soul’ of My|self at a moment in time, T. To solve and exfiltrate p* the character F2R must isolate a moment of conscious experience of waiting and immanent cooperation. In order to understand number isolation in the context of surreality is to acknowledge the geometric topology of one’s brain. A geometric topology that provides not just instruments of phantasy but also a topology for the imagination. Is this absurd? My|self believes that the endgame will never be reached or in any case, even if it is, My|self will never know. A manuscript is near ready for a publisher. Drawing on philosophy, game theory, neuroscience, absurdist literature, and the psychology of waiting, the manuscript will try to argue that an existential crisis, like the recent pandemic, can reveal an imaginary game sΓ↑@>αη1φ∑ of paiting in which individuals became fantastical players -sometimes rational, sometimes irrational – negotiating obedience, survival, and the haunting possibility of being the only loser in a no-exit endgame. In the interim, take your seats, enjoy the play.