patterns:  people are water.  yes, that is literally true, but he meant it more, of course, a metaphor.  there are channels carved out, controlling flow, and people fill them, fall in predetermined ways.  the idea of people at all is out of only convenience, really they are patterns played out, ghosts of information possessing flesh, incarnations of other lives likely to survive because they have a catchy tune, self-promotion, promises of preservation, replication, encoded in the illusion of an individual.  hosts for innumerable viruses of culture, speech, action, motive.  not people: prototypes.  conductors, bits of maps larger than themselves, letters of words written on a scale escaping them.  the world, all of it, is patterns battling for predominance.  look out the window, find it in the lines of buildings, angles, the disease of different architectures.  media methods of infection, every conversation a contamination of tiny cultures trying to survive by sounding reasonable, desirable.  he looked out the window, felt this too was not his, but still stonger, as patterns of thought might go, because it (like before had commonly been presumed of “people”) had a knowledge of itself.