Both consciousness and the unconscious ‘collect’. It is as if some eons-old mind (in a time when it could do those things) cast the future on its cold eye, saw Plato’s cave, and became our brains. Where it will look with us—through “cavernous Earth / Of labyrinthine intricacy, twenty-seven folds of opakeness”—is what you and I are doing this instant. Still, beneath the frontal lobes, at the stem of consciousness, is that reptilian speechless gaze. Man is amphibian to oblivion.
— from Beam 12, Ark (The Foundations)