I am a witness for a self-aware world, a world that's not just chunks of matter, but an organism that dances matter into an entity that can know. It can know truth and fiction and the truth of fiction and the fiction of truth. It turns order into disorder, but with knowledge salad on the side. I'm a compartmentalized agent of a super-organism that is beyond my capacity to understand or speculate the purpose of. I am a lonely witness.
servo-whine striding, yet silent in stillness, mechanical creatures roam the plains: pack hunting with skill but without purpose. it's the only thing they know.
Looking out the car's rear window, I saw a strange and alien sky, and wondered where I was, and whether I was still somewhere that I would - elsewise - recognize, and - if not - whether I could get back, and whether I would want to go back. I saw a strange and alien sky, and did not look to see the ground.
the acrid smell of burnt gun-smoke dulls in the mind, but not in the air the brain tires of smelling it, and so it fades, but it has nowhere to go -- not in this violent place of dead & heavy air
Emerson said, "Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string." REM said, "What's the frequency, Kenneth?" Will Kenneth's waves propagate down the line? If so, would they add to, or cancel out, the waves of others? That depends on the frequency, Kenneth! I guess that's why Michael Stipe took such an impassioned interest in the question. Is it even a good thing if one's waves add to those of another? Might it not become disharmonious, like a runaway washing machine, shaking violently, parts flying through the air in smooth ballistic arcs only to bounce and clatter in dull discordance. Does one's iron string even need to come into contact with Kenneth's? Might not the wave energy passing through the air stir up a resonance in one's bones? Questions, such as these, haunt me -- not to mention: Who, exactly, is Kenneth?
People sometimes tell me they have trouble understanding poetry. That's because they consume it as they would a banana, starting at one end and chomping down to the other. Poetry has to be consumed like corn on the cob. One should start at one end and work down to the other, but then one has to go back to the beginning -- change one's angle of perspective -- and - again - go from one end to the other. I can't emphasize this point about changing one's angle of perspective enough. There is a difference: with corn on the cob, one rotates the corn, but, with poetry, one has to rotate something within the reader. Otherwise, one is just chomping into an empty rut - a track devoid of sustenance. Then, one has to repeat the process until every last morsel has been consumed. That's how one ingests poetry.
Human nature is a raging river which a few shitty sandbags of common sense will not detour. Some people stand on the bank and shout at the river. I will admit, I've done the same. But those words neither soak in nor bounce off that raging river -- they're made silent, dying in air. Some people try to steer the river by splashing at the lapping waters near its edge, But none of them is Moses, not one can dam a river by force of will. And - even if one could -- eventually, that person would have to let go, leaving a backed up and angry river to rage onward.
One burning moment -- taffy-stretched to the edge of reason: stretched so broadly that one can't fathom escape - like Monkey on the Buddha's palm One burning idea -- cloned, and then carved to make infinite variants, and painted infinite shades: the dark tone of each darker than the last Burning ideas populating the vast expanse of a burning moment, until the urge to escape insists that one carve a hatch into living tissue But what is it that does the stretching of the burning moment & the cloning of the burning idea? Can't that stretcher and cloner be wound back, scaling all to proper proportions? And can't it be done before that terminal instant is carved in jagged stone?
I A young man set his ex-fiancé on fire. (Or, so the story goes. [He claims she self-immolated.]) She succumbed to third-degree burns... but not right away. She lived long enough to know the agony of third-degree burns. They'd met in college, both studying to be engineers -- I mention that because at the heart of the issue was caste. It seems absurd enough to murder a fiancé over some imaginary mark of superiority, but even more so when one considers that they would have had the same qualification -- possibly similar jobs -- but for the boy's bigoted parents, who insisted he call off the engagement, and the boy, himself, who took things that extra murderous mile. So, it wasn't even about who the couple were, it was about what their grandfathers did for a living. What a world. II The war is still burning. Among the latest questions are: Will Belarus be forced to join in the fighting? & If so, will having another set of soldiers who are completely uninterested in the war -- other than as a trial to be survived, that is -- help or hurt Putin's position? A related question is whether Putin would rather watch the world burn than to lose face? What a world. III The Pandemic said, "Psyche!" This means America will roll the odometer on COVID deaths. We had things almost back to normal, and then the virus caught its breath, got it's footing,... whatever viruses do. What a world. *** I think I'll check the news, again, maybe sometime next year.
The Midnight Circus was not as it seemed. It was bright colors: motion-blurred. It was the tinny monotony of music box-style tinkling tunes & organ tones. One could even make out the scent of fried foods and cotton candy, among the many other [uncircus-like] odors. But there was also the story a mind wrote to dance sensory facts into sensory fictions; that was where the falsity lie. If one opened one's eyes, letting them focus: there'd be sparking wires, & flames licking ever closer. The shrill organ tones would become screams. The summer night's humid heat would become third degree burns. The circus smells would become dust and death and acrid burnt combustibles. So, he didn't open his eyes to war or his impending demise, but let his mind march into that big musty, canvas tent, surrendering to its irreality.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 