crawling from the cave, like Plato's untethered shadow man a portal to perfection, as perfect as anyplace can be: meaning, it has depth & credibility the day is cloudy, and yet it's blinding, blinding to eyes attuned to the light of dancing orange flames, flames seen secondhand -- bounced off a wall, a dark, dank wall what amazing sights must there be - out there don't disappoint me now
What happens in the strange, nearsighted isolation of the forest? -- sounds dulled by thick, soft moss and masked by burbling water, and insect buzz, and bird song What happens to the rude mechanicals who venture too deep into those soft but terminal lands? -- where the last stand of life plays out
Myths cheapen love with potions & pointy passion projectiles, pansies squeezed over the eyes of cold souls [when paired with a proper incantation] can make love from naught or turn love on its head, but that which can be turned on its head is not love -- & never was love.
Hangman... Axeman... Guillotine art-eest... Stool-kicker... Lever-yanker... Elongator of necks... His motto: "Making them deader than your average beheader." Sharpening his blade, Split hair-testing Precise as the Taoist butcher -- blade between bone, no nicks allowed Killer of killers, an audience thriller Step right up... Any last words? Masked & shirtless + pudgy & sweaty He's the hangman, the axeman, a killer of killers.
Anarchy evokes chicken body bumper cars. Constant movement that is not only undirected, but also: fast, violent, random, chaotic, and doomed to be short-lived. Anarchy seems like space in which many participants would soon be on their backs -- legs churning in spastic bursts, ineffectually. Like toppled robots or cockroaches that waded through gassy trenches. Limbs moving, as if confident that they can right the ship and recover the upright. But everyone watching knows they can't -- that the laws of physics won't support it, that it's just wasted motion. They might as well be in night terrors, for being able to move ineffectually seems only moderately less terrifying than not being able to move at all -- when faced with a situation from which one wants badly to get away. But, maybe, I've got it all wrong. Maybe that's not Anarchy at all.
What's a Self? ...a soul? ...a set of neuronal activity? ...an illusion? ...a ghost in a machine? ...the body, the brain, & the whole enchilada? Memories can be false, and some always are. Thoughts can be illusory, and some always are. Feelings can be flighty & fickle, and some always are. If one loses a little toe, is one a diminished self, or still whole? What about if one loses a pinky toe-sized mass of brain? So many possibilities: ...death, ...changed personality, ...emotionlessness, ...speech pathologies, ...blindness, ...memory loss, ...coma, ...no discernable change, and so on. What's a Self? ...a dog? ...an embryo? ...an AI? ...an extraterrestrial? What is a self? Am I a self?
in the chiaroscuro world of the night market, fruity colors blare in orange, green, & yellow between angular shadows the sun is down; the city is alive, and soon the night market will be lively
coffee flecks swirl in a steaming cup cyclonic do-si-dos, swinging and folding, merging into clusters between the cyclones there are highspeed byways cutting across the surface a jitter of the table seems to stop the dance, but then it resumes entropy falls to eventually follow its imperative -- entropy rising: using order to turn all that energy into a lukewarm cup of joe this same fluid clockwork played out in primordial soup to begin the dance of life
A ship crosses the ocean, in the darkness: darkness, black & endless no moon, no stars, just clouds -- thick & low clouds that can't be seen The ship has lights, but those lights know an event horizon Lights sometime glint against the waves, those roiling & undulating waves, and the lights bounce off the ship's hull But no one can see them, because if anyone could see them, the seers would be seen-- unless theirs is a ghost ship, piloted by literal ghosts, or some other agent of observation Maybe there is fog -- not enveloping the ship, (such mist would be felt on the skin of those on deck) but, rather, a fog between where the ship is, and where is should be For it is surely off course, listlessly drifting, all hope arrayed against edges: edges of ice & edges of the world Not that the world is flat, but, perhaps, it's not fully sculpted: maybe nothing lies outside the range of the seen: outside the bounds of experience It sounds crazy, but all kinds of crazy form in a mind submerged in darkness
Everything is dull before the world changes. People live their rituals, complying with habits. But the world will change, change from one day to the next, and not the subtle, unceasing change -- perpetual and ubiquitous -- that has always been. No. This will be an eight megaton shift into the new, and nothing will ever be as it's always been. Never again. It will happen without warning or precursor -- without a hint that the world is about to be revealed, to be discovered to be something wholly different than anyone ever imagined. Welcome to the new now [prematurely speaking.]
Tiger Riding for Beginners 