Tuesday, April 25, 2017

black and white / full spectrum - the sonnet


I did not publish my last essay “easy,” or its sonnet “hard,” because my macbook crashed to the floor in the dead of night, never to boot to the light of day again. I’d owned the beast for 7 years across 4 continents which only describes the amount of love, misery, fury and joy it carried with it into the aether. Hopefully we are too early in the Artificial Intelligence design cycle for my computer companion to have been too contaminated, with the only waveforms emanating from it’s off-or-on blackhole status reflecting my humanity more than the twisted code of today´s masters of the universe. may they . r . i . p .

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I’ve had much time to think about this essay, for I was already gun shy and self-conscious about expressing the written word prior to my computer’s demise, nor was it just the written word for which my creative being seems to have been stymied. I´d like to draw up a list of all the whys and wherefores, but they’d all be exterior - ghosts of resentment, fear, lack of _____ (fill in the blank). The longer i waited, the larger and more fearsome the demons grew - sort of; otherwise, you wouldn’t be reading this. Eventually the utility of seeing my own thinking in such a way as to expose my flaws to myself became too tempting. I’d rather laugh at you, but that would be cruel and likely not as funny. I’m beginning to suspect the root of my creative ebb has been from taking it “all” too seriously, as though somehow my tired old mac crashed to the floor for some more sinister reason than my own lack of mindfullness. But this is where it gets really dicey, even if there was a demonic purpose in the cosmos responsible for ending the life of my innocent if somewhat trusted ally - so fucking what. If we are in the midst of a holy epoch, like extinction by our own hands, or the just result of damnation by a divine entity so stupid it would condemn us for the blasphemers in our midst - that sort of monumental conceit is laughable.

Computers in fact are little more than a gazillion off and on switches trained to hum on command, sort of like the current ruling class appointee - all together now, “of thee i sing.” Nor am i immune to the siren of media; having weened myself from the phone, for about a split second after the red circle with a slash through it on my screen condemned me to what the technician would later confirm, i considered life offline. Talk about your two-edged sword, we as a species are crashing into the point-of-no-return like it was the Superbowl with our team behind by 3 and 30 seconds on the clock, but all i could come up with in my existential moment was “how’m i gonna write without text edit”¿ Yes, it was worth it to stay online, even though i am in pain here and now sifting through my ignorance for some thread of logic that would encourage an unknown stranger, or cadre of strangers to train the digital lens back up our economic food chain; identify the villains responsible for war and sentence them like Prometheus to have their livers consumed into eternity: sidebar - so you can get a feel for how far off course we are, Prometheus - a Titan, was condemned because he tricked Zeus into portioning the gizzards of livestock to the gods and leaving the meat to nourish humanity - not one of the schmos riding in limousines calling themselves Titans today gives a rat`s ass if you live or die, much less if your food is nutritious. 

Leonard Cohen described writing as what’s left after you delete the slogans, but in the same interview he also, g_d rest his soul, talked about the tyranny of posture by saying there’s a good thing to say about everything, if you’re on the right side.” It is a conundrum to me that those wreaking the most havoc are in the greatest need of kindness. War will not rescue us from ourselves - that is fact; the same sort of fact that you will die alone, even if you are surrounded by 7 billion other human beings dying that same instant. So what of kindness, how is it the wisest of our kind for as long as we have recorded our experience have said virtually the same thing Mr. Cohen framed so eloquently - “love is the only engine of survival”¿ How have we allowed ourselves to be so easily bamboozled into this corner of terror in a world full of magnificent grandeur¿ What have we accomplished by quarreling over scraps believing anyone can be improved by what they own¿ I don’t know; i wished i did, but like wife # one was fond of saying, “wish in one hand, shit in the other; see which get’s fuller faster.” I learned a lot from her - mostly the difference between enough and too much, that and kindness is always possible even if you have to walk away to make it happen.

Some things one cannot walk away from, one’s self, for example. Take the arrogant fools building computer profiles of person`s of interest, which in today’s political climate is everybody and nobody. The persons, LLCs or as i like to think of them, faceless cowards pulling on the levers of power determine who is scrutinized and to what degree. But what can they ever learn, and this is very important, to what end¿ I write with great difficulty hoping my ignorance will bubble to the surface while i attempt to have fun with words. For me, learning who the fuck i am seems to be the only practical endeavor, for if i’m unable to recognize myself how would i ever be able to see another clearly? Social media provides the collusion delusion of complicity against power by encouraging the assumption that, 1) what you post is recognizable, 2) what someone else posts resembles anything. Near as i can tell, it’s all emotional pornography. One of my defects is caring what someone else thinks, so now that our keystrokes have been monetized for the benefit of the ruling class, it is logical to believe what one types has value to somebody. As a writer this becomes a thorny issue for me. If the world of ideas is my sanctuary, how do i distinguish a thought of my own from a prompt; or whether that prompt is arising from a sincere effort to help me on my bumbling human way, or an intrusion from some psy-ops handler from a “contagion” experiment gone horribly wrong¿

Then again as Larry the door maker might say, t’was ever thus. It’s frustrating to think how little we’ve changed, yet how easily we are being changed. I made a promise to my father to never stop writing; he was a loving man - shortcomings and all. I’ll not lie and say that is why you are reading this, rather i’d share his sense of fun, which at it’s core is the most worthwhile aspect of the creative life. My good fortune has been in defining my own fun - like plumbing the depths of one’s own misery in public with little hope of finding anymore common ground than one might find parking cars. There is pain, the pain i create for myself and the pain depicted in our media for the sole purpose of inflaming passions. I can do nothing about the latter, but denounce it for its cowardice and its incompetence. That doesn’t make my self-inflicted suffering vanish, but it does help with the delusion that one can do nothing to help. Suffering is an oddly binary experience, or as Bill the house builder was fond of commenting “you want that pain to go away, slam your hand in a door and you’ll forget all about it.” There’s a sad element of truth to that joke - it is the temptation to confront greater pain that makes you laugh through your tears, but more importantly the inescapable fact there is always a choice. Not the lesser of two-evils fallacy used to bouy the latest ruling class democratic charade, but the kind of choice one makes to see light in heart of darkness.


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full spectrum - the sonnet

“The electro magnetic spectrum is the irreducible constituent of all physical reality.” - Albert Einstein

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i memorized this as a man-child;
googol says it is not a real quote.
could be - hippy days were pretty wild -
lots of nonsense, like looking for a groat.

people in different places and times
see different things - each no less true.
some threads will run all the way through - like rhymes
uh-huh / uh-uh may’ve saved a caveman crew¿

from what, i can’t say - you know i don’t lie;
wouldn’t if i could - best left to experts.
you know the ones - “i know holy - here’s why,”
though their truths often come mostly in spurts.

now’s a good time to pull out all the stops
end greed, hate, delusion - ruling class props

jts 042517
http://stoneartist.com

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved