Embroidered Realities and Digital Reefs
Some things defy neat classification. Is
’s piece for us today a short story, a prose poem, a stream of conscious experiment? Of course it is all of these things and more.Life- and art- wouldn’t be much fun is everything fit perfectly into pre-determined little boxes and pigeon holes now would it? Discovering new approaches and viewpoints and ways of doing things is part of the fun if you ask me.
And on the subject of creativity and ways of doing things I highly suggest you pair today’s piece with Harley’s outstanding manifesto. I will be plugging it heavily over the coming days and weeks because it deserves to be not only read but also widely acted upon and lived. Read it and you will see why I feel this way.
Enjoy.
TJB.
In the attic of somnambulant evenings, swept away by self-sacrifice and paperback bruising, a woman traverses a metaphorical landscape– fashioned by myth and novocaine– it is a closed universe undergoing metaphysical re-construction- as the temple of art loses its signal to the popular arcade of the akashic and fills its blank spaces with memory cassettes and rotten philosophies. The ugly cities within the artery of the inner world reproduce unconscious debaucheries from the jukebox of the conscience, spitting out aural hallucinations and milk of angelic visions. The jester of junkie street eats opium and reveals prejudiced prophecies– uttering shrieks of love-sighs for the drug of poetry. Employed by the priests of imagination are the ill-famed smoking Cherubium– junkyard weaned on monastic delusions of trend-fed creativity– scrolling illusory screens for the next attention fix of virtuosity– as they bestow miniature eternities of digital salvation– available with ads only. Soul salesmen profit off of the promise of individualism in a world ripe with groupthink– worshiping at the subconscious cathedral of conformity. The wandering woman finds herself in the embroidery of a decrepit and dying system– and wishes to invent a new kind of salvation. A global looking glass into the backstage of the soul– the one not shrouded by ego. Volumes of esoteric scripts instruct her on pruning it– the budding dream against all man made counterfeit heavens. And soiled with genius– she at once invokes the sacred, embezzling poetries thru each open orifice. Her mind unlocks old photographs of fate and she reads into each destiny with a meticulous depth, the kind that predates a poet’s suicide. Streaming secret notebooks of dead knowledge, she visits The Gas Station of Energy Transfer, where you hook yourself up to an infinity-machine and fuel yourself with whatever chosen emotion you wish to invoke. She decides on eating liquid inspiration, and they inject her with it, right into the bloodstream. She feeds herself daily on pocket muse, the kind you get in containers from Persona Grocery Stores. In bed she consumes visions, when she wakes she sees the sun and eats it, projecting the offspring of photosynthesis onto whatever mulberry parchment she can manifest. She taps into miniature buttons of artistic fauna, watering the precocious plants until they seed ideas for her revolutionary parables. But underneath the river of her coursing skin, she has yet to realize that she is just the same as all other consumerists. She was initiated into the cycle of indulgence young, and thus her psyche is dependent on outside sources for motivation. Her inner atmosphere is entirely conditioned by man-made machinery, and as much as she wishes to abstain from the world she was ushered into, she cannot quite be born again– not when toying with the tools that make it so easy to think. And in the end she reaches the empty streets of epiphany– realizing that to be self-created she must refrain from modern technological advancements and raw dog the innards of reality clean of her digital crutches. Without the machines, she is a void. But she is an honest void. So she must move to nature– not the pocket-world of imagined realities, but the world outside, where titan kewpies breed and lush faunas congregate and speak evening-song hieroglyphics. Out in the land of experience, she can meet reality and beg it for mercy, for all that time spent injecting herself with manufactured dopamine in an artificial, digital prison. Someday she might excavate a glimmer of original thought, so long as she creates more than she consumes- out in the real world of humanity's most ignorant ruins.