Monday, January 13, 2020

Diary: From the Cage



a Monologue is a Diary entry (a.k.a. Blog)
2020 MMXX
How to Improve the World (While it gets worse)

"There is poetry, as soon as we realize that we possess nothing." -John Cage

The beat goes on…the line

MM.
The best we can do, the MOST we can believe (we have ALL the evidence needed to conclude) that LOVE is the rarest element, Love as in War, fairness, not human justice, becomes a spectator sport whereby we are relegated to the sidelines, like marginalia not a minority, meaning there was never enough space in the thick of things for everything or everybody, as in Justified, paragraph or body, filling the white spaces which had been left intentionally blank. The difference between font and handwriting is that none remember how it all ended with a period or what comes last and none are able to decipher the cursive which was once composed as a hybrid theory of print and point like code, one is true-the typeset, the other opinion, fluid connecting gradients and a blending of tone.

Dial tone-there is no OPERATOR-nobody was there and nobody noticed there was no busy signal we were just too busy to wonder if the other is ready to receive us, never mind, the tone we needed to call out on an open line became a recording device for the wireless messages, the reading of thoughts and sending of signals seamlessly untethered

To the wall, booth, outlet, and yet it feels like an inlet, a rush of information and forceful alternating currents suck us in like a Black hole which you know holds no history of itself, resembling pupils opening wide for the shallow blue light emitted by this pale blue dot, not pixel or vector or ‘X’, it is only area, conjecture, look what could be here, look who we could be, we have friends and likes and like friends distributed opinions and impressions liberally causing the conservative to recoil, everyone’s hates hippies, the lazy, the wrong people chosen for the right-choice is no longer as cheap as freel will. 
We pulled a Trump card before losing the whole pot to the house. The tarot doesn't even know how to draw out the future. Like passport stamps and books of stamps, badges and business cards, libraries of matches and books of matches, cases of paper and cases of beer, bic lighters and bic pens, sharpies that have been banned and dried up and crayons that have become candy-Apples, a barrel of-
Monkeys escape only to entertain us in their anthropomorphic endearment, flattery, flinging poop and wide gum grins, picking lice and having a bad day-they look just like you, or the other way, you are what you consume.
We all died of consumption. 
Save the Planet, Save your Soul, Save the Bees, Save our Ships, Save the Day, nobody saves what they don’t have to use right now, which is called need, like common sense which has been added to the national deficit so nobody notices how scarce figures may be…
The race has been lost, we need not run in place, inside, from ourselves, from them, from the return of the RED SCARE and Pennywise and the Joker and the scabs have re-opened from constant abrasion, personal space resembles dark matter, heavy and plastic, full of preservatives to linger longer and avoid the living while surviving longer and if only Twinkies were clonable we might become sweeter on the inside or carcinogenic, the big C as terminal wars will never be over, people just go home, or return to where they came from, or where they remember being last since homes had been foreclosed upon like plywood windows, a cautionary deterrence for ill winds. Not here, not today, No vacancy, No welcome mats, no hospitality.

XX.
There was something not clear through the screen, the snow that didn’t white out the sound we waited for the attachment that was not attached and fell into the ether without a paperclip symbol, the signal seeking itself, eaves-dropping, line sharing, filming, peaking and ebbing of influences, like grand idea and super-ego, there was representation where like-ness was not like this
Be original. Artists never needed money. Artists don’t eat food. Artists require shelter for storage, like a flash drive, and Artists were thirsty-but-the-water-was-tainted-so alternatives were offered, red pill, blue pill, white pill for all ailments and enabling the growth of the HMO membership, enlistment was for hacking not sawing, nobody saw a thing but it was recorded by a lamp-post that turns on when it begins to feel dark, like religion.
Who told you to believe that? You believed them, in them. You believed what they said which was what someone they believed told them and it was not about what you thought, it was about what they thought and not about listening.

We are never lost. Now, we will always find an alternate route. We follow directions dutifully as if all  we needed to know was left or right or ETA or ERA, but rights on reds are the angles efficiency of FedEx-EXCEPT packages still get lost and messages are misunderstood...
MMXX.
In this century we call this ‘in the Ether’, knowing quantum physics has already accounted for this element or is working on the forensic accounting of what fell off the back of the truck, walked out the back door, knocked off the flat earth, this Ether has holes and gravity waves in-between zeroes and ones that hit us making ripples in our reality of Newtonian necessities such as what goes up must fall, as if Karma carried weight like Atlas, finally shrugging it off-no patience would provide clarity-wait-we never asked where the stone fell in, we only assumed someone, somewhere understands and can demonstrate simplest like color coded radar which was always accurate based on humidity and pressure changes, such is life. This is why flat tires are heavy and feel squared up against right angles and left blinkers like arrows one way-archery is a forgotten skill like Latin, camping, Thank you notes, Customer Service, and stick shifts.

Love. Love was always Love. Technology would never cure the struggle. Curing requires exposure to the elements out of our control. Love we scream in song, in prayer, in death and by birth, for a car, for a cat, for that thing you thought would make you whole, a hole in the wallet, no worries, we carry no cash, peddling and bagging are no longer employment, do it yourself, find the change, put your purchases in your deep pouches and follow your dreams.
Who remembers their dreams when we must get going before we know where we have been and how to start making a difference between yesterday and now-making love never seemed so necessary for our future starting tomorrow,
It will be clear, sunny and 2020.
We will never know what to wear for this occasion.
Just so you know, I can only read the first row.
I need glasses. Don’t pour here.
X marks the spot that needs a kiss. Saving our selfies, we needed faces we could touch and roll cages not airbags. Driving is safer. North and South are not so fixed as indefinitely Up and Down or 0 and 1. 
Where to start over?

Finally, the cat ran out of the box marked with a capital ‘S’. It was blind and afraid, but it “lived” nine lives this one time, Lost and Found traded places. Many a man contemplates becoming a Martian, meanwhile, it all occurs as novel, again, nobody listened to the ending.
"We need not destroy the past, it is gone." -John Cage

Inspired by "Diary: How to Improve the World..."by John Cage


Painting by Harry Wilson Watrous, 'The Composers' c. 1910 in Public Domain.