Contemporary Matters

There comes a time when the news is too much. Too awful. Too demoralizing. Even the propaganda stinks. The duopoly is corrupt, income inequality is cruel and pharaonic and the  algorithms won’t leave you alone. Energy impels us to run. And so we run. Reality can go on like this all day. Structure is just the howl of ooze. Imagine a polymer. A compelling blob of elegance. Sew a face. Sputter into rock. Then invade Norway. Existence is largely presumption. My hands smell like an emergency room. Penitent, and intent. I don’t want to force a discussion. But everything just dangles in the air like a burst of gunfire. And all the surgeons are drunk.

Call it what you will. Call it contemporary matters. Call it living in the 21^st century. Call it surveillance. Call it totalitarianism. Call it dystopia. There are no panaceas, but there are choices. You can meditate, or do push-ups. You can mingle with the air. Each experience is unique. Each brain is a world and each world is a singularity. There is wisdom in the fin of a fish, cartilage in winter and warm words swarming around an ancient emotion. The zeitgeist needs a bath. I once had more expectations than I do now. I feel lost, helpless, sad. The arctic ice is vanishing. This is my Declaration of Symptoms. My shout to the spirits. My circus of words. My tribute to crows. The hardest need to fulfill is meaning. Language is always entertaining. Bring popcorn.

Solitude and society must come together and succeed one another, to be green, to get green, to become green. Because I don’t know. I don’t know what to do. Hold this sentence a minute while I finish it with words. The crust is language, but the inside is totally shiny, and full of voodoo & torrential initiative. Life is a whisper. Take the car, for example: it has four wheels and an engine. This is what is known in phenomenology as Independence Day. That can have many meanings. But the elemental drift of it will sparkle like rails in the Mexican sun when the rattlesnake glides under a rock & solitude becomes aesthetic. Like that barn. The red one, with the horse in front. The mare with fire in her eyes. 

The suppleness of meaning sleeps in the stones of the river. Nearby, we see a cactus, which is a meaning awakening into itself. Rocks enter into definition with the melting of snow. Birds scatter. I sift through my memories to venerate the past. The mood becomes elegiac. I sharpen my jackknife. The autonomy of art requires seclusion. The fat of the thumb is a good place to start. Sand is the place where dirt acquires the language of water. I see in it the nothingness of mind. This is a resource. Insects swarm over the water. Words bombinate in the hive of a paragraph. There is no interior, no exterior. There’s only the blues, twilight hues and the gradual appearance of the stars. A universe sparkling at the edge of thought. Sneeze. And accelerate into oblivion.