The Truth Is Engineered

The truth is engineered. We know that. Every day we see Eloi shepherded by algorithms. You could call it propaganda. Psychology in action. But please. Don’t tell me I’m skin diving. I know what I’m doing. I’m good at dismantling bombs. But brainwashing eludes me. I have to watch my ears. There has been talk of other worlds. And since thought is a mode of transport, I demand a soliloquy for the growl of abstraction. The architecture of improbability makes the jaw slide forward. It’s not a look people trust. It’s a bit aggressive, for one thing. You have to be careful with language these days. People are being arrested for things they say. Stress reduction techniques like erotica, lemon meringue, or spending time in nirvana can help. Poetry is a burst of cerebral fireworks. Use whatever you have at hand. Fingers, thumbs, tapioca. The entire works of Aristotle. It's not easy being a tree. It takes thousands of mouths to nibble the sun. You can hear it in the leaves, when the wind blows: the clatter of similarities tethered to a semantic crack. It takes a lot of synonyms to simulate a jungle. A little Apollinaire, and the jingle of ink.

You can laugh about jingling an improbability to a physics class, but will the equations lift the adherent husk of reality from a semantic gall? Anything to do with the sea confers a veneer of luscious anticipation. If I see a yo-yo, I try to protect the spin with my vocabulary. Much of my learning has been the result of error. Massive fuck-ups. Faux pas, Freudian slips, badly timed jokes and a salty disposition. Cioran is a bitter fruit, but with just enough sweetness to make it alluring. Sometimes a solid trumps fluidity. This is a wonderful thing. For example, belugas and dolphins love ice cubes. They can’t drink seawater, and fish contain little water. Remember your Pataphysics. Indentations are the propellers of rumination. Words that no longer refer to the familiar become the stirrups of phantom horses. All it takes is a bronze pronoun pressed into the hand of chaos, and within minutes a towering contraption of words clanks across the floor spitting assumptions at the environment. This is where anticipation comes in, and mirrors and invocations. Forget coupons. Forget bitcoin. All anyone needs is a pretext, and a quantum dime.

The bedroom light painted a pleasant story. An imperfectly made bed, an elegant old bowl and pitcher from the 19^th century, a bureau, some lamps, a Bluetooth radio and Van Gogh’s washerwomen at work under a drawbridge. The wealth underneath the bed is a mental construct designed to listen to my skin whenever I flop around in bed. I fear this may get a little personal, but isn’t it worth it, occasionally, to fondle a wild elevation with the gloves of sleep? At night, the buffalo drift over the hills like clouds of shaggy fur. Pollock’s use of black anchors the splatter of white and red to a punctual riot in green. I stiffen every time I see it. The grouse is prominent when the sweat convenes in eagles. Art is what made me so strange in the 60s. Art, and Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac, which I read one summer afternoon in San José, California, 1968, lying on a mattress on the floor. The sensations of that moment are still with me, but mainly the euphoria of mountain exuberance, and the spontaneous vigor of the prose. I love whatever is manufactured out of thin air - rock fire rucksack and wood, the ecstasy of the stars - and falling into a trance, pumping shadows out of the underworld and nailing them to the wall.