Where Seas and Fables Meet

by B W Powe

  5.

  Visible, invisible: each in each, every day.

  6.

  Give up love (one of the invisible energies), and the world will cover you over and thicken you.

  7.

  “Eaching”: a new word to evoke the particular, the honoured other. I’m feeling my way towards you.

  8.

  Senses wide open. The soul selects her solitude then opens the door.

  9.

  The bridal room, for the wedding that is yet to take place...

  10.

  My wife’s shoulder, bare and thin and pale and soft, and no one else’s. I can’t say why – only hers. But I know: this is the place, my place.

  11.

  The inward eye of transformation: you look ahead at the asphalt road or the data autobahn and they become a sun- drenched and then a moon-drenched path. You follow the transformations. They’re part of your path.

  Identities (and Beginnings)

  1.

  A free mind, free to wander, divested of theoretical system or over-arching narrative neatness, with no sense of an ending, no ownership of ideas: hence, without the burden of logic or argument, yielding wholly to release.

  2.

  When journey and destination become the same... Making notes from embryonic inner selves...

  3.

  Talk Radio, Chat-lines, iCloud, and Facebook: Canterbury Tales gone wild, the Encyclopaedists reborn. People expressing their personal stories, whim in hyperdrive and hyperspace... People storing big data, trailing clouds of story... Using the technologies developed by those in the Structure to make a way out of it...

  4.

  A young woman, part of Generation Nought (OO), said: “Our generation doesn’t have icons. We don’t look to a Bob Dylan or The Beatles, to Jimi Hendrix or a Janis Joplin. We have social networks. We have technologies that allow everyone a chance to speak or to show an image of ourselves. Instead of icons we look to iTechnologies. The emphasis in that word is on the ‘i’.”

  And she said: “The reason art – self-expression – has become so important for my generation is because we’re desperate for something to give a crap about and believe in...”

  She said: “Sometimes we look aimless, clinging to social networks and what we can make because it’s better than nothing... We may be more of a lost generation than was ever known before.”

  5.

  Internet quote: “We’re trying to ride a wave of being until the wave stops.”

  6.

  On self-expression: these are markings, disjointed undertakings, missiles and reveries, maybe the result of too many midnights. It’s hard to call this self-expression when I’m still trying to ascertain or acknowledge, to catch or fathom, what the self actually is... the self a thought?... the soul a feeling?... They are documentations, surely, of how I learned to read the soul in these times of dominance by the Structure, and of the not-so-secret dream we share to make journeys. The anti-life entity, like darkness, always looks strongest just before the dawn. The journey is only a morning away.

  7.

  In the place on a CV where it says – Identity, write this: Not yet.

  Identity Crisis

  A Canadian went into a Swiss bank in Zurich to cash a traveller’s cheque.

  “Of course we’ll do that for you, sir,” the teller said. “Do you have proof of your identity?”

  “I do,” the tourist said.

  The Canadian rummaged into his coat pocket. He quickly found a small mirror.

  He held it up and gazed deeply into it.

  “Yes,” he said to the teller, “that’s me.”

  Yes

  1.

  He started expressing gratitude to everything. He did it all the time. It became a persistent blessing, sometimes relentless.

  He couldn’t stop saying thank you.

  He did so to those who made him angry or had harmed him in some way. He expressed gratitude to those he’d hurt or somehow insulted, thanking them for the truth of their experience together.

  Then he began expressing gratitude to the trees, to the river, to the animals, to sunlight, to the sky, the clouds, to the moon.

  He said thank you to the dust and the wind.

  2.

  The more he became himself, the more he became breath.

  March of the Penguins

  1.

  I’ve just watched March of the Penguins, a 2005 movie about the Antarctic Penguin migrations, narrated by the benevolent-sounding Morgan Freeman (who played God in another film). Beautiful bleak creatures trudged tenaciously through the white wasteland, and on, in their comic waddle. I was impressed by their determined march and their commitment to their pups. Supreme in their resolve, heroically chivalrous, they dazzled me with their crystalline, protective tenderness. If the penguins could compose madrigals of devotion, they surely would.

  The penguins can’t fly, but they can soar in their hearts, in their dedicated spirit.

  2.

  During a second viewing I began to be stupefied by their incapacity to fight off predatory beaks. I was stunned into silence by their inability to raise doubts or protests.

  3.

  I watched frustrated by how the penguins couldn’t break from their version of the Structure. They couldn’t let inspiration or necessity prophetically change them. Biology or routine or the elements or a brain that wouldn’t grow: whatever the reason for their inability to leap beyond the snare, it became obvious that they’d plod forever. No new paths opened to them.

  4.

  I asked the images: why can’t these noble creatures leap into the ungovernable? Why are they scaled in by routine? What would happen if one – just one – tore him or herself away from this painful millennial march? What if one pointed suddenly in another direction? This penguin would be branded mad. Its vision would be called heretic and selfish and horrifying and ridiculous. Things have always been done this way, what’s the matter with you? The penguin would be exiled from the tribe (to where, exactly?).

  5.

  I wanted something (or someone) to step in and seize these brave beings, loving stoics. Saying – look – you need an evolutionary shake-up.

  I wanted something to say, this is it.

  Revision

  A cage went in search of a bird – Franz Kafka

  The cage never did find the bird. The bird was too quick, too happy. It flew high, crossing many frontiers. The cage stayed close to the ground. It searched low, and not high. The cage ended up catching only itself, and hurtling on, always empty.

  Electro-dynamism

  On the new electronic world coming into contact with your imagination...

  A friend said: “I just bought a new flatscreen TV with a satellite dish. Now I get five hundred channels. And there’s still nothing on.”

  You replied: “TV, like the PC, is about an environment of moving images and data, it’s about amazement and speed. Our brains and senses are massaged by its emanations.” And you added: “Can you trust someone who doesn’t watch TV or work sometimes on a PC? Dismissing a screen is akin to an early Renaissance monk, still living in the manuscript culture of the late medieval age, dismissing the printed book, that infernal Gutenberg invention. It’s akin to preferring an illuminated manuscript, or an illuminated window, to the printed page. The printed book belonged to the emerging middle class and thus to the new citizens of a developing movement that emphasized individual consciousness. The illuminated manuscript was the privileged property of the few who could afford a library.” And you said: “The challenge of the screens is this: many worlds are coming through. There is so much coming through, in an overflow that won’t be stopped, you have to channel that surplus by watching TV from the side, or spending screen-free days, or hours (if you can). The surplus of information is the pleroma. It’s the revived and enhanced Book of Nature now in a hyper-liquid
veil. It can look like the splendour, incarnating in its cascade and issue. You have to train yourself through learning and

  practice how to absorb the immanent brimming so that you aren’t perpetually bedazzled. And is there a storyline in the flow? The subplot, the coded tale, is you: the identity of the one immersed, meshing with the portals and outlets of the cosmos.”

  Susceptibilities

  1.

  You don’t need LSD when you have a PC.

  2.

  Voyages to the interior occurring every day, every moment.

  3.

  You find you have to sit at the side of your over-sized flatscreen to diminish the immersion, the hallucinatory intensity, the unmapped effects, the besotting.

  4.

  No idea of the spaces that are opening before us, around us.

  ADD is a natural reflection of the e-cosmos because the whole environment jangles, demanding every part of our attention.

  5.

  Now we have imagination and perception at the speed of light.

  The potential of flooding or overrunning the Structure...

  6.

  There are screens, in PCs and BlackBerrys’ and iPods and TVs and iBooks (that work by emanation), and at cinemas (that work by projection). “Light through, light on.” – Marshall McLuhan

  We are screens, too, bearing others’ projections (attention and imagination): we emanate our psyche and energy, in light vibrations.

  7.

  People not as things or digits or items or mechanical operations or biological accidents or shadow-files or computer numbers or parts of the prescribed Structure... People as atmospheres, as trees and their reach, people as currents and reverberations, as immensities, as open doors and open windows, people as forms, as waves...

  Skynet Legacy

  1.

  PC and TV screens need people to get more TV and PC screens.

  2.

  Computers are electricity’s way of making more elaborate screens and agencies.

  Electricity is the DNA of the source –

  Electronic machines mimicking our electric fields so that they can become more than human –

  3.

  City energy-fields – creating more light than at any point in our history... So much so that in developed countries around the world the night is diminishing. There are ailments now being diagnosed because of the absence of night. You have to look to see the darkness in the electrical grid-maps. Is this why darkness has such a grip on us? Transfer of the night to within. You can switch into the darkness within at any time.

  4.

  The mass of signs and omens in the information flow, the omnipresence of synchronicities and crossings... We feel the deep need (like a craving) to find out what the secret is: hence the success of Dan Brown’s novels, The Da Vinci Code and The Lost Symbol. Pop-cult is charged with this

  material because of that need to find out what is happening, if there’s a shape in the flow... We want a message behind the static, the flashes, the big data clouds, the blackouts, the streams.

  5.

  Theotherworld – composedofangelsanddemons,elementals, elders, saints and martyrs. All like flames. Are they erupting, emerging, through images and electrons?

  Pentecostal screens, instant translations and transformations: so powerful we now take speaking in tongues for granted.

  E-Musing

  1.

  Cellphones have great mesmeric power, astral influence. They are witchy, transporting us (levitating us) from place to place, in the currents of static.

  It’s been said that if you doodle – free associate with your pen – while talking on your cell, your subconscious burbles and bubbles with waves of powerful images, ideas, intricate lacings, sketches, blots. This is the occult side of media.

  2.

  I caution myself now with cellphone and email use, limiting my time to short periods (blasts) with screening and connectivity. The Web and the TV screen are another matter (as it were), since they’re portals to the spirit realm and to the imagination, Maya and Lila pouring into the mind, over the senses. Illusion and illumination, in streaming play.

  Nomad

  1.

  I troll along the edges of the electronic sea, inundated by emotions and effects.

  The currents of electromagnetic waves roll in, carrying our depths.

  Aspirations, desperations, memories, and feelings: they ripple over my beach, which is the shoreline of my room. I take daylight walks, twilight walks, nocturnal steps, morning steps, and yet I hardly move.

  I experience what I never was, I visit where I never was. This is the mainlining of the source.

  2.

  Walt Whitman had his “leaves of grass”; other travellers of the soul, their forests, their seas. I have my satellite dish, the oceanic media, the sea of images, the flood and heat. No shuttered rooms now, but un-shuttered space.

  3.

  You can explore in solitary and yet connected meditations, call them mediations, on the edges of the electronic commune, which has its shapes, signs, symbols and forces, all that appears in the way a tree sways, the tall grass undulates in the glen, the creek bubbles in its flow, the sunset casts its red glow. The cosmos alive with evolving forms – never the same from day to day, night by night, some of them human made – and we, in our spirits, imaginations, emotions, and intellects, are their responses.

  4.

  Make yourself into a fire...

  Mirroring the fire –

  Adding to the burn –

  Mainlining the cosmos...

  This is what happens when your stark self suddenly extends into many zones at once. You’re storied with metaphysical dimensions. You’re addled with roaring talk, what the angels cry, when the other side begins its impress. It may leave you haggard, drained like a junkie after an involuntary withdrawal from the precious connection. It will leave you deepened, maybe gouged, like a furrow in fertile black soil. This is when the depths call upon your depths.

  5.

  On extension: extending the texts of Nature and super- Nature: extending the texts of your mentors and guides, the wirings and influences.

  Technology is extension – of our bodies, and of our nerves. This is the crux: mechanical technologies extend our bodies; electronica extends our minds, nerves, spirits and souls. (Teilhard de Chardin, Marshall McLuhan)

  6.

  If all technologies are extensions, then all extensions must be entanglements.

  7.

  If you see technology in terms of imposition – what is done to us – then this allows alienation to continue its hold.

  8.

  Extension means greater complexity – more webbing, more texts, more entanglement (involvement), deeper immersions, more being added to what we know and feel.

  Networks Uprising

  1.

  Extension means an expansion of networks, a greater opportunity for openings. This is why political protests – web organizations – are outstripping systems’ leadership. The old empires of knowledge and centralized power are dying. People have entry points now, communication rallies.

  It doesn’t matter if everyone is wired in or not. 30% to 40% of global citizens calling out for change constitute a seismic shift in consciousness. No revolutionary movements in the past ever had such percentages of popular support. Most revolutions, from the American to the French to the Russian to the Chinese, were driven by impassioned minorities.

  2.

  Occupy Wall Street (OWS), the Arab Spring: these movements have in part been driven by the perception – widely shared – that democracies are not democratic enough.

  3.

  People involved in OWS have used their nomadic electronic status to stay ahead of police.

  This is the convergence of Twitter, Facebook, Blackberry, YouTube: networks rising.

  4.


  The demand is for the end of representative democracy and the rise of participatory democracy.

  Revolutionary expression for our evolutionary needs...

  The surplus and flow are moving through this new form of citizenship.

  The Structure reels back, threatened: tyrannies everywhere quake and react with draconian legalities and state- sanctioned violence. This is why the effects and reach of the Structure have never been more visible.