I got a speeding ticket, can you imagine? I am far too slow.
Do not go gentle into that good night
Dylan Thomas, 1914 - 1953
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
There is courage in age, since there is so little left to
lose. And yet those things which would marshal our forces debilitate, sometimes
starting with the memories, sometimes with the muscle, sometimes both together.
Muscle memory is how we once learned to read and write, and now it has gone all
digital. To the fingertips, as though they were the only thing which feels.
Eyeballs the only parts which touch. Body is irrelevant if not for style and
fashion, exposure, beware the bozone layer.
My memory and belonging(s) are distributed geographically,
and blessed by grants of internal combustion I can still reassemble many of
them, so long as I have a (willing) daughter along for the narrative ride. In
the landscape I discover things which had and would otherwise disappear from my
mind. The artifacts I’d constructed had a certain durability, as did
architectural features of that landscape which would last at least a human
span, stubborn.
Not in China, where political, social and architectural
landscapes are designed for 40 year spans and memory is willfully erased, it
was that painful or booby-trapped with foul infrastructure along a
standards-free bumpy adaptation to global modernism. Tear it down and build
anew before the internals announce their rebellion.
The modern always means that space where intention prevails,
and beneath which slack lies buried. Where can Chinese memory persist in this
so-called State of Amnesia, or is that our state? Our American means are still
that much more powerful. Attention is pulled to screens and cowling covers the
pounding recirculated explosive fossil-fueled engines of destruction. Only
history retains projectile unrestrained exit velocity.
Now that children can deploy fissile-fueled energy
generators, hadn’t we better re-examine the underpinnings? In China it does
still seem more tragic that the written language did not deploy a mere 26
characters and a few more for the ASCIIng. Even to read, the motor memory was a
necessary internalization as lightning fast an understanding of its construction
could decipher running script and on the fly energize those recesses of mental
processing. The qi would run the gamut of the body and out the brush tip,
flowing onto a page, leaving traces not only for the mind, and it never did
matter if they were written on sand, so long as they could be remembered,
prompted, by some geographically relevant tracing, even if only in the mind.
Those things are gone for good, as soon will I be and not
only because I share little intentionality with the crowd of us. These
technologies we deploy so proud and freely are now become quite merely choice
deferral engines, for their promise of no harm at some indistinct point in some
future we can no longer even imagine without them. These technologies. And
choice deferred is choice rendered up to those who would aggregate our labor
inputs for their own well-intentioned enrichment.
It was never enough that the moral regulators keep our
enthusiasms at bay. Preventing too much predation in the name of evermore Me.
It is more important to feel powerless, to be made to feel, to be a consumer of
feeling. Our memories and feelings are all digitized to some cloud to which we
must be redirected, approvingly by boilerplate clicks, and owned by the
Corporation to which by MicroSerf-like servitude our wages pledge allegiance
and we do battle against our fellows in the its Name. We have so little choice
and we need to buy new screening devices.
I would like you to cheer me on by Facebook imagery, showing
me at my best while stumbling about the globes I circle. I am in love without
objection, nor focal point for eyes or fingerings up yours.
And yet I rock. Cycle. Without intention without direction
without destination, perhaps that frustrated along the way there were never
enough breaks. Never enough slack line balance lost among the wired men.
But
There is no structure to intention. It rather comes upon a
person all external according to accidents and happenings few of which we might
control. And so the question remains that when you are the lucky one who can
take the inputs of so many assembled others and deploy them on whose behalf why
do you still want them all for yourself alone? And what, please god, would it
take to entertain a different take, if not for the eternity into which you will
not travel so vociferously.
You cannot trust that structure which fed you the goods,
there is not enough bedrock scientific establishment of its reality and it was
never luck alone so you might plant your flag on it, to claim it on the behalf
of those who also crave the hilltops and buy tickets to watch you there.
Advertisements of empire. Colonial predations upon your person, but nevermind.
That’s all conspiracy.
And so if your mind were actually implicated in the reality
you experience, you know, on the same model of where memories are stored and
you only narrate a thread to pull them together across your life and times, as
though that actually were reality. Not quite hallucination and not quite
history which would be shameful if not revised, but something which gets to be
called “you.” Hey!
It would not move if not for wanting. And there is terror in
the system which would keep you wanting so much more by way of virtual reality
constructed on the backs of mothers earth. What would happen if you were no longer
subject to that terror?
The mind, you know, did not evolve from cosmic stuff in this
direction. It was there at the beginning because however else would those
particles be conceived? They have no particular existence but for someone’s
taking their measure. Two alone can’t even interact perceptually once there are
no further particulars to exchange. These particles exchanged define the
forces, the outfielding or infielding, the toward or away which always depends
on the priors for directionality. Ah, there is love and there is hate too down
here below.
Those are only feelings. No perceptual measurable reality,
but sometimes in mind alone you can know where something is heading and that it
will forcefully interact at some juncture in your future. These too are real
and from the beginning, as it were, no necessity to reside in God’s mind,
having love only for the reality of our direction. Some things should not be
named, if for no other reason that naming invites engendering and then control
and intentionality. There is no intentionality to love. And gravity is just its
artifact.
Among the masses there is scant exchange of anything
particular at all to generate that geography of stickiness. It would be a force
only in our mind if we could let go of discovering its secret exchange and fall
for it. But for the embrace of those who could not care less.
It is still that easy to know with something approaching
certainty where we are headed, if not how to make it so or not so as the case
may be. Reality will not be seduced and yet it is our own personal intention
which we are so desperate to augment so as not to fall subject to otherwise
stark direction.
And still we make our choices by impulse. By indirection as
much as by direction, and it is a felt need. As it was from any beginning that
you might imagine.