Friday, January 5, 2018

Explain That You Live Between Two Great Darks




  • Bernie Sumner turned 61 yesterday.
  • Another post on my assisting Power surveil me: What capitalism realised in the neoliberal era, Han argues, is that it didn’t need to be tough, but seductive. This is what he calls smartpolitics. Instead of saying no, it says yes: instead of denying us with commandments, discipline and shortages, it seems to allow us to buy what we want when we want, become what we want and realise our dream of freedom. “Instead of forbidding and depriving it works through pleasing and fulfilling. Instead of making people compliant, it seeks to make them dependent.
  • My aunt gave me a FitBit for Giftmas. It bluetooths to my iPhone. I presume all the information the FitBit collects is stored in my iPhone's cloud for any who can to see.
  • I had to ask for something - my aunt, who I love, does not accept "I don't want anything for Giftmas" as an answer to the question "what do you want." The day before she asked we'd been on a hike - the app on my phone said we hiked 6.7 miles, the same brand app on Earthgirl's phone said we'd hiked 8.2, the info on the hiking website said the hike was 7.4. I'd read somewhere that FitBit is an accurate pedometer. Wish I'd asked for bluetooth headphones.
  • Every post but two a year tagged My Complicity.
  • The telecom revolution is authoritarian.
  • Mapping a world from Hell.
  • When we are all there together.
  • Checkmating. Life in the Trollocene.
  • In the wee small hours of the morning.
  • Remake / Remodel. I put the Roxy Music song there in comments, not approved yet as I type.
  • It is true that once upon a time there was always a New Order song in my head. The song just below is without question one of half a dozen of my most air-guitared songs of my life. Not in my head all the time any longer, sweet still when yes.






THE CONTINUOUS LIFE

Mark Strand

What of the neighborhood homes awash
In a silver light, of children hunched in the bushes,
Watching the grown-ups for signs of surrender,
Signs that the irregular pleasures of moving
From day to day, of being adrift on the swell of duty,
Have run their course? O parents, confess
To your little ones the night is a long way off
And your taste for the mundane grows; tell them
Your worship of household chores has barely begun;
Describe the beauty of shovels and rakes, brooms and mops;
Say there will always be cooking and cleaning to do,
That one thing leads to another, which leads to another;
Explain that you live between two great darks, the first
With an ending, the second without one, that the luckiest
Thing is having been born, that you live in a blur
Of hours and days, months and years, and believe 
It has meaning, despite the occasional fear
You are slipping away with nothing completed, nothing
To prove you existed. Tell the children to come inside,
That your search goes on for something you lost—a name,
A family album that fell from its own small matter
Into another, a piece of the dark that might have been yours,
You don't really know. Say that each of you tries 
To keep busy, learning to lean down close and hear
The careless breathing of earth and feel its available
Languor come over you, wave after wave, sending
Small tremors of love through your brief, 
Undeniable selves, into your days, and beyond. 



1 comment:

  1. Wait for Me


    A dream of life a dream of birth
    a dream of moving
    from one world into another

    All night dismantling the synapses
    unplugging the veins and arteries . . .

    Hello I am a cake of soap
    dissolving in a warm bath

    A train with no windows and no doors
    a lover with no eyes for his mask
    —inside is the speed of life

    Who can doubt the worth of it
    each letter written is obsolete
    before it finds its friend

    Our life is shorter now
    full of chaotic numbers
    which never complete a day

    It will be the same
    as it has always been
    and you are right to pack

    Your heart in ice
    if you believe this.


    ---James Tate
    from Absences, 1972

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