digital gothic: a spellbook for the new sorcerer (new work 2)
Another installment from a work-in-progress:
(comments are always appreciated, particularly on how the audio/visual media works with the writing)
**For best results, watch the video below while listening to the music linked to the playlist at the top of the piece. Then leave the music on repeat while you read the poem.
"On her eyelashes the fog brings you trembling mercury…"
-The Fog, Carlos V. Suárez
Fig. 22: Gate Crashing: [Playlist: iBenji, Seems]
Part 1:
it all starts with an itch that inward look:
the wet dog nanosecond then a twist and counter
the speed of oscillation varies with distance from the center of the creature but
the body already knows how to get to other worlds
close your eyes if you must but trust
the break follow the wobble it's a flywheel in your pocket
timing the path of intersection with the already turning
to converge and merge and merry-go-flung
the motion always invisible at onset but you feel it coming
deep inside an unnamable internal tissue
a supermassive formation collapsing into a relativistic star
please don't stop cracking the excitable cells in the dragon's tail
until the spike train
rolls with great speed and variable friction from the mouths
of voltage-gated channels
and you erupt across the threshold of the rapidly expanding pattern:
I can't tell you, dear sorcerer, what your path to the gates will look like:
all internal language is a secret working
but hang tight in that crawlspace
the worst of the ride is reaching cruising speed
and I can send some guides:
(in the mean time)
enter scarab glittering
on iridescent wings, towing
by fine invisible filaments grasped in hindmost legs
an intricately woven cobweb banner that reads
up and down one column at a time
as well as across, from left to right:
"contrasting" viewpoints on your journey divide prominent philosophers:
Sir Isaac Newton's view is a time to give and a time to dance as other "times" persist,
this view becomes a time to mourn effectively killing time at the time of death
and a time to die is part of the fundamental embrace like frames of a film strip, a spread out structure of time to plant time to uproot across neither future event nor plucked thing
what is planted: a dimension in which events sewn then thrown not discrete or measurable
yet occur as objects in a sequence a birth container one could step in or out of or
a silence kept a together lost a wasted search, give up, tear apart, kill, weep, love, hate, laugh (that's Leibniz, Kant) the transport time itself an idea certainly but not a thing but
a fundamental structure travel-able as thought
(and on a second banner, clinging to the first
via some dust bunnies and a chain of bluish laundry lint:)
Travel:
1. To go from one place to another, as on a trip; journey.
2. To go from place to place as a salesperson or agent.
3. To be transmitted, as light or sound; move or pass.
4. To advance or proceed.
5. To go about in the company of a particular group; associate: travels in wealthy circles.
6. To move along a course, as in a groove.
7. To admit of being transported without loss of quality; Some wines travel poorly.
8. Informal: to move swiftly.
9. Basketball: to walk or run illegally while holding the ball.
the second "l" in the word ball is festooned with busily rebuilding spiders,
as the passage of time cannot be directly perceived as it happens
but must be re-membered to exist
unendingly given arms legs
and breathed
from trembling drops spun into vibrating strings
ad interim, your guides have arrived:
stay tuned for Part 2
