“Not to Touch the Earth 2: Relegation” 2012, collage by Amanda Langley
Since deleting my Fakebook, Instaham, Bumblr, MyWaste, TwLitter, and ChainedIn accounts two months ago, I am slowly resuscitating brain cells sedated in junk food technology. I have reclaimed reality: “Wow, what is this? A real, live asshole standing in front of me that I can actually punch in the nose instead of meekly ‘unfriend’? And oh, what is this? A handsome Adonis in the flesh, a man I can lick lusciously behind the ear instead of cyber-file away under a list of 1,200 other people I am too busy to see in person.” Its not hard to colonize a mind. Ask Mark “Sucker”berg.
All the cybernerds can keep their warped googly-glass world and voluntary relegation of mind, heart, and soul tucked into megabytes and phony algorithms. And I’ll keep sweeping up blank stretches of white light in the blogosphere. I’ll be unleashing my own cryptic arrowheads to scalp a few modern day “neo-savages”. But lets not keep all of this from watering our rookie vegetable gardens. Real worms still exist outside firewalls.
Sinead O’Connor, that Joan of Arc of music, said it and meant it best when she declared “I do not want what I haven’t got“. She is like that pesky servant of truth that slashed every single one of the Silicon Valley trolls that popped out of their cyber Hades in the early 90s, promising spun gold, power, knowledge, and new age cybernetic possibilities. Not only does the digital emperor wear no clothes, virtual reality can tell you THERE IS NO EMPEROR! But the “self” is another matter to consider.
Whenever I get lost with my “self”, I consider being someone “else”. Social Media can help in that game of identity reconstruction. By posting and by ingesting the pictures you choose to click on, you transition via voyeuristic will. You make yourself believe you are something that you can become. Presto, its la cosa nostra without having to make anyone take a dirt nap, yet. You’ve coned the con of cons if you can con yourself.
When everything seems to be compartmentalized and relegated to be regulated, I turn once more to the sanctuary of the imagination. Thankfully, science and technology can’t solve everything.
The following is a poem I wrote to undo the tie that binds.
For the Blessing of Absence
And so this…
where every inch of earth has been pressed thin-
every bloody cell carved out of a woman’s darkness be pulled
by the same sterile light;
No place,
No face can claim this psychic recipe.
Where numbers have numbed every corner of reason,
such is this matrix, a lottery of emotions, tangling frontiers-
Refusing to reuse the quadrants of space faithfully packaged into
shapes of thinking.
Excite all the unicorns into conforming:
That is “science”‘
That is the room in the elephant.
The bigger the story,
the smaller the possibilities of what was or never be.
9/16 @ Prospect Place
