Very hard to describe this - the site of my hands, slightly cut from playing guitar for so long, the skin and viens and such delicate division that is now pressing key after yielding key in order to push me through to all of you digitally. What makes a human through a hail of binary code? Other web logs or jounals on line? Do they exist? And the flaws of this are numerous. This keyboard will jam full of too many things and ultimately will obey the laws of motion, of time, and crumble.
Death can be digitized as well as poetry now - be electronically threshed together - it's no longer a million monkeys on a million typewriters working for a art, but rather now something much different - the monkeys have been fired and the machines are cleaner, more sleek, more attuned to what they need to do: no more randomness - now it's exact verbage. Poetry reduced to 10101010 and what next? That's what makes flaws lovely, I suppose.
I am scared because in a world that draws chrome walls around anything that is not protected, we are all blinded and alone and safe. Damage, then, is perhaps what becomes important as it exists inside the box. Damage. Experience. With either/the same comes Experience, comes Change, comes Love, comes ANYTHING ELSE, really. Change certainly isn't going to be comfortable at times, but you can look at those scars, each a severed isolated memory etched, and hopefully appriciate some of them.
With all of the computer screens and televisions becoming wider and smaller and flatter every day, this world sometimes doesn't even seem three dimentional. But as a term for depth, at least, dimentions exist everywhere for everything, with locked-up catalysts either sleeping or angrily pounding the gates, all forces of action waiting to happen, to Change, and betwixt kisses from digital lips or hybridized cells monitored by machines, it seems like it's time to put the cards down and imagine, to you, what matters.
Not what computes, not what pariciple completes a program's structure, not even just the cold word "logic", but instead what matters to you.
I am a hopeless romantic and my arsrenal could be more than you have ever seen. Their letters to me form tiny ledge upon ledge stacked to the sides, stowed in boxes, old perfumes mingling and letters, always letters. I imagined her tonight as I left the car and was amazed to feel my steps lighter. To my car that she rode in never, opened my door to a slight rush of coffee, kisses, caresses, any of these it could have been, as the more youth I remember, the older I start feeling.
Things stagger together in "order" because from whatever origons they have, coicidence has placed them. But their trajectory can be either digitally organized or left to the heart. Now you tell me: your palm pilot or your palm? My lovesick kid has gotten better again, as he always does, and as usual is asking for more. Sit. Roll over. 1010001010. But he doesn't understand digital commands because you can't crumple up an e-mail with a lover's perfume and can't cross the T's the way that you want to, no, not with all the Font Type options in the world. And the letter can't get to you by a nonchalant icon on your screen on day - you hold in your hands paper made by people, their craftmanship a tangible expression of love. And verses digitized love? It feels the same way as everything else digitized - at times like wall of glass in a white room, ungiving and quiet, or like standing while a hail of ice cubes rush at/around you, cold water sneaking around behind your neck. Clinically, it's over, and instead of an e-card with an animated icon wishing you a happy birthday, you can have an actual person to give you a hug to do so. That, or a perfectly-shaded icon telling you to have a happy birthday and her voice sounds 128, no, 96km encoded mpeg, unless it's just a bad WAV file, and the MIDI background music will start later once the loading is finished, which should take
which should take you no guess as to the fact that we are frail, fragile, beautiful, jealous, mainly alive beings. Love can't be digitized. It's not going to be, I hope. So difficult, at times, to write a poem on a computer screen and wait for it to gain the same properties as something written with ink. But that gap isn't getting smaller, and with every technological progression, am I the only one thinking that maybe we're also conversely losing something at the same time? Something more organic, maybe. It's what makes that little jump of happiness when I get a letter in the mail all the more concrete, I suppose.
This sounds pessimistic and it's not meant to be. Just an observation from a guy in the midwest who is writing on his mother's birthday. And now I'm going to go help my dad move a desk. heh. Poetry and the internet - what a pair.
still right over here,
Jared