Monday, November 11, 2019

Storystyling : Sylvan Petrol & (General) Motors (five / 7)

Reminder

Once upon a time, there was no time. You cannot remember when it was. Because it wasn’t.
Then started to appear a weird thing that provided you with the information about the arrangement of your activities. More often than not, all you needed to know was when one class ended, and the other began. But, it wasn’t easy to situate those dynamics within the unlikely movements of two sticks sliding from one increment to another, drawing endless circles…meaningless circles that you learned to translate into even less sensible notions of minutes, seconds, hours. You learned to read those bizarre circles. But, you never fell for them.

Later, you met people whose world was like a mosaic. Because it consisted of the pieces determined by those quirky messages that were sometimes coded so intricately that few could understand, let alone explain, the underpinning logic: they consisted of symbolic chunks whose substantial portions were muted by virtue of the invisible segments inexpressible through the signification based on numbers. There were no hands to point at the digit, thereby conjuring up the content of the message and what divides it from the previous one. There were only numeric statements flickering on a display, ignoring the lump skipped by the discrete expressive mode the device spoke in. You learned the difference. You learned what you prefer.

Over time, you’ve been observing the world that became tyrannically ruled by those pieces, regardless what system of signification they were enabled by. But, you don’t know when it began. All you know is that you see people who worship their shoes because they help them make an incredibly great number of steps per hour. They can take them anywhere in no time. All you know is that you see people who can walk as fast as their suit allows them. And it ensures incredible mobility, which those fast walkers admire as much as they would be thankful for…well, another such item. All you know is that you see people who on a daily basis so indulge in the enchantment by strings of figures pouring down their screens, constantly bombarding their sense of sight with blinking packages, that they oftentimes confuse stars with those. Just as they function perfectly well in that confinement of a plastic forest completely unaware of the river flowing in its midst.

All they know is that they have to walk fast, look fast, eat fast, sleep fast, work fast…be fast. Because somebody decided upon the manner in which their activities need to be carried out. Absurdly, those who conceptualize modus operandi take no prisoners. They impose even on their good selves a tremendous burden—composite of sorts consisting of tough requirements regarding efficiency, efficacy, responsibility, complexity, and quantity. Absurdly, they’ve gotten so enmeshed in devising such a system that they totally forgot about their own role in it. They think that somebody else had imposed such demands. But, they have no memory of who it was. All they know is that they have to meet those requirements. Which they do. And yet, just how they do it is an enigma in its own right.

Since the standards seem to be skyrocketing, so are the means that enable them to keep up with those. Shoes, suits, and figures help, but there needs to be an additional source of energies for such gargantuan tasks to be performed. Surely, they find them. As they keep moving on on that mystical fuel, they start remembering that the symbiosis is by no means a recent phenomenon. They know they’ve known those sources for quite a while. So fucking long that they cannot possibly know since when. So fucking long that they cannot possibly distinguish between their own and those external sources’ power. They cannot possibly retrieve the capacity to see that the demands are, actually, conditioned by those very sources. Only, people who rely on them became totally unaware of that fact. They rely on them to ensure meeting the requirements, thereby only solidifying their harshness and complexity. They set nearly impossible assignments due to their being hyperenergized. The-chicken-or-the-egg dilemma. Or, some such shit. You name it.

You understand the perplexity of it all. And yet, explain it you cannot. You see the predicament in the very kernel of it. And yet, crack that nut you cannot. You learned to sustain that awareness. Only, you wish that of which the awareness is was different.
like phunk!


/

Once upon, time started assuming a fluctuating role oscillating from an ingredient in the composite spacetime to a discursive travesty of a highly bewildering signifier-signified nexus. Under the disguise of the word space, time was passing—invisible, secretly, hidden even from itself within that tricky linguistic interchangeability. You realized that, if not arbitrary, certainly loose hinges kept signification attached to the container into which it was poured.  You understand that this utterly versatile contextualization is based on, conditioned, and ensured by the ubiquitous permeability of unstable boundaries. You know damn well what context is and how it shapes communication, yet you are hesitant to accept just about any form the supposed signal acquires depending on the robe it is clad in—you know what noise is, how important distinctions are, and how to discern and sustain the awareness of them.

You were taken aback when you noticed the space-time discursive flirting with percolating properties of cultural realities. You cannot fathom the connection between the word time and some of its apparent correlatives, let alone, synonyms and/or homonyms. You’ve been disgusted by the manner in which people adopt the newly created givens: you saw that the multifaceted notion of time became so elusive that almost the phenomenon itself seemed to have begun the weird odyssey in pursuit of the way back home.

It’s travelled long way. The sea was stormy. The waves wild. The clouds as dark as pirates’ dreams. The days were as grey as the ports that in a negative way define them. It was cold. The rage of the nature in a wild dance with itself was occasionally soothed by the droplets of water like galaxies dispersing throughout the confines of the vehicle. The ship was being transfigured into a cosmic fantasy. The droplets tasted salty. They were salty.

You thought time had a long way to go to ram it. You could not imagine the face of that ithaca. Nor did you care. But, you couldn’t help wondering how far from itself time was. What is more, you were endlessly perplexed by people’s allegiance to control and, despite the abovesaid diversity, their persevering in organizing their everyday in accordance with the very basic meaning of the word time, this, consequently, resulting in the prevalent urge to do fast, eat fast, be fast, talk fast, walk fast, but not running. Ironically, not having time to run.

You know that, regardless of the extent of puzzlement, you are appreciative of that deprivation. Only, you wish the absence of that undesirable component of the everyday were a matter of decision governed by different postulates. You wish that the reasoning enabling decision making were premised differently. You learned to recognize the bizarreness of the situation and to persistently detect masks. You also know that there are masks and masks, that there is off-mask and off-mask. But, you don’t know how to explain it. Not that you even want to. I don’t.
like phunk!


/

You’ve learned to synchronize your walk with your thought. You came to admire walking as one of the elevated faculties providing a human being with the opportunity to observe, simultaneously noting the relationship between the imagery without and that within. You’ve found out that such activities have established themselves as the sources of peculiar, quiet rejoicing: they secure perpetual flux of the fuel on which both walks & thoughts run; they run not—not because there’s no time, but because there’s no need.

You realized that one of the aspects that made this singularly majestic activity worthy of its self-sustained reputation was the magic of moving from one spot in space to another. Between them, eons condensed in the color of flora, centuries roaming around clouds, hours sinking into the grooves on petals’ skin. Steps like hands on the face of the clock. Each nanomovement, a seepage of sand cohorts from the upper to the lower chamber of the hourglass. You’ve learned to feel the smoothness of your movements, as it reflected the dialogue between your eyes and your mind.

You were taken aback when you were introduced to one of the most bizarre ideas related to the activity you so appreciate. That provocation came from the sources conversant in the matters of vurtuality. They taught you that there was a connection between speed, distance, and time. So, you thought they believed in the capacity of time to condition the other two. You suspected that there was quite a bit of room for the collusion between velocity and time, as well. Distance does not know it. But, people should, you’d think. It kept you puzzled until you started being stunned. Stunned by the capacity of the people to imagine and believe in imaginative powers. They imagined so much that they stopped acknowledging those powers. A total neglect of the actual sources led to the troubling state of affairs where performative aspect of language threatened to be adopted as a totalizing lingua franca. The agreement was silent, but you distrusted the accuracy of that word, preferring to think it was rather the lack of awareness that spurred mushrooming of the supposed linguistic communities utterly desensitized to:

(1) the word distance;
(2) its role in the practice called critical thinking;
(3) its meaning in physical terms;
(4) the manifestation of that notion in the three dimensional word.

You were perplexed by the insight into the devastating state of affairs featuring many an individual heavily deluded by the dynamism in the virtual sphere. They erroneously equated the fact that the flow of 1s & 0s can put you in touch with a mate from the other side of the globe in a matter of seconds with there being no distance between those long-distance interlocutors. They, in a way, equated time and space by pretty much obliterating both. This left them with speed solely. Alas, in that relational empire of their linguistic limbo, it could not be sustained as the phenomenon in its own right. They did not know how that could be. Well, more precisely, they would not have known had they wondered, had they been intrigued, had they cared, had they had the capacity to reflect the linguistic pattern that shaped their world, i.e., had they had the capacity to detect relations between certain things. Instead, they kept brooding between words, concepts, and the space that they so blindly denied. I don’t.

In a universe where words mean something because their performative potential allows for proliferated interpretations, you might be prone to think that where there is no time, space disappears, as well. This, you may be led to believe, could mean that once space-time was done away with, speed surfaces as sovereign power that entails the highly praised categories of shoes, suits, and numbers. But, you know better: you’ve learned to admire your walks.


/

Not only are you aware of the significance of distance in spatial terms, but you also know how its metaphorical aspect informs the perception of the world, self, and everything else. This sharpens your sense of historicity. And yet, overhistoricize you do not. The former increases the puzzlement by those who bow down to the shrines of velocity, yet shun spatiotemporality altogether. They, you decide, must be radically desensitized to the mutually conditioning relations within the equation featuring the three dimensions. The latter informs two major aspects of your reasoning:

(1) You can’t bear to look at the impossibility of vibrant integration of distance into the everyday of those worshippers of a silicon jungle.

(2) Imagine a world in the future that is nearly impossible to envisage. From that historically remote spot, people would contemplate the world, themselves, and everything else. From that historically remote spot, they’d be curious to know what the world was like in the far away past. They’d know that once upon a time, people discarded the notion of space because in no time they could reach virtual destinations and be somewhere. They’d also know that infatuation by vurtuality was part and parcel of prevalent acceleration that kept them captive within the deceitful sense of there being no time for anything. Hence, they decided that there was no time. That, in a way, resonated with their innate aversion to historicity. It would have entailed—had they had a modicum of inclination toward logic— repudiation of an investment in the future, as well. This is uncertain. On the one hand, it is well known that logic is among the scorned faculties. On the other, the logic of  the very assumption is questionable. For one, their supposedly being logical would result in having to cast aside any sense of future. Conversely, their being illogical is supposed to save them from an apocalyptic mentality. Something is not quite right in the way some propositions and consequences are related. Anyways, those guys from the future would know that once upon a time, there was a bunch of humans who knew no other pattern of being in this world but immediacy. Because there was no history, and the future was too complex to think about, they could only be, think, live, do following the dictum of immediacy. Now, if those futurist explorers of the past did not take such a picture with a grain of salt, if they did not distance themselves from sweeping generalizations, you would be invisible to them, their offspring, and whoever happens to populate this benighted planet whenever on that weird chronological continuum.

 : mannerz first, 4 fuck sake! Tho shalt not succumb to logghoreaic robozombism, yo! Instead, behave 4 fuck sake, behave 4 fuck sake, behave 4 fuck sake, yo! In addition, cut the fucking crap, cut the fucking crap, cut the fucking crap, yo! Once & for all, remind yourself, reiterate & reinstate the axiom of the smiling constellations: once you said something three times, didn’t ya! You imagine and you don’t. You know and you don’t. You like and you don’t. You speak and you don’t. Now, come to your fucking senses and be (in)visible. Come to your fucking senses and lucidly be your ludic self, ol rajt! Come to your fucking senses and watch your fucking tongue, ha!


***
as i am strolling through all these thoughts of mine, i am not too sure if i am solely reminiscing, or if my pondering reflects frequent reveries that i eagerly immerse myself in, or if it is all merely the reflection of my quirky affinity for the climate domineered by rolling, fluffy formations ranging from white, bright, exuberant mischievous flakes carried easily across the blue overarching dome to heavy, robust, solemn, self-sufficient travelers immune to the commotions of the air currents around them.

as i am brooding hybridized with those thoughts of mine, i wonder  how i could possibly track exactly the origins of those elusive, endless, immeasurable, indefatigable sources of wonder. But, it seems to me that the drift i continuously feel  above—regardless of the degree of darkness and its counterpart—is always the presence indicative of the phenomenon i most gladly associate them with.

as those puzzling zones are being crystallized, my awareness of the prevalent sensation is solely informed by the mesmerizing occurrence that never fails to reassert itself whenever in the depository of patiently waiting molecules of the H & O nature, they start mingling, stirring, softly saturating the confines, soon to be let loose and pour themselves over the silent forest, thereby generating the magic of the constancy of the hum heard only by that mighty host.

when those weird floating sculptures melt, leaves sing the songs radiating invisible glow to the heights that send the flow. as they absorb the precious liquid, they distribute it through the rhizomorphic web within the trees, only to pass it on further to the surrounding, to the neighboring valleys, then to their abutting pastures, orchards, vineyards, fields, parks, gardens, flowers, skin. soft raindrops sprinkling the face. just as they merge with lazy, rolling movements of the flowing giant in the midst of the plastic jungle.

i am being constantly reminded : trees, not a jungle / language, not letters.
kessenem / pleazy.


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