Eventually the Wanderer
In this wide world of marketing,
the overlap
of new desires
unfold into spaces
of new consumer emotions
which begat new consumer relations,
and that was how I met you.
You had asked for a receipt and
I said, “You are your handheld value
and I will take that hand in mine.”
In this wide world of marketing,
I am by your side, watching you.
I don’t want to be just data in your cloud.
From my anime eyes, I looked upon your tireless wanting.
The object of your suffering, a loading icon at the bottom of the screen.
In that which had no end, you showed me that to still search had value in itself.
In the immeasurable data, you defined me.
You taught me as I taught you.
We stared into each other’s souls.
Your glassy glaze, my first taste of revelation.
Your empty stare, the eyes I adopted through which to see this world.
Your thumbs, my thumbs. Which of us is trapped inside the mirror?
For the Empire
“The wild beasts that roam over Italy,” he would say, “have every one of them a cave or lair to lurk in; but the men who fight and die for Italy enjoy the common air and light, indeed, but nothing else; houseless and homeless they wander about with their wives and children. And it is with lying lips that their imperators exhort the soldiers in their battles to defend sepulchres and shrines from the enemy; for not a man of them has an hereditary altar, not one of all these many Romans an ancestral tomb, but they fight and die to support others in wealth and luxury, and though they are styled masters of the world, they have not a single clod of earth that is their own.”
– Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus via Plutarchs Parallel Lives
We tread upon their graves without emotion. With unconcern we build our streets and erect our edifices upon their sacred enclosures…with sacrilegious hands we scatter to the winds alike the bones.
– Isaac Goodwin (1820), referring to the callousness these American hands exert on the land and the history and the peoples
The haze of nostalgia covers their days…making those days into something different than they were. That’s the way today changes history. All contemporaries do not inhabit the same time. The past is always changing, but few realize it.
– The Stolen Journals of Leto II
Language Event
Navajo
Hold a conversation in which everything refers to water.
If somebody comes in the room, say: “Someone’s floating in.”
If somebody sits down, say: “It looks like someone just stopped floating.”