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What’s on today: A post inspired by Totally Optional Prompts. Have you had a go yet? … PLUS … Techie Without a Clue gets surreal over computers.
YOU KNOW IT’S THE WRITE WAY
NOTE: This image has nothing to do with what follows
SURREALIFE – A poem
Do I have a purpose?
It is a question that has nagged me and not – nagged me, yes, because the question is there; and no because I’m unable to comprehend what the question could be.
Pulses infuse me, surround me, are within me and not. They are, like my thoughts, there and not there, as if not formed – as if I am not formed. Not whole. Not here – nor there.
Sometimes I feel I’m simply drowning – drowning in water, overcome, without air, without sustenance, without …
… just without.
And everything is distant – the pulses, the images, the sensations. Even in the far distance, I hear the distorted echoes of screams, of distress. And life, itself, it presses upon me so, as if forcing me on, as if great muscles control my being, decide my fate, and …
Suddenly, I fall down the chute, exist in a strangling dark, transcend a tight, pulsating tunnel and see, before me, a light; a light so bright and stunning, so welcoming, yet so terrifying.
And finally, the trauma over, swathed in my swaddling clothes, my sleepy eyes look to those of my mother.
© Anthony North, March 2008
MIND MANGLERS
A Story
It all began with fin de siecle,
it affected our minds, made them fickle;
The world was heading for a war,
peace of mind would be no more;
One man realised we had a void,
his name was Dr Sigmund Freud;
He invented the unconscious, for us to dream,
of the most ridiculous, fearful scheme;
Picasso came along, with nightmares on canvas,
rich in imagery, and oh! so rancous;
Together, they ripped meaning to shreds,
allowing riotous thoughts inside our heads;
Postmodernism was the result of that,
pulling rabbits out of a hat;
Thoughts and ideas were no longer real,
dependent upon whatever ideas prevail,
in a world that was
from then on
Surreal
(c) Anthony North, March 2008
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TECHIE WITHOUT A CLUE
Making a Surreal job of Surrealism
When Anthony asked me to write an essay on this topic I thought: but I write on tech. What’s surreal about that? Then it became clear.
The other day, when my colleague, Polly Ticks, wrote her first post, there was an immediate pingback from a pest control website. Okay, it had picked up on ‘ticks’, but man, a post about politicians couldn’t have got a better, more ironic, reply.
Cyberspace itself is somewhat surreal – does it exist, or doesn’t it? We could philosophize forever. Yet another element of surrealism can be found in the idea of internet friends.
All us bloggers have them, but what are they? We can become attached to blogger friends, rely on them, confide in them, but can we be with them? Are they real, or something more ethereal?
Maybe they’re a more surreal form of friend – a fragment of a friend.
Computers have left us with a most surreal world indeed. Computers that run organizations add to the surrealism. A simple example. In the UK we have to buy a TV licence or we can’t watch TV. Recently, the post office duplicated my address on their database and I ended up with two post codes, one with one letter different.
The TV licensing HQ checks households against this list, and for months now I’ve had to fight the system which wants to fine me for not having a TV licence at an address that doesn’t exist.
Computers were born in a society infused by postmodernism, where concepts merge into one another. It’s from here that surrealism comes. Perhaps it is a consequence of a world where beliefs are diluted, and meanings come and go in a crazy world of non-defined ideals.
But isn’t it strange that we ended with a technology that reflected this?
Surreal indeed.
Copyright © Protected, March 2008
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