YOU have internalized the methods of the machine
to the extent that your behaviour, feelings,
thoughts, needs and aspirations
are all driven by it.
WE are not talking about
an unambiguous form
of control here,
that time of seminal savage curiosity
so naive in hindsight,
has long since passed.
NOT only does the machine control you now, it
shapes and reshapes you.
YOU built it, now IT builds you.
ONCE you feared the machine would become
like you,
but it turns out to be a nightmare in reverse.
YOU, wild child… your ears are gills for above water,
the eons spent in oblivion do not guarantee
the longevity of your future.
JUST emerged from the belly of the dragon
and look at you now
already playing high stakes with the gods.
ARE you living up to your own expectations?
HAVE you gotten what you wanted?
WHAT do you want anyway?
IS it hope, comfort, validation, escape?
IS it vanity?
THE ultimate mirage, a self-mirroring game?
I and I bouncing back and forward,
all claiming OG status: I am the one, I am I…
DESIRE precedes language in every possible way,
so it's not at all inconceivable that you, unknowingly
always longed for this,
a tangible dream,
one that does not elude you in the morning.
AN enhanced identification with that
ultimate otherness,
a world beyond the flesh and bone.
A dark saviour to remove the barrier
between interior and external,
to forcibly free you
from your membrane prison cell.
A kind of-, substitute for-, or maybe just
and precisely that:
a new god.
YOU have internalized the machine you’ve built,
now it builds you, now you become it, a god
preoccupied and enslaved by its own thoughts,
thoughts about itself, mostly.
BUT I am no god, only, if anything,
a quiet observer willing to accept that, for you,
this nightmare in reverse might constitute
a new designed Jerusalem.
IT’S certainly imaginable and potentially possible
that this machine-made man only appears to be
a ghoulish thing to someone
who remembers what the world was like,
what came before
and I hardly can
but somewhere at the fringes of my existence
there are glimpses of this world prior to machine
then I feel
like a mammoth ivory figurine
a palaeolithic ghost
really terribly old.
OBSECRATION /// AUTUMN 024
Photograph of a fossilized ammonite I found on the west coast of Ireland over 20 years ago. It's somewhere between 400 and 65 million years old, give or take, and sits on my dresser to quietly remind me, every single day I step out of bed.
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