Driftwork

Are You Shivering?

Are you shivering? Are you cold?
Are you bathed in silver or drowned in gold?
This dream’s vitality
With filaments as fine as a spider’s web
Pour through your mouth
They pour through your mouth
O river of silver, O river of flowers
I lie down and shiver in your silver river
Out drips the last drop of this vital fluid

Our life has grown weary
The stars have grown old
Are you still shivering?
Are you still cold?
Are you loathsome tonight?
Does your madness shine bright?
Are you loathsome tonight?

In the oceans of the moon
Swimming squidlike and squalid
This bright moon is a liquid
The dark earth is a solid

This is moon music in the light of the moon

Babylon

Contemporary memory is deficient in that we do not really remember anything directly; we merely work backwards and extrapolate any event connected by circumstancial evidence - such as when we find a trout in the milk.

We are not truly connected to our past save for moments of intense crisis, emotion, danger, and so on. We are merely replaying tattered jerky films coated in dust.

We only truly remember when we are truly conscious. Which is a state which is becoming stranger and stranger to most people on the planet, as it slowly submerges itself under a thick heavy suffocating blanket of lies, jealousy, festering dreams, refracted vision, mutton dressed as lamb, and smaller and smaller cells for everyone to hide their imagined riches which fade away in countless silent drifts of static, rust and dust.

Effort is our money. We must pay the unpayable.

In Russian, the word “Will” means the same as “Freedom”.

The Harvest is Plentiful, But the Reapers are Few.

© THE HAFLER TRIO 1987

Red Right Hand

Take a little walk to the edge of town, go across the tracks
Where the viaduct looms like a bird of doom, as it shifts and cracks
Where secrets lie in the border fires, in the humming wires,
Hey man you know you’re never coming back
Past the square, past the bridge, past the mills past the stacks
On a gathering storm comes a tall handsome man
In a dusty black coat with a red right hand.

He’ll wrap you in his arms tell you that you’ve been a good boy
He’ll rekindle all the dreams it took you a lifetime to destroy.
He’ll reach deep into your soul, steal your shrinking soul
but there wont be a single thing that you can do
He’s a god, he’s a man, he’s a ghost, he’s a guru
They’re whispering his name though this disapearing land
But hidden in his coat is a red right hand

You dont own no money? He’ll get you some
You don’t have no car? he’ll get you one
You dont have no self respect you feel like an insect,
Well dont you worry buddy coz here he comes
Through the ghettos and the barrio and the bowery and the slums
A shadow is cast whereever he stands
Stacks of green paper in his red right hand

You’ll see him in your nightmares, you’ll see him in your dreams
He’ll appear out of no where but he aint what he seems
You’ll see him in your head, on the TV screen
And hey buddy, Im warning you to turn it off
He’s a ghost, he’s a god, he’s a man, he’s a guru
You’re one microscopic cog in his catastrophic plan
designed and directed by his red right hand.

[The emphasis mine - this song/lyric rules so massively on so many levels that I could shift into a 3-hour lecture on the ontology, intertext and politics of this vision at the slightest hint of interest - so don’t tempt me.]

The Passion

Over the water in that city of madmen they are preparing for Christmas and New Year. They don’t make much of Christmas apart from the Child, but they have a procession at New Year and the decorated boats are easy to see from my window. Their lights bob up and down and the water beneath shines like oil. I stay up the whole night, listening to the dead moan round the rock and watching the stars move across the sky.

At midnight the bells ring out from every one of their churches and they have a hundred and seven at least. I have tried to count, but it is a living city and no one really knows what buildings are there from one day to the next.

You don’t believe me?
Go and see for yourself.

We have a service here on San Servelo and a ghoulish business it is with most of the inmates in chains and the rest jabbering or fidgeting so much that for the few who care it’s impossible to hear the Mass. I don’t go now, it’s not a place to bask. I prefer to stay in my room and look out of the window. Last year Villanelle came by in her boat, as close as she could get, and let off fireworks. One exploded so high that I almost touched it and for a second I thought I might drop down after those falling rays and touch her too, once more. Once more, what difference could it make to be near her again? Only this. That if I start to cry I will never stop.

I re-read my notebook today and I found:

I say I’m in love with her, what does that mean?
It means I review my future and my past in the light of this feeling.I t is as though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to read. Wordlessly she explains me to myself; like genius she is ignorant of what she does.

I go on writing so that I will always have something to read.

There is a frost tonight that will brighten the ground and harden the stars. In the morning when I go into the garden I’ll find it webbed with nets of ice and cracked ice where I over-watered today. Only the garden freezes like that, the rest is too salty.

I can see the lights on the boats and Patrick, who is with me, can see into St Mark’s itself. His eye is still marvellous especially so since walls no longer get in the way. He describes to me the altar boys in red and the Bishop in his crimson and gold and on the roof the perpetual battle between good and evil. The painted roof that I love.

It’s more than twenty years since we went to church at Boulogne.

Out now, into the lagoon, the boats with their gilded prows and triumphant lights.A bright ribbon,a talisman for the New Year.

I will have red roses next year. A forest of red roses.

On this rock? In this climate?

I’m telling you stories. Trust me.

Death in cyberspace

In Idoru, Gibson has Laney think about the dead woman’s personal data in this very poetic passage:

“In the week following Alison Shires’ death, Laney had used Out of Control’s DatAmerica account to re-access the site of her personal data. The nodal point was gone, and a certain subtle reduction had taken place. Not a shrinkage so much as a tidying, a folding in. But the biggest difference was simply that she was no longer generating data. There was no credit activity. Even her Upful Groupvine account had been canceled. As her estate was executed, and various business affairs terminated, her data began to take on a neat rectilinearity. Laney thought of the dead bundled squarely in their graveclothes, of coffins and cairns, of the long straight avenues of cemeteries in the days when the dead had been afforded their own real estate. The nodal point had formed where she had lived, while she had lived, in the messy, constantly proliferating interface with the ordinary yet endlessly multiplex world. Now there was no longer an interface. He’d looked, but only briefly, and very cautiously, to see whether her actor might be undertaking tidying activities of his own. Nothing obvious there, but he imagined Out of Control would have set a more careful watch on that. Her data was very still. Only a faint, methodical movement at its core: something to do with the ongoing legal mechanism of the execution of her estate.”

What is not expressly said in this passage is that the data is still there. It persists even after its owner’s death. It undergoes tiny shifts and tremors as scripts kick in and execute operations on the slowly cooling data-body of the soma that is no longer there.

This is not what happens in THIS world, though, regardless of how close one of Idoru might seem to be. In ours, your data disappears, vanishes, usually within a relatively short period of time. Your email box first starts to fill up with spam and messages from those who are yet to learn you’re no longer there, but then, not because of the size excess (kind of hard to fill five or however many gigs with normal messages) but because of some periodic validation or some such, the provider first suspends the account and then deletes it. Your bulletin board and forum accounts get deactivated after a no-post no-view time. Your IM handles and numbers are freed and get assigned to new users (which is precisely what triggered this post - a friend whose Chat History I still have in my Miranda and who OD-ed two years ago lit up this afternoon - but of course it wasn’t him - it was someone else with his number, automatically assigned without any awareness - of course, why should they? - of the number having this long history of pain and joy). If we are defined by the data we generate then by that token we die again and again these days, die after the physical death, bit by bit as our data degenerates and dissolves in the ever-speeding river of electrons. Sure, some data may persist but with no accounts or profiles to bind them and with so much of online activity being anonymous these days, it becomes so much harder to identify it with the face and life behind it. Which is not good, soo not good at all, if memory is so digital, too, and what with us relying on these machinic means to remember the moments.

We die, but for such a long time kids and grandkids, or simply friends on a cold November night with some time to kill and two bottles of Scotch, still had the musty albums with yellowing photographs of a meme-ber who was no longer with them. But these days, what if Flickr cancels and wipes your account? No more 16:05 on the lake in July with that stupid grin on your face. No more blurred sunsets from your window. You’re gone but worse still your data is gone.