The movie set as a metaphor for life

There's a lot of waiting around and occasionally something explodes.

Circulation

Writers, blood donors

Left weaker but stronger

By transference of essence

A stranger benefits, or else

Red pouches of rectangular life

Rest untouched on dusty shelves

Nurses & librarians

In hospitals for bodies & minds

Blood & books on carts with bar codes

Your blood is inside of you but it is not helping anyone

Your blood is only noticed in emergencies

People-Synesthesia

We are colors. Not the tone of our skin. More like an aura. A color that follows us as we live.

If you know somebody's color, your vision of them will snap to a quick focus. Misjudge someone's color/character and you will never discover how the two of you reflect.

I am green.

Inspiration: James Stewart Polshek, architect, who said, "...those guys were dividing up the world into whites and grays. I said, I’m not white or gray. I’m pink, and I’m not going to be part of this, and I wasn’t."
Soundtrack: Prefab Sprout, "Green Isaac"
Alternate spelling: For this piece I prefer "colours."
Thanks to: Summit County Historical Society

The odds

Here's the problem: Wandering minds wander towards unhappiness (or away from happiness?) but also, simultaneously, towards inspiration. You may stumble across one on the way towards the other, or carry one on your back as you trek in the direction of its opposite, but within the realm of psychological states their territory is adjacent. This is why so many people have pointed out the correlation between creativity and depression. It's not a question of causation but of limitation: Given a finite number of mental/emotional moods on the road to somewhere else, we are bound to meet (come into the company of) either the High or the Low. This present moment is the Middle. One step in either direction invites the flip of a coin.
The issue is that we believe a coin has two sides, and must always proclaim Heads or Tails. We forget that a physical coin---with its shape, mass, and form in three dimensions---bursts beyond the abstraction of probability. We forget about that bit in the middle. That numinous realm, within the spin of which we fervidly circle, is where we spend most of our time, until, under the impression that it all can only ever be One or The Other, we throw all our weight against an arbitrary side, hoping to topple it and yield the definitive. But certainty can never be achieved, only imagined. Finality is a mirage. If a coin holds within it (is charged with) a perfect 50-50 probability, then any one coin toss means nothing. We will always have both Heads and Tails. Flipping Heads and then stopping does not eliminate the future yielding of Tails.
In other words, whether standstill or wandering, we are only tossing coins.
But I'm already contradicting myself, because I was trying to say that Duality was an Illusion.
I'm wandering again.

Sweet Dreams

In dreams I am Icarus, cooked by the Sun of the day; in free fall, as the last black vestiges of subjective skepticism are charred off brittle distant/nonexistent skin, pulled down by the heavy gravity of sleep, approaching an annihilating oceanic subconsciousness. And the bubble, bursting, cakes up anything ever used as material for me, and the thing that is plummeting through the meniscus of oblivion is not me; and so a wounded animal somewhere recognizes its cage, comprised of high school lockers, as meant for a someone whom its guards cannot remember and have always failed to capture; and yea, though this creature is unfairly charged, it is yet tried for this forgotten someone's wrongdoings; hunted/haunted by the faces of that someone's acquaintances, and it has neither wits nor history with which to defend itself, only a crippling chestful of guilt; and so it bounds through this funhouse of horrors for eight hours at a time in an instant, until game is called and the hounds retreat, only to call rematch the following evening

Isaac Don't Write

Before
NAiLED QUiCKSiLVER
the-Undulant acrobatic of flux
(waveforms(against(an(oscillatory(horizon)))))


After
Why would I want more time to write? Writing is only the recording of rainfall, a recreation of precipitation assembled from memories. A copy of a copy. Displayed impressions of marks made in the mud, & when the basin runs dry, writing is wringing. No, at moments like those, the writing isn't worth doing. Writing isn't it.
Because even though writing stands guard over it, writing is still standing in front of it, blocking your view of it, & you have to peer around it, come at it from different angles while walking sideways away from it, to even be aware of it, it, it that is found within fissures, inside slants, between raindrops. The only way to find it is to look the other way. If you want to ask for directions, you can't just ask how to get there, you have to ask for the way to somewhere else. I'm driving around for hours without any sense of direction but it's only when I forget where I'm wanting to go that I pull up at Serendip.

The error of the retained image

1. Chess board
2. Square on a chess board
3. Player viewing a square on the chess board
4. Player viewing that square on that chess board not as it is in reality
5. Player viewing that square on that chess board not as it is in reality, but as it was one or more moves ago

—in this manner, we fail to adapt to the changes, the current reality, the progression of one moment after the previous—

—superimposing memory over our own optics, we remain imprisoned in our idealization of the past.

6. Player viewing that square on that chess board not as it is in reality, but as it was one or more moves ago, makes a move which acts upon this conception, or fails to anticipate a perspicacious move by the player's opponent
7. Player viewing that square on that chess board not as it is in reality, but as it was one or more moves ago, makes a move which acts upon this conception, or fails to anticipate a perspicacious move by the player's opponent, and, in so doing, loses the game.

"Tell them what you did"
Zoom. Let me make myself clear. Clarification. Cleverness. Wistfulness.

Middlegame

Deep Blue sees every potentiality but the Grandmasters know tactics. There is no fun in seeing everything. There is no fun in watching the only possible outcome play out. The fun is in the guessing. The fun is in remembering & inventing tricks, schemes, strategies, histories, inversions, deceptions, revelations. Do I  do this because it is fun, or out of obligation to the next move, the next move, the next move. I feel it somewhere between the squares, in the lifting of an arm. My fingers are still on the piece.

Beehive Head (My Brain Is)

HORNET'SNESTBUZZINGTHICKETZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZDRONINGDOGFIGHTCANNIBALISTICQUEEN

HYPERSHARPSTINGERSSUPERTHICKHONEYZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

ZZZZZZZZZZZDOUBLEBARRELSHOTGUNBLOWOUTTHEHONEYCOMBS

Mechanic Sentience

It's not that computers reveal themselves as computers by failing to approximate the way that humans answer questions: they reveal themselves as computers by failing to approximate the way that humans fail to answer questions.

Asking someone a direct question is like firing a cannonball at the ocean: Scattered speech splashes in alarm; the question submerges under placid immaculate surface, cannonball sinking to ocean floor, black, buried, silent, but present, displacing water & the currents of thought.

Listen to machines.

Depreciation

There's a coin in the road but it's nobody's lucky penny
Just a testament that Lincoln's copper profile has lost its worth
"A poem is never finished, only abandoned"
Paul Valery
Abandoned nature, abandoned industry, abandoned gray & green
Abandoned people, used up but unspent
"This land was made for you & me"
Woody Guthrie 
The first stares from the undergrowth but holds up her hand when I wave
The second circumvents the fence & asks for the time; it could be anytime
"It's ten to three"
Isaac Mell 
Fallen from a pocket, pushed out of a mind
Even the bridge will leave this flat-line road, raising up & returning to heaven 
"ROAD CLOSED"
The City of Cleveland
I fail to stop to stoop to pick up the penny
Is a poem considered abandoned if it has never been begun?

Gauging our position with the power of song

Music is the most enjoyable standard by which we judge ourselves. 

A song is a moment extended, reproducible at any moment---dips on the long timetable of your lifespan (if we were drawing this, it would look like notes on a staff).  

Compare yourself to the person you were at first listen. The song doesn't change, but you do. (You may find new corners to turn within the song, on a deeper layer down, each time it unfolds for you, but you know what to expect.)

Whereas people change (or stay the same in a different way), making perfect timing between two people impossible (well, any kind of perfection is impossible---but you can get to some very nice things that are imperfect yet correct in their own way), CD, tape & vinyl are set in stone.

Does music degrade? What is the half-life of a three-and-a-half minute song? Can you sustain that peak level of enjoyment for the rest of your life? Or does the melody coat itself around the perimeter of your head like wallpaper (as with all comforts & luxuries, fading from our perception)?

We may ignore a song, but it's always there, waiting to be appreciated, even (especially) when we're distracted to do so.

Songs are wiser than we are.

In Transit, to, Somewhere

Words are a public transportation system that you get on when you are a young child & it takes you where you need to go, fast, & you may see something outside the window that you can't get your lips around, but it's all right, you're safe inside, & you can point out the window.

These words never vibrated. I never spoke, spokes on a wheel that turned a cog in your mind. What was changed, when these marks were made, I made not a whisper, not a shout, nothing moved in the air other than the friction of fingers over keys. 

I know why my recording career never took off---I didn't understand that all rooms have a sound, a feeling, & I was content to speak into a microphone [in that one room] or play a synthesizer that never really made a sound, never really vibrated: rock 'n' roll, jazzzzzz, POP, these are sounds, & they need to be released. A synthesizer synthesizes but you need something to start out with, something real, something that actually happened.

Then you can change it.

Grains of Sound

An exchange between two young men overheard while walking downtown: 

"What do you listen to?"*

*(Actually, what I think the inquisitor, who had a thick Russian accent, said was, "What do you listen?" which is a much different question & a much better one at that. I also suspect that he didn't know the person he was asking---just pulled up on his bicycle next to a stranger with headphones.)

He received the safe, evasive answer: "Oh, everything."

Well, yes. We hear everything. In a manner of speaking (listening), this is true.

We hear everything, though isolating only small pieces---clutching small handfuls of sand from the beach of ambiance, tones rescued or washed away by the waves---yet every grain of sound escapes our grip, to return to the cacophony where one grain means nothing but many encompass the shore. Our toes impress upon the soundscape, concretizing vibrations. Echoes.

E{{{{ECHO}}}}O

E{{{ECHo}}}O

E{{ECho}}O

E{Echo}O

EechoO

EchO

O

Photograph

Old photographs are leaves. 

We trace the subject down the bark of their history & into the past

where the branches of previous possibility appear like prints in a darkroom.

Photographs fade, just like potential.