Opsceticism: : Crystal Dreams VII

This was motivated by walking outside this morning - here in Kendall Square, Cambridge, Ma - and I was just waking up, and thinking that sometimes just stepping outside your own door gives you the courage to write something. Thanks Ms. Estabrook.

And also - if this helps - I was reading recently:
"If the language seems logoclastic, then one must change one's way of reading it, so that what seems broken will be whole."
John M. Bennett ("The Blank Generation: An American Avant Garde," 2002.)

Heady sim stuff, heading into a prismatic future.

this was really good.

And Kate (wicked Kate - taming Kate), you've been round here these parts forever and know this is actually a rather straightforward peice for me.

Thanks Deanna.

Wow Will, great one. I take the title to be a hybrid of "op" and aceticism, but I'm happy to be corrected. As such, we search in visual ways to provide quality to our pain, to our experience. Your magnificent poem ends with the visual cascade of pure water falling mixed with the perception of forgetting how it can do that... fall. That is a brilliant crystallization of thought (to steal a phrase)

Hey Ed, the title was just made up from Optical and Asceticism - and was spur of the moment, dude - as I said - and you know - raining like hell today, and thought about that as I ran to the market to get eggs and such, and came back to write that

In order to move past a coruscating cultural present moment that shocks and seduces, but offers nothing of substance, that is to say, the pastiche Zeitgeist that is postmodernism, Will takes a vision of rain in Kenmore square and maps it for us as a metaphorical taking off place for a new visionary art movement that replaces many false quests at once with an intricate patterning of his own consciousness projected on the world. The Romantics also flung self onto water--so many poems from Wordworth to Coleridge to Byron to Nerval to Lautreamont, the maddest of all, share the archetypal image of the poet on a cliff, contemplating the waves and seeing the futility of self in the world, the Weltschmertz meme explicitly stated, and then buried in subsequent art movements from modernism to postmodernism, from Frankenstein to AI cyborg dreams.
Will brings it back to ordinary consciousness. Will keeps the world real. Will wants the zero moment of pre-Simulationism dawn to map itself without apotheosizing despair.
I like it!