Antique animist thinking used to hold that a shaman was needed to tap tap tap into the spirit plane; to put the visions seen of fever patterns from a twilight nature into words; to bleed unto Filthy sentences.
It’s a cheap kind of Faustian bargain: an interface with the other side but with none of the risk. And, anyway, the devil’s toehold on the world is tenuous at the best: he looks in on the good life as one looks at a daedalum, one static image at a time, and conjuring the rest.
(I say daedalum, though a daedalum is just the name of an early zoetrope, perhaps the first. It just so happens that He prefers the former as it sounds like Dead Alum, which is what so many of those alchemists he bamboozled ended up as).Crickets are chirping by the hidden driveway [a baritone sings, it's surrounded by swamps with green snakey vines]. I approach the sound [the same baritone sings, the crickets are chirping/they stop at my step/I stop my step/and they start up again].
In the end this is all, everything we do, images in a zoetrope: the static is the tweet, the message, the harangue containing three new words and a fourth to start the Filth; the spin comes at the end of the year when we see the efforts of those 365-days spun and with a light shone upon them so we can lament and promise to do better.
Is it enough to show how the nightmare works?
So the people will wake up, is it enough?
Written on Sunday, 6 January 2013