The Archaeology of Virtuality

from Metatronic: an Alchemical Journal (for Robert Kelly) 


The car arrived without a driver. 

~ 

It is only those who have no future to whom the agents of the future come. 

~ 

Dear Angel of Incidence, 

The source for the Pegasus/Mercury paper tape code is "Information Representation and Manipulation in a Computer" by E.S. Page and L.B. Wilson and, yes, that was the impetus, with a nudge from Blackburn's Watchers and a nod to Sappho's 'Fragment 182.' The rest obsessed from that. A simple machine shuffling the flows. Contact human reference that oblique figure cut from the argument (apropos of Atropos and several threads severed, or persevered perhaps, in the process). 

~ 

She appeared to be translucent, faintly silvery and unambiguously briefly leafy, an imperturbable oscillating conundrum. ("Sometimes I wonder where the message begins and the world ends.") The wobbling pivot of that disturbance in air resolved into a sufficiency of indeterminacy, that is . . . the signifying calligraphy is inscrutable. An instruction manual in the form of a riddle or a self-fulfilling epiphany. 

~ 

In the leaves of the trees, lenses . . . and a dangling entanglement, primary circuitry of the time-adjusters. 

~ 

Listening to the dead (mostly). Their music is alien polar silence(s). As for the asphodel and the river of murmuring, memory is random and (mostly) involuntary, that Daphne bit specifically, notwithstanding the keeper of austere ceremony. We drink the bittersweet water and forget. 

~ 

Bitumentation is the enumeration of a deprivation. Interminable contextuality, equal to the measure of obscurity. We are more than the sum of our seeming. 

~ 

The divination is in the (living) syntax. 

Monaural Vortex, or Early Onset Nostalgia

PASTORAL LOGIC                                    for Clark Coolidge

I surfed through this nuworld this afternoon 
and it was shiny, noisy, clean and intact 
as brass tacks clasped in memory stacks, as 
phantoms on bicycles pedal soft into ruined futures. 

The earth unscrolled in folds beneath the furrows 
of human endeavour, though old not much wiser 
as if nothing had happened to turn in alarm 
from casually irrational acts and predatory charm. 

I passed the fields of crushed red brick 
where a viral sky shed fat flakes that vanished 
into robin's-egg blue smooth to the touch 
yet intricate as ice rimed upon grimy windows.