21st century

The oppression of language (two poems)

 

 

 

 

The following two poems explore the human need to express everything we experience and the impossibility of absolute correspondence between lived experience and our descriptions.  I wonder why we cannot contain the purity of experience in ourselves without exchanging it for the artificial-reality of words and symbols. Wouldn’t it be better to leave the flux to itself while we join in its silent (nonverbal) dance in an ahistorical frenzy? For what are our conversations but a miniature-history of the world and our lives? Must mankind be forever trapped in the webs of a descriptive situation? What’s the need to define place, time, mood, thoughts, hopes and expectations?

 

 

Is life too great for anyone to bear alone that we must reduce its intensity and infinity to the limited bounds and finiteness of language? 

 

If we cease to communicate (purge) life could we die from an overdose of life itself?

 

 

 

 

 

These are the dry leaves of the 21st century
Falling upon our feet that coil
A path as snakes on a dune of sand

These are the subway noises
Under the surface of our routine
Where are our shouts of ecstasy?

These are the ripples of passion
Unborn embrace of earthly bliss
We are one catastrophe away from paradise

These are the memoirs of all power-lines
Showering us with light of illusion
Approaching twilight for today’s relics 

These are the end-products of pleasure
Fascination with the wonders of plastic
And a what-for question left unanswered

 These are the dry days of the 21st century

 

 

 

 

 Fetch me nature’s product in a plastic bag
While this blue-eyed kid stares at me
As I dance to the melody of pure purposelessness 

 Talk to me about an Asian photograph
While this train takes me to your hometown
As I write lines of life’s ineffability

Promise me there is a higher plan
While I grow old with laughter
As I adjust my twisted underwear

Abandon me for taking the trivial for the profound
While the grass is still wet outside
As I swear life’s grandeur is best unexpressed

Contemporary observations

If Kafka’s works became so renown for expressing a sort of futility in life, a conformist frustration with the operations of society; it must be a sign that people have shared in this same suffering. Each generation must have some idiosyncrasy that the most representative writers get to explore and express. What peculiarity belongs to the early years of the 21st century? It’s hard to imagine any human ever devoid of The Search, a hunt for something, whatever it may be—considering we are desiring animals. So desire (fulfilled or frustrated) will always be playing a role, but the conditions where it arises are different each time. Our age’s most predominant traits are the expansion of technology, communication and the understanding of the cosmos through science. Everybody still eats, sleeps, fucks, travels, watches sports, marries, gets divorced, believes in God or no god. The difference now is the scope of our vision, enlarged by the aid of technology and science. There is still uncertainty in what the ideal politics should be (not unlike the Cold War era), and the optimal economic doctrines (aren’t the world poverty rates an alarming setback in our hopes for the success of a free market economy?). Life nowadays is an acceleration of pleasure. Society rears a career-hunting crowd TRUSTING in the utopia of happiness through material well-being. How long will it last, will natural resources outlive our greediness? Or will human immoderation cause the demise of our consumerist ideals when global warming or another oil crisis takes hold of the world? And when we turn to the individual’s inner life can we claim we have gained greater interior harmony with the easily accessible pleasures that technological entertainment affords us?

We… post-postmodernists?

Our Age is too near to get sight of its boundaries, it is too early to understand its misconceptions. We are too dogmatic in our denial of dogma, absolutely certain in the impossibility of absolute truth. We refuse categorization, even the relativistic classification nauseates us with its blatant inaccuracy. We have exhausted the map of the expected, we have sailed off the edge of objectivity. Is there enough courage at last to tear open the last unexamined convictions?

 

Science has detonated such a bright flash in the sky of our conceptions, it left us bleakly trembling under the paleness of the explainable.  Our lust craves for some personal knowledge beyond the downpour of communication.  Yet, we are still too philosophical in the claim that philosophy is futile and irrelevant, too logical while we humiliate the world into meaninglessness.

 

Every man has always been in error. We scrutinize the lack of breadth in antiquity, humans living under the conditions of necessity. But has the wealth of leisure begotten any real savory experience of the magnitude of the universe? Do we not still live under the dining lamp, stuff our heads with hamburgers and neglect the vastness of space and time only to idle hours of curiosity?

 

Do we prefer to stand still in opposition to progress or move frantically to and fro in opposition to linearity? Is there much to gain in opposing the current of history? Does the weight of our question collapse under our temptation to doubt?

 

Why do we seek definition?  How can we induce our subjective universe to submit to our words before we have been able to glance it all? Existence is too chaotic to wear the stale garment of adjectives and deductions. Whatever we seek – if we seek anything at all – lies beyond the fortress of definition.

 

Let the living eyes of the future bury us with their dead words,

                                                for we will be by then … dead things.