We Are the Post-Moderns

So disembodied yet so appropo. Post everything but now. There could be no post post now for there would always be post post post. Not allowing victory to even merely exist was not as thorough a victory as believed before, that is, when victory on a somewhat naive level was still believed in and lived through.
The dream was always to create the story outside of the story’s knowledge while remaining inside the story’s core. The dream was to sidestep each new passing word to get away from having to be “nailed down.” Acrobats all yet all were fooled by fools for no act of acrobatics, no swerving aside, no soul-looking down-looking away-looking otherwards, could take the post post modern to post post post modern without allowing the entering of the fourth then the fifth etc. etc. etc.
We fight, for lack of a better word, for the better word, because we were taught to by those who were taught to by those who were taught to because some before them could not simply do. The rest of us deem it insane and leave it. The good children wear black and move to new york and never disobey unto death. There will be some great comparison someday we are all so sure about that. Those who know and those who know. All will line up and each will bat an eyelid in a certain way and the other will move a finger just right and one will say to who? God? Ourselves (Capital O)? What? We don’t know. For then we are dead. But we’re not. We’re not! We’re not.
We were called slackers. We were called generation X. Some of us were called Baby Boomers and some of us are simply old now. Was it, after all is said and done, merely insanity? Was the desire to create something new we felt as children a biological necessity that refused to allow our lesser aspects, our minds namely, to have any inkling of? What of the wasted years? What of the pages torn, the words strewn about computer landscapes to no avail, pitiful responses from the leaders of the pack who only know what will sell, who don’t know any longer their own reasons for living, for creating, for being, in a way resounding of non-being, simply to know what it may be like? What then of the hoardes who hold our consciousness captive in books the likes of which will never see our names. Why no socialism of publishing?
Because we do not warrant such gifts of life, such easy planes upon which to sail into better knowledge of ourselves which provide smooth gaits down placid avenues at dusk where light lingers yellow downward upon us like in movie screens where angels of light linger as well but are light and because we are too young to know know in our knowing place that angels contain light, are light, and yet why can’t we? Why can’t we?
Where are the rescuers? We all know that Dante’s Inferno is a metaphor for the deeper recesses of the mind. Our hells are inside of our heads. Whether or not any of it has actual place other than inside creative representation is anybody’s guess. In mythology they recommend that when in the land of the dead please do not stop and help the wretched souls which may cry out to you and, of course, have a nice day. We scream for aid us here in the purple seas where fires boil our knees as our hands red and peeling reach for the only sight we have ever seen. We are the magicians of gore soulical.We are the torch bringers, the lappers of flame, the underwater scarecrows floating like bubbles up to you to be known, to be lifted out of this place and set aloft.
In mythology when things got really bad for a particular person a god would often raise that person into godhood his or her self. That’s what we’re like when we want to be published. At times, those of us who know that much of our writing impetus was spawned originally by mirely muck, lucklessness, downward grins, black nails, quiet lunches alone staring at nothing in particular, deem it necessary to continue our quest for the non-dying of the light. As students we often lay on our beds prostrate in utter dread without even knowing it, for death is symbolic of all that is wrong with our lives and we non-students of mythology are never quite made quite aware of quite the way we should quite handle this quite unseemly and unsettling knowledge quite other than in our veins so that we may become upstanding and, hopefully, quite overly-employed American citizens.
But some of us don’t know how to be this. We don’t know, have never known, how to “join in.” Luckily, we are not in power and since we are the weak link we tend to die off quicker than most. Sometimes, one or two of us is shown appreciation for our intense and seemingly accidental relationship with the darker aspects of, say, (oh, why not) personality. When this happens the rest of us light up like the Fifth Dimension going way up high on their beautiful balloon. But then we come down because we realize it was all just a cruel joke. Every now and then the others who are born with the ability to count numbers, to care in ways useful, throw us a bone because they recognize our humanity. Unfortunately, those bones usually are thrown to those of us creative, darker types who have died of our personal maladies. The Kurt Cobains. The Marilyn Monroes. Do you see just thinking about this how much bullshit is actually inside of us? We are the post moderns. We’ve pushed creativity to its very limits. We’ve accepted that our lives are more important if they can become symbolic. Yet the world has grown so large that we are beginning to recognize that we will die unnoticed and without meaning anyway. Even if we do all the right things artistic. No apologies necessary for rushing here, but there needs to come an end to these words unless somebody takes notice of them soon. For without my reflection I am but a vampire, and being the non- vampire sort of guy I am, simply non-existent and the world being what it is, so quick to withhold pity anymore except for those with the physical type of ailment, I deem it necessary to do what you would have me do anyway: transform.
But if I do this you lose. Better to kill more of the light than to have to take it upon yourself, to add it to your own store of light and thus lose yourself. It is the river that I have almost drowned in, the river that, if I can survive, will have taught me something that you will never know for fear of the overflowing.

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Published in: on September 21, 2009 at 10:42 pm  Leave a Comment  

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