this pen is unpredictable
this poem has not been created.
Don’t even think of gliding your eyes
across its body of text
This poem is liberated
you shan’t grab it
with your nets of semantics, semiotics, or semi-psycho analysis
This poem is no phenomenon
it is event-less
it has no horizon.
This poem is you, my dear,
ultimately freed of criticism or reverence.
animasuri’13
20 February 2013, Beijing
A Belgian in Beijing
At five in the morning everyone I used to know
lives in the past
This time is a realm of tranquility
I imagine a grand relationship
as I envision to be their truthsayer
I see their future;
if ever so shortly;
if ever so mundane:
I know their world–at the opposite of the globe–
shall not end.
At five A.M. even Beijing is breathing
it is the avantgarde whispering:
“We still are to continue our course.”
While Beijing outs its sleepless ones
Brussels by night slowly slides in sleep
At this fine time at five
everyone I used to know is
–for the briefest of moments–
unreceptive
to the overture of a day about to march onto them.
A day I have lived.
A source I have signed off on.
They shall be circumvented
by the stories I have lived,
circulating in the resonances
of that pre-destined day.
Or, shall that day’s sun
–that wakens on to me–
betray me
and lay down its arms
leaving buddies slain
in a perpetual history?
Indeed, the sun shall be at the center
of their day
–fueled by melancholy–
not I
I’ll but live in its future-past
peacefully reminding myself
it’s five ten now
animasuri’13
Beijing 20 February, 2013
Not See, Not Hear, Not Speak…
The Three Rhetorical Monkeys are PATHOS, ETHOS and LOGOS.
a pseudo-graph showing linguistic attributes on its two axes: “Standards In Death” versus “Impressionist Statistic in Units of Black and White”.
The idea arose during my daily dose of world radio programs offered by an established broadcaster. I heard reports of various global conflicts and struggles. Those touching the heart are often those that seem to involve some fatal ending to one or other of the main actors in these more-than-stories.
These stories, intangible and beyond the walls that enclose my mind, pull my sense of empathy between that of alienating storytelling and personal calls for action. This mechanism is fueled by the struggle between subjectivity and objectivity. The latter has been of ongoing interest to me.
Such struggle, I believe, is most sensitive within journalistic work. Arguably scientific endeavors too (involving verifiable and falsifiable data and processes) require objectivity as well as rigorousness. These are however ideally established within controlled environments; such as a laboratory. On the other hand, linguistic chemistry, such as catalyzed by journalistic research and on-the-spot reporting across media and global broadcasting systems, can affect large communities in very immediate manners and in degrees of high individual connotation.
Death is traumatic yet it is part of the holistic process of becoming. How is it spoken of? How does it affect the identity and story related to the deceased? How does it affect those inflicted with grief? How do individuals and communities realize and box the reality of such quasi variations of death?
Why is social status associated with “assassination” or simply with being “killed?” How come the word “butchered” has been used for both women or children as well as cattle? What makes an enemy crush-able as bugs have been referred to?
This visual poem—poetically transmediating data visualization into poetic freedoms—is entitled “Standards in Death.” It plays with the perceived superficiality in the reporting of profound events yet also unearths a hint of a linguistic pattern; a subjective association due to repeated association of one verb with one life, creating an objectified reality.
Standard in Death
The man of status was assassinated
The man of war has fallen
The man of age has passed on
The man of the streets was murdered
or simply killed
The man of enemies was crushed
the bugs too
The woman and child were butchered
the cattle too
The innocent were massacred
each finds their reported standard in death
animasuri’13
Beijing
Art appropriation via deviation, or differently put, transmediation. A poetic exploration of art history by means of a computer screen shot. Is it anachronistic? Is it a surreal juxtaposition? Beyond the distractions of any perceived or superficial narrative it rather shows a lack of linguistics, an absence of historic continuation. It reveals a skeumorphic warp into a digitized reshaping: to an abstract of virtually all visual language, all art history, all logic, all subjectivity and objectivity. Therefore, that what embodies all, embodies nothing. It is a time-framed light-sensitive grid.
I stumbled on Keith Aggett’s work while studying the online culture surrounding the technique of vertoramas. In short; he’s a photographic zen master. He made me think of a category I have baptized as “peaceful digitizations”: a category under which I will post digital or digitized media that have offered me an aura of peace.
