Digits in the Digital Realm

It's been a long time since my fingers tapped the keyboard, hoping to share a thought or two with the digital world.  This does not necessarily mean that the woman who claims to live forever suddenly died.  No chance.  

One wonders how long a blog can sustain its original intent. I notice many of my friends from a year ago are either gone totally, or, like I, have lost the ability to maintain regular postings.  I can't speak for them, but for me, I must say the inspiration hasn't left me, but I have been suffering, acutely, the demands placed upon anyone who works in an industry (ha! Education. ha!) where the employer is trying harder and harder to get fewer workers to do more work for less.  End of excuses.  The intent of my blog isn't gone either; it was and is to talk about life and eternity.  Well, what the hell, there has to be more to say about that, though it may come through a different perspective now.  Here's what tumbled out of my fingers today.  It's not a prophecy.  It's not my best work either.  But I think it's funny, in a way.

*

We've lived past the end of time,

and into a time when days are endless;

when pain stabs so deep that it is

painless, and you and I 

live in the digits

of a realm ethereal.

I'll meet you at the cyber cafe

at the intersection of Mars

and Lars (a lusty

sailor who came into port one day

only to get lost

in the stars) .  There

I'll sit drinking vodka, wearing a 

retainer designed to keep my 

knees from dropping.  It's best that way.

I know you came

to my door and rang and knocked

more than once, you even shouted, and I hid

on the third floor and watched you

from my window walk away.  You 

should know better.  Don't

come back another day.  Instead, book

mark me on your smartphone; in this domain,

don't go away.  Here, I linger always,

answer feedback, 

and replay.

Tomorrow, yesterday, and today.

Ghost Radar

So I have this thing called

"Ghost Radar"

on my iPhone.

( spudpickles )

And

whether or not it's a legitimate way

to find ghosts

is under some debate.

However, mine is quite active.

What it does, see,

is it spits out words.

I can fully understand the critique

that the thing is just

"spitting out random words."

It does appear that way.

Though I will admit that

on more than a few occasions,

the Ghost Radar

has responded to the situation

appropriately.

Consider,

for instance, 

the time I sat down to eat

this delectable lamb chop

and salad and rice,

and the Radar was on,

and it said:

Yum!

Or the fact it keeps

identifying itself

when I turn it on at work

as the man whose

tenure track line

I filled.

He vacated it

by dying,

by the way.

Oh, well,

Right?

Coincidence,

yes!

**

Several months,

while I was sitting

and playing

my guitar,

I had the radar out,

and it spat out these words:

Broke

Ourselves

Consonant

Jet

Younger.

Now, what the hell is that?

You might wonder.

Random words.

Random or no,

I used them as the basis for a poem

(by me)

and here that poem

is:

Brokeourselvesconsonantyounger

Broke ourselves in two

consonant to the power

of the jet that propelled us,

younger,

                          backwards,

                                               with no glances

                                                    save

                                            the last ones

                                                                                that we shared.

I believe there was

something real

        despite

                         the odds stacked against us ---

I believe there was

love

                             like neither of us

                       felt possible.

(by Makropoulos --

if you're going to cut

& paste that,

please keep the line

by Makropoulos!)

* * *

The words after that,

by the way,

were:

Sound

Pot

Casey

Italian

unit

Now honestly,

I could do nothing

with them.

Random Words

Makropoulos's birthday

(click on this cake for a fabulous website for Children's Cakes!)

`/.

So, it's true --

Makropoulos had her birthday,

about a week ago.

I almost didn't tell you,

because,

well, 

being 425

is a bit embarrassing.

Hell, that means

you don't even need to use 

single years to count your age:

you could use

1/4 centuries.

Seriously.

Using QtCs

the time period by which folks like me can most efficiently

remember our ages,

I am

17 QtCs

old.

Now, I'll tell ya,

that sounds a hell of a lot better than

admitting to

425 years.

From this point on,

I'm 17 QtCs old,

old.

Now, if you determine my age in a system

by which

I could divide my age

by 50 year periods,

well,

those being

HfCs,

well, 

I'm

8 1/2 HfCs.

Of course, 

I could just go to a system

whereby

I count by

centuries,

and then I'm a mere

4 CNTRs,

because a 1/4 CNTRs

isn't worth 

counting.

In that case,

I'm really

in my infancy,

and have every right

to act like a child.

Right?

~/. >

On my birthday

eve,

I did a channelling,

and boy,

was it nuts.

I can't even begin

to explain it.

So I'm not going to post it.

Or. . . . .

. . . . . . . maybe

I'm going to post it

after I post 

this one.

Because it's

absolutely

unexpected and illogical.

gooo figure

we're talking:

A chic who says

she's 425 years old,

and

she channels,

and she's saying

it's absolutely illogical.

Well, the whole damned thing

is absolutely

illogical

which is why

I fight with it:

this ability

to give my body

and my head

over

to some other entity -- not me.

( examiner.com )

Please believe me:

I am good.

Utterly good.

No other force

can channel

through me

except a good force.

I have that

on God's word,

in God's name.

That's the truth.

. . . and . . .

I'm 425 years old

this week.

Fingerlips: a love note

1.

 

My fingers are my lips

as they curl over these keys

trembling with the desire to make contact,

to speak, to even cast a smile

towards you,

who take the time to glance 

or even linger longer

here with me.

But if no words come to me,

well,

you see nothing.

You think I am other wise occupied

perhaps working

perhaps talking

perhaps flirting 

with some living, breathing creature

Don't believe that.

You

are my current lover--

you who listen;

you who read.

Anywone who comes here

and tries to puzzle

together the parts

I perform here for you:

I am devoted to you.

2.

This space, this tiny sliver

of the virtual domain

is always on my mind,

and I regularly sort through

my thoughts, seeking

the one

worthy of being spoken 

here,

for you.

It is as if my mindwere its own virtual domain.

The strand that this

Makropoulos

occupies is glimmering and timeless.

The rest of my mind these days is so cluttered

with timebound tasks

that insist they must be done

NOW

And then a day or two later,

I look back at those tasks

that demanded such immediate attention,

and - if I can remember what they were -

I ask myself:

Was that really such an insistent task?

Was it even necessary?

Usually, the answer is no.

The most necessary thing we

have to do

is live fully and love each other,

and treat as holy

the bodies - those earthly avatars -

that we have chosen to use

while in this domain that demands

that we be flesh.

Only THAT

must be our most insistent task.

the beginning of the end of my stories

I tend to feel that humans are a bit like cats. As T.S. Elliot helps us see, cats all have that jellicle name, that name that captures their essence and is their true name. Humans rarely name their cats by their jellicle name, because, quite frankly, we don't take the time to get to know them before we name them. Same with kids.

Makropoulos is really just a character in a story that was originally written by Karol Capek, in a play called "The Makropoulos Case." This was later made an opera by Leos Janacek, which of course I have sung in many times. I like singing my own story. The last time I saw it - yes, literally saw it from a seat in the audience - was at the English National Opera, sometime in the 1990's. It struck me than, as I watched someone up there performing the character that is me, that I have become somewhat frozen in time, and yet, look how the theatre itself has changed! My own changes have not been external. I've just continued to gather information, through novels and essays and poetry and plays and newspapers and magazines, and radio and television and movies and now the internet. And whether I like it or not, that information is all related to a similar modest theme, that being the meaning of life. Of my life? Yes, in a way. But I think I realized very early on that my own life is of very little consequence in the larger scheme of things, though I can make it meaningful for myself, and I've tried to do that. The real challenge has been to make it meaningful in a way that it's also meaningful for others.

This blog is my most recent attempt to make my life meaningful, or to capture all the meaning I've gathered over my 424 years, and to put it into some logical sequence. Yes, that's right, I've been around for at least 424 years - or at least those are the years I remember. I remember, for instance, Shakespeare. He was a skinny little runt of a man, not much to look at. But pompous and confident - and that was what made women fall for him. He thought all women loved him, and to be true, I did for a time. But he was sloppy, way too sloppy for me, both in and out of bed. And, as you might imagine, he talked way too much, and treated his wife like crap. But I'm here to tell you now that he did create most of those plays, though the actual language was often the product of a game he played with some of the other actors, like Burbage and Alleyn. Sometimes Ben Jonson came along for the fun of it, though most of the wordsmiths were actors. And there was a woman - not Shakespeare's sister, as Virginia Woolf imagined - but a woman nonetheless. Her name was Liza, as I recall, though everyone called her Val. I never really asked why.

But that was way too long ago to dwell on it. I am here, now, in 2009. A most trepidatious year. Everyone seems to be frightened - of the economy, of the weather, of the earth, of themselves. I do feel I've come to an end, perhaps an end of my life, perhaps an end of life as we know it, perhaps just an end, packed with all the hopefulness of a new beginning. Everything I see seems to be aware of the endings around us, and the changes that come with them.

I could make myself miserable thinking about endings, and - quite frankly - sometimes I do. However, I force myself to be more optimistic. There is a new beginning beyond the ending, even if that beginning is the beginning of an eternal, sweet, silence. It's something, and if nothing exists, than silence is something. It has form and dimension, when cast against the platform of nothing.

But I diverge. . . . I must tell you of a dream I had, about six years ago, and that marked, for me, the beginning of the beginning . I don't know if I can truly categorize it as a dream, except for the fact that it happened at night. What it really was was a voice, and it wasn't the first time I had hear this voice. Let me tell you.

I heard it first around 1984, when I was living in my grandmother's house, shortly after her death. My father's death preceded hers by a few years. I was always a bit of a loner, but a pleasant one. And dating back to my childhood, I had this horrible tendency to have premonitions or visions. Dead people would appear in my dreams and give me messages for the living. When this voice came to me in the 80's, my premonitions had subsided a little. But there I was, sleeping in my grandmother's bed, when a voice ripped me out of my slumber with one statement: "we are entering a new era."

The statement itself did not appall me. I was about to go off to begin my M.A., so I figured it was pretty much a personal message, though I really did find the voice to be quite creepy. It did not come from me. It came from outside of me. It hovered over me, like a protective mother over her child. Its tone was deep and cavernous.

I'll honestly tell you that, until I heard the voice again, in 2004, I hadn't thought that much about it. But then I heard it again. This time, I was in New York State, and it was the first weeks of my new job there. I was comfortable for the most part, and vere excited about the new position. And I was sleeping.

Suddenly, during the early morning hours, a voice - the same voice - ripped me from my sleep. The voice was deep, as I said, and it sounded terrifically hollow. It also seemed to be straining to produce itself, as if it needed ana apparatus, with a throat, to creat the sound it needed to make. The sound, too, seemed to be coming out of a skeleton, like ti was pushing itself through an impossible aparatus, in order to b e able to speak and make words.

What was shocking, though, was the news it gave:

"Jesus will come as the scholar on the four days of the grid."

I woke up, right away, and wrote it down, then went back to sleep, hoping it would continue, and tell me, for instance, what the grid is, or who Jesus would be. It said nothing more.

I went to a psychic and explained the message to him. He said it was probably personal. The Jesus it referred to is the Jesus in me. OK, fine, that works (I thought.)

I forgot the message for a little while, but not long. It was just too odd of a message, and the voice that bore it was so urgent. Whenever I try to explain that voice, I think about it this way: it was a compulsion to speak. But to speak requires an apparatus. So somehow the compulsion to speak found some form of semi-physical apparatus, and the words tore through it, as they might through a skull or a boney aperture. Thus, the voice itself is hollow, almost the negative image of a voice.

Anyway, I eventually found myself thinking about the message again, and especially a couple of its key words: the Grid and/or the Age of the Grid. Jesus. The scholar.

It seems the term "the grid" has been in popular usage for a little while, and, in particular,it has come to refer to electronic media, We have companies called "National Grid," and the phone service is on a grid. Grids surround us.; they help us make life manageable.

And then there is the matter of Jesus, an image who many people on this planet feel they have a personal relationship with. But do they really know him? What's he like? Will he like candy or ice cream? Will he be a person at all? Or many? Or just an impulse?

And then there's the matter of scholarship. Sophia Knowledge. In the book of Proverbs, wisdom is the most important thing a human can work towards.

Ever since I received that message, I've been pursuing its meaning. I have some ideas. I'll share them with you later. I hope you enjoy them, but alway remember: they are fictions. Even I am a fiction, and a product of fiction.

Thanks for stopping by --