Adrift in the ocean

You are walking. A drifting amoeba in the ocean awash. The brisk inner city streetscape passes, chroma-keyed in through your movie’s iris lens. Sun glass shields protection from uncomfortable eye contact in morning light after late night recovery from lack of sleep time.

You are navigating human traffic and commercial push media. On screen data billboards connect you to the sphere, everywhere. Digital text displayed teleprompter style updates your mindspace to the latest newsfeed novelty. Three minute cycles of news-bytes. Fast food information, no nutritious thought.

Your in-pocket microphone keeps you mobile but connected to the satellite’s orbit. A network of voices at the end of numbers. You look at its video-display, empty of message or TV it sits on its GPS screensaver, visualising coordinates of your geo-position in case you ever happen to feel lost...

Your ears are wearing sound muffler/amps. Subtle orb-like ear-phones that fit softly into your lobes, playing audio from your mobile’s in-built digital radio. The street is a motion graphic to this soundtrack of electronic beats, chosen by DJ Anonymous in another country. Every surface is media. Business signage and graffiti artistry decorate the avenue. Logos and neon attractors steal your involuntary visioning. On the pavement chalk drawn poetry talks of earth beneath the concrete. Clothes of all fashioning float past carrying words and phrases. Faces blend. Pretty girls and busy consumers. Homeys in groups and hippies on bikes. Corporate uniforms and homeless rags waiting for trams. Mid-riffs and piercings. Multiculture and monoculture side by side. A million dimensions interacting in the form of individuals pass by like strings of culture personified. Brainstems and memories, inhabiting bodies over lifetimes. Organisms of intelligence. You are one too. Immersed in human ecology.

Last night you surfed codeworlds of binary. The ocean of information we all live within. You are still there, even as you walk. Your mind is still wading through the data it downloaded via retinal scans from cathode screen to synapse node. Memory sorted internally. Your consciousness floating in and out of thought overflows. Virtual reality travels with you even away from the machines that were made to host it.

They say time is shortened with every space conquered. Speed is power. Information is weaponry for and against your intellect. Love is healing. But time is shorter and shorter. Hyper-capitalism stole it. We bought it back, not even realising the swindle. Eager for experiences sold to us as commodity. Hungry for distractions from our real work life. There are so many jobs to do on this planet. The ones that are worthless are paid. The ones that seem meaningful only voluntary. Is that inevitable?

Now you are in body, in clothes, traveling pavement in the physicality. The world is pressing up against your bubble, sliding off and around. Light curls. You pass through it, elsewhere, caught up in stories and media-bytes of another land. Another world of earthlings. A war fought in your country’s name. Collective disembodied representation of your region, community and history. A political entity armed with votes and military firepower. Led by a man you didn’t vote for, and whose regime you fight with every act of evolu-tion. ‘The Terror’ they call it in the mainstream feed links, propaganda voice for the Empire. But every war is terror. That’s another reality. Mediation separates but also transport you there. You think of Marlon Brando’s mantra as Captain Kurtz: ‘The horror. The horror.’ The Apocalypse is Now.

Cameras owned by corporate journalist copyrights send you 3D video feed from the reality TV show they made about invasion and promoted like an action movie premiere. Tanks and metal birds have become the stars of the spectacle performance. The machinery of warfare overtakes the debate as to whether or why they must be used at all. Last month the world came together against this, and it didn’t change anything. Now all the protests seem hollow. I heard someone call it ‘compassion fatigue’ as the audience sits back in to its role. In the marketplace of novelty the machinery of atrocity has become commonplace. Another headline amidst celebrity gossip and sporting persona sound-bytes. But you don’t want to be desensitised to reality. You want to be conscious, even though it hurts.

Today the ink is still drying on the paper that will describe it. Blood is still being spilled, but you can’t see it. You know it is happening, but must concentrate on the here and now as well. Money is short. Your hungry stomach calls for work and concentration. In the back of your mind you remember your father is sick, dying of cancer sticks abusive. You want to be with him too, but can’t put your life on hold either. You are missing the luxury of your lover’s limbs. She is elsewhere too. An absence of gravity, leaving you groundless.

Suddenly the idea of tears escape you. You rub dry eyelids and forehead like you are trying to push out the thoughts. Tiring of this uncomfortable feeling. Somehow you are implicated and you don’t like it. So you erect shields against these thoughts to concentrate. The now. The here. You project a psychic bubble to protect you from the constancy of overload, from the barrage of the information feed, from your own thoughts and distractions. You desensitise yourself. Train your eyes to ignore. But in doing so, you miss the sublime details too. You don’t want to just walk through this avenue of spectacle for the sake of it, but that is all it seems to want you to do. Billboard big brothers don’t encourage our spiritual selves. Why would they? Does it sell?

You keep walking. From every angle information hits you like distraction from the places you need to be in your mindfulness. You balloon your psychic bubble. Toughened with experience and resolve. Push these thoughts away from the forefront of mind’s eye. Trying to find a direction. A purpose for this journey of time, besides the process of aging.

The clear mind.

~

Written in 2004 by Timothy K Parish.

First published in Undergrowth Magazine and The Book of Portals