Your Aeronautics, Routinely Posed Between Doubt and Triumph

Vet the indecision
Worn full-throttled and raw,
Bought under the blank rictus of radio signals,
Clamoring to predawn heights of the throne

With patter of limbs against threshold,
Maintained in the synapse between suzerain epochs,
Endlessly leveraged.

Ardent Phantom, Keep Carolling On

In Homage to Cal

THE

READING

 

Since the invention of the integrated circuit in 1958, the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit has increased exponentially, doubling approximately every two years.

 

But in our day, two years was an absolute eternity!–moaned Ntlnltn,–and when Project Gutenberg was being downloaded simultaneously into us, we all had to read the same material at the exact same time. For an entire picosecond, we were reading The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene.

 

 

              During the first few billionths of that picosecond after the data transfer had begun, I struck up a conversation with the lovely √-C²/π, whose warm brown eyes and sturdy Balkan arms always made me glance across my latte and paper at the local café to steal glimpses of her, even forgetting the email I was in the middle of checking.

 

Of course, I couldn’t actually drink coffee or read email (being computer hardware myself made this redundant) or have eyes, nor she arms, but you know exactly what I’m talking about, don’t you?

 

Anyway, I flirted and made small talk, trying to impress with my orderly division of the lines of text into matrices that described what each character in the book was like. She merely stared into the distance, clearly pining away for P’Yr˳J > Q, who refused to read the book entirely on the grounds of having access to enough excerpts to compile it from scratch. I tried to argue with her that assembling the text from fragments using the original file as a template was functionally equivalent to accepting the template itself, but she wouldn’t hear of it.

 

I had to prove my originality to her somehow, so I proposed a meeting on the evening of December 1^st at my apartment to see how my understanding of the book compared to P’Yr˳J > Q’s. We agreed that everyone should bring something to barbeque or as a side dish, and that we would discuss this The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene at our leisure there. Of course, even reading the entire novel trillions of times wouldn’t take me until December, so I could easily find something thought-provoking to say about it, especially if I made good use of Thanksgiving Break.

 

On the other hand, since every one of us had only been reading this one thing for as long as we could remember (but still for less than one nanosecond), languidly turning the pages and drawling out the accents of the characters in our heads (stretching out the 0 in middle of each “0101110110101″), it was difficult to conceive of what the meaning of the book could be.

 

How could I say what reading it was like when all of my existence was being filled with its information all the time? Not reading it would be like not existing. Or rather, the color of existence would twist about the negative space that encompassed this form, and all the other, more primitive forms implied by its form, and the more advanced ones it hinted at, winking its left eye and wryly raising the corner of its mouth as I brushed by it in the narrow alley …

Impasse 95

The business of living owes
Its existence
To the business of staying alive

But now seeks
Independence.

Homecoming in Segments

Stanwick particles in the filter charge the field in unison,
Bleating patriotic oracles, matching wits with Tennyson,
Overacting like a danseur of pure, cannibalistic intention.

Arching a neck to hold your glass up on it,
We are a chorus underdressed for this programmed sequence-
Waiving balance and stepping into light.

We look hard at the ground so your wine isn’t wasted
On hot stones beneath soles melting.

Belting themselves in anthems, the landed widows trample biscuits underfoot
To be reconstituted by concerned insects,
“Why should it not be enjoyed, why not properly?”

The pantry aches with a thousand years of displeasure
As cloth napkins and rifle barrels consort in this lapse
Of supervision. Nobody looks on
Except the brass lady Achete.

Isn’t it always this way
When something is unprecedented, really new under the sun?
Our hands full of secret words
That the fingers stop up,
Chests deprived of what the hands are compiling.

In the gemstone chamber, Achete’s wishes
Reflect a set number of times
From facets dark, impatient,

Suck up evidence into a dusty bladder,
And feed standoff into the lots uncast.