POSSIBLE WORLDS (Epilogue Written Amid the Ruins)

He was a young man, here to cut up a National Geographic,

to come to another destination, maybe the double life of avant-garde earth stations, and shopping

anywhere, any time.

“How can it be solved?”

Now, because this world, this world of electronic satellite communications

is a poor river,

a closed-loop of the monstrous, monotonous, across which

we move incessantly, cheeks with thorny sticks and charged with promise,

at least in part, the world’s greatest

you is crushed for industrial use,

what a way to go,

an ode to a stalk of the urban proletariat.

Born of Kings and Stars.

I made ‘Possible worlds’ in 2022. But my obsession with the image is longer lived, snaking all the way back to a day in the early 1980s when I found the National Geographic from which I stole the base image in a sleepy second hand bookstore in Hurstville, Sydney.

The image is from 1969. It represents the then stunning view of automation and what-not coming in the near future. I recall being somewhat fascinated and disappointed that the 1970s and 80s I grew up in bore only a passing resemblance to such images of a happy, technological future.

Jump forward a few decades and all that remains of that issue is the much cut-up and cut-out remnants. Indeed, this base image, which I had rescued from the bin and stuck together (it was originally a two page spread), was itself showing its age–or at least its wear. The left side is the result of my immaculate archiving.

The base image has been subtly altered. The poem, screed, etc., that accompanies it is composed of choice words and phrases taken from the abundant results of industrial cultural production. It is featured in a recent zine of poems I published in 2022: sexpoem. I will make a pdf available of this in a few days. But in the meantime, check out this review of said zine by Gerald Keaney.

The last two lines, “an ode to a stalk of the urban proletariat. Born of Kings and Stars” is as much about me as it is about you. We all find ourselves the unfortunate denizens of a proletarian age, in which capital, capitalism, the commodity-spectacle, what have you, has either made us over into the proles it needs to produce and consume , or–once ruined or rendered superfluous to capital’s needs–so much human material carelessly thrown onto the scrapheap. Perhaps a more sane future will realize the melancholic truth of this era: it is a proletarian age in which even stupid capitalists are reduced to mere appendages of powers they barely understand.

Perhaps one day we will build a suitably pathetic Statue For A Proletarian Age–not in commemoration, but only to recall the living nightmare that briefly and disastrously took hold before the dawn of a truly human society.

A world that still remains to be built.

This has been another Collage Tuesday post on Wednesday…