WHEN EVERYTHING'S RANDOM

When everything’s random; is anything ever awry? Every river’s going to make the sea; so what river’s flowing the wrong way, even if it ends in a desert like a beached whale of salt being carved up by the locals? And whose life among us is somebody’s else’s starmap? Whose constellation isn’t the cut of their sail? Success, an ultimate failure; failure, an unanticipated success, no face is a bad portrait, no hand fuller or emptier than another, no eye, an illegal immigrant to the seeing, a tunnel under the border of anything. Why live in a palace of billboards and pop-ups like a jack-in-the-box, where your vital signs have become a product key of microdiesels and digits that could deactivate your system if the coupling in the lock proves false, and nothing exists until it is electronically spermed on the wall of the one-eyed womb of the t.v.? Do you thumb through the computer like a recipe-book of spells, as if the cauldron were a god who could choose its magician and vision to throw down the snake that will eat yours whole as if it were your mind? Junkie. Dazzle. Data. The moonlight is the frost of a white eclipse, and there’s a card our disconnected roots are looking for to network with the rain. And the roads and the riverbeds and the mindstreams we might have taken, the transformations we might have undergone, left to surf our own feelings and thoughts, to browse our own beings for insights in the woodlots that don’t need a mouse and a pad, are left to explore your absence like an understudy of the view. What was forgotten when we learned to write; what will be forgotten now that we can overclock the light? You are the cauldron, the wand, the summons and the vision; your life is the spell you cast over everything. Why forego the greater tree of the divining, the one the lightning hits like a fast dose, for the little stick that goads you through the labyrinth looking for the eye of the needle like the stray thread of your own unravelling? It’s not the ghost of the content that matters the seed into growing, but the mode of the knowing that shapes the flowing. Panes et circenses, sed quis custodes custodiet? Bread and circuses, but who watches the watchers playing us on the other side of the screen like the upgraded vessels of the merchant marine that port and traffic and trestle our bloodstream, the new fishermen, spiders in bubbles, bending and mending the spaces and faces under the veils of their nets, not out to catch souls or fish this time, or to bleed the ocean with slaughter, but the water, so that when a fish swims they prescribe the seas, and when a bird flys it downloads the skies they freely move it through, unspooling the birthcord of the kite that’s tethered to their windows, everything ready and feathered for flight, and a weathervane to cue the wind which way, which way to blow the measured seed to the binary field that serves the sowing of the morphology of our knowing.

PATRICK WHITE