consuming fictions

 

 CONSUMING FICTIONS

 

The fiction that old people are aged to perfection inspires belief in the inevitable cruelty, stress, and depression people endure day to day or year to year or in short or long spans in claims of humanity.

2020 cast a universal shroud.

2021 makes uninvited progress.  It maximizes raw fear, terrorism in many guises, decline of happiness. We respond by becoming shadow figures of what once we thought we were, the special creations of the Trinity.

 

It is possible to have lucid memory of the way we were, but the effort throws us into absurdity.  It is not possible to possess abundant bliss.  If we make super-human efforts ( enormous leaps of faith )  to enjoy bliss, we fail. We are left to feel we are raisins in the sun and rain. We are weather's collateral damage.

 

Aged to perfection, we suffer as we follow "the science."  And we eventually know "the science" is metafiction.

 

So much death.  So much grief to carry.  So much to lament with friends and relatives as we walk on the shifting surface of a Footbook.  Friends are people with whom we lament without compromising conditions, although some friends prove to be unreliable.  Reliable friends grow smaller in number.

We turn to music and fiction.  Music is the better balm.  So too is writing as a special method of reading unknowns.

 

Under the dispensation of pandemic, we go back to fiction and music, to what  I try to nail in a poem-in-progress ----

 

It floats intact

on the boiling sea --

the iceberg ship of the foolish.

The advent of Eden gets reborn.

People sing surreal tales to survive.

 

The lines are easy.  Enacting the lines is difficult.  Using writing as therapy, I am keenly aware that Richard Wright's novel The Man Who Lived Underground is an example of veillance, surveillance, and sousveillance.  The novel deals with social technologies and social commerce with prophetic force.  Steve Mann's article "Veillance and reciprocal transparency. Surveillance versus sousveillance, AR glass, lifelogging, and wearable computing. "  The article was published in the 2013 proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Socity (ISTAS): Socail Implications of Wearable Computing and Augmediated Reality in Everyday Life, pp. 1-12   [ doi.10.1109/ISTAS 2013.6613094 ] Mann's speculations are presented in the triple-talk of an arrived future.  Clues for the contemporary reading of Wright exist in unexpected places.  The convergence of veillance [plain sight], surveillance [oversight], and sousveillance [undersight] informs the pages of Wright's novel.  In his lifetime, some people listened poorly to Wright; some had the temerity to accuse him of being out of touch with his native land after 1954.  Dogdamn!  The detractors were out of touch.  A fine commentary on their venom is Frank B. Wilderson III's Afropessimism (2020).  We consume fictions and non-fictions to tell ourselves what time it is.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            August 3, 2021