21-12-09 Birdsong
This one’s interesting to me in that over the four years or so since I wrote it, it’s borne itself out as a note about technology incestuously recreating itself and dragging our minds with it. The last two lines of the first burst echoed the jangle and burp of modems connecting, a sound now pretty much as obsolete as the clack of a manual typewriter.
Quite often these bits of writing come from ideas for characters rather than heartfelt trawls of the soul. Tech-speak shapes thought as Orwell’s Newspeak was intended to, and there’s also something here of J G Ballard’s transference of romantic signifiers into a material world informed by the bleak glamour of polypropylene mouldings, arterial motorway traffic-flow and high-rise developments.
Birdsong
Ask not that my mind be still’d in spirit-longing,
Nor that it rest content with Nature for my Muse
Where Clare may scour the hedgerows for an inkling
And Wordsworth get the juice from epiphanic daffs
I don’t do darkling. Or
Whatever Hardy had it thrushes do.
I have a book-and-cd set to show you
What he actually meant. Or we can call up a dotcom;
Download a thrush.
The g-dang-along chirrup of the modem tone
Signing-in, logging-on, is a song we know.
The web we’ve woven, to bang an old conundrum
Like say, nest-building, signifies
Complex organised behaviour
Or a precursor of intelligence.
You pays your money.
Yeah well, the hell, we’ve all installed
Drop-downs; pop-ups; hyperlinks
So intimate we locate sites
Of URLs along the DNA
That predispose us to remain on-line
Or lose our connectivity;
Contain an Error 404;
or Download Can’t Be Opened – no creator program found.
Offline, incorporated in the multichannel polyphonic
Streaming real-time biosphere
In downtime we make time to defragment: troubleshooting paranoia: schizophrenia; trauma,
Self-diagnosing dirty codes and patches inherited
From early Beta-versions of our personal OS:
The ghost of Freud’s ego in the machine.
In place of sense and sensibility, our causalities
Derive from deconstructions of the disauthored text
Relayed in mediated intertextuality.
Birdsong changes over seasons.
Hardy’s crepuscular throstle would have been
Virtually unreadable to the thrush on the cd.