Saturday, February 18, 2006

Geo-Sift: The Refined Drive

(Nothing like wasting a night away writing bad poetry ;)

Geo-Sift: The Refined Derive
by Michael Benton

Jean-Luc Nancy asks “What is to be done?”
Where are we heading?
What do we want/need/desire?
Who will stand up and lead the way?
The historical avant-gardes are but
ashes in the dustbin of history.
Their methods and ideas are now
just fodder for the latest corporate fad.

Debord’s spectacle is no longer a fantasy
but a reality that surrounds the confines
of our fake plastic world.
We are all just fish swimming mindlessly
through the cultural aquariums
that filter our mediatized landscapes.
Are you unhappy with your appearance?
Do you have a desire to confess on national TV?
What scandals shall occupy our minds,
diverting us from the truth and leading us astray?

Once again what is to be done?
We are dominated by the priesthood
of instrumental reasoning and sanctioned experts.
Confess your desires, we are the new religion.
The omniscient media uses sex and death
to decorate their myths of material satisfaction.
The cultural regulators in their ivory towers
despise the masses from the safety of their fortresses.
Feeling safe in their illusions
they continue to lose touch with reality.
Our political leaders are Waiting for Godot
They are as lost as we are, but unwilling to admit it.

We are no longer a product of nature.
Our technological wonders fuse with our psyches.
Flesh to machine, this is the age of the post-human.
Urban megacities dominate our global reality
Centers of power---they control information and finances.
Earlier theorists realized the importance of mapping
out these concrete jungles. To map the psyche
of our communal constructions.

This is the new pataphysics.
Jarry’s Ubu married to geology.
Collective memories mined
like the substrata of the earth.
Sifting the fallowed voices of our cities,
perceiving the core truths that are the foundations,
and disregarding the detrital productions
artfully designed to distract us.

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